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Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hi brain

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Speaker 1: Stuff Lauren vocal bomb here. The image of the starving

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Speaker 1: artist is a well known cultural stereotype. But is it

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Speaker 1: simply a stereotype or could the brain chemistry of artists

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Speaker 1: actually be responsible for their tendency towards poverty. An experiment

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Speaker 1: conducted in Germany raises this question and probably the eyebrows

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Speaker 1: of many artists. As reported in the April issue of

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Speaker 1: the Creativity Research Journal, the researchers sat down twelve artists

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Speaker 1: and twelve non artists and gave them colored images to

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Speaker 1: choose from on a screen, including green images that provided

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Speaker 1: a cash reward. When the green images popped up and

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Speaker 1: were chosen, the non artists brains showed a great deal

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Speaker 1: of activity in the pleasure area that releases dopamine. Brain

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Speaker 1: scans of the artists showed less activity in that dopamine

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Speaker 1: producing area. The researchers concluded that the artists were less

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Speaker 1: responsive to monetary rewards than other people. It's admittedly a

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Speaker 1: small sample size, but still an interesting result. The authors

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Speaker 1: wrote in the paper. These results support the existence of

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Speaker 1: characteristic neural traits and artists. But do these neural traits

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Speaker 1: mean that all but the most successful artists in fact

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Speaker 1: have low earning potential. First of all, the poverty of

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Speaker 1: artists may be culturally exaggerated. As a group, artists in

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Speaker 1: the United States have higher incomes than the average American worker.

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Speaker 1: According to census figures analyzed by the National Endowment for

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Speaker 1: the Arts, in the medium income for craft and fine

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Speaker 1: art artists in seventeen was a little over forty dollars

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Speaker 1: per year, or about twenty four dollars per hour, a

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Speaker 1: livable wage by most standards. And second, the nature of

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Speaker 1: the art market makes the life of an artist a

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Speaker 1: bit less fundamentally secure. This is explained well in the

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Speaker 1: book Art and Value Arts Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical

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Speaker 1: and Marxist Economics by painter and professor Dave Beach. He

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Speaker 1: described how the art market is different from the market

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Speaker 1: for most other goods. Art is not a standard commodity.

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Speaker 1: He wrote, the creation of art, as well as the

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Speaker 1: marketing and purchase of art, are outside the bounds of

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Speaker 1: the regular market. Art is not usually made as a

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Speaker 1: result of corporate investment. Artists do not generally get an

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Speaker 1: hourly wage for their labor, and the price of art

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Speaker 1: is not set through competition in the same way that

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Speaker 1: other products prices are determined. The art market is different

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Speaker 1: and it shapes the prices artists can set and expect

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Speaker 1: for their labor. Dutch painter and sociologist Hans Ebbing explored

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Speaker 1: the mindset as well as the socioeconomic forces that lead

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Speaker 1: to what he called the admiseration of artists, immiseration meaning

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Speaker 1: economic impoverishment. He said that for one thing, the art

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Speaker 1: market has a winner take all attitude, and in addition,

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Speaker 1: artists may not have other skills and so remain in

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Speaker 1: the work that they are drawn to. He said that

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Speaker 1: artists also find non monetary creation based rewards in their work.

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Speaker 1: By the way, a bit of perspective, if you earn

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Speaker 1: more than you one thousand dollars a year, you are

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Speaker 1: part of the richest four percent of the planet. Today's

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Speaker 1: episode was written by Still Simonton and produced by Tyler Clang.

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Speaker 1: If you enjoy our show and want to support us

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Speaker 1: in return for some brainy housewares or people wears, visit

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Speaker 1: our online shop at t public dot com slash brain stuff,

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Speaker 1: and of course, for more on this and lots of

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Speaker 1: other rich topics, visit our home planet, How stuff Works

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Speaker 1: dot com,