The Artist in the Office

Karen is working on her fourth novel. Although her first three novels were published and received good reviews, none of them sold enough copies to allow her to quit her day job. Jack is a fine actor who has played lead roles in community theater productions, but he’s never managed to break into the professional scene. Sam would love to create sculptures for a living, but he has a family to support. All of these people are artists who hold nine-to-five office jobs.

People talented in the arts often end up in office jobs for several reasons. First, the arts are extremely competitive, and while opportunities to earn extra pocket money doing temporary work in the arts are fairly plentiful, those that provide the artist with a decent salary and benefits are rare. Also, achieving excellence in the arts takes lots of time and energy, and office jobs with regular hours and reasonable workloads may leave the worker with more of these than all-consuming professions such as teaching, law, or medicine. And artists, like everyone, need to support themselves and their families.



The artist in the office faces a unique set of challenges, including:

1.    Divided energy: While other workers can throw themselves whole-heartedly into their jobs, the artist always has to hold something back for his or her art. This can be difficult in today’s fast-paced, demanding office world. Many artist-office workers sacrifice sleep to practice their art, staying up until two a.m. playing string quartets or getting up at four a.m. to write poetry before work. This can make sleepiness on the job – or on the road getting to the job – a serious problem.


2.    Bottled intensity: When the words to an actor’s soliloquy are circling around in his/her head all day, waiting to be released on stage, the person may feel like a balloon about to burst. For a singer it can be painful to be silent at work, for the dancer to sit still, for a writer to keep words inside that yearn to be typed or written. People with a strong need to express themselves exist in a perpetual state of tension until they’re allowed to do so. For this reason, some artists – particularly writers -- may find ways of practicing their art on the sly at the office, resulting in two further challenges: guilt and the fear of being found out.

3.   Staying in the closet: Few office employers are likely to knowingly hire or promote a poet or a composer, especially in the corporate sector. (In the 1950s, when corporations gave applicants fake “personality tests” which were really designed to screen out independent thinkers, checking a box saying that you wrote poetry would automatically lead to rejection.) Thus, artists may feel they have to stay in the closet rather than “coming out” and letting anyone in their office know their true passions.

4.    Frustrated visionaries: Artists tend to be big-picture thinkers who are great at making connections. While others can’t see past tomorrow, artists can tell you what’s going to happen for the next five years, and they have a great sense of what’s important and what isn’t. In the office world, they may feel frustrated by the pettiness and short-sightedness of those who can’t see what they see, sometimes playing the role of Cassandra, the Greek maiden who was blessed with the gift of foresight but doomed to perpetual disbelief on the part of others. 

5.    Loneliness: Artists in the office may feel they have little in common with coworkers who go home and watch T.V. every night while they head for the rehearsal or the studio to start their real work. Non-artist coworkers may find artists’ emotional honesty and intensity threatening and avoid them, causing them pain, especially as artists tend to be thin-skinned and easily hurt..

6.    Boredom and daydreaming: The only thing the true artist really wants to be doing is his or her art. Many artists find their office tasks tedious and unrewarding even though they understand that the work needs to be done and may be perfectly competent at their jobs. The tendency for artists to daydream, however, can sometimes lead to absent-minded mistakes, shame, and other negative consequences.

7.    Starved for beauty: While non-artists are often oblivious to their surroundings, artists may be more sensitive to them. They may love beauty and hate the sterile, cost-cutting décor of modern workplaces. Literary artists may also be annoyed by the colorless, odorless officespeak in which coworkers communicate, though they may have fun satirizing it.

If you’re an artist/office worker struggling with these challenges, it helps to try to find others who are also dealing with them. Perhaps you think you’re the only one, but you might be surprised. I thought the same thing when I started out in my own office job, but since then I’ve met a photographer, a cartoonist, several musicians, two actors, and a whole group of creative writers among my coworkers. If you can’t find any other artists at work, find out if any of your artist friends do office work and what it’s like for them.

If you’re an office employer, you might think you shouldn’t hire artist-types who have their “heads in the clouds,” but I beg to differ. While you probably wouldn’t want your team composed of nothing but artist types, in today’s fast-changing world, creative thinking has become a lot more important than it used to be. You need someone around who can see the big picture and make the connections no one else makes, and you need to listen to that person. One can easily imagine, for example, that if the CIA had had a few artists working for them in the right office – people capable of imagining someone using airplanes as missiles against high-rises, as any good screenwriter might do – perhaps 9-11 wouldn’t have happened.

Coming next: The rights of office workers.