- Dant Panem: The Misunderstood Profession Of The Artist

Carmina non dant panem : the misunderstood profession of the artist

Introduction

This paper explores the matter about the value of culture under the modern economic paradigm, taking into account mostly visual arts. The search, in fact, intents to evaluate how the estimation of art as common good may affect aspiring artists in contemporary society. The objective of this study is to analyse the tensions between arts and economics and the difficulties that for a long time have resulted from the integration of the artist within pre-established professional categories. From the Romantic myth of the starving “virtuoso”, the exclusion of artists from the social context has often legitimated a cultural eccentricity that justified a greater expressive

Also from the Australian cultural economist D. Throsby’s surveys emerged that artists, often self-employed or part-time employed in creative and non-creative jobs, work longer than the average earning less. Already in “The Wealth of Nations” by A. Smith, the artistic professions are defined “frivolous” and “unproductive” as they do not to add value to a “vendible commodity” in an economy concerned only with prices (Towse, 1996, p. 96). Altogether it is know that working in the arts can be a great hazard, but there are still a lot of incongruences within the cultural market as, despite its precariousness, it is highly attractive. Artists, hence, show that their career is actually a vocation (Tessarolo,

The value of art, in fact, is conventionally determined by its aesthetic taste, by its meaning and by the feelings it conveys (Klamer, 1996). This explains why, in order to replace the inability to explain the condicio of creativity, artists are often referred to as “genius”. Being the criterions to appraise pieces of arts not evident and universal, the strongest contributions to the ease of the artist-genius come from the critics, who can revalue and exalt their histories and their qualities (Tota, 1999). With the intersection between the social and the intellectual activity, indeed the interaction with the public became the discriminating factor for the evaluation of arts. Being professionals, in fact, means transform one’s knowledge and ability into an instrument to satisfy shared needs (Tessarolo, 2014). As human beings often diverge from what is normally predicted, cultural economics goes further then the neoclassical supply-and-demand approach, taking into account psychological anomalies and behavioural aspects (Frey, 2013). Steiner and Schneider, for example, from their empirical study into artists’ job, noticed that who is involved in artistic professions usually is more satisfied and pleased than workers in other fields.