Creative Accounting is Hell Gate's new column exploring the unfiltered economic realities of life in New York City's creative circles. Our interviewees might have day jobs outside of their creative practice, but not careers.
New York City is the world's cultural capital and also, in its unaffordability, perhaps one of the most casually hostile places for artists to live. This familiar contradiction has inspired Hell Gate to start this column focusing on the finances of New York City's working artists, in which we will ask about each interviewee's income, recurring expenses, and what extraordinary expenditures and surprise sources of income have popped up in the last three months. Our first Creative Accounting interviewee is the sculptor Dean Millien.
Since Hell Gate profiled Millien last year, he has landed what should be one of his career's biggest breaks: In April, the 53-year-old's gothic aluminium foil menagerie "The Cats and the Rats" marked his debut at MoMA PS1 as part of the museum's "Greater New York 2026" group exhibition. Non-artists might see a name on a wall or website at a world-famous institution, and assume that these are the few that have already got it made.
But in truth, the last three months of Millien's finances show the not-so-glamorous reality of the institutional art world—how landing a prime placement in a big, splashy show put on by one of the city's most prestigious art museums doesn't necessarily translate to immediate financial gain. As the inaugural artist in Creative Accounting, Millien epitomizes the reason Hell Gate wants to pursue this column: "You can't eat prestige."