Why Are Artists Poor?: The Exceptional Economy of the Arts (review)

In their treatments of the arts, economists have had a paradoxical career. By subjecting art to the same principles as any other commodity, they have had very little to say about what art is, but have been enormously influential in shaping public policy and perception of the arts. In the United States, arguments about the performing arts' inability to recoup costs through extended runs were crucial in getting the National Endowment for the Arts going in the mid-1960s. In the 1980s, impact studies sought to calculate to what degree monies spent on the arts encouraged consumption and stimulated a central urban economy otherwise in decline. And when arts were under attack for being decadent and useless, economic reasoning came to the rescue, demonstrating that exposure to the arts raised test scores and stabilized communities at risk. Requiring the arts to be utilitarian comes at a price: they remain poorly understood and poorly compensated. It would seem that the antidote to this divided state of affairs would be an economist who is also an artist, one who could account for what makes the arts different and understand what makes artists poor. Enter Hans Abbing.

Abbing has written a thorough and comprehensive interrogation of what makes for an arts economy. He writes from the dual perspectives of a painter and neo-classical economist. The first perspective informs his understanding of the ways in which markets for art objects are alienable from artists. The second assumes a universe of free-willed individuals whose choices are based upon maximizing reason and reward. While Abbing writes from the Netherlands, where government subsidy of the arts is a normative condition, his notion of market ideals reveals the controversial economic logic in the United States that has shrouded itself in veils of aesthetic preference and cultural sensitivity. A careful reading of Abbing, therefore, can help readers ascertain the economic dimension of debates that parade as strictly moral in character. While his own concern is with the market as a guarantor of economic freedom, Abbing unintentionally provides a briefing on how the often invisible machinations of economic censorship subtend other forms of sanction and exclusion of artistic expression. Abbing, I would suggest, provides a clue as to how an apology for the exclusionary forces of the market are crafted through the arts. It is the disavowal of economics as such that renders the arts exceptional. The denial stems from a mythos of the sacred character of art woven by artists themselves that extends to relations of exchange and of the state.

The book revolves around three central questions: How does art bear value? How is the artist situated in society? What regulates the arts economy? To the first question, Abbing sees economic activity divided into separate spheres of gift-giving, which is selfless, qualitative, aesthetic, and sacred; and, market exchange, which is self-interested, quantitative, profit-taking, and profane. The traffic in art, insofar as it preserves the "anti-market" sensibility of the gift by means of market exchange, would seem to be the last bastion of moral purity in a world profaned by commerce (39). At the same time, art resolves this antimony between qualitative and quantitative by reconciling aesthetic judgments that serve to order preferences with the price-setting calculus of the market (55). Abbing treats art the way the Victorians conceived of gender, with clearly demarcated spheres of public and private. Abbing's uncited connection to discussions of gendered unpaid labor underwrites his contention that artists' self-understanding as somehow separate from economics allows for their poverty. Artists are, in effect, persons whose "willingness to work for low incomes is high" (113).

Circularity notwithstanding (artists are poor because they are willing to be; or, domestic labor is unpaid because women do it out of love), Abbing gives a number of factors that contribute to the impoverished artist's sensibility and situation. Among these: artists are attracted...