John Cage appeared on an Italian quizshow. Jean Genet stole rare books. Emily Carr reared bobtails. And Kathy Acker did X-rated acts with her boyfriend … we explore the unlikely sidelines of struggling artists
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efore he pioneered a new genre of semi-autobiographical writing, the great French novelist and playwright Jean Genet pioneered something very different indeed: a special briefcase for stealing valuable books that he would later resell – after reading them first, of course. “I perfected a trick briefcase,” he later recalled, “and I became so handy in these thefts that I could push politeness to the point of pulling them off under the very nose of the bookseller.”
For as long as young people have dreamed of careers in the arts – as novelists, painters, poets, musicians and other species – they have had to measure their dreams against their economic circumstances. Often they have found a yawning gap between what they hope to do and what they have the means to pay for.
To fill that gap, aspiring artists have worked at cafes and construction sites, trained to be teachers, lawyers and doctors, borrowed money from friends and family, sought out generous patrons and well-to-do romantic partners and squeaked by on as little money as possible. They have cobbled together income from a truly stunning variety of ad-hoc schemes, from modelling nude and breeding Old English bobtail sheepdogs to, in Genet’s case, practising a rarefied form of shoplifting.
