The Art of Money
The Art of Money
Turning financial success into a creative pursuit Jacob Schroeder Mar 15, 2022
What do you consider the act of ‘making money’? Is it an act of accounting and measuring? Or, is it an act of imagining and contemplating? Our finances involve numbers and data, but they’re intractably tied to our personal ideas, experiences, feelings and behaviors – intangible things you can’t formulate in a spreadsheet. Therefore, to manage the human side of money, it’s better to think more like an artist than a scientist.
It’s a shame many famous artists had financial troubles.
Johannes Vermeer is said to have left behind 10 young children, a house full of paintings no one wanted and enormous debts, causing his wife to declare bankruptcy. Mozart wracked up massive amounts of debt, too, to feed an extravagant lifestyle. Not to be out done, Oscar Wilde lived far beyond his means, until he eventually fell into poverty and supposedly spent his last bit of money on booze. When he took his own life, Vincent van Gogh was poor and destitute.
It’s a shame, because some principles great artists follow to make art could also apply to making money.
Art and money share more similarities than we like to think. Money, like art, is a means of self-expression; it helps you turn the life you imagine into reality. They’re both deeply personal. There is no one right way to sculpt a Greek goddess or invest in stocks. Most of all, money offers a lot of insights into human behaviors and sensations.
It is often those human elements that lead to financial problems, but that also give our financial decisions meaning. Therefore, when trying to create a financially successful future, we may need a little more right-brain than left-brain thinking.
Take it from Andy Warhol, an artist who loved to blur the lines of commerce and culture, who declared:
“Making money is art and working is art and good business is the best art.” Andy Warhol
Why it helps to think of money as more art than science
Is personal finance an art or a science?
The juncture of art and money has gotten most attention as it relates to investing. Investor Howard Marks said: “Investing, like economics, is more art than science.”
Why?
Investing encapsulates the vagaries of human nature in the face of uncertainty. There is an element of personal intuition that guides the algorithms. That element of variance and uncertainty is what Barry Ritholtz expands upon in his definition:
“Investing is the art of using imperfect information to make probabilistic assessments about an inherently unknowable future.”
Perhaps it’s not a coincidence then that some investment charts resemble the art of Piet Mondarian, as if an abstract geometric representation of human behavior, financial enterprise and economic forces.
The art of investing
Retired adviser and author Paul Merriman, meanwhile, advises us not to take the investing-as-art concept too far:
“Follow your own instincts and hunches and amateur research if you want to bet on sports teams. But don't do that with your savings.”
While contemplating risk and return expectations based on intuition and feelings may not be wise, there is a good reason for thinking about money from an artistic point of view.
The art critic Jerry Saltz describes art as “a means of expression that conveys the most primal emotions: lonesomeness, silence, pain, the whole vast array of human sensation.” These primal emotions are often the source of our financial challenges.
More than 80% of Americans have financial regrets, according to a Bankrate survey. Most of these regrets can be attributed to personal attitudes and behaviors, such as spending beyond our means (too much debt), thinking more of the present than the future (not saving) and comparing ourselves to others (too much house).
You can have all the financial data, research and evidence in the world. But what good is it if you never analyze yourself?
As Morgan Housel puts it: “Financial success is not a hard science. It’s a soft skill, where how you behave is more important than what you know.”
Thinking artistically about money – to have deeper awareness of our emotions and behaviors – may not be just an interesting perspective but a necessity. But I’d argue that an artistic mindset can do more than just help us make better financial decisions.
Alain de Botton and John Armstrong in their book, Art as Therapy, describe art as a tool:
“Like other tools, art has the power to extend our capacities beyond those that nature has originally endowed us with…Art can help us identify what is central to ourselves, but hard to put into words.”
Money is also a tool that has the power to extend our capacities beyond our natural abilities. It allows us to buy things we couldn’t create on our own. Investing allows us to grow our money and create a desired lifestyle that most of us couldn’t achieve by saving a portion of our paychecks alone. Money, like art, can help us imagine a better life, whether that means going to college, retiring from work or giving back to our communities.
Further, money can help us identify what is central to ourselves. When thinking about our financial futures we’re forced to determine what needs, wants and values are most important.
Money is one part data and math, two parts imagination and personal awareness. The science is the data and information we gather; the art is what we decide to do with it.
So, how can we think more artistically about money? And, how can it specifically improve our relationship with money? Well, let’s learn from the artists themselves.
Money Lessons From Famous Artists
Here are some words of advice from artists that could double as insight for turning financial success into a creative pursuit.
To continue reading, please go to the original article here: