Why is a day job seen as the mark of an artist’s failure?

Here are the two sides of the myth: the obscure martyr unsoiled by commercial success; and the unbridled genius who can’t help but have it all.

In reality, most artists, even most great ones, also have day jobs. During the late 1950s and early ’60s, the staff at the Museum of Modern Art in New York City harbored grand ambitions. Painters Robert Ryman and Robert Mangold were guards, curator and critic Lucy Lippard was a “page” in the museum library, minimalist Sol LeWitt worked the desk and sculptor Dan Flavin ran the elevator. (Miriam Takaezu, an employee in Personnel and sister to famous ceramist Toshiko Takaezu, apparently took it upon herself to hire artists.)

Work from this MoMA cohort introduces “Day Jobs,” a group show of 38 artists at the Blanton Museum of Art in Austin, Texas. The exhibition blows through the polite separation between artwork and money work. Not only does it name, in wall label after wall label, what each artist did to keep the lights on, it demonstrates how artists drew techniques, subjects, even inspiration from their diurnal grind.

Put another way, the show refutes the idea of the spontaneous generation of masterpieces. Far from it. Great artists need the world, maybe more than it needs them.

“I think we overlook how much mundane moments can shape creative discoveries and directions,” the curator, Veronica Roberts, said.

When Frank Stella moved to New York in 1958, he painted houses. In 1959, he had his precocious MoMA debut: canvases covered with black enamel stripes the width of a housepainter’s brush.

“When we view artists as living in this rarefied realm,” Roberts said, “we do a disservice to ourselves and to them.”

Which might be why the “Worst Job Ever,” a recent help-wanted ad from an “Art World Family” seeking a combination personal assistant, babysitter, gardener and “dog systems” manager for less than $100,000 a year got people’s hackles up. It wasn’t so much the conditions (unfortunately common enough), and not even the post’s arch tone but the fact that there was an artist behind it, asking to escape the surly gravity that holds the rest of us down: trying to be an artist without the world.

Why is it so hard to acknowledge that artists work for money? The art business puts the precariat and the bourgeoisie in proximity, which can certainly breed resentment. But it’s more than that. In the Basquiat/Electrician dualism, we’re given to believe that true talent will be rewarded, while those who change lightbulbs for a living just aren’t that good. In the myth of artistic meritocracy, a day job is the mark of failure.

Pressure also comes from fellow artists. Virginia L. Montgomery, a video artist in “Day Jobs,” told me that one of her (more privileged) classmates at Yale called her a sellout because she worked. Howardena Pindell, also in the show, climbed the ladder as a curator at MoMA for over a decade while developing her style of abstract, pointillist collage. (She had two separate résumés.)

Pindell recalls misguided peers blaming her for gatekeeping.

“One African American woman artist would heckle me in public settings and call me at home with veiled threats,” she said, “and would say I was the reason MoMA did not collect her work.”

“Artists have this ambivalent relationship to their day jobs,” said Hannah Wohl, an assistant professor of sociology at the University of California Santa Barbara and the author of a book on creativity and the art world. Day jobs provide stability through the feast-or-famine cycles of gallery sales. At the same time, “being able to give up your day job is a sign of upward mobility.”

Still, it’s not that simple. A job also signals a certain salt-of-the-earth authenticity.

“I’m thinking of one instance of a gallerist who was bragging about starting to represent an artist while they still taught at the YMCA,” Wohl said. “Or another dealer bragging about how she started representing this artist who used to be an art handler at her gallery.”

Jeff Koons, aptly represented at the Blanton by his gleaming steel bust of Sun King Louis XIV, was a successful commodities broker before he conquered the art market. (He also sold MoMA memberships.) Andy Warhol got his start illustrating shoe ads.

But maybe quitting isn’t the goal.

“I’m grateful that I have a day job,” said Montgomery, one of two artists in “Day Jobs” who still have theirs. “If I was constantly thinking about myself and my own needs all the time, I would go a bit crazy.”

Montgomery works as a graphic facilitator, transcribing corporate brainstorming sessions and TED Talks into symbols in real time. Her videos are likewise full of morphing and empathic imagery, like a luna moth hatching from a ponytail.

Ragen Moss, a lawyer since 2005, sculpts bodily, glassy, cocoonlike forms inscribed with legalese. Because of her career, “I feel authorized to ask huge questions: Where did law begin? What is it for? Who does it serve?”

I asked both Moss and Montgomery if they would quit if they could. Neither said yes. Their jobs ground their art in experience. And both mentioned the value of coming into contact with different kinds of people — a point echoed throughout “Day Jobs” under subheadings like “Caregivers” and “Service Industry.”

As Roberts admits, curating the show, she sidestepped two huge categories of common artist gigs: teaching and assisting other artists. A work by Manuel Rodríguez-Delgado involving a climate-sealed notebook and custom shipping crates glances off the unwieldy category of preparator work, and the wall label for Sol LeWitt’s “Wall Drawing #48,” per his instructions, names the people who drew it. Who hung the rest of the “Day Jobs” show? Who will secret it away when it’s done? That crate would take more than one exhibition to unpack.

The need for such a reckoning is evident in the 115,000 followers of Art Handler magazine, an Instagram account and erstwhile journal focused on the art world’s back of house. Clynton Lowry, an art handler and artist who has shown at the Kitchen art center in New York, started the project in 2015.

“I was interested in hearing artists not just describing these jobs as a sideline but something that’s integrated in their lives, and in their thinking as artists,” Lowry said.

You don’t have to be poor to be a great artist. You do have to live in the world.

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