Arts Jobs are Growing, says the NEA

Well, excuse me if I’m not excited about the news from the Bureau of Labor Statistics, which forecasts “growth trends” for jobs in the arts.

What jobs? Where?

The National Endowment for the Arts commissioned a study, Artist Employment Projections through 2018, which was released on June 27.  In the decade between 2008 and 2018, the labor force is expected to increase “by 10 percent, or 15.3 million people.”  Artists are not in the highest-growth projection (that would be registered nurses and customer service representatives), but the numbers appear to look good for artists--until you see that “artists” as a category includes everything from radio announcers to animators.  

In terms of the arts, says the study,  “The art occupations with the highest projected growth rates are museum technicians and conservators, curators, landscape architects and interior designers.“   Indirectly those curatorial and interior designer jobs will translate to exhibition opportunities and sales. Inscialla, as they say in Italian, by way of the Arabic: god willing.

But the “artist” category sees only “average rate” grown for artists, sculptors and craft artists. Inexplicably, this category includes commercial-sector jobs in art directing and in technology-savvy animation, which is on the rise. But if you’re a painter?  “Average growth” just means that the jobs increase along with the population—i.e. more people, more art students, more artists disgorged from art schools.  Here's a no-brainer forecast:  I see growth in the Williamsburg/Bushwick rental market. 
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The competition for jobs will be, says the report, “keen.” This is news?

And what, exactly, is a job for an artist: Is it working in an art gallery? Showing in an art gallery? Selling from a show in an art gallery?  Having a tenure-track teaching job (because there are so many of those available). Working in an art supply store?

Frankly, most of the jobs we have are the ones we create ourselves: making supplies or offering services that other artists can use, creating events that benefit artists, teaching out of our studios, lecturing, writing. But here's the thing: these jobs don't even get counted as jobs.  And recognized or not, they don't bring in a lot of money.

I think Jared Keller, writing in The Atlantic blog on this same topic, nails it:

There is another, less positive reason why artistic jobs might grow faster than the general economy. They're cheap. As my colleague Derek Thompson noted, graduates with arts and humanities degrees are among the lowest median earners by major group, just above social workers and educators. In the early years of the recovery, some of the fastest growing positions are what economists call "McJobs," offering service work at long hours and barely livable wages.

We’re not artmakers because we expect to be millionaires. But we are taxpayers, and some of our tax money went into producing a report that does not serve us—painters and sculptors, at least--in any real way.

NEA: Next time, use that “research” money to find out what artists are really doing. Better still, use the money to fund artists!