Economy of the work of the artists

With the wrong way of a design of the satisfied artist, practitioner only art for art's sake , the economy of the work of the artists analyzes the answers of the artists to the economic and institutional incentives, as well as the forms of the contracts binding the artists and the intermediaries of the market of art (producers, agents littéaires, editors, etc).

A particular market

The job market of the artists presents four distinctive characters indeed:

a distribution very unbalanced of the profits , indicated under the name of star system , where a very low number of agents receive a very significant part of the total of remunerations. This distribution results in the establishment of lists indexing the most required artists ( list has ) and of those which are it less ( list B ).
a systematic excess of offer : there are always more people wanting to earn their living by an artistic activity than of request.
of the nonmonetary profits leading the agents on this market to accept remunerations definitely lower than those which their qualification level would be worth to them elsewhere.
a not separation of the artist and work : the artists are interested in the image which them production gives of themselves.

So the form of remunerations and engagements are rather definitely different from what one in general observes in the economy of work.

To that specificities of the goods are added produced:

nobody knows: it is very difficult, even impossible to predict in advance the request or the success which will meet a given good (delivers, painting, film).
infinite diversity: contrary to goods like the computers, which can be differentiated according to a relatively low number of objective characteristics, the cultural goods are different on a very significant number of varieties, thus multiplying the diversity of the produced goods.

Formations

The essential problem of the artistic studies is on the one hand the acquisition of the technical skills necessary to art considered, and on the other hand the evaluation of the students from the point of view of list A/liste B prevailing in their outlets.

A study of years 1970 highlights the way in which the romantic ideal of the creator was registered in the design of the artistic studies. Although the study does not make it possible to generalize, the analyzes of Francoise Benhamou on the contemporary star system indicate that this logic remains dominant. Logic in question is that of the preeminence of the Talent, conceived like innate on technical virtuosity.

Within the framework of an artistic course, the talent is thus expressed like the capacity to express new artistic problems, and to solve them by average originals.

Example: One of the artistic problems of Mark Rothko was that the Portrait, by giving only appearance external of the individual, informed about transitory characters and did not give access so that he wanted to capture, the intimate feeling of the model. Its solution was to paint stripped portraits of any anecdotic element, giving access to a direct feeling of the strangeness of the other.

The evaluation of the relevance of the problems and the originality of the solution rests thus on the judgment of the pars or the trainers, themselves artists. However, this evaluation is different from that of the public in the broad sense: Cellars brings back experiments where two juries, one of artists and one of not-artists, had to judge same work. The first jury supported the originality, the second technical virtuosity in a known style. This system of formation thus encourages all the artists to develop their originality with the detriment of the development of competences enabling them to guarantee an alternative employment in the event of failure. That thus involves an over-investment in the search for originality and an underinvestment in negotiable know-how. Nevertheless, the analysis of this system remains limited by impossibility up to what point of knowing a more important stress laid on know-how would have important consequences in losses of original works.

Contracts and division of the risk

The form of the contracts in culture industries is significantly different from that which prevails in the majority of the sectors of the economy. Thus, remuneration generally has as a base the division of the receipts in the form of royalties, once covered the production costs of the various actors. The essential problem is the comparison of artistic actors, who seek not only incomes, but also a maximum exposure of their work to the public, and actors answering a more traditional economic logic of maximization of their incomes or those of their company.

Contractual risks

Pyramid of the incomes and star system

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