Looking for work? Artists Need Not Apply

SALON
By Scott Timberg

They’re pampered, privileged, indulged – part of the “cultural elite.” They spend all their time smoking pot and sipping absinthe. But the daily reality for the vast majority of the working artists in this country has little to do with Angelina Jolie or her perfectly toned right leg. “Artists in the Workforce,” a National Endowment for the Arts report released in 2008, before the Great Recession sliced and diced this class, showed the reality of the creative life. To most Americans, this middle class of the creative class might as well be invisible. [link]

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While most of the artists surveyed had college degrees, they earned — with a median income, in 2003-’05, of $34,800 — less than the average professional. For some fields, the damage tracks, in an extreme way, along with the Great Recession.

• Jobs in graphic design, photographic services, architectural services – all peaked before the market crash and and fell,
• 19.8 percent over four years for graphic design,
• 25.6 percent over seven years for photography and a brutal
• 29.8 percent, for architecture, over just three years.
• “Theater, dance and other performing arts companies” – down 21.9 percent over five years.
• “Musical groups and artists” plummeted by 45.3 percent between August 2002 and August of 2011.
• “Newspaper, book and directory publishers” are down 35.9 percent between January 2002 and a decade later;
• Over the past decade, the number of members of the Associated Musicians of Greater New York Local 802 has shrunk to 8,500 from about 15,000.
• When a Kentucky paper reported the Chapter 11 filings of the Louisville Orchestra, the accompanying comments gave a sense of the way we think about culture and the market. “Get rid of them, the Ballet and any other useless tax funded ‘entertainment’ that isnt self supporting,” one said. “Pack up your fiddles and go home boys and girls. Maybe find real jobs. Go to Nashville and vie for some sessions work.”
• Newspapers, who by some estimates laid off as many as 50 percent of their arts writers in the years after the 2008 crash,

It brings to mind Oscar Wilde’s line: “A cynic is a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing.”