Building a healthier relationship with money
By Michael Lee

'My Own Words' is a monthly series which features personal essays by practitioners in the Southeast Asian art community. They deliberate on their locality's present circumstances, articulating observations and challenges in their respective roles.

In the arts, talk of money is like dealing in the “dirty business” of capitalism. The topic is wrapped up in shame, secrecy, and fascination. We have read about the high prices of artworks yet are expected to be hushhush about our personal finances and refrain from raising money matters.

This text is not meant to provide financial advice, which financial advisers, courses, and platforms do best.¹ Instead, by reflecting on personal experiences and observations, I offer the following considerations to answer the question: How can arts practitioners develop a healthy relationship with money for personal and collective flourishing?

Michael Lee, 'A Soldout Show is Better / Than Making A Lot of Money', from the series "Not Artistic Advice" (side 1 and 2), 2021, two-sided wall-protruded light box with vinyl stickers and spray paint on acrylic sheets, and LED, 40 x 40 x 7cm. Photos

1. Relate wisely to money

Ever given yourself a bigger treat than your windfall; or got annoyed by the rich for having it good? We all have our own narratives about money, and some of them do us no practical good. Self-awareness helps us to identify unhealthy relationships with money.

A healthier relationship might look like this: we have clarity on our goals, such as owning an apartment, and understand that a certain amount of money is needed to reach them. Then, we act with financially supportive behaviours.

Zoom screenshot of workshop 'Financial Matters: It's All About Cultivating The Right Attitude' by Noorlinah Mohamed, from the workshop series 'Workshopables' organised by Michael Lee and Ong Kian Peng. Photo by Michael Lee.

Learning to identify signs of financial distress is also part of savviness, as money problems affect–and reflect–our mental health.² Indeed, financial savvy does not require going to extremes like working tirelessly and stingeing excessively to achieve ‘FIRE’ or ‘Financial Independence Retire Early’.³ It is about having enough to care for oneself and one’s community.

“Learning to identify signs of financial distress is also part of savviness, as money problems affect–and reflect–our mental health.² Indeed, financial savvy does not require going to extremes like working tirelessly and stingeing excessively to achieve ‘FIRE’ or ‘Financial Independence Retire Early’.³ It is about having enough to care for oneself and one’s community.”

2. Be aware of industry myths. ⁴

Why are most artists poor? Hans Abbing found that chief among reasons is the myth of the artist’s autonomy, which insists that worthy art is produced ‘regardless of expenses or demand’.⁵ A related myth is the struggling artist, part of the wider narrative on abjection, where suffering is the road to glory.⁶

Myths are preferences that have become commonsensical, and henceunquestioned, truths. Yet they cannot be simplistically applied to all of us.

We need to relate these myths to our own contexts. Artists with financial backing will find it easier to uphold the myth of autonomy. For those of us with bills to pay, it is wiser that we make sound financial decisions alongside achieving a realistic level of autonomy.

Michaael Lee, 'National Theatre', from the series 'Planting Building', 2017, topiary with live plant and stainless steel mesh. Photo by Tan Hai Han. — Michael Lee, 'National Theatre', from the series 'Planting Building', 2017, topiary with live plant and stainless steel mesh. Photo by Tan Hai Han.

3. Develop good remuneration practices.

The art world is replete with stories of remuneration “malpractices”. Alleged poor pay and working conditions led dancer Sara Wookey to publish an open letter about her refusal to participate in a performance at MoMA.⁷ Separately, in a Guardian article, Lanre Bakare investigates a curator’s lower earnings compared with that of the "head of coffee" at Tate Britain.⁸

Arts funding is usually the smallest part of a country’s annual budget, which means that every dollar we try to earn is cut from a tiny piece of the pie.⁹ This does not mean that we do not take steps to update old remuneration practices.

PS Paid Studio Visits,¹⁰ an initiative by Para Site Art Space, pays artists for giving virtual tours of their studios. In the art world, hosting studio visits has long been an unpaid gig deemed a privilege for artists to clinch opportunities. Para Site’s programme represents a healthy change, which can lead to fair payments and the establishing of market rates.

Michael Lee, 'NO', 2018, partition with LED neon ropes and steel rods. Photo by NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore.

4. Buffer for both the foreseeable and unforeseeable.

Among the inevitables in life is ageing and its accompanying predicaments like failing physical and mental capacities. Meanwhile, unforeseeable circumstances include illnesses, accidents, and, as we are still experiencing, a pandemic.

Having buffers helps to cushion the shock from these situations. It is a key reason why the typical recommendation for financial health is sequential: start with insurance, followed by savings of at least six months, and then investments.¹¹ Buffering also explains the three-way apportionment of income: ‘must spend’, ‘good to have’, and ‘untouchable’.¹²

Such financial frameworks are aplenty. The key point is to craft a personally relevant, sustainable, and evolving model for our own changing needs and goals.¹³

Directional Signage for Talks, from the series 'Got Room, Do Things' by Michael Lee, 2018. Photo by Michael Lee.

5. Balance personal and community needs.

We need the community, such as art dealers, to secure art sales. For this reason, it is fair for the dealer to take a cut of the proceeds. On the other hand, giving too much of our own resources for a social cause is unsustainable.¹⁴

‘Money Lobangs for Part-Time Educators and Other Creative Independents’¹⁵ is a Facebook group I started in 2018 for the community to share resources on financial opportunities for arts freelancers. It also invites those with full-time jobs to contribute, based on the belief that collective flourishing requires participation from the entire arts ecosystem.

Each of us has the freedom to find our own position along the spectrum between self-preservation and community contribution, though going to either extreme is never realistic.

Acknowledgements

I am grateful to Annie Jael Kwan for commissioning me to design and facilitate the workshop ‘Financial Literacy for the Artistic Life’ in 2021 as a programme under Asia-Art-Activism. This article is a development and reflection from the workshop.

The views and opinions expressed in this article are the author's own and do not necessarily reflect those of Art & Market.

This essay was first published in CHECK-IN 2022, A&M’s second annual publication. Click he r e to read the digital copy in full, or to purchase a copy of the limited print edition.

Read all My Own Words essays here.

Notes

¹I recommend ‘Seedly’ and 'The Woke Salaryman’ among the various financial literacy platforms in Singapore. ‘Seedly’ is a community-run Facebook group for personal finance (https://www.facebook.com/groups/seedlyfinance), while ‘The Woke Salaryman’ is a finance education website (https://linktr.ee/thewokesalaryman) that illustrates complex money concepts through easy-to-understand comic strips.

²Financial difficulties and mental health problems are interlinked. Money problems zap mental energy and affect relationships, thereby impacting on our mental health by stirring feelings of guilt or shame, anxiety, low self-esteem, frustration, and fear, which may be exacerbated by insomnia, suicidal thoughts, and substance misuse. Conversely, mental health problems may impair our judgement, leading to poor financial decisions. Money and Mental Health Policy Institute, ‘Money and Mental Health: The Facts’, n. d., based on another article by the same publisher, ‘Money on Your Mind’, 2016, https://www. moneyandmentalhealth.org/wp-content/uploads/2017/06/Money-and-mental-health-thefacts-1.pdf

³The acronym for ‘Financial Independence Retire Early’. See, for example, Alexandra Kerr, ‘Financial Independence, Retire Early (FIRE)’, Investopedia, March 5, 2022, https://www. investopedia.com/terms/f/financial-independence-retire-early-fire.asp

⁴I trace my former unhealthy relationship with money to my childhood of observing my parents often quarrelling over money. The lesson that “financial greed knows no good ending” somehow got etched in my psyche and followed me through my involvement in the arts. At first, it manifested while I was a full-time lecturer in an art school. I made ‘conceptual works’ as ‘proof’ that I was not selling out. Later, as an arts freelancer, I lived hand to mouth with very little savings, even though I had paid projects to work on. A few times, my bank account was left with a two-digit balance. Then, in 2017, my residency at the NTU Centre for Contemporary Art Singapore, with its six months of very reasonable stipends, allowed me to taste financial buffering, and I finally experienced a sense of calm. That was when I decided to leave my unhealthy relationship with money – a process that is ongoing.

⁵Hans Abbing, Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (Amsterdam: Amsterdam University Press, 2002), 155.

⁶AL Kennedy, ‘Why I Hate the Myth of the Suffering Artist’, The Guardian (April 2, 2012), https://www.theguardian.com/books/booksblog/2012/apr/02/myth-of-the-suffering-artist.

⁷Sara Wookey, ‘Open Letter to Artists’, The Performance Club, 2016, https:// theperformanceclub.org/open-letter-to-artists/.

⁸Lanre Bakare, ‘Tate Britain’s £40k “Head of Coffee” Role Sparks Row over Low Curator Pay’, The Guardian (January 29, 2020), https://www.theguardian.com/artanddesign/2020/jan/29/ tate-britains-40k-head-of-coffee-role-sparks-row-over-low-curator-pay.

⁹This is a point raised to me by Singapore-based theatre practitioner Noorlinah Mohamed after my financial literacy workshop (organised by Asia-Art-Activism), which helped me to rethink my usual knee-jerk outcry at "bad payment practices" by arts institutions.

¹⁰Para Site Art Space, ‘PS Paid Studio Visits’, 2020-ongoing, http://www.para-site. art/2020/05/06/ps-paid-studio-visits/.

¹¹moneysense, ‘Financial Planning Is For Everyone’, n. d., https://www.moneysense.gov. sg/financialresilience.

¹²Lewis Weil, ‘An Artist’s Guide to Financial Planning’, The Creative Independent (March 2, 2018), https://thecreativeindependent.com/guides/an-artists-guide-to-financial-planning/

¹³A tool I have found to be personally useful is the “annual” financial spreadsheet. This is an adaptation of the typical monthly income-expenses statement recommended by financial advisers. Whereas the monthly financial statement contains a single column of figures of income and expenses, my version contains 12 columns–one for each month of the year. What this sheet does for me are two things: It gives me a middle-term sense of my financial goals and situations, and keeps me on track. It also helps me make wiser financial decisions rather than emotionally driven ones. FreshBooks, ‘What Are Monthly Financial Reports?’ (March 28, 2019), https://www.freshbooks.com/hub/reports/monthlyfinancial-report.

¹⁴For example, the case of Rembrandt, a commercially successful painter, art dealer, and antique collector, who died poor due to his lavish spending. It is a tale of caution against the common sense that the affluent do not need financial planning. Study.com, ‘How Did Rembrandt Become Poor?’, n. d., https://study.com/academy/answer/how-didrembrandt-become-poor.html.

¹⁵Michael Lee (initiator), ‘Money Lobangs for Part-Time Educators and Other Creative Independents’, 2018-ongoing, https://www.facebook.com/groups/400537900382186. The motivation for setting up this Facebook community came about after I read a news article that covered the extreme measures taken by adjunct professors to cope with their low and irregular income, including sleeping in their cars, and sex work. I do not mean to discriminate against their choices but to discuss the precarity, rights, and well-being of freelancers.