“Old World Inspirational Sign,” by Flickr user Nicholas Raymond

It’s no secret that embarking on a professional career in the arts requires a degree of boldness in the face of economic uncertainty. The prevailing stereotype of the “starving artist” indicates that people do so anyway – either willing to forego comfort for creativity’s sake, possessing alternative income (such as a day job or family help), and/or confident that their talent and drive will see them through. But how long do they stick with it before throwing in the towel – or professionally shifting gears? As the Greek playwright Aeschylus wrote: “Necessity is stronger far than art.”

A study from 2016 assesses the odds of artistic longevity through the prism of academia: does a formal education enhance one’s chances of making it (and staying) in the arts? Using data gathered by Statistics Denmark, “Artistic education matters: survival in the arts occupations” analyzes more than 27,000 employment records between 1996 and 2012 across five categories of Danish artists: visual artists, choreographers and dancers, composers and musicians, film/stage actors and directors, and writers (including journalists).

Authors Trine Bille and Søren Jensen estimate the impact of a formal artistic education on the length of artists’ careers in each of these groups. (The definitions of “relevant education” and “relevant industry” for each arts group are specified in an appendix to the report.) Among their key findings:

• Formal education reduces the rate of attrition (i.e., abandoning an arts career) for musicians, actors and writers.
• The same correlation is not seen among visual artists and dancers, though these samples are smaller.
• Exit rates – especially early in a career – vary between artists in different fields.

Methods of Inquiry

The Bille/Jensen report leverages Statistics Denmark, an agency that collects a remarkable census of all Danish citizens covering employment, income, industry, age, and gender, among many other topics. Made possible via a personal identification number associated with every Danish citizen, this is arguably the most robust longitudinal dataset we’ve ever encountered at Createquity. For its purposes, “Artistic Education Matters” homes in on people ages 18 to 70 (excluding pensioners) who have a positive income primarily generated by work in one of the five defined arts categories over the 17-year time frame of the study. Exit rates are marked by a ‘‘definitive exit from the artistic labor market’’ – a shift in occupation that continues throughout the observed period without a return to arts employment.

Via a literature review, the authors point to several hurdles in the arts labor market, including an excess supply of artists, paltry average income, skewed income distribution, and a low overall survival rate, with just 20% of the subjects remaining in their fields after ten years. “Compared to other fields of employment,” they write, “the arts seem to be a risky business.”

Bille and Jensen’s conclusions focus on artistic survival rates – the odds of remaining in an arts profession – more than income levels. Indeed, they cite a host of cultural and economic literature indicating that artistic education does not have a significant impact on income, noting that many artists are self-taught and theorizing that “indefinable” factors – such as talent, creativity, and ambition – may contribute more to higher rates of payment than formal training does. (Despite this conclusion, Bille and Jensen perform their own analysis of income levels in the dataset and find that, at least for Danish musicians, actors, and writers, a relevant education actually does positively affect earnings. Income from self-employment is not included in the study, though, so we should take those results with a grain of salt.) While acknowledging that “higher income makes [artists] better able to live from their arts,” “Artistic Education Matters” concerns itself mainly with education’s effect on longevity – not financial success per se – in a chosen arts field.

Bille and Jensen employ the Cox model of regression analysis to to investigate what factors predict longevity in the marketplace as an artist, controlling for income level, relevant experience (i.e., working in the field in which the artists studied), other experience, additional employment, and demographic variables such as gender and age.

Motley Crews

Overall, across the five artist groups studied, only about 20% remain in their chosen occupation after 10 years. The report makes clear, though, that the impact of an arts degree varies considerably by discipline. Below we discuss which groups benefit most from a relevant education, from most to least:

• Writers: the authors note that “it is not possible to separate authors from journalists” in the dataset, and this is the largest group, with 14,943 subjects. About 20% have a relevant education: for them, the exit rate after five years is 20%, compared to more than 60% for those without a writing degree. Bille and Jensen note that journalism in particular “functions more like an ordinary labor market, where an education may have an important signaling effect to employers.”
• Actors: the sample of 3,813 “film, stage, and related actors and directors” shows this group to be most vulnerable to an early exit. While Bille and Jensen note that “an actor can get a job without any formal education or other experience,” 16% of the actors had in fact formally studied their craft. At the five-year point, only 45% of those with a relevant education had left the field, compared to 75% of those without.
• Musicians: the sample of 3,161 “composers, musicians, and singers” shows 34% with a music degree; among this group, 55% left after five years, compared to 70% for those without. The authors note relatively high barriers for entry in this field: “technical skills may have an impact on the survival.”
• Dancers: The group of “choreographers and dancers” has only 296 subjects; just 9% of them have formal dance training, and this is said to have “no impact on staying in the profession” (the five-year exit rate difference is less than five percentage points). However, the authors note the small dataset: “The problem is that there are very few observations for this group.”
• Visual Artists: Among 4,851 “sculptors, painters, and related artists” (including workers commercial fields like advertising) the authors report that just 2% have a formal arts education, “which means that most of these visual artists were autodidacts.” Based on this small sample, the formal education “seems to have no impact” on an early exit.

Bille and Jensen also cite data from a 2005 French study – Gender differentiated effect of time in performing arts professions (Coulangeon et al), which investigated survival function estimates for musicians, actors, and dancers in France from the mid-1980s to 2000. Both studies indicate that the most vulnerable period of attrition for all artist groups is in the two years following entry to the labor market; the Danish study, with a wider dataset, shows an even more dramatic early exit rate than the French study.

What Else Might Be Going On?

An obvious and tempting conclusion to draw from these results is that, yes, an arts degree is valuable, at least if one works in music, theater, or literature and if one’s goal is to stay in the profession for as long as possible. Yet for all its specificity, this analysis leaves several key questions unanswered and hypotheses unexplored. Among them are:

• Are these results simply an indication that people who bother to get a formal education in the arts are more committed to their chosen art form in the first place? Could there be a sunk-cost effect where people feel like they ought to stay in an arts field longer if they invested substantial time and resources getting trained in it? Especially since, for most, that probably also meant not getting a degree in some other field?
• Are the conclusions about visual artists and dancers – that formal education has little impact on longevity – simply a reflection of limited data for those groups or is there something more to this than first-glance results?
• Is it possible that people who survive the longest in the arts have alternative income streams (such as family help) that wouldn’t be reflected in this dataset?
• What is the relationship between survival in the arts and financial success? The authors note that a relevant education correlates with higher salaries for three of the arts groups – musicians, actors, and writers – and these are the same groups in which education is seen to increase longevity.
• What role does self-employment play in all this? Unfortunately, the authors chose not to include income from self-employment in the analysis due to challenges with the dataset, which could have skewed the results in unpredictable ways.
• Would we see these same types of results looking at similar data from a different country and/or a different time frame?

The Bille/Jensen study would have benefitted from a closer examination of these hypotheses as they relate to the Danish dataset. With its literature review and emphasis on longevity, this report adds a helpful lens to research gathered by Createquity last year in “The BFA’s Dance with Inequality” – which cast some doubt on the importance of arts degrees for lower-income students – as well as our 2016 article “Who Can Afford to Be a Starving Artist?” But because the study is light on analysis of socioeconomic factors and personal wealth – particularly the role that secondary income support plays in extending an artistic career – it doesn’t illuminate its subject as much as it could.

Then there are socio-political aspects such as government support for arts education: Denmark has a robust social safety net compared to, say, the United States, which may play into arts longevity. Getting a formal arts education in Denmark – where university education is free and living costs are buttressed by a system of grants – does not entail the equity barriers found in countries with high, generally unsubsidized university costs (especially at the graduate level).

Still, with an extraordinarily comprehensive national dataset, thoughtful analysis, and pinpointed conclusions, Bille and Jensen make a strong case for the connection between formal art education and longevity in an artistic career, especially for those working in music, theater/film, and literature. This should be good news to arts school students and grads who hope to spend their lives doing nothing else.

Image: “Gogbot,” Installation at the Gogbot Media Art Festival in Enschede. By Flickr user Ineke

The Fractured Atlas and Createquity teams are back with a second installment of the Createquity podcast! Our first series, “Watch Where You’re Giving,” discussed the implications for the arts of the growing philanthropic movement called effective altruism.

In this series, we look at what it takes to “make it” as a professional artist, as explored in Createquity’s recent series of research-driven articles. Is a college education actually necessary, and how much depends on talent versus luck versus a high tolerance for uncertainty? And is the chance to succeed as a professional artist equally available to people of all backgrounds and income levels, or are people who, for example, grew up in lower-income families less likely to become professional artists?

In this latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists.

Episode 1:

Guest Michael Feldman (bio below) provides a quick rundown of the research Createquity has done on this topic. Hear about how the decision to become an artist is affected by socioeconomic background and tolerance for risk, and what artists have in common with tech entrepreneurs. This includes a comparison of different state-run programs for artists in countries outside the United States.

Episode 2:

In this case study of sorts, guest Theresa Hubbard, Program Specialist in fiscal sponsorship at Fractured Atlas (bio below), explains how fiscal sponsorship and the organization’s other programs can help mitigate some of the challenges and risks working artists face. She also discusses her own professional and personal experiences with access to creativity and her views on the future of the field.

The Host

E. Andrew Taylor, Host
Andrew Taylor thinks (a bit too much) about organizational structure, strategy, and management practice in the nonprofit arts. An Associate Professor of Arts Management at American University in Washington, DC, he shares what he learns at “The Artful Manager.”

Around the world, we see people facing challenges not only accessing careers as artists, but also sustaining them. South Korean artists make 77% and Canadian artists 74% of their respective countries’ average income. In Ireland, 80% of visual artists who depend on their creative income live in poverty. One survey respondent in that country describes the outlook for artists this way: “The future always looks worse than the past. Economic booms are quite bad for artists, because they can’t afford to live where they should for their careers. Busts are worse.”

Generally, people born into less affluence have to work harder to catch up in any field. The Guardian’s Sonia Sodha writes that “we’ll never be able to eliminate the role that good fortune plays, but we need to do much more to lessen its influence and increase the relationship between effort and success.” What role can government play in lessening the influence of fortune when it comes to supporting artists? A look at several countries gives us some clues.

Tran Thi Doanh, Vietnames painter – Photo by Flickr user, Duc

Two Models: National Status vs. Sink or Swim

In some countries, including the United States, being an artist doesn’t necessarily mean having a professional artist career track, especially not in any sort of state-sponsored system. As one national study of artists reported, “some painters interviewed said that career was not part of their professional vocabulary; they simply were painters.” In that context, as we’ve explored, many US-based artists have day jobs and backup plans, and find themselves crossing between nonprofit and commercial sectors in a demanding market economy.

In other parts of the world such as in the former Soviet Union, as scholar Nina Dimitrialdi describes in her 2009 PhD dissertation on challenges faced by US and UK artists, “artist” was indeed a profession just like any other. An artist in the Russian Federation with “professional” status from the government currently receives compulsory social programs such as insurance covering illness, housing, maternity, disability, and retirement. Many countries with cultural sectors based on the old Soviet model, such as Egypt, fully bankroll training programs and manage “card carrying” artists and their benefits through a national union.

Left: Egypt’s High Institute of Ballet, 2013 (conditions under Presidents Mubarak, Mansour and Morsi) | Right: Same facility in 2016 (under President el-Sisi) – Images by Shawn Lent and Madga Saleh

Whether or not artistry is a formal profession in the eyes of the state, and what states do or don’t do to support that profession, reflects different agendas within different political systems. While the American model mostly distributes public funding for the arts indirectly, via tax deductions for nonprofit organizations and their donors, many other governments provide substantial direct support to individual artists. Increased overall government funding for the arts could be an important indicator of potential support for economically disadvantaged artists, but there is an opportunity in cultural policy to assess what funding schemes help bridge wealth gaps in the profession.

Unfortunately, we found existing research on this topic to cover predominantly North American and European countries, with few nationally representative results relating to artists from poorer backgrounds. While it is difficult to get a good read on the situation internationally, in many parts of the world, it does appear that dedicated government support – in the forms of subsidies and other incentives – has opened the artistic profession to more people across social classes.

Europe Day Slovenia – Photo by Flickr user, Steve

Public Policy Can Keep Artists Afloat

We see a number of countries enacting support programs for artists that are tied in with their tradition of centralized social services, supporting the basic needs of all citizens; this could be critical for artists and similar types of workers. As Quartz’s Aimee Groth put it when speaking about entrepreneurs, “when basic needs are met, it’s easier to be creative.” By giving more of a safety net to artists born with less means, government programs can make it easier for people (artists included) to risk being “entrepreneurial.”

Slovenia, Finland, Italy and Austria are a few of the many countries that offer pension and retirement programs to deserving artists as defined by those governments. The South Korean Artists Welfare Act extends the country’s employment insurance to 180,000 artists and accident insurance to 57,000 artists. The Danish Arts Foundation’s life-long benefit grants (livsvarige statsydelser) are awarded to state-selected, high-achieving artists in that country. In Thailand artists employed by the Ministry of Culture are considered civil service officers with the same salary system and benefits, and in Germany, the Artists’ Social Insurance Fund (Künstlersozialkasse or KSK) has been supporting self-employed artists and journalists since 1983.

2009 Making an appointment with Sabine Schlüter, head of KSK (Künstlersozialkasse) – Photo by Flickr user, Henning Krause

Estonia

Another country advancing its support of artists is Estonia, where a select group of artists and writers are offered a €1005 salary per month for two years plus health insurance and a pension plan. According to Indrek Saar, Estonia’s Minister of Culture, “the purpose of [the program] is to offer for a couple of years a possibility to work in peace and social guarantees for the distinguished creative people. Economic stability of a creative person gives better preconditions to create a new work of art.” This year Saar announced a 13.5% raise to the minimum wage for cultural professionals in that country’s government. This program is quite similar to one in Sweden, where income guarantees are given to selected artists who have created work considered “important for Swedish cultural life.”

Netherlands

The Netherlands has historically been a strong leader in this realm. The Dutch Artists’ Work and Income Scheme Act (WWIK), in place from 2005-2012, was the third major artist subsidy program developed for the country. WWIK provided financial support (70-125% of the guaranteed minimum income) for artists with a low income for a maximum of 48 months over 10 years to cover the start-up period of their professional arts career. Dutch artists also received extensions in the availability of unemployment benefits (4 years rather than 6 months).

While that program did not track impact for artists from financial disadvantage, another example from the Dutch attempted to connect cause and effect. From the 1960s-80s, the Netherlands provided temporary assistance to low-income visual artists that allowed those artists to sell their work directly to local governments as a supplement to income. The number of participating artists increased from 200 in 1960 to 3800 in 1983. During the same period, the growth rate of student enrollment in fine arts departments at Dutch academies was 60% higher than the average growth rate for technical and vocational training in other fields.

Members of Ethiopia’s Ras Theatre group dance and play as they wait for Uganda’s President Yoweri Museveni at Bole Airport, Addis Ababa – Photo by Flickr user, Andrew Heavens

The Warning: Selling Out (or Buying In) for Survival

Governments sponsor artists for a complex set of purposes: cultural tourism like the kind Russia is planning in occupied Crimea; income generation or nationalism such as with the Agencia Cubana de Rap in Cuba; protecting the national image like in Vietnam; “preserving the country’s national cultural assets for the benefit of all citizens and future generations” including aboriginal arts like in Canada; binational collaboration such as that of China-Moldova; cultural diplomacy, placemaking, or improving public morale. Generally speaking, state-sponsored artists are expected to adhere to policies that align with national interests.

2013 Venice Biennale / Maldives Pavilion – Photo by Flickr user, Emergency Room Thierry

Before we all make a rush on the Dutch consulate or start demanding new state-sponsored artist programs in our respective countries – quite the issue to float in our current political climate – it’s worth considering the pitfalls that can come with increased government involvement in the arts.

• Threats to Freedom of Speech: Several of the programs mentioned above are or were careful to allow artistic freedom. The Netherlands supported the artists participating in its assistance programs regardless of the style or content of the work they produced. In Estonia, Minister Saar explains that artists receiving the government salaries are “still free in their creative work; the only requirement for the creative person is the commitment to one’s creative work.” Unfortunately, such freedoms are the exception rather than the rule. Many countries, such as Zimbabwe, have a national agency for censorship. While increased government support for artists can result in great technical rigor in the respective art forms, like in Russian ballet, it can also mean stringent restrictions on artistic expression and a high level of government interference. In 1980, UNESCO recommended governments “determine those remunerative jobs which might be confided to artists without restricting their creativity, their vocation and their freedom of expression and communication.” Russia may recognize artistry as a “profession,” but its track record with creative expression is abysmal; the organization Freemuse registered 32 attacks on artistic freedom in that country (such as censorship, imprisonment, physical attack, and death) in 2015 alone.
• Questions of Scale and Dysfunction: Government funding artists doesn’t automatically result in a net benefit for all individual artists, let alone poor artists. Many of the programs we came across focused on a relatively small number of superstars. Can any of these programs run at the scale needed to address the flaws in our arts ecology? And at what point might increased scale mean increased risk of corruption? Would an international scheme across the sector be more effective than relying on individual polities?
• Risk of Perpetuating Cultural Inequities and the Residual Effects of Colonialism: We have been examining government programs from the perspective of reducing socioeconomic inequality in the arts ecosystem, but in fact artists who are LGBTQ, with disabilities, from marginalized racial or religious groups, or political opposition may be just as likely to be excluded from government programs in many countries. With decision-making about which artists to cultivate via government sponsored programs so centralized, states have few incentives to include groups that may be at odds with perceived government interests.
• Risk of Servile Labor: Similar concerns apply to arts disciplines and new forms of self-expression. If you pursue a career as a painter of socialist realism art because the government only supports and allows that form of art, then there are fewer opportunities for you to express yourself and for audiences to gain benefits from a variety of artistic expressions. Artists in North Korea have been exported to execute massive arts projects in countries such as Cambodia, hired as employees to earn hard currency for the State.
• Lack of Cultural Variety: Even when a government’s intentions are pure, it is not clear that placing decisions about artists’ careers in the hands of bureaucrats leads to the best possible mix of cultural products and experiences. Generous benefits for artists in all likelihood means a limit on the number of artists who can access those benefits, which may mean that the people left out have even fewer opportunities to have a public creative identity and get paid for it. For all its issues, the United States’s market approach is rarely criticized for yielding a boring, homogeneous mix of work.

National Ballet of China ‘Raise the Red Lantern’ – Photo by Flickr user, Jesse Clockwork

Government policies can make it possible for artists to pursue better, more dignified careers, but there is no such thing as a free lunch. As we move forward in addressing the questions of support and equal opportunity in arts careers, we must be conscious of the tradeoffs inherent in systems that rely on more overt government or other patronage of the arts.

In the latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists.

Cover image: “Radical – Avant la Tempête @ EDLD 2015,” courtesy of Flickr user, Duc, via Flickr Creative Commons license. 

Ukulélé — photo by flickr user oh_debby

In a perfect world, who should have access to the arts? Among artists, arts administrators, and arts educators the answer is likely to be unanimous: “Everyone!” And yet for the most part, that conviction is based on little more than gut instinct and personal experience. Do we actually have any evidence that people are happier with their lives for having art in it?

Those of you who read Createquity’s recent article on television and wellbeing might have noticed an interesting tidbit: according to our analysis of data from the 2012 General Social Survey, there is no relationship between having attended an exhibit or performance in the past year and one’s satisfaction with life, after controlling for factors such as health and income. Left unexplored by that analysis, however, was the question of more active forms of participation – i.e., creation and performance. Enter “Artful Living,” a recent paper from Vanderbilt University’s Curb Center for Art, Enterprise, and Public Policy. Not only does the 2014 study reveal a positive correlation between several forms of active participation and life satisfaction (which some scientists refer to as “subjective wellbeing”), it finds that some forms of art increase people’s wellbeing more than others, and that the arts improve some people’s lives more noticeably than others, too.

In “Artful Living,” Steven Tepper and his team examine the relationship between several creative pastimes and subjective wellbeing, and compare findings across demographic groups. The authors focus specifically on “artistic practice” (including activities such as playing a musical instrument and craft-making), rather than more passive forms of arts participation, such as attendance and reception.

Drawing on data from three national surveys, the researchers find a generally positive relationship between maintaining an artistic practice and various measures of subjective wellbeing. For instance, using a dataset of over 20,000 responses to the DDB Needham Life Style Survey of consumer attitudes in the U.S., the authors find that all three of the artistic practices examined (playing a musical instrument, gardening, and craft-making) are all positively associated with life satisfaction. Moreover, life satisfaction increases with greater frequency of participation in any of these activities. While the relationships are positive across the board, there are considerable differences between those three practices: the wellbeing gains associated with playing an instrument are almost twice as large as those for craft-making.

Besides the differences across artistic practices, the researchers observe that these positive correlations are more pronounced among women and people of color than their male and white counterparts. The relationships are particularly strong for women engaged in craft-making and gardening and people of color who either play an instrument or garden. The authors theorize that this might be attributed to certain benefits of artistic practice like self-expression and a greater sense of personal control and efficacy, which might be particularly helpful for improving the wellbeing of historically marginalized groups.

In addition to the DDB data, the Curb Center researchers analyzed data from a survey of 1,700 college seniors at nine institutions (the Double Major Student Survey) and from the Strategic National Arts Alumni Project (SNAAP), which surveyed slightly more than 4,000 graduates from 76 art colleges. The results from the Double Major Student Survey lead the authors to conclude that students who engage in arts activities have a more positive self-image and social outlook. The SNAAP data indicates higher levels of life satisfaction among former arts students who have continued their artistic practice, but only among those who feel that they have adequate time to practice their art. Those who continue to create art but feel they don’t have enough time to do so report lower levels of life satisfaction than arts graduates who gave up their creative work entirely.

While these findings are intriguing, it is difficult to say how meaningful these associations are, as the effect sizes are fairly small. The developed models include variables such as age, race, gender, income, employment status, and marital status, plus data on respondents’ artistic practice. All of these variables together only explain about 8 to 13 percent of respondents’ subjective wellbeing.

The authors try to contextualize the size of the wellbeing increases associated with an artistic practice by stating that the increases are comparable to or greater than those that result from being married or having children. That seems pretty impressive at first glance, until one thinks about the fact that over 30 percent of marriages end in divorce, and that spending quality time with a crying newborn at 2am is a decidedly mixed blessing. It turns out that the ups and downs of these life-changing events are reflected in wellbeing surveys: the impact of marriage on wellbeing is fairly mixed, and while individual studies have conflicting results, it seems like levels of life satisfaction generally aren’t so different for parents and non-parents.

A more helpful point of comparison is provided in a study that compares the wellbeing impacts of sports and cultural engagement in the U.K., which came out the same year as “Artful Living.” As in “Artful Living,” the British researchers found a positive, statistically-significant relationship between artistic endeavors and life satisfaction. However, the increase in life satisfaction associated with arts engagement is slightly lower than that of participation in sports. This certainly isn’t the final word on the subject, but it demonstrates how comparisons can be used to make the effect sizes intelligible.

Even with these caveats, “Artful Living” serves as a great example of exploratory work demonstrating the relationship between the arts and wellbeing in the U.S. It also gives us valuable insight into the varying effects of artistic practice on different populations. As always, additional research would be useful. While experimental methods would be desirable, incorporating more forms of artistic practice within a general population survey like the DDB Needham Lifestyle Survey might be an excellent first start. In the meantime, “Artful Living” is notable for taking the challenge of measuring the wellbeing impact of the arts head on, and lays a helpful foundation for future research.

Who will take care of these artist-citizens when they get sick or injured? Who will grow food and repair buildings? Who will mediate disputes? Perhaps in a radical shift toward interdisciplinary living, these functions will be considered new artforms. Perhaps the growth of artificial intelligence will, in fact, have rendered these functions obsolete, freeing people to focus on artistic pursuits if they wanted. In our 21st century reality, though, not everyone who envisions an arts career can follow through on that dream. The option to make one’s living as a pro artist is bestowed upon a small portion of the people who desire it.

Which begs the question: who should those people be?

Photo by Flickr user, hollyannephotog7

As we at Createquity perceive it, they should be the artists whose work offers the greatest benefit to others. That can mean engaging an unusually large audience. It can mean winning disproportionate respect from experts. It can mean adding something unique to the cultural diet of humanity. Or it can mean improving lives in other concrete and meaningful ways.

Those criteria should have little, if anything, to do with an artist’s family tax bracket. And yet we see troubling signs that socioeconomic status does correlate with access to a professional arts career. Logically, it makes sense: if an occupation is attractive but probably low-paying, and then there are socioeconomic inequalities in the road to becoming a professional, inevitably that line of work would beckon more people from affluent backgrounds.

Empirically, reliable data is hard to come by, but what we have found tends to support the suspicion. One U.K. study finds that artists there are predominantly middle class, and a U.S. report declared that average household income during the childhood of artists (in 1979) was the same as those who went on to become chief executives, general managers, and engineers—above the 60th percentile of family income. Our own analysis of the 2008 Survey of Public Participation in the Arts via the National Archive of Data on Arts & Culture reveals that professionals in “Arts, design, entertainment, sports, and media occupations” were about 60% more likely than average to have a father who attended at least some college (55.9% vs. 34.5%), and 70% more likely to have a mother who attended college (55.9% vs. 32.6%). That is the most extreme skew of any of 23 occupation categories for mother’s education; for fathers, it’s exceeded only by mathematics and computer science occupations.

Artist by Flickr user, Esther Simpson

What’s behind these trends? Last month, our article on The BFA’s Dance with Inequality explored whether the cost of an arts agree poses a barrier to individuals in the U.S. from financially disadvantaged backgrounds who may otherwise wish to pursue a career in the arts. The short answer is that it doesn’t – in fact, the vast majority of working artists in this country do not have arts degrees, although the importance of such a credential to an arts career does vary widely by artistic discipline and goals.

What about risk? Could poorer individuals be shying away from becoming artists because of what might happen if it doesn’t work out? Are the risks associated with an arts career disproportionately discouraging to economically disadvantaged individuals? Are there other sectors we can learn from?

Here’s what we do know about pursuing a career in the arts.

• The notion of “the day job” is very real. Artists tend to have other work to draw from to earn income. The day-job phenomenon is especially true for artists who support single-income households. For example, Australian artists who don’t rely on the income from a partner spend more time on non-arts work.

• Many artists are making backup plans. Although artists are possibly go-getters by getting out into the field sooner than other professionals (with fewer total years of education), nearly half of them in the U.S., according to BFAMFAPhD’s “Artists Report Back,” built a safety net by majoring in another subject. Arts students also pick up more minors and teaching certificates as part of their “backup” planning – one way to try to minimize the risk inherent in their choices.

• The artist’s path is fraught with risk. The professional arts career has a long gestation period with high opportunity costs. Artists face greater variability in their earnings than those working in other fields and are five times more likely to be self-employed. Some have hypothesized that this nature of the arts draws more risk-seeking individuals than the general labor market.

Inequality Across Sister Sectors

In many ways, artists have a lot in common with tech entrepreneurs. The early (and sometimes not so early) stages of their careers could be likened to the startup phase of companies, in which Mark Zuckerberg hopefuls pull ramen-fueled all-nighters for uncertain, uneven remuneration. Working artists interact with labor markets in ways that could be compared to small firms. The two fields have common controversies: for tech entrepreneurs the necessity of a college degree has likewise been called into question. There’s even a debt-free, direct path for emerging tech stars from all types of socioeconomic backgrounds. A prime example is the Thiel Fellowship; following in the footsteps of other dropouts such as Bill Gates, young tech entrepreneurs are receiving $100,000 if they leave or put off college to pursue their own Thiel projects.

Photo by ThielFellowship.org as well as LinkedIn user, Mike Olson

Unfortunately, in both fields, the risks involved in developing a career seemingly correlate with the underrepresentation of low-SES professionals. According to one U.S. survey, entrepreneurs skew toward affluence; by another account, tech entrepreneurs come mostly from middle-class backgrounds. The Global Entrepreneurship Monitor found that “more than 80% of funding for new enterprises comes from personal savings, family and friends.”

We don’t know whether tech entrepreneurs try to mitigate the risks of their careers, but it seems like artists do. A question lingers: if artists can and do create backup plans and hold day jobs to lower their personal risk, how do we explain why aren’t there more low-SES professional artists? Perhaps it’s related to social and human capital. In order to be successful, artists need to be able to commit uncompensated time to a passion project, particularly over an extended period. They need to spend thousands of hours in training/practice, which are thousands of hours that they’re not earning a living.

No matter what entrepreneurial capacities we teach, push and support to prepare emerging artists for this uncertain economy, a person’s financial circumstances could matter quite a bit. Resources depend, at least partly, on a stable asset base, and the limited resources of low-SES populations might impact their ability to grow their new businesses and arts careers, demanding greater risk-taking. The National Bureau of Economic Research recently provided indications that risk tolerance relates much more to circumstances (behavior in relationship to environment) than to personality, pointing to evidence that individuals from poorer backgrounds have lower risk tolerance.

Risking It All, for What?

Like tech entrepreneurship, the arts are among the world’s “winner-take-all” industries; with the exception of a handful of superstars, most of the pack will struggle mightily toward public acclaim and financial stability. The risk artists face, though, is on another level: even when successful in establishing a career at all, they experience the biggest drop between income during childhood and income during adulthood among the 31 careers in the National Longitudinal Survey. Researcher Pierre-Michel Menger reports in the 1999 Annual Review of Sociology that “the skewed distribution of artists income is strongly biased to the lower end of the range.” In Canada, arts managers, directors, coordinators and government cultural workers have higher and rising salaries compared to the art-makers themselves, who in the U.S. are more likely than non-artist and technical professionals to live below the poverty line (6.9 percent vs. 4.2 percent according to data from the 2000 US Census).

Is it just the dream of fame and fortune that compels aspiring artists to take such gambles? Or is it expression and societal contribution? Financial benefit, interestingly, does not appear to be much of a motivator for good work. According to Menger, professional artists feel “zero or negative correlation between effort and earnings.” In a recent London study of cultural industry professionals, 88% reported that they have worked for free; individuals from low-SES backgrounds may not always have that luxury. Indeed, risk aversion might be a reason less affluent individuals in the United Kingdom are more likely to participate in the arts informally.

Photo by Flickr user, Samira

Looking Ahead

While we have yet to find solid evidence that risk dissuades individuals from economically disadvantaged backgrounds from pursuing arts careers, we know that if the arts and entrepreneurship remain enclaves for the privileged, we will all be the poorer for it. As much as our cultural and technological palettes have been enhanced by the likes of Nina Simone, Mark Rothko, Steve Jobs, J.K. Rowling, and Hamilton‘s Anthony Ramos, they shouldn’t be the exception that proves the rule.

One potentially promising area of investigation would be to examine alternate systems that could better support such professionals by decoupling success from an inequitable distribution of risk. Do we need more targeted support for less affluent artists? Germany, France, and Holland have been experimenting with social welfare programs for artists. The government of Sweden is offering lifetime pensions. With a more equitable socioeconomic grounding, the issue of risk for artists (as well as for tech entrepreneurs) might become moot. In our final article of this current series, we’ll explore that topic in greater depth.

In the latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists. 

Cover image: “Semana Alagoana de Hip Hop,” courtesy of Coletivo Popfuzz via Flickr Creative Commons license. 

In “the real world,” 84% of working artists—defined by BFAMFAPhD’s controversial “Artists Report Back” study as people who make their primary living from their artwork—do not have degrees in the arts, and 40% have no college degree at all. (It’s important to note that due to data limitations, these figures exclude artists with master’s degrees or beyond in any field; however, the number of artists affected is relatively small.) If arts training programs continue to climb in popularity while budding artists from less affluence are deciding against studying the arts in college, does that mean the college-to-career trajectory is a myth? Has the arts degree become a luxury, or are artists from less advantaged backgrounds missing out on something?

Graphic by Shawn Lent for Createquity. Source: Artists Report Back

An Incubator of Artistry or a Waste of Precious Prime Time?

What can we make of the implication that higher education is not the golden ticket to creating or performing art for a living? It would be overstepping to say that arts degree programs provide students with no value at all: for one thing, they offer important time to refine one’s craft within a supportive but highly disciplined and similarly-skilled community of peers, critical mentors, and potential networks. Such credentials can serve as a signal of high artistic quality and capacity, a prerequisite for certain grant funding. We should note, though, that artists move freely between the nonprofit and commercial sectors in their pursuit of paid work and the value of a degree likely varies by context. It looks like a person doesn’t necessarily need a BFA or MFA to become a professional artist, but the degree could help an artist reach a higher level of industry success or make a full-time living as an artist.

At the same time, arts students may not have this expectation of working as artists. Across the board, most graduates (73%) work in a field outside their major. Arts students, in particular, might be prepared to thrive in other sectors, and they seem fine by that; the ongoing Strategic National Arts Alumni Project survey (which likewise has its limitations) finds that arts graduates are generally satisfied with their experiences and would do it again if they had the chance.

B.A. and Arts Double-Majors at Commencement 2016, UMD School of Theatre Dance and Performance Studies | Photo by Karen Kohn Bradley

For pro artists, the necessity or desirability of arts degrees may vary considerably by discipline. Although full-time symphony orchestra musicians are selected by audition, it is hard to find one these days without a degree in music. On the other hand, from the Oregon Ballet to Bally’s Jubilee, dance artists often delay or skip college because of the early retirement age in most dance forms (90.5% of working dancers and choreographers are under age 40, compared to 39.6% of working musicians). Examples like these leave arts degree programs vulnerable to the charge that they are building up a profession (academia) that isn’t necessarily serving artists. Sarah Anne Austin questions, “If opportunities in American modern dance are disappearing, and if being a tenured faculty member at a university is the only stable job available for dancers and choreographers, and having this job depends on being able to attract students… does this make American modern dance a pyramid scheme?”

One Option in a Long Line of Pricey Career Strategies?

Such questions wouldn’t be so charged were it not for the very real concern that arts degrees perpetuate inequality in the sector. Professional artistry has a lengthy and complex gestation period that is slammed with socioeconomic obstacles. Factors that may make, or break, one’s professional success as an artist include personal networks, the prestige of the teacher, portfolio materials, membership in a union/guild, affordable housing in a city with available arts jobs, and a myriad of other opportunities such as showcases, apprenticeships and internships.

Graphic by Shawn Lent for Createquity. Source: Playbill

Like aspiring athletes, emerging professional artists benefit from school and community members who identify and develop their interest, regular and rigorous private lessons, and pre-professional training. These present quite the financial hurdle for families: a recent calculation estimates that it takes $100,000 to raise a professional ballerina. Against this backdrop, the cost of college may only exacerbate what is already a yawning opportunity gap.

The Greatest Risk or the Great Arts Equalizer?

We may not know definitively whether arts degrees provide added value to aspiring artists, but we do know that they pose quite a bit of risk, particularly for artists coming from low socioeconomic status (SES). Although artists with bachelor’s degrees in any major earn more than artists who went pro after high school, new BFA holders quickly face the reality that artists experience lower returns to formal education than they would in other professions. Anywhere from 10-20% of artists with bachelor’s degrees report a “major impact” on their career decisions due to debt from higher education; this debt load comes on top of a heavy earnings penalty across the board for artists (8.4 percent lower than the rest of the labor market, according to 2000 Census data).

Graphic by Shawn Lent for Createquity. Source: U.S. Department of Education IPEDS Survey

Particularly on a discipline-specific basis, the conditions leading up to the decision to pursue professional artistry may represent disparities of access. If it were the case that high school graduates who aspired to artistic careers couldn’t pursue their dreams because of the risk aversion associated with low SES, that would be a major failing of a healthy arts ecosystem.

Given that, it’s probably a blessing in disguise that you don’t need an arts degree to become an artist. In fact, the preponderance of upper-middle-class students in programs offering those degrees might well indicate that poorer, emerging artists are making informed decisions that are in their best interests. Everyone’s situation is different, and statistics can only tell us so much about an individual case. But if you’re worried that an expensive four-year degree is your only way to the top of the arts heap, you can take heart in the knowledge that many, many creators and performers have made it there without one.

In the latest Createquity podcast series, Createquity and Fractured Atlas team members illuminate the major factors that contribute to artists (or prevent artists from) establishing successful careers. We also focus on some of the tools Fractured Atlas has developed to support artists, with the larger goal of helping create a more navigable and equitable ecosystem for professional artists. 

Cover image: “Hiram College Commencement 2015,” courtesy of Kasey-Samuel Adams via Flickr Creative Commons license. 

“Few and Far” photo taken by Bill Dickinson

Title: Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists

Author(s): Susan Jahoda, Blair Murphy, Vicky Virgin, Caroline Woolard

Publisher: BFAMFAPhD

Year: 2014

URL: http://bfamfaphd.com/

Topics: arts degrees, debt from arts degrees, the lives of working artists

Methods: Summary statistics from data from US Census’ 2012 American Community Survey (ACS) Public Use Micro Sample (PUMS).

What it says: Only 16% of working artists in the United States have arts-related bachelor’s degrees. Forty percent of working artists over the age of 25 do not have bachelor’s degrees in any field, and the remaining 44 percent have bachelor’s degrees in other fields. Of the two million annual arts graduates, two hundred thousand make their primary living as an artist. The median income of working artists is $30,621, but those with bachelor’s degrees have median earnings that are higher at $36,105. Arts grads’ debt loads tend to be higher than non-arts grads, and some of the best arts schools in the country have shockingly high student loan default rates. Those pursuing arts bachelor’s degrees are largely white and female, and the majority (54 percent) of working artists are male. The report makes three recommendations for the art schools and the field:

• While the majority of working artists do not have arts degrees, formal arts education is still a valuable way of building critical thinking, skill building, and other competencies that would be difficult to gain outside of formal school. The authors encourage those seeking arts degrees to seek low-cost or free options instead of expensive schools.

• Philanthropic and cultural institutions should look beyond higher education for emerging talent.

• Encourage groups of working artists without degrees and those with arts degrees to share and learn from one another.

What I think about it: These statistics do not include those with Master’s degrees or higher in the arts because of the way the Census collects data about educational attainment, and the methodology on earnings does not include those who make their livings as designers or architects. I wonder how many of those who do not have bachelor’s degrees in arts-related subjects went on to get MFAs. The choice to exclude architects and designers also seems like it would exclude some high earners in fields that typically require or heavily favor those with formal arts education.

Additionally, I wonder about how the statistics on the probability of artists attaining degrees compares to the rest of the labor market. In the United States, just about a third of people over the age of 25 have a bachelor’s degree, and in the labor market, a proportion of 60% of people with a bachelor’s degree puts it on the higher end of educational attainment in terms of professions. Further, I wonder how often people in other professions tend to stay in the same field as their college major, which would contextualize the other figures they cite in the report about the educational background of artists. I recognize that this is meant to be a critique of the conventional wisdom of a particular group of people about pursuing arts in higher education, but without some context about earnings and degrees in the United States, I think the findings and the interpretation can be distorted.

What it all means: The findings on the relatively high debt load for arts graduates combined with the seemingly low probability that those graduates will go on to become working artists presents troubling evidence for those considering higher education in the arts. Further, that seven of the ten most expensive colleges in the country after financial aid are art schools is evidence that arts students are over paying for their degrees. However, without additional context to compare these findings to the rest of the labor market, it’s hard to really understand whether we should think the proportions of holding an arts job or an arts degree in the arts profession are high or low.

Our research questions include:

• How does economic disadvantage decrease access and knowledge of working arts opportunities?

• How many low-SES people who might want to be artists cannot be artists because of barriers to participation?

Literature from our initial scan includes:

Anderson, A. R. (2003). Class matters: human and social capital in the entrepreneurial process. The Journal of Socio-Economics, 32(1), 17–36. Retrieved from http://www.sciencedirect.com/science/article/pii/S105353570300009X

Beattie, I. R. (2002). Are All “Adolescent Econometricians” Created Equal? Racial, Class, and Gender Differences in College Enrollment. Sociology of Education, 75(1), 19–43. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/3090252?seq=1#page_scan_tab_contents

Benhamou, F. (n.d.). Artists’ labour markets. In A Handbook of Cultural Economics (pp. 53–57). Retrieved from https://books.google.com/books?hl=en&lr=&id=eyXQbYAXCBQC&oi=fnd&pg=PA53&dq=time+and+money+required,+successful+artist,&ots=808sTBgr7J&sig=p1sN51mGV3lieGBaFekB8ppBHLM#v=onepage&q=time%20and%20money%20required%2C%20successful%20artist%2C&f=false

Bui, Q. (2014). Who Had Richer Parents, Doctors Or Artists? NPR Planet Money. Retrieved from http://www.npr.org/sections/money/2014/03/18/289013884/who-had-richer-parents-doctors-or-arists

Cox, R. D. (2016). Complicating Conditions: Obstacles and Interruptions to Low-Income Students’ College “Choices.” Journal of Higher Education, 87(1), 1–26. Retrieved from https://muse.jhu.edu/login?auth=0&type=summary&url=/journals/journal_of_higher_education/v087/87.1.cox.html

Filer, R. K. (1986). The “Starving Artist”–Myth or Reality? Earnings of Artists in the United States. Journal of Political Economy. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1831960

Hans, A. (2008). Why Are Artists Poor? : The Exceptional Economy of the Arts. Retrieved from http://www.oapen.org/search?identifier=340245

Jahoda, S., Murphy, B., Virgin, V., & Woolard, C. (n.d.). Artists Report Back: A National Study on the Lives of Arts Graduates and Working Artists. Retrieved from http://goo.gl/N2AYyx

Luftig, R. L., Donovan, M. L., Farnbaugh, C. L., Kennedy, E. E., Filicko, T., & Wyszomirski, M. J. (2003). So What Are You Doing after College? An Investigation of Individuals Studying the Arts at the Post-Secondary Level, Their Job Aspirations and Levels of Realism. National Arts Education Association, 45(1), 5–19. Retrieved from http://www.jstor.org/stable/1321105

Minniti, M., & Nardone, C. (2007). Being in Someone Else’s Shoes: the Role of Gender in Nascent Entrepreneurship. Small Business Economics, 28(2), 223–238. Retrieved from http://link.springer.com/article/10.1007/s11187-006-9017-y

Mullen, A. L. (2014). GENDER, SOCIAL BACKGROUND, AND THE CHOICE OF COLLEGE MAJOR IN A LIBERAL ARTS CONTEXT. Gender & Society, 28(2), 289–312. Retrieved from http://gas.sagepub.com/content/early/2013/12/17/0891243213512721

Rampell, C. (2014). The Most Expensive Colleges in the Country are Art Schools, Not Ivies. The Washington Post. Retrieved from http://www.washingtonpost.com/news/rampage/wp/2014/03/28/the-most-expensive-colleges-in-the-country-are-art-schools-not-ivies/

Simon, R., & Barry, B. (2013). A Degree Drawn in Red Ink. Wall Street Journal. Retrieved from http://www.wsj.com/news/articles/SB10001424127887324432004578306610055834952?mg=reno64-wsj&url=http%3A%2%2Fonline.wsj.com%2Farticle%2FSB10001424127887324432004578306610055834952.html

SNAAP. (2013). An Uneven Canvas: Inequality in Artistic Training and Careers. Retrieved from http://snaap.indiana.edu/pdf/2013/SNAAP%20Annual%20Report%202013.pdf

Strategic National Arts Alumni Project. (n.d.). Spotlight on First-Generation Artists (PART 2). Retrieved from http://snaap.indiana.edu/databrief/vol4no1.html

Meanwhile, we have also begun work on a new research area, continuing our investigation into the history of the arts ecosystem.

History of the Arts Ecosystem: expanding definition of the arts

Arts institutions and organizations that constitute the core of the formally recognized “cultural sector” were—and continue to be—dominated by Eurocentric artists and art forms. While this bias persists, the definition of what counts as art, and what is deemed worthy of study and support by formal institutions, appears to have expanded considerably over the past 50 years.

Createquity is investigating this shift as part of our larger project on the history of change in the arts ecosystem, with an emphasis on the role of changemakers. A few of the questions we will be exploring in this research process are:

• What are some examples of artistic activities and traditions pursued by artists or communities of color that have seen an increase in prestige and recognition from the 1950s to today?
• Is there any data or method of quantifying this increase in prestige?
• How much has the amount of monetary support available for noncommercial artistic activities and traditions pursued by artists or communities of color changed from the 1950s – today?
  • How does this contrast this with the general increase in support available for nonprofit arts activities, and with demographic shifts in the same period?
• Have artists of color working in the commercial sector seen increases in the resources they personally gain as a result of their artistic work?
• Who are some of the most important actors from within communities of non-Eurocentric artistic practice who have deliberately organized to increase the visibility of their work and their peers?
  • What was their original intention when they started the work that led to this change?
  • How did they gain attention or resources for their activities beyond the norm for their time?
• What are some identifiable moments of reform from within institutional funding communities?
  • How did they start?
  • Who made the ultimate decision to change institutional policies and why?
• Has the bulk of this shift been in recognition and prestige as opposed to monetary resources?
• How have artist-driven movements or projects and funder-led initiatives interacted with one another on this issue?

We have begun our initial literature search, and we are also looking for suggestions from our readers. Read more about that here.

The New York Times Building, photo by Scott Beale / Laughing Squid

One hot August day last summer, my Facebook news feed suddenly blew up with frustration directed at New York Times fact-checkers, editors, and writers over the geekiest of subjects: data quality. The complaints were coming from friends of mine associated with the Future of Music Coalition, frequent commentators on policy affecting musicians in particular and creators of all kinds. These are two brands that I respect enormously – the Times website gets multiple visits from my browser a day, and FMC puts out some of the best policy analysis out there – so of course I wanted to find out what all the fuss was about.

Remember the fierce debates that gripped the music industry when pirated MP3s started popping up on filesharing sites like Napster and Audiogalaxy? On one side, copyright defenders fought these sites tooth and nail, even to the point of suing individual users, in an unsuccessful effort to stem the tide. On the other, copyright reformists and anarchists embraced filesharing as a way of bypassing traditional gatekeepers. To bolster their position, the old guard frequently adopted doomsday-like language predicting the death of the music industry and the loss of artistic vitality. The new guard argued the opposite, contending that piracy was essentially free marketing for artists, and that if anything the increased exposure and attention would facilitate connections (and transactions) that would not have previously been possible.

So who was right? A cover story published last year in the New York Times Magazine by noted business and technology writer Steven Johnson would have you believe that piracy has turned out to be no biggie for artists and society. The article, entitled “The Creative Apocalypse That Wasn’t,” attempts to explore how “today’s creative class [is] faring compared with its predecessor a decade and a half ago.” (Johnson and his editors at the Times annoyingly use a different definition of “creative class” than Richard Florida, who originated the term—they specifically mean people who work in entertainment industries.) To do this, Johnson examined a raft of secondary data sources to assess everything from the size of the industry to average incomes to aesthetic quality.

Despite evidence that Napster and its successors have indeed undermined the value that consumers place on recorded music (annual revenues have declined from $60 billion to $15 billion worldwide), Johnson’s analysis finds that musicians, along with writers, directors, and other performers, don’t seem to have suffered greatly as a result. To support his contention, Johnson cites data from three sources that collectively show creative industry jobs, businesses, and incomes growing in relation to the rest of the economy between the turn of the millennium and 2014. He considers possible macro explanations for the trend, including declining costs of production and distribution and increased revenue from live music performances. He even attempts to address the quality of different disciplines over the time period, concluding that TV is in a golden age and that film and books are arguably no worse off than they were before. Far from harming the diversity of artists’ voices, according to Johnson, technological change has enabled it.

The article immediately provoked an intense backlash from artists and industry representatives alike, many of whom didn’t see their story represented in the data. The most thoughtful broadsides came from Future of Music Coalition, which pointed out that the case that artists and musicians have not suffered economically over the past 15 years relies heavily on the data from the federal government’s Occupational Employment Statistics (OES) and Economic Census, both of which turn out to be compromised. By the government’s own admission, OES is not an ideal data source for making comparisons over time, and some sleuthing by FMC and Thomas Lumley pinpointed a definitional change that appears to account for all of the growth reported in the number of musicians and then some. Meanwhile, according to Patrick Wang, general definitional fuzziness may be distorting the numbers of all creatives as well, with coaches, scouts and public relations specialists accounting for much of the growth seen in those statistics. Johnson’s article also neglects to mention that the number of artists employed by businesses, as reported in the Economic Census, has dropped—even though the number of businesses employing artists has grown. And there are a number of reasons why some of the more secondary elements of “Creative Apocalypse” (e.g., the analysis of the growth of live touring revenues) need to be taken with a grain of salt as well.

These are significant flaws, and it’s perplexing that Johnson’s editor at the Times, Jake Silverstein, persisted in calling the article “excellent” and “thoroughly researched” even after they were brought to his attention. That said, when a data source turns out to be suspect, it doesn’t always mean that the conclusion you were drawing from it is wrong. In November, the research team at the National Endowment for the Arts took another look at the issue through the lens of an entirely different data source: the US Census Bureau’s Current Population Survey. Unlike the OES statistics, the CPS is set up to be analyzed longitudinally, and there are no changes in how “musicians, singers, and related workers” have been defined over the past 15 years to muck up the analysis, making it a much better data source for this purpose.

The CPS data shows that the percentage of musicians in the workforce has remained largely stable over the time period, splitting the difference between Johnson’s article and the revised analysis offered by his critics. More importantly, the CPS data shows musicians’ real incomes rising substantially, and faster than overall workers, during the time period in question, albeit with substantial variance from year to year. (This had already been the strongest part of Johnson’s analysis – as he correctly pointed out in a response to one of the critiques, no one has been able to point to a data source that has musicians’ average incomes declining since 1999.)

So it looks like there has been some growth among creative fields, music included, in the past decade and a half. Why, then, does it feel to so many like the profession is in crisis? After all of this analysis, the biggest unanswered question is about the distribution of the growth. When we write a sentence like “musicians’ income has increased,” the mind immediately conjures a picture of a rising tide lifting all boats. But what the data is really saying is that the average of all musicians’ income has increased – which could mean that a few fatcats making a killing are disguising stagnation or worse for everyone else. In the original article, Johnson makes a weak case that this is not happening, using incomplete data on live music tour revenue only; however, in one of his follow-ups, he claims that he looked at median income for musicians, which has—surprise surprise!—outpaced the growth in average income during the years from 2004-2014. But before we get too excited about this, keep in mind that this analysis used the same flawed data set as had been discredited earlier, and the same challenge that skewed the numbers there (dumping a bunch of elementary and secondary schoolteachers into the mix midway through) could quite plausibly have affected the income figures too. Johnson’s rhetoric implies that all artists are sharing in the largesse, but if income inequality is increasing, that would be like touting America’s shared prosperity on the basis of stock market growth since the depths of the recession.

Another clue to explain the reaction to the article comes from the NEA’s response, which pulled the figures on real investment in new music between 1999 and 2014 from the Bureau of Economic Analysis. In contrast to movies, television programs, and books, which have seen steady or increasing investment over that time period, annual investment in new musical intellectual property products has declined an astounding 28% in inflation-adjusted dollars. The decline in recorded music revenues likely has a lot to do with that.

Overall, the picture being painted in the data (that we can trust, that is) is one of the same number or fewer people identifying as full-time professional musicians, but making more money on average. But as anyone who follows the music industry knows, that misses a significant part of the story. Thanks to technological changes that have made the means of music production and distribution cheaper and more accessible, it seems like a good bet that there are lots more people who are pursuing public identities as musicians today than there were in 1999. If that’s the case, but yet there are not more people able to make a living as a musician, it would mean that a data set that captured all aspiring musicians might well show average incomes going down.

So, back to Johnson’s premise: are we better off than we were pre-Napster? It depends on your perspective. There is still plenty of money to be made in the creative industries, and Americans are still as willing to pay for entertainment as ever, although the specific mix of goods and services is changing. But if you’re a creator who works primarily in music, it does seem like opportunity might be shrinking. So far, it doesn’t look like the decline in recorded music revenues due to streaming and piracy has spread to other industries and genres, but it’s unclear whether film and TV are being buoyed by shifting audience preferences or have simply managed to stave off a similar collapse that is coming soon.

Meanwhile, we’re left with the plight of the artist. In recent decades, researchers have found that one of the surest paths to unhappiness is to have expectations that go unfulfilled; Nobel Prize-winning psychologist Daniel Kahneman writes in his book Thinking, Fast and Slow of a study that showed that “measured by life satisfaction 20 years later, the least promising goal that a young person could have was ‘becoming accomplished in a performing art.'” It’s tempting to interpret the increase in access that technology has provided to aspiring artists of all kinds as an unqualified boon for society. But to the extent that the opportunity to have a public identity as an artist has translated to expectation of public success as an artist, we may be looking at a system that, in the aggregate, punishes people for pursuing their dreams – a creator’s curse of sorts. If true, that issue goes way beyond how Pandora and Spotify divvy up their royalties and whether Apple Music gives sweetheart deals to Taylor Swift. And part of the answer may lie in helping aspiring artists make more informed decisions about how much of themselves they’re really willing to give up for art.

Related reading:

• What am I worth to you?
• Artists not alone in steep climb to the top

• The backlash against unpaid internships has spread beyond our borders: Ontario’s Ministry of Labour has ordered two high-profile Canadian magazines to immediately end their internship programs. The Ministry also announced it plans “an enforcement blitz this spring focused specifically on internships across a variety of sectors.” (NB: while nonprofits are generally exempt from the US Department of Labor requirements for unpaid internships, state laws, including New York’s, can be more stringent.)

MUSICAL CHAIRS

• After nearly 30 years as CEO of National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Jonathan Katz is set to make his exit soon.
• Margit Rankin has resigned as Executive Director of Washington State’s Artist Trust. The Trust plans to “focus on internal efficiencies and statewide reach before hiring [her] replacement.”
• Carolina Garcia Jayaram was recently appointed the new CEO of United States Artists, and will be taking the Los Angeles-based organization back with her to Chicago.
• Miguel M. Salinas, formerly Program Director at the Adobe Foundation, is moving into the newly-created position of Program Officer for Local Grantmaking at the David and Lucile Packard Foundation. His portfolio will include arts funding for Northern California’s Monterey County and surrounding region.
• Ken Cole of the National Guild for Community Arts Education will be taking over the role of Vice President of Learning and Leadership Development with the League of American Orchestras.

ALL ABOUT THE BENJAMINS

• The Detroit Institute of Arts saga continues. Not to be outdone by the “grand bargain” that would offer the city (and its creditors) over $800 million in exchange for taking the art museum (and more importantly, its art) off the table in bankruptcy negotiations, one of those creditors, Financial Guaranty Insurance Co. (FGIC) is now soliciting bids for the DIA’s entire collection. So far, four bids have been received with a high of $2 billion, but they’ve drawn a cool reception from the city’s Emergency Manager, Kevyn Orr. Curious why Wall Street types care so much about a bunch of old paintings? Well, one estimate puts the opportunity cost of displaying Breughel’s “The Wedding Dance” at $1,200 per viewer.
• The CEOs of the Hewlett, Ford, and McKnight Foundations got together to discuss the results of a report that suggests a kind of Lake Wobegon effect among foundation leaders: they tend to be pessimistic about their field’s overall progress toward achieving goals, but optimistic about the work of their own foundations. The three executives acknowledged their incentives to demonstrate individual leadership get in the way of the collaboration and coordination to which they aspire and promote to their grantees.
• Speaking of foundation strategy, Daniel Stid, senior fellow at the Hewlett Foundation, candidly asks on the foundation’s blog whether Hewlett’s nascent bid to advance democracy by supporting both political parties and campaign finance reform makes any sense. Score one for philanthropy transparency – and zero for the rest of us: several days after the post went up, there were exactly no responses.

IN THE FIELD

• In response to an uproar from patrons, the San Diego Opera formed a special committee of the board to explore ways to avert the closure it announced abruptly last month, and a board member has announced a $1-million gift. Also, and we’re not sure which way this cuts, PR doctor Mark Fabiani has volunteered his crisis-management services, putting the Opera in the august company of Whitewater-era Bill Clinton, doping-era Lance Armstrong, and kleptocracy-era Goldman Sachs. Alas, it all seems to have been for naught.
• Portland, Oregon is about to go on a Bard binge: more than fifteen local theater companies are collaborating to produce all of Shakespeare’s works across the city over the next two years.
• Scape Capital, a Russian management firm, has purchased ARTnews from long-time owners Milton and Judith Esterow.

BIG IDEAS

• One possible result of investing in a “STEAM” (science/technology/engineering/math + arts) approach to K-12 education: shifting to a framework of “deeper learning” as amusingly outlined in this recent Hewlett blog and pioneered by San Diego’s High Tech High. High Tech High, incidentally, scores extra awesome points for launching their own MOOCs (with the help of their students) on how to design and build schools using this approach.
• A simple point, but one not made often enough: nonprofits see growth in their costs in part because growth in their revenues makes it possible.
• Are think tanks doomed in the face of human irrationality?

RESEARCH CORNER

• The state of the nonprofit sector is pretty grim, according to the Nonprofit Finance Fund: more than half of surveyed organizations reported they were unable to meet demand for their services, and are operating with three months or less of cash on hand. You can dig into arts-specific data using this interactive tool. Some nuggets: only about a third of arts nonprofits reporting an inability to meet demand, and arts orgs are significantly less likely to regularly collect data long-term data on impact than the nonprofit sector as a whole.
• A new NEA analysis of monthly census data reveals that the unemployment rate for artists continued to drop slightly in 2013 (7.1% vs 7.3% in 2012) and has recovered considerably from its Great Recession peak of 9.5% – though it remains much higher than the 2006 low of 3.6%. Two interesting sidebars: 1) Some findings about those for whom the arts are a secondary job, including the fact that 20% are teachers in their day jobs – and 20% are artists in a different capacity. 2) Although artists are classed as professionals, their 2013 overall unemployment rate was much closer to the total population’s (6.6%) than to other professionals’ (3.6%).
• This handy infographic breaks down the differences between US and UK philanthropy. The gold for sheer size goes the US, where the average person gives almost three times as much and the non-profit sector represents almost seven times as large a share of GDP, but the authors caution their fellow Brits against imitation in the full paper.
• Nifty data crunching suggests that films passing the Bechdel Test — a standard, albeit depressing, measure of gender bias — are actually a much better return on investment than Hollywood execs claim.
• Think there’s no way to judge creativity? Think again: new research suggests that people can be trained to accurately identify “subcomponents” of creativity. Interestingly, the control group  didn’t deem the same works “creative” as the group that received the training. Control group members did, however, tend to identify the same works as other control group subjects, implying they were all reacting to another, unknown component of the art.
• Speaking of assessing creativity, education leaders who bemoan American students’ consistent “underperformance” relative to counterparts in other countries may have a glimmer of hope: the Programme for International Student Assessment (PISA) conducted its first test of creative problem solving and found that American students did much better than they did on standard reading, math, and science tests. The bad news? They still trailed students from several countries like Singapore and Australia, both of which happen to put heavy emphasis on arts education. Hint, hint…