Speaker 1: Welcome to brain Stuff from How Stuff Works, Hi brain
Speaker 1: Stuff Lauren vocal bomb here. The image of the starving
Speaker 1: artist is a well known cultural stereotype. But is it
Speaker 1: simply a stereotype or could the brain chemistry of artists
Speaker 1: actually be responsible for their tendency towards poverty. An experiment
Speaker 1: conducted in Germany raises this question and probably the eyebrows
Speaker 1: of many artists. As reported in the April issue of
Speaker 1: the Creativity Research Journal, the researchers sat down twelve artists
Speaker 1: and twelve non artists and gave them colored images to
Speaker 1: choose from on a screen, including green images that provided
Speaker 1: a cash reward. When the green images popped up and
Speaker 1: were chosen, the non artists brains showed a great deal
Speaker 1: of activity in the pleasure area that releases dopamine. Brain
Speaker 1: scans of the artists showed less activity in that dopamine
Speaker 1: producing area. The researchers concluded that the artists were less
Speaker 1: responsive to monetary rewards than other people. It's admittedly a
Speaker 1: small sample size, but still an interesting result. The authors
Speaker 1: wrote in the paper. These results support the existence of
Speaker 1: characteristic neural traits and artists. But do these neural traits
Speaker 1: mean that all but the most successful artists in fact
Speaker 1: have low earning potential. First of all, the poverty of
Speaker 1: artists may be culturally exaggerated. As a group, artists in
Speaker 1: the United States have higher incomes than the average American worker.
Speaker 1: According to census figures analyzed by the National Endowment for
Speaker 1: the Arts, in the medium income for craft and fine
Speaker 1: art artists in seventeen was a little over forty dollars
Speaker 1: per year, or about twenty four dollars per hour, a
Speaker 1: livable wage by most standards. And second, the nature of
Speaker 1: the art market makes the life of an artist a
Speaker 1: bit less fundamentally secure. This is explained well in the
Speaker 1: book Art and Value Arts Economic Exceptionalism in Classical, Neoclassical
Speaker 1: and Marxist Economics by painter and professor Dave Beach. He
Speaker 1: described how the art market is different from the market
Speaker 1: for most other goods. Art is not a standard commodity.
Speaker 1: He wrote, the creation of art, as well as the
Speaker 1: marketing and purchase of art, are outside the bounds of
Speaker 1: the regular market. Art is not usually made as a
Speaker 1: result of corporate investment. Artists do not generally get an
Speaker 1: hourly wage for their labor, and the price of art
Speaker 1: is not set through competition in the same way that
Speaker 1: other products prices are determined. The art market is different
Speaker 1: and it shapes the prices artists can set and expect
Speaker 1: for their labor. Dutch painter and sociologist Hans Ebbing explored
Speaker 1: the mindset as well as the socioeconomic forces that lead
Speaker 1: to what he called the admiseration of artists, immiseration meaning
Speaker 1: economic impoverishment. He said that for one thing, the art
Speaker 1: market has a winner take all attitude, and in addition,
Speaker 1: artists may not have other skills and so remain in
Speaker 1: the work that they are drawn to. He said that
Speaker 1: artists also find non monetary creation based rewards in their work.
Speaker 1: By the way, a bit of perspective, if you earn
Speaker 1: more than you one thousand dollars a year, you are
Speaker 1: part of the richest four percent of the planet. Today's
Speaker 1: episode was written by Still Simonton and produced by Tyler Clang.
Speaker 1: If you enjoy our show and want to support us
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Speaker 1: and of course, for more on this and lots of
Speaker 1: other rich topics, visit our home planet, How stuff Works
Speaker 1: dot com,