Is the recession good for young talent? The video artist Bill Viola seems to think so. In March, after collecting a $75,000 Eugene McDermott Award in the Arts, he told a Boston auditorium packed with students from MIT’s Visual Arts Program: "You . . . are in an amazing situation. You’re about to graduate from an elite institution and go out into a world with no jobs. . . . As the Buddhists say, ‘If you’re not empty, there’s no room to put something in to fill you up." Viola got by on grants before his first commercial gallery show, at age 42, set him on a lucrative career path that made his works worth hundreds of thousands of dollars. Asked about his speech, the artist warned against putting money first — and took a dig at an equally successful contemporary. "If you do cost-benefit analysis, you’ll end up like Jeff Wall — doing things calculated to suit this market."

"Running on Empty" originally appeared in the May 2009 issue of Art+Auction. For a complete list of articles from this issue available on ARTINFO, see Art+Auction's May 2009 Table of Contents.