The eco­nom­ics of art is a peren­nial source of debate. Pro­po­nents of fund­ing for the arts usu­ally fol­low one of two argu­ments. The first is that art con­tributes intan­gi­bly to soci­ety by con­tribut­ing a rea­son to live, as opposed to a way to live. The sec­ond is that art actu­ally con­tributes tan­gi­bly to the greater econ­omy through the hard work that many artists do for rel­a­tively lit­tle pay. In con­trast, those who oppose fund­ing for the arts argue that fund­ing is waste of money, because valu­able art will be able to sur­vive eco­nom­i­cally on its own any­way: good artists will be in high demand, cre­at­ing scarcity for their work, and hence ensur­ing them a com­men­su­rate level of income.

But art has never been a good fit to any mon­e­tary econ­omy, because money was not really designed to han­dle art. Money, and our cur­rent eco­nomic sys­tem, was designed to han­dle finite com­modi­ties that can be traded. This is when clas­si­cal eco­nomic the­o­ries show some sem­blance to real­ity. These same eco­nomic the­o­ries fall short, how­ever, in cor­rectly mea­sur­ing other kinds of real value, not just in the arts, but in all areas of human activ­ity, because many of the impor­tant things that we do can­not really be mea­sured in mon­e­tary value. And when we do try to mea­sure these things in a mon­e­tary way, it often causes new issues (e.g., giv­ing away sex vs. charg­ing for it).

A recent episode of the TV series House reminded me of this fact. A doc­tor wanted to know why he was being paid less than the other experts on his team when he had the same qual­i­fi­ca­tions and was as use­ful to the team. His boss said, “Come on, you know salary isn’t based on what you’re worth, it’s based on what you can nego­ti­ate.” Because he had no com­pet­ing offers of employ­ment, he was being paid less.

Cre­ative artists (as opposed to inter­pre­tive artists) fall into the same pit trap. A com­poser is always dis­pos­able, because his or her labour can always be replaced with some­one else’s. Sure, a par­tic­u­lar com­poser might have a pro­found artis­tic mes­sage to share that would touch a lot of peo­ples’ lives. But there are always hun­dreds of other com­posers with a good, if not life-shatteringly pro­found, mes­sage to share. Some of them will be young com­posers who have never had any pro­fes­sional oppor­tu­ni­ties to speak of and would jump at the chance to gain expe­ri­ence. But once they have this expe­ri­ence, they haven’t gained any bar­gain­ing power, because they never have real “com­pet­ing offers” and there is always some­one new who is ready for the next “oppor­tu­nity” to work for free.

The sit­u­a­tion is dif­fer­ent for visual artists, because they cre­ate objects that can be sold. A paint­ing can be treated like any other rare object and fits in per­fectly with tra­di­tional eco­nomic the­o­ries: if there is only one orig­i­nal, then it com­mands value if many peo­ple want it. But for a com­poser or a dancer or a singer, the orig­i­nal does not exist: dance and sound are intan­gi­bles that can’t be held in one’s hands. True, there are some super­star per­form­ers who can turn their very pres­ence into a rare com­mod­ity to be sold, but this doesn’t help com­posers or chore­o­g­ra­phers or play­wrights or filmmakers—or any other artist whose work is intan­gi­ble and real­ized through other people’s efforts (through inter­pre­ta­tion, in other words).

This prob­lem, to my mind, inval­i­dates the argu­ment that good artists will be able to sur­vive on the mer­its of their work. The cre­ative artists—the ones who come up with the vision for the art in the first place—almost all work in the intan­gi­ble realm, and their work falls between the cracks of our eco­nomic sys­tem. It can­not be assigned value and hence it is assigned a default value of zero, despite the fact that we instinc­tively know this to be an untrue val­u­a­tion. Our soci­ety avoids the issue by giv­ing other (often menial) jobs to peo­ple who work with intan­gi­bles: Com­posers, your job is to get stu­dents to enroll in a uni­ver­sity music pro­gram; singer-songwriters, your job is to per­form in such a way that you can sell a lot of t-shirts. Nobody actu­ally tries to assign value to the intan­gi­ble work that makes the per­son valu­able in the first place (i.e. cre­at­ing music).

To com­pli­cate this issue, our eco­nomic sys­tem also rewards instant grat­i­fi­ca­tion and the pro­duc­tion of goods that can serve the most peo­ple at the least cost, regard­less of qual­ity. The sys­tem doesn’t do a good job of dis­tin­guish­ing value from mon­e­tary worth, and nei­ther do most peo­ple in the sys­tem (the “con­sumers”), because they have been trained to make short-term deci­sions based on price alone. The clas­sic exam­ple of how this type of eco­nom­ics works out is the obe­sity epi­demic. Peo­ple eat a lot of fast food because it tastes good (at least in the few sec­onds after it enters your mouth), it’s cheap, and it’s read­ily acces­si­ble. Some­times it’s the only option, as a result of monop­o­lis­tic pres­sures on the part of the fast-food indus­try. But we have come to a gen­eral con­sen­sus that it is not healthy and it costs us dearly on the long run, both in terms of health and our wallets.

There­fore, in the cases where the arts do pro­vide tan­gi­ble prod­ucts for sale (paint­ings, sound record­ings, DVDs, etc), the mar­ket does a poor job of judg­ing their value. Suc­cess­ful artis­tic “prod­ucts” are those that repli­cate the McDonald’s phe­nom­e­non in their respec­tive dis­ci­plines. They tend to be dis­pos­able, quickly for­got­ten, and eas­ily replace­able. They become fillers or back­ground to our lives, as opposed to adding to them. And this is a truth that is as applic­a­ble in the high-art realm as in the pop­u­lar one.

Before mod­ern media, peo­ple were much more recep­tive to art in gen­eral because they rarely expe­ri­enced any of it. Today, they still rarely expe­ri­ence any of it, but they do expe­ri­ence a replica of art, equiv­a­lent to how fast food is a replica of real food, and which is sim­i­larly designed to take their money with­out pro­vid­ing any long-term value. So it’s no sur­prise that there is antag­o­nism against sup­port­ing the arts: the eco­nomic frame­work of our every­day lives can’t eval­u­ate it, and what does get pre­sented to us as art too often is only artis­tic replica.

This is hardly a jus­ti­fi­ca­tion to stop sup­port­ing the arts, how­ever. Lest we for­get, there is hardly an indus­try in the West­ern world today that does not rely on sub­si­dies to sur­vive. Real, open, free cap­i­tal­ism is just too bru­tal. There is a strong hypocrisy in claim­ing that the largest banks and auto man­u­fac­tur­ers in the world might some­how need sub­si­dies to sur­vive (despite pub­lic dis­ap­proval) but that the arts should be self-sufficient. No human activ­ity, eco­nomic or oth­er­wise, is really self-sufficient, and we should be espe­cially sen­si­tive to those that are poorly served by the reign­ing eco­nomic the­o­ries. We need to remem­ber that these are only the­o­ries, not truths. And per­haps a wake-up call in this respect will end up being the most last­ing legacy of the 2008 credit crunch. Art has never been a good fit for eco­nomic the­ory, but that doesn’t mean it has no value. After all, it’s been around longer than his­tory and refuses to die despite our neglect, so art must be some­thing pretty impor­tant to humans on a fun­da­men­tal, bio­log­i­cal level. The only ques­tion is do we want to allow as many peo­ple to access real art as pos­si­ble, or allow it to get buried under a moun­tain of replica?