Hans Abbing’s book Why Are Artists Poor? should be assigned reading for every art student because it talks about the place of art and the artist in society in practical ways, from the viewpoint of the economist, somewhat objective, from ten stories up as Abbing puts it. Abbing, who is both a visual artist and an economist, gives us a view we in the arts rarely see; that in fact we are reluctant to see. It is almost antithetical to the arts to distance ourselves that much, our discipline being so much about focus and imagination; innovation, we think, requires immersion. You can’t think “outside the box” without being inside the box, deep inside.
What Abbing sees from his vantage point is not a pretty picture. The vast majority of artists are poor, very poor compared to the general population. Yet despite their poor earnings and meager possibilities, artists hang tenaciously onto their chosen role and ever more young people flock to the arts.
Abbing looks for explanations for this uncommon and seemingly irrational behavior and finds the arts to be submerged in a miasma of inaccurate and inadequate information, mythology, and misunderstood and hidden motivations, all of which he sums up as being “exceptional” (the subtitle of the book is The Exceptional Economy of the Arts).
Abbing’s use of the word “exceptional” is carefully chosen, for it simultaneously means both “deviation from a norm” and “special;” it captures the self-identity of the arts as both marginal and progressive, disdained and privileged, suffering and ecstatic. In no other field, Abbing postulates, do we find such glaring contradictions.
Abbing asks hard questions: How important is art? Who decides how important it is? How do artists make a living? Do they even make a living? If art is so important, why is it so difficult, and rare, for artists to make a living? Is there a relationship between who decides what art is important and why it is so difficult for artists to make a living? These are not questions we are comfortable asking in normal life, let alone in the arts where money and talk of money are treated with suspicion and where relations of authority and power may be contested but are rarely fundamentally questioned.
By all Abbing’s measures, the arts are “exceptional.” Yet, I had a nagging feeling all through the book that somethings were not being fully discussed.
Now I have a theory that every book has its Achilles heal, it’s vulnerable spot. In Abbing’s book, I suspect the weak link is quite fundamental, lying in the conclusion that the arts and the economy of the arts are exceptional. My suspicion, yet to be substantiated, is that the economy of the arts is not exceptional at all, but typical of the economies experienced by the vast majority of people no matter their profession or vocation. If I’m right, it will have bearing on Abbing’s conclusions, but not in my view on his observations, which remain valid for what they are, reflections of his experience as an artist and his knowledge of economics, and useful for how they reveal assumptions and mechanisms that drive the arts.
