Starving Artist Economics
Thursday, February 26th, 2009OK, we all know the chances of success as an artist are slim, but apparently, it’s not just a matter left to chance, it’s almost a mathematical certainty.
This article on Baumol’s Cost Disease centers on the high cost of being a performer, and the low return on that investment.
Baumol’s cost-disease (sometimes more prosaically referred to as the Baumol-Bowen effect) is well-known among economists and arts administrators, but not many working musicians have even heard of it. First described by economists William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen in 1966, the main symptom of the disease is this: labor costs in the performing arts will always inexorably rise, and at a faster rate than other industries. That’s because in most industries, technological advances allow for increased productivity without an increase in labor. This doesn’t happen in the performing arts, though. As Baumol and Bowen famously describe it in their book Performing Arts: the Economic Dilemma:
Whereas the amount of labor necessary to produce a typical manufactured product has constantly declined since the beginning of the industrial revolution, it requires about as many minutes for Richard II to tell his “sad stories of the death of kings” as it did on the stage of the Globe Theatre. Human ingenuity has devised ways to reduce the labor necessary to produce an automobile, but no one has yet succeeded in decreasing the human effort expended at a live performance of a 45-minute Schubert quartet much below a total of three man-hours.
Technological advances have allowed cartoonists to produce a certain type of artwork at greater speed than before, if you are the sort of artist who uses Photoshop for all of your background work, that is. But that doesn’t actually seem to have resulted in faster artists, unless you happen to be a cover painter. It takes a heck of a lot less time to Photoshop a cover than it does to paint an original oil.
The technology appears to have created a demand for more intricate, polished comic art. You can create more impressive images with less effort, but on the whole, I don’t know if it’s actually making most artists faster. They are simply taking more time to produce flashier images.
And of course, if you are Jeff Smith, you’re not using a computer to draw anything. It takes Jeff Smith just as long to draw a comic page now as it did 20 years ago. And there will always be an audience who chooses to follow the work of artists who draw sans machine.
The computer has lowered the rates of some artists and forced others out of the business. Letterers now get paid what they did more than 20 years ago. And tight pencilers no longer need inkers. That work can also be done on computer. The tales of ex-top inkers who now work at the Subway Sandwich shop are not mere anecdotes.
