I’ve been thor­oughly enjoy­ing Hans Abbing’s Why Are Artists Poor?, which formed an impor­tant source in my last two arti­cles. Abbing is an econ­o­mist and a visual artist, and he tack­les the broad ques­tion of artist poverty from the per­spec­tive of both dis­ci­plines, try­ing to fil­ter out the biases and myths that color tra­di­tional interpretations.

As a part of his dis­cus­sion, Abbing brings up the ques­tion of what con­sti­tutes a pro­fes­sional artist. Accord­ing to econ­o­mists, pro­fes­sion­als are peo­ple who earn some non-negligible por­tion of their liv­ing via their pro­fes­sional activ­i­ties. This def­i­n­i­tion works for a lot of the activ­i­ties humans do, but it’s prob­lem­atic in the arts. Con­tinue read­ing “Is There Such Thing As A Pro­fes­sional Composer?” »

The chal­lenges of learn­ing com­po­si­tion in academia

I’ve always said that I learned despite my edu­ca­tion and not because of it, and after my master’s degree I decided to put my money where my mouth was and not pur­sue a PhD—much to my relief, the com­mis­sions and com­pos­ing con­tin­ued any­way. A few months ago I read a great arti­cle in Slate by William Pan­na­packer that really struck home for me. The basic premise was not that new: uni­ver­si­ties are mak­ing them­selves irrel­e­vant in the human­i­ties, arts, and sci­ences. What was refresh­ing, how­ever, was that this wasn’t an anti-intellectual rant, it was just an hon­est exam­i­na­tion of what higher edu­ca­tion as an insti­tu­tion is try­ing to do and how it thinks it should fit into soci­ety. So what if your goal is to be the best com­poser pos­si­ble and to have your music heard by other peo­ple who are inter­ested in sim­i­lar types of music? Should you get a degree in com­po­si­tion? Con­tinue read­ing “Why Com­posers Should Drop Out of Uni­ver­sity (and What They Should Be Learn­ing), Part 1” »

A recent arti­cle in Slate by Jan Swaf­ford got me think­ing about one of the major dis­tinc­tions between infor­ma­tion on the Inter­net and off the Inter­net. As I’ve been argu­ing for years, the way we inter­act with art has fun­da­men­tally changed. Swaf­ford looks at this from the per­spec­tive of a writer to argue “Why e-books will never replace real books”.

Basi­cally, it comes down to directed or active activ­ity ver­sus non-directed or pas­sive activ­ity. When you turn on the radio, the selec­tion is pas­sive. You can choose the sta­tion, but you can’t choose the pro­gram­ming. When you search for music on YouTube, how­ever, the selec­tion is always active. Con­tinue read­ing “Search­ing vs. Finding” »

A few weeks ago, a friend’s link to a rant about a rant about the Hype Machine, a music blog aggre­ga­tor, got me think­ing about the issue of whether it’s bet­ter to do art full time or part time. The short answer to that ques­tion, of course, has to do with what bet­ter means to you. But I still think there are mean­ing­ful dis­tinc­tions that can be made between the kinds of art that get made in either situation.

The ques­tion of bet­ter can be addressed to a large extent using eco­nomic sce­nar­ios, though not by rely­ing on clas­si­cal eco­nom­ics. Basic eco­nomic the­ory would say that the more reward you get for your work, the more devoted you will be to it, hence ensur­ing value. Also, we would expect the best artists to receive the most money because their work is in the high­est demand. So full-time artists, by this def­i­n­i­tion, should always be bet­ter artists. Con­tinue read­ing “The Starv­ing Artist: Full Time ver­sus Part Time” »

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. Con­tinue read­ing “Eco­nom­ics vs. Art: Why a good fit has never existed” »