Bellow you will find a key summary from a recent report by the national Endowment for the Arts in the USA. This should not come as a surprise to anyone. Once the economy and the financial system started to collapse, the first areas to suffer indirect consequences of cost cutting are activities that do not impact the sustainability of businesses in the near term. Budgets for commercial and commissioned photography are reduced or deferred, corporations that use photography services close business, and investments in art fall as people get far more cautions about cash preservation. It is difficult to provide advise that sounds very positive and we all go through this together. These are uncertain times.
Moments of difficulty bring also moments of opportunity. Opportunities to rethink the focus of the work, to seek for areas of business opportunities that were ignored when your art had easier access to capital. Moments of difficulty are moments of change, adaptation and evolution is the way to survive. Perhaps it is a good time to consider offering your art and skills to audiences and customers that you have not explored before. If anything, in difficult times, remember that the essence of your art remains unchanged. Perhaps you have now the opportunity to explore with higher intensity these free personal projects that could become the source of the new opportunities coming forward.
[see the report here]
Artists are unemployed at twice the rate of professional workers, a category in which artists are grouped because of their high levels of education. The artist unemployment rate grew to 6.0 percent in the fourth quarter of 2008, compared with 3.0 percent for all professionals. A total of 129,000 artists were unemployed in the fourth quarter of 2008, an increase of 50,000 (63 percent) from one year earlier. The unemployment rate for artists is comparable to that for the overall workforce (6.1 percent).
Unemployment rates for artists have risen more rapidly than for U.S. workers as a whole. The unemployment rate for artists climbed 2.4 percentage points between the fourth quarters of 2007 and 2008, compared to a one-point increase for professional workers as a whole, and a 1.9 point increase for the overall workforce.
Artist unemployment rates would be even higher if not for the large number of artists leaving the workforce. The U.S. labor force grew by 800,000 people from the fourth quarter of 2007 to the fourth quarter of 2008. In contrast, the artist workforce shrank by 74,000 workers. Some of this decline may be attributed to artists’ discouragement over job prospects.
Unemployment rose for most types of artist occupations. Artist jobs with higher unemployment rates are performing artists (8.4 percent), fine artists, art directors, and animators (7.1 percent), writers and authors (6.6 percent), and photographers (6.0 percent).
The job market for artists is unlikely to improve until long after the U.S. economy starts to recover. Unemployment is generally a lagging economic indicator, or a measure of how an economy has performed in the past few months. During the prior recession (2001), artist unemployment did not reach its peak of 6.1 percent until 2003 – two years after economic recovery began nationwide.
{ 1 } Trackback
[...] of work, I just read this article on Exposure Compensation which gave some statistics about artists and unemployment. Here is [...]
Post a Comment