Should We Let More Artists Starve So Some Can Succeed?
Should We Let More Artists Starve So Some Can Succeed?
Courtesy Amsterdam University PressWhy are artists poor? It’s a good question. Just don’t ask Hans Abbing, the Dutch economist and author of “Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts.”
Abbing was the speaker at a well-attended Monday night event at Artists Space in SoHo, at the invitation of Working Artists in the Greater Economy (or W.A.G.E.), an advocacy group that presses for nonprofits and museums to pay fees to artists for showing their work, a model that seems to work in Canada. Abbing’s book, “Why Are Artists Poor?”, was published all the way back in 2002, and it hasn’t exactly made a huge splash. However, it has gained a certain degree of notoriety in New York thanks to W.A.G.E.’s stamp of approval, and it has occasionally been taken up to make prescriptions for arts policy. So it may be important to nip Abbing's percolating influence in the bud, and say clearly and for the record that his argument is balderdash.
W.A.G.E., which used to describe itself as a “pro-artist, pro-capitalist” group (by which they meant they were for artists getting paid, not that they were for wealthy artists ruling over the proletariat), seems to have been attracted to the book because, as an economist, Abbing is all about debunking the notion that spiritual gratification trumps material rewards when it comes to art. You can see how this type of perspective would be appealing if you’re an artist and feel like you're getting ripped off, discovering that, as you become more successful, you are going deeper in debt because institutions expect you to work for love of art alone.
But this, unfortunately, is not where Abbing stops. Instead, “Why Are Artists Poor?” turns out to be a crusade against subsidies for artists. In fact, it is a spin on the libertarian dogma that everything wrong with society is produced by government meddling in the free market, only applied to the visual arts.
At this juncture, it might be worth noting that Abbing’s worldview doesn’t really seem to be based on familiarity with the realities of the contemporary art world. Thus, he argues that the distortions of government intervention explain the existence of “contemporary” or "avant garde" art, which he thinks wouldn’t have any economic influence without subsidy from the state. But astoundingly, the only example Abbing gives by name of a “contemporary artist” who might represent this sickly anti-economic style of contemporary art is — wait for it — Damien Hirst (pg. 68), i.e. Mr. Art Market himself. Huh?
Maybe that’s just Abbing’s personal bias creeping in (an artist himself with a passion for life drawing, he’s got a dog in the race). The “traditional” versus “contemporary” thing is really just a sidenote to Abbing’s main claim that the reason artists are poor is because of “oversupply” — there is more art then there is demand. The conclusion he comes to is that any attempt to provide economic support to artists outside the market — through grants or tax breaks or even private patronage — simply sustains people who couldn’t make it on their own merits, thereby drawing more people to art than the field can sustain. "In theory, then, extra funding will never increase income levels but merely increase the number of practicing artists," he writes (pg. 130).
Thomas Malthus made the same argument about the poor, to the acclaim of the 19th-century British ruling class: any attempt at social welfare just slowed the process of thinning the herd, leading to more poor mouths to feed and worsening their conditions through overcrowding. Abbing is a cultural Malthusian.
To be fair, at Monday’s W.A.G.E. event he claimed to have backed off this extremist argument a bit in the years since "Why Are Artists Poor?" was published. Now, he says, he focuses less on the actual role of subsidies in sustaining unproductive artists and more on the importance of government subsidies as a symbolic “signal” that falsely tells artists that art is a viable career. (Granted, Abbing is speaking from the Dutch perspective, where subsidies have been historically generous, but he is not shy about generalizing.)
A telling moment came during the Q&A section, when someone from the audience asked if he had an opinion about the astronomical prices fetched by art on the secondary market. “I don’t have very much to say about it,” Abbing answered mildly. “I suppose it would arouse anger from some artists.” Got that? State support for arts is a distorting “signal.” But endless hype about torrents of cash pouring into the art market? It's not even worth considering that that might be a significant factor in convincing young people that art might be a viable career.
In the United States, the decade has definitely seen a spike in the ranks of what are classified as "independent artists, writers, and performers” (from 509,000 to 676,000 between 2000 and 2008), despite the fact that overall subsidies for the arts — corporate, federal, state, and private — have generally risen only slightly, or, more often, decreased. (Americans for the Arts gathers the data for its National Arts Index.) U.S. artists would have to be pretty frickin’ dumb to think that the National Endowment for the Arts, cut to the bone and relentlessly demonized as a swindle to honest taxpayers, is sending them a “signal” that art is a career with a booming future. On the other hand, there has been a huge boom in the art market in the same period. Abbing is living in an upside-down world if he thinks the "oversupply” of artists is best explained by government distorting market signals.
Nevertheless, I agree with Abbing at least that you cannot explain the very real and probably unsustainable growth of the cultural economy simply as a function of raw economic calculation — though I wouldn’t see it as being based solely on a romantic “myth” to be debunked either. Rather, it seems an effect of what art has historically represented for society, combined with the realities of contemporary economic life.
“I must study politics and war, that our sons may have liberty to study mathematics and philosophy,” John Adams, the second U.S. president, famously wrote in a letter to his wife. “Our sons ought to study mathematics and philosophy, geography, natural history and naval architecture, navigation, commerce and agriculture, in order to give their children a right to study painting, poetry, music, architecture, statuary, tapestry and porcelain.” Part of the social contract has been that the struggles of each generation of parents are justified if they can make it possible that their sons and daughters be a little less alienated. And the arts, in theory, are a place where you get to dream a little. Thus, as societies become more affluent, more people tend to move towards arts careers (this is a cross-cultural phenomenon, even in places that have traditionally revered science and technology, like Japan). Studies of the artistic workforce, spotty as they are, show that each year a considerable number of people become artists after quitting other jobs, knowing full well that they will make less money, but simply looking to do something that is a little more personally fulfilling ("Handbook of the Economics of Art and Culture," pg. 821).
More artists exist than can possibly make it without a change in the way society consumes visual art, that’s for sure. But the reason for this phenomenon likely has at least as much to do with how goddamn alienating non-artistic labor is as with how naïve artists are — that is, with the ruthless realities of the market that Abbing looks to for salvation.
Interventions is a weekly column by ARTINFO deputy editor Ben Davis. He can be reached at bdavis[at]artinfo.com.
Comments
I didn't read Abbing's book, but I did listen to his lecture carefully, with an ear to the fact that he is an economist, and a European. Subsidies represent a very different portion of the pie in the Dutch art world - which I know you are aware of - so it is important to not that Abbing is not Friedrich Hayek. He was very quick to say that it was unfortunate that all Americans don't benefit from universal health care.
I think the title of Abbing's lecture was misleading. the subject he seemed to be addressing best was not WHY artists are poor, but why aren't artists like OTHER poor people. The story he told of the "greedy" dancer, was clearly intended to be an observation about artists vs other poor people.
Unlike the other (presumably also poor) men and women who pose for Abbing he has found that the dancers (artists) haggle for more money when they are unemployed (as dancers), but that when they are employed again (as dancers) no amount of money will keep them working as models. This is anecdotal evidence, but detailed economic data on artists is spotty at best.
The observation Abbing made - that like all "human beings" artists are logical but short sighted - reflected that Abbing was using a conventional model of Homo economicus, but he was also making the point that artist have different goals than other poor people. He went out of his way to say that "artists are what a Marxist might call less alienated" (I remember because he had that screwy Mike Myers Goldmember accent and he disfigured the word). That statistically we (artists) have the educational and family backgrounds simular to professionals, but that choosing to become (and remain) an artist defies the logic of a career choice.
Abbing said art does not seem to be (He had no data for this) a choice, but something that artists feel compelled to do despite the obvious economic downsides- that art is closer to a "vocation": something we are called to do. I got know sense that Abbing believed we were called by a transcendent force like God or not-Selfish-Genes, but instead by an accident of history - that in the wake of the Enlightenment, and under the shadow of the Industrial Revolution a peculiar set of ideas about the relationship between "Fine Art" (and Fine Artists) and commerce emerge. That the understanding of "Autonomy" that leads us to call art stores "galleries" and their shop keepers "gallerists" (I mean you Larry Gagosian) is a massive constellation of biases, assumptions, attitudes, and prejudices that artists benefit from (subsidies/patronage), but may also hold us back.
What I got from Abbing, was not that with more subsidies come more artists, but that no reasonable amount of subsidies will raise artists out of poverty because of the low value we (as a group) put on not being poor. Like you Ben, I don't see that as an indictment (Abbing may), As societies grow more affluent, I very much like the idea that more people self-identify as artists. Perhaps that means that the End of History is a bunch of happy, well educated poor people.
It's funny to me that artists think that they are so special. Moreover, they do not even recognize that there is art in so much more than art, per se. Perhaps that is part of the problem.
I, personally, have gone across many fields, yet, as I tell my proteges: better to be over prepared than over confident. There are many other people trying to make it in many other professions, beyond art, and never will make it.
Perhaps part of the problem is that people see, on the one hand, that there are many people in art making a lot of money, even though their "art" is far from anything any reasonable person would think is creative, innovative or valuable. You point to people quitting their jobs to become artists, one would presume without even any proper training. You don't see people quitting their jobs to chase their dream lof being a physicsist because they realize that they would get no where without a proper traing background. You do, however, see people quitting their jobs to trade stocks at home, again, because they perceive it as easy because they have witnessed many other people with no talent for investment who've made money trading stocks on their own. Indeed, the outcomes for most of those people is much the same as for all of the poor artists you're pointing to. Which brings me to a good point to close: maybe there are so many poor artists because they are truly poor artists, even though we have seen some poor artists who've managed, like those aforementioned self-styled investors, to make money.
Among the many problems with Abbing's analysis are his sweeping generalizations about artists. Some are prosperous, most are not. They arise from many different class backgrounds. They have different ambitions and varied relationships to the market. Art is bought and sold, but it is more than a commodity, and simplistic economic analyses will not be able to adequately address its relationship to capitalism.
You mention Canada - which is why I decided to respond. While CARFAC instituted a fee schedule for which museums, galleries and artist run centres pay for the right to exhibit an artist's work, the amounts are quite low - about $1,500 for a solo exhibition. Nevertheless, it is a good basic system that can be improved upon. I applaud their work in lobbying for 5% of the sales in secondary markets to be paid to artists. CARFAC came about through artists' self-organization efforts in the 60's, an era which also saw the beginning of arms length public funding of artists and art institutions. Yet Canadian artists continue to be the primary financial supporters of the arts through volunteer labour and low pay in comparison to other 'professionals' with similar education and skill levels. The main outcome of public funding for the arts in Canada is to provide public access to art and culture by subsidizing its presentation. Secondary effects are also important here, though. Through self-organizing, artists have a place at the table when it comes to cultural policy and are a strong political voice locally and nationally. The public feels entitled to cultural opportunities at little or no cost. Art is not seen as reserved for the wealthy alone. It's true that the US and Canada are very different cultures, and that public investment in the arts is more likely to be seen as a 'market distortion'.
There are far too many people claiming to be artists than there are actual artists in the market. Lots of crafters, hobbyists, and "wannabe's" and "artists" working for their love of art - not enough actual artists.
The market is saturated with self-described or annointed "artists" that dilute the art, the market, and the prices. The public yawns because there's nothing innovative or because the artist failed at engaging the audience - then the pendulum swings back with waves of nostalgia for the long gone masters while the small group of genuine artists left compete with tablet computers, artisans, and retired boomers who always wanted to be in a plein air competition or feel they can do the art fair circuit now that they "have the time". There are too many interior design craftsmen holding paintbrushes and hoping for grants - not enough expression and passion while clinging to their branding and marketing - the result is a nauseating sense of apathy on the part of the buyers and utter frustration on the artists' side while the general public shake their heads at what they see.
Artists won't be or continue to be poor once the market is no longer artificially supported by outside influences. They will have opportunities for increased sales and incomes, because they will be able to charge a fair price for their work just like other professional vocations - let the doctors and lawyers work for their love of their vocations - let the artists make money their work is worth on the market. The patrons will be able to understand the price structure when dealing with artists and/or galleries and the mystique of being an artist will go away.
http://instudiowithjohnstillmunks.wordpress.com/2012/01/15/not-everyone-...
It seems rather odd that we would be blaming subsidies for the arts for "legitimizing" art as a career while completely ignoring the role of art school. Hundreds of colleges and universities, both public and private, offer BFAs and MFAs, so is it any wonder that these students expect to become professional artists after graduation? Yes, higher education is theoretically only about learning and the furthering of knowledge, but it's also implicit that this training will be of some use in earning a living.
Surely students do not attend art college with the expectation that they will then have to re-enter another institution and get trained in accountancy or botany.