An Economic Theory of Avant-Garde and Popular Art, or High and Low Culture.

• Author: Cowen, Tyler
• Position: Statistical Data Included

Tyler Cowen [*]

Alexander Tabarrok [+]

Artists face choices between the pecuniary benefits of selling to the market and the nonpecuniary benefits of creating to please their own tastes. We examine how changes in wages, lumpsum income, and capital-labor ratios affect the artist's pursuit of self-satisfaction versus market sales. Using our model of labor supply, we consider the economic forces behind the high/low culture split, why some artistic media offer greater scope for the avant-garde than others, why so many artists dislike the market, and how economic growth and taxation affect the quantity and form of different kinds of art.

1. Introduction

   Artists both produce and consume their own work. Artists seek not only profit but also fame, critical praise, the satisfaction of creating works that speak to them personally, and the enjoyment that flows from artistic labor. Most generally, artists produce works of a type that please themselves in addition to pleasing the market. We attempt to develop a general treatment of how producers weigh their own interests against those of the market when money and satisfaction conflict--the dual function of output as both consumption and sale good drives our central questions and most of our results. [1] In section 2 of this paper, we formally model the relevant trade-offs between the pecuniary and nonpecuniary satisfactions of art and investigate how changes in wages, lump-sum income, and market size will affect an artist's pursuit of market sales versus self-satisfaction. We also examine how reproducibility (i.e., electronic recording, the printing press) affects the incentive of artists to cater to mass taste rat her than to the demands of connoisseurs.

   Section 3 of the paper argues that under certain conditions artist self-satisfaction may be mapped onto the empirical categories of high versus low art and avant-garde versus popular art. With this mapping we are then able to discuss a number of other issues in the economics of the arts. Most generally, when do artists choose high art and when do they choose low or popular art? Moving to a more specific question, why do some artistic media offer greater scope for avant-garde styles than other media do? Why, for instance, do most prominent painters serve minority tastes, whereas most prominent filmmakers aim at satisfying popular taste? Even relatively avant-garde moviemakers typically aim at a larger audience than most painters do. Our analysis helps to explain how technical aspects of artistic media combine with economic incentives to direct artistic creativity toward various styles of art.

   The analytical apparatus is also used to explain the forces behind the split of high and low culture. We address the stylized fact that the most popular styles have diverged from the most critically acclaimed styles over time (Gans 1974; Brantlinger 1984; Postman 1985; Bloom 1987; Levine 1988). Mozart was critically acclaimed as a great composer in his generation and his music was also popular. Shakespeare's work was not considered avant-garde or inaccessible in his time but it was acknowledged as being of very high quality. Today the gulf between the critics and the masses is much wider. Elliott Carter does not sell millions of CDs, and Michael Jackson does not command Carter's musical respect. With increasing frequency popular art is not critically acclaimed and critically acclaimed art is not popular. We provide an economic account of this stylized fact. Finally, we analyze how taxation affects the supply of art and the content of artistic products.

   Our investigation is motivated both by our interest in the theory of choice and by the importance of the arts sector in today's economy. Culture-movies, music, books, theater, television, etc.--accounts for approximately 2.5% of American GDP and provides America's strongest export sector. The economic importance of the arts is arguably larger, given the nonpecuniary returns to artists and given that art is partially nonrivalrous and nonexcludable. Victor Hugo's Les Miserables, Mozart's opera The Magic Flute, and da Vinci's Mona Lisa all offer continuing value far in excess of their original market prices, and some current works will follow in their footsteps. The arts also may produce significant positive or negative externalities on the mores and culture of a nation. America's changing social climate, for instance, is often linked to the influence of television, rap music, etc. Similarly, the virtues of classical Greek and Roman civilizations are often attributed partially to their poetry, rhetoric, and dra ma These differences between art and other goods enhance the overall significance of the arts to society above that as traditionally measured. [2]

2. Artist Labor Supply and Satisfaction

   We model an artist's utility function as an additively separable function of consumption and art production. The assumption of additive separability is introduced to make the model tractable:

   [U.sub.A](c, L, s) = U(c) + V(L, s). (2.1)

   U(c) is the utility derived from consumption of goods other than art and art production. V(L, s) represents the utility of working L units of time on art of satisfaction level s; we assume V(L, s) is concave. An art work consists of many different characteristics; a painting, for example, has color, style, form, subject matter, and so forth. Each work of art is a bundle of characteristics. Increases in s represent higher satisfaction bundles to the artist; s may be thought of as a subjective index of quality and [V.sub.s](L, s) as the nonpecuniary returns from a change in the characteristics of an art work. By definition, artists in our model always prefer to create art with higher s values. Only by accident, however, will a consumer share exactly the same tastes as an artist. Each consumer, therefore, has a most preferred s.

   Artists have rejected market sales in pursuit of the nonpecuniary benefits of high satisfaction art in numerous historical instances. Beethoven wrote his late string quartets to satisfy his creative urges, knowing the works were too complex to satisfy a wide public audience at the time. Donatello and Michelangelo, perhaps the best-known sculptors from the Italian Renaissance, would walk away from commissions if they could not determine the content of the project. James Joyce chose a level of esoterica for his Finnegans Wake that excluded most of the world's readers, even intellectually inclined ones. Today, movie stars will sometimes accept a lower cut of the box office if they can work on projects of their own choosing. In a sample of over 1000 U.S. painters, 70% reported rejecting on more than one occasion high-paying but artistically unfulfilling commissions (Jeffri 1991).

   Mathematically, we assume [U.sub.c], [V.sub.L], [V.sub.s] [greater than] 0, [U.sub.cc], [V.sub.ss] [less than] 0 and [V.sub.LS] [greater than] 0. [3] The last assumption says that the marginal utility of labor in art is increasing as the artist works on more preferred or higher satisfaction art. A positive [V.sub.LS] is a stronger assumption than we need for our results. Normality of L and s is enough to support our results. A positive [V.sub.LS] is sufficient for both L and s to be normal. [4]

   The artist wishes to maximize [U.sub.A] subject to the budget constraint

   c = [w.sub.1](s)L + [w.sub.2](1 - L) + y. (2.2)

   Consumption is limited to the sum of income from the art sector, [w.sub.1](s)L, income from the nonart sector (which we will call the manufacturing sector), [w.sub.2](1 - L), and lump-sum or non-wage income y. Our budget constraint draws attention to two factors often neglected in economic treatments of the arts. First, artists may support themselves by receiving external grants or outside lump-sum support. Family funds, bequests, and other lump-sum grants have been important encouragements to the careers of many artists. Nineteenth century French cultural activity, for instance, relied heavily upon family funds and bequests. French painters who lived from family wealth include Delacroix, Corot, Courbet, Seurat, Degas, Manet, Cezanne, Toulouse-Lautrec, and Moreau; the list of writers includes Baudelaire, Verlaine, Flaubert, and Proust. [5]

   Second, the budget constraint represents the ability of artists to earn income in the manufacturing sector of the economy. Part- or full-time participation in nonartistic work is not restricted to the budding amateur, or to the New York waiter trying to land a part in a Broadway production. Wassail and Alper (1985) found in their survey of contemporary New England artists that 76% held part-time jobs. Surveys by Statistics Canada indicate that 60-80% of the Canadians working in the performing arts also have jobs in other sectors (Watson 1988). [6]

   We also treat y as representative of wealth in a very broad sense. As the economy grows, the labor time required to purchase goods falls and thus real wages in both sectors of the economy rise--in this model this is equivalent to an increase in lump-sum income. Thus, economic growth will increase y and induce changes in labor supply and occupational choice. The model is written for one artist, but we will also be interpreting it as the reduced form of a model with many heterogeneous agents (for example, agents may have different preferences for working in the art sector or different artistic abilities). Thus, we will sometimes speak of an increase in L as an increase in the supply of labor to the arts. In this paper, we analyze the causes and consequences of long run changes in occupational choice and art quality. We thus ignore the role of the artist as price setter and instead focus on the trade-off between pecuniary and nonpecuniary returns in a given market setting. [7]

   To examine the trade-off between the pecuniary and nonpecuniary benefits of art, we make wages in the art sector a function of s, [w.sub.1](s), and wages in the manufacturing sector fixed and exogenous...