show me the money vs art

Show me a professional artist or creative with no ambition and I’ll show you a liar. No matter how much we may love our art for its own sake, very few of us will turn our noses up at the rewards on offer, such as money, fame, status and privilege. Such rewards are known as extrinsic motivations, because they are external to the work itself. In many creative fields, the extrinsic rewards on offer are so spectacular that competition is cutthroat and hordes of young (and not so young) hopefuls are prepared to invest huge amounts of time, effort and energy for a shot at the big time.

‘But hang on a minute — didn’t you say in the last post that intrinsic motivation is critical for creative success? And that most creative professionals are more motivated by the joy of work than by money?’

Absolutely. If you want to produce outstanding creative work, then while you’re working you need to be 100% focused on the task in hand. In fact, you probably need to be obsessed by your work. But that doesn’t mean you don’t care about the rewards. Have another look at the list of IT workers’ motivations in the last post — ‘compensation’ is not the highest ranked motivation, but it still is comes in fourth place, above professional development, peer recognition and ‘exciting job content’. Money may be relatively less important than things like challenge and flexibility, but it’s still important. IT is a reasonably well-paid profession, so it could be argued that these workers are sufficiently well off that they have the luxury of not having to worry about money. Unlike the young Charlie Chaplin, who ended up in a south London workhouse after his father had abandoned him and his mother was committed to an asylum.

Have another look at Chaplin’s words. He didn’t say that his art was driven by money, but that he ‘went into the business for money’, implying that this was a hard-headed career choice. He also said that ‘the art grew out’ of the business, suggesting something separate but related, as if the business and his professional ambition where the soil, and his art a beautiful flower that emerged from it. Or to change the metaphor, it’s as though art and business are parallel rails in any creative career. Both are essential for success and leaning on one at the expense of the other can be disastrous. Lean too far towards the rewards and you become a hack, churning out mediocre work to pay the bills; neglect the money side of things and life becomes too stressful to focus on your work properly.

Managers of creative professionals are faced with the same dilemma. On the one hand, it’s in their interest to spend company money wisely. But if they fail to reward people according to their expectations, this can become a point of contention and a distraction, affecting the team’s performance. Think of the premiership footballer whose form dips during protracted contract negotiations. Before we look at options for striking the right balance, it was reviewing the different kinds of extrinsic reward on offer for creative work.