5 - Artists, superstars and creativity

Summary

In this chapter we shall focus again on artists and their rationale for producing art. After all, artists are behind any cultural activity, and economic theory can offer some useful tools for understanding their motivations while empirical economic work can shed light on what we know from real life.

Although Chapter 3 dealt with the many institutional factors that are relevant for artistic activity from a policy-making perspective, we shall change perspective in this chapter to focus on the artists’ viewpoint and how their individual production decision depends on income potential, the bottlenecks to recognition in their particular sector and the labour market for artists more generally.

One key element of the artistic labour market is the fact that, when thinking of any cultural sector, there is typically a set of artists who come to mind. And these usually are the ones who dominate their industry, not only in terms of their content and influence but also in terms of their income. These superstars, such as Ed Sheeran or Taylor Swift, J. K. Rowling or E. L. James, Lang Lang or Anne-Sophie Mutter, are filling concert halls and captivating listeners’ as well as readers’ attention across the globe. At the same time, they are also the highest-earning artists in their genre. And the link between top earners and superstardom can also be established in history, with Beethoven, Michelangelo and Shakespeare being the superstars of their time. However, there are, of course, exceptions to this rule, such as when we think of van Gogh, who never became famous during his lifetime. Nonetheless, for most cultural superstars it is a striking regularity that those who receive most recognition also earn the most.

Moreover, we shall look at the various empirical studies, which shed light on the determinants of creativity from an economic perspective. In addition to the labour market dynamics there are various social as well as psychological aspects in artistic production that have achieved some attention in economics. One such question is when artists reach their peak performance and what their career trajectories typically look like. Do artists shoot to fame when they are young or do they need to mature their talents in order to produce their best work?