Make art: for love or money?

Iggy Pop – who ought, quite frankly, to know a thing or two – gave a recent interview to the NME in which he gave the following piece of advice to all wannabe rock stars, art stars, would-be career bohemians, and all the other flotsam and jetsam of the creative underbelly: don’t get a job. According to Iggy, we should all be unemployed, and so should all of our friends. Don’t even hang around with people who’ve got jobs, said Iggy. It’ll bring you down. Hanging around with a bunch of [other] impoverished, famished, spaghetti-eating, tobacco-smoking artistes in threadbare shirts and rotten trainers at least furnishes a sense of community, whereas if everybody else is buying a house and shopping at Waitrose it’s quite difficult not to question one’s raison d’être. Which, of course, one must never do – not if one’s serious about making it, just like Uncle Iggy did.