Abstract
Not all artists are poor, but the inequality of incomes is marked. On average, artists receive lower incomes than people in other occupations. A few superstars earn high incomes. This leads to great inequality among artists. Artists with high incomes are often among the best artists. Various determinants of artists’ earnings have been identified. Talent, or creativity, is very important, but belonging to a well-established artistic network, training in a prestigious school and luck also matter greatly. Artists are considerably more satisfied with their work than non-artists, mainly because they are intrinsically motivated and enjoy autonomy.
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Related Literature
A basic contribution to artists’ labour markets is
Throsby D (2001) Economics and culture. Cambridge University Press, Cambridge
Major insights into the unequal distribution of income among artists include
Frank RH, Cook PJ (1995) The winner-take-all-society: why the few at the top get so much more than the rest of us. Free Press, New York
Rosen S (1981) The economics of superstars. Am Econ Rev 71(5):845–858
Awards are discussed in
Frey BS, Gallus J (2017) Honours versus money. The economics of awards. Oxford University Press, Oxford
Artists’ happiness is empirically analysed in
Trine B, Fjællegaard CB, Frey BS, Steiner L (2013) Happiness in the arts—international evidence on artists’ job satisfaction. Econ Lett 121(1):15–18
Steiner L, Schneider L (2013) The happy artist: an empirical application of the work-preference model. J Cult Econ 37(2):225–246
A general discussion of happiness research is given in
Frey BS (2018) Economics of happiness. SpringerBriefs in Economics, Springer International Publishing, Cham
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Frey, B.S. (2019). The Artists’ Labour Market. In: Economics of Art and Culture. SpringerBriefs in Economics. Springer, Cham. https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15748-7_4
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DOI: https://doi.org/10.1007/978-3-030-15748-7_4
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