A young French economist got a lesson in risk assessment when she arrived in Chicago last week for the 13th International Conference on Cultural Economics. She turned her back on her suitcase in a hotel lobby and it vanished.
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Abbing was at the meeting, with an answer right out of Econ. 101: supply and demand. “Artists are poor because there are so many of them,” he says. It’s a glut that began after World War II, when the romantic notion of a bohemian lifestyle gained currency in spite of the obvious lack of financial rewards. In “Living on the Edge,” the paper he presented at the conference, Abbing argues that subsidies for artists, intended to alleviate the problem, only exacerbate it, creating more “loser” artists without increasing overall incomes. In place of financial success, artists expect some kind of nonfinancial recognition, he says, but even that fails to materialize for most. His solution: give up on art as a vocation. Make your day job your only job and (horrors!) aim for the status of “nonprofessional artists who matter–gifted amateurs.”
Julia Rothenberg of the City University of New York hung out in West Chelsea a few months after 9/11 and noted that while the tiny blue-chip sector of the art world was chugging along just fine, the bulk of the artists who’d been among the “frontline troops of gentrification” in New York could no longer afford to live or work in the city. Dennis Farber, an artist and teacher at the Maryland Institute College of Art, said the “big secret in visual arts is family money.” Those who have it can train at academic hot spots in New York, London, and LA, live in the right places (New York), and hang in long enough to succeed. Those who don’t generally wash out.
Art accompanying story in printed newspaper (not available in this archive): illustration/Laura Park.
