What motivates this study, and reports on things like “cultural tourism,” is the urge by arts and culture types to show that we\u2019re in the game, too: We\u2019re not just sulking in the corner, writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg. (As a poet from Manchester, England once put it.) And the data shows, indeed, that creatives produce jobs, income, revenues for the state, etc.<\/p>\n
These \u201ccreative jobs\u201d made up, in 2012, $155 billion of California\u2019s economy, almost 8 percent of the state\u2019s revenue, and roughly 1 in every 10 of the Golden State\u2019s jobs. And some of these creative-industry jobs pay healthy salaries: Digital media folks make, on average $163,000, toy designers just under $100,000.<\/p>\n
Now, let me first praise the study: It\u2019s important to have data on this stuff, and the Otis report is credible and well-respected.<\/p>\n
But the cheery way this is typically spun in the media obscures what\u2019s really going on. If we put video-game designers, movie-studio executives, Silicon Valley types and fashion people in the same data set with modern dancers, novelists, stage actors, and so on, we get numbers that makes the field look healthier than it is. “It\u2019s not like everybody is a starving actor or actress or writer,” economist and lead study author Robert Kleinhenz told KPCC<\/a>. That\u2019s great \u2013 unless you\u2019re one of the many actresses or writers who actually are starving.<\/p>\n The more comprehensive studies of the larger situation for artists \u2013 performing, visual, literary and otherwise — is the NEA\u2019s Artists in the Workforce, and in the visual arts, the survey by the group WAGE. These show something that most of us work the non-corporate side of culture know all too well: The majority of creative folk are struggling, or at least treading water: They are at best members of the shrinking middle class. For many, the recession has not lifted. The majority of folks working in the arts are not making six figures. In fact, if money is the only motivation, students should go to business school.<\/p>\n You don’t have to be a pure and rigid art-for-art’s-sake type to feel a bit queasy whenever the arts are asked to justify themselves this way.<\/p>\n This all said: The California Arts Council is using the report as a way to urge more arts funding. If this study has gotten the attention of politicians who will restore the arts council to its early-\u201880s funding levels, though, I\u2019m all for it. A press release that came out just minutes ago shows state Senator Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, urging increased funding because of the Otis study.<\/p>\n \u201cNo matter how you paint it, California ranks 48th in the nation in per capita spending on state art agencies, or about 3 cents per resident,\u201d Lieu said. \u201cThis is an insufficient investment in the state’s art programs, and it means art programs and art-related businesses are unable to thrive, or in some cases, to even exist.\u201d<\/i><\/i><\/p>\n Here\u2019s what we need to keep in mind. The value of learning music, theater, painting and so on \u2013 and having a life deepened by reading novels, going to plays, and other cultural commitments \u2013 goes beyond the economic consequences. If we don\u2019t remind ourselves of that, we become purely utilitarian, like the characters in Dickens\u2019s Hard Times<\/em>, and the arts will lose. If we measure everything in dollar terms, or in terms of GDP, we\u2019ve lost our values completely. And if we read this study in a superficial way it says, Everything is okay.<\/em> They’re not.<\/p>\n So let\u2019s be glad for this study, but keep it in context. ALSO: Ever since reading the memoir Exile\u2019s Return<\/i> in college, I\u2019ve been a serious fan of the man-of-letters Malcolm Cowley. (The loss of the public intellectual, who could write accessibly about serious matters, is something American culture can surely use more of, and he was one of the best.) So it gratifies me to see this excellent review<\/a> by Dwight Garner, of Cowley\u2019s selected letters, that gets at Cowley\u2019s role in the careers of Faulkner (whose books were mostly out of print before Cowley revived his career), Fitzgerald and Kerouac, his political swerves, and his witty assessments of the literary scene over many decades. (To Cowley, creativity wasn’t all about the revenue it generated.)<\/p>\n![\"9780140187762_p0_v1_s260x420\"](\"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/culturecrash\/wp-content\/uploads\/2014\/02\/9780140187762_p0_v1_s260x420-196x300.jpg\")
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