by :Elisabeth Eaves
Even in the best of times, the market for cultural goods is a mysterious one. Pure hype can drive up the value of a work of art (see: Damien Hirst) in a way that never happens with cars or dishwashers. So much subjectivity is involved that predicting demand is nearly impossible. Even Hollywood, which tries harder than other creative industries to gauge the market, winds up with Ishtars and Waterworlds on its hands. At the other end of the budget spectrum, painters and novelists and dancers make sacrifices that would never make sense from a profit-and-loss point of view.
As we embark on a long, hard recession, the creative industries are feeling the pinch too. The high-flying contemporary art market is proving to have been a bubble. Over in book publishing, this week brought the announcement of more layoffs: HarperCollins (owned by News Corp. (nyse: NWS - news - people )) let go of two top executives, the heads of the Collins and William Morrow imprints, and said that several of the company's imprints will be shuttered. This news follows layoffs in recent months at Random House, Simon & Schuster, Houghton Mifflin Harcourt and Macmillan.In these industries, though, reaction to the recession has produced some bizarre ideas, ones that would never occur to anyone analyzing, say, banking.
The first is that the recession might be good for artists and writers. All the yahoos who were in it for the money will get lost, or so the theory goes, leaving the field open to the truly dedicated, who will make work that is "authentic." The celebrated German painter Gerard Richter recently advanced an argument along these lines. In November, he described price tags on even his own paintings as too high and told TheScotsman that "we are losing our culture, when you see the auction catalogues full of bullshit and hype."
The second idiosyncratic argument being circulated in the world of arts and letters is that better bottom-line management is more likely to hurt than to help.
Both ideas are misguided.
I understand why some artists and writers resist identifying too closely with money. Creative careers tend to be vocations. If you start valuing what you do in, say, dollar-an-hour terms, the result can be terrifying. And the more you let your ego inflate based on a huge sale, the more emotional fallout there will be in that year you don't sell anything.
source : Forbes.com
