Artists as workers: Theoretical and methodological challenges

Abstract

Artistic labor markets expand along a path of highly unbalanced growth: competitive pressure, flexible specialization of the work organization and pervasive work contingency cross individual as well as entrepreneurial ideals such as self-achievement and innovativeness in ways that challenge conventional views of the skilled working process as well as the conventional survey and measurement methods. High differentiation of artistic products and steady oversupply, which are common traits of an imperfect monopolistic competition, are magnified by work arrangements that evolve towards increasingly fragmented and brokered employment relationship. Work trajectories combine features from professional as well as from entrepreneurial careers, under constraining contingency. Yet, uncertainty of the creative process, that goes along with the ‘functional flexibility’ requirement in the arts, helps to explain artistic behavior: neither a rational actor nor a deterministically driven agent, the artist may be depicted as a bayesian actor learning to balance self-actualization against occupational risk.