[Finale] Why Are Artists Poor? (book review--long)

[Andrew Stiller]

I just finished reading the book discussed below, wh. I think will be 
of interest to many list members. A modified version of this review 
will be posted at Amazon.com.

Hans Abbing, _Why Are Artists Poor?: The Exceptional Economy of the 
Arts_. Amsterdam University Press 2002. ISBN 9053565655

An important book, though badly flawed. The author is both an 
economist and a painter/photographer, and thus highly qualified to 
write on this subject. His main argument is that art is quasi-sacred, 
and for that reason both its practitioners and its consumers are 
loath to think that it is "about" commerce or commodity exchanges. 
Most money that flows to the arts does so in the form of gifts (not 
just grants and donations, but family support and even individual 
artists subsidizing their own art with funds from a day job). Even 
outright sales are disguised to resemble gifts. The only learned 
profession with lower incomes than the arts is the clergy, who 
operate on similar lines, for similar reasons. Artists who make a lot 
of money become suspect in the eyes of peers and critics (case in 
point: Salvador Dali).

Artists use grant money to quit their day jobs while remaining as 
poor as ever. Abbing argues at length that European-style subsidies 
merely encourage more people to enter the arts, thereby actually 
increasing the number of poor artists without ameliorating the plight 
of the profession as a whole. The main value of such subsidies is to 
the government (prestige, status, and I would add though Abbing 
doesn't: appeasement of the intelligentsia)

Abbing's basic argument is a persuasive one, at the very least 
thought-provoking in an area all of us need to think about more than 
we have in the past (Abbing argues that young people enter the arts 
blindly because it is not in the interests of the arts community to 
inform them of huge unlikelihood of any one of them actually 
succeeding as an artist). His analysis can be used to answer 
questions he doesn't even address, such as why the output of musical 
masterpieces has remained roughly constant for 800 years while the 
number of composers has increased a thousand fold, and the audience 
by a factor of
100,000. It certainly answers the question recently raised on the 
Orchestralist as to why American musicians were being asked to donate 
to rehabilitate the shattered Iraq National Orchestra while all other 
Iraq reconstruction jobs were being handed out on a for-profit basis.

Artists can even glean some practical advice here: The person with 
the money should always be given the oppportunity to look like 
(s)he's doing you a favor. For success, it is well nigh essential to 
suck up to power and influence, but be subtle about it.

The flaws in this book? Abbing relies almost entirely on hypothetical 
examples (by no means all persuasive) to demonstrate his points. His 
command of English grammar and syntax is a bit dicy. He has a 
particularly European, maybe even specifically Dutch, outlook that 
takes him to some peculiar places: he takes it as a matter of course, 
for instance, that the the films of Werner Herzog are of greater 
esthetic value than those of Steven Spielberg, and he thinks that 
Henryk Gorecki lost status when his music became popular. He divides 
the contemporary "fine" arts into a supposedly prestigious 
"avant-garde" layer and a less prestigious layer that is merely 
modernist--a view that will strike most Americans as 30 years out of 
date. He names several dozen contemporary visual artists during the 
course of the book, not one of whom have I ever heard.

Architecture, where poverty is much less endemic than in the other 
arts, is nowhere mentioned.

He repeatedly (and correctly) asserts that artists usually come from 
the upper strata of society, while failing to notice that they do not 
often come from the very topmost tier. He fails to address the 
phenomenon of philistinism, which denies the "sacred" status of art 
on which the whole arts economy is supposedly based, and which has 
been a major, structural distorting factor of the US arts discourse 
since the nation was founded.

Finally, his historical viewpoint is shortsighted. He contends that 
the conditions he describes have only been in place since the 
nineteenth century, but there is much evidence to suggest otherwise. 
Consider Hogarth's "The Distrest Poet" (poets are stereotypically 
poor, it seems to me, in all cultures). Earlier still, consider 
Chaucer's Clerke of Oxenford--not an artist, true, but the type is 
clearly recognizable: a man with a great deal of economically useless 
education who, when he does get a little money, spends it on yet 
another book. Throughout Western history, successful composers have 
usually lived not by composing but by sinecures in other professions: 
the clergy, then musical household management, then conductor, then 
college professor.

Despite these and other problems (hugely exasperating at times) 
Abbing's main thesis is sturdy enough to withstand even the most 
obtuse misapplication, and for that reason I would recommend this 
volume to anyone even tangentially connected to the arts 
community--though it should be taken with a very heavy pinch of salt.
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