“The Creative Economy,” and Malcolm Cowley

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”d46qMqunSiyQZaayiQ00FiACRUSOSiOO”]

AN important survey has just come out from Otis College of Art and Design – its annual report on the “Creative Economy.” Previously concentrated on the Los Angeles area, the survey is now statewide.

What motivates this study, and reports on things like “cultural tourism,” is the urge by arts and culture types to show that we’re in the game, too: We’re not just sulking in the corner, writing frightening verse to a buck-toothed girl in Luxembourg. (As a poet from Manchester, England once put it.) And the data shows, indeed, that creatives produce jobs, income, revenues for the state, etc.

These “creative jobs” made up, in 2012, $155 billion of California’s economy, almost 8 percent of the state’s revenue, and roughly 1 in every 10 of the Golden State’s jobs. And some of these creative-industry jobs pay healthy salaries: Digital media folks make, on average $163,000, toy designers just under $100,000.

Now, let me first praise the study: It’s important to have data on this stuff, and the Otis report is credible and well-respected.

But the cheery way this is typically spun in the media obscures what’s really going on. If we put video-game designers, movie-studio executives, Silicon Valley types and fashion people in the same data set with modern dancers, novelists, stage actors, and so on, we get numbers that makes the field look healthier than it is. “It’s not like everybody is a starving actor or actress or writer,” economist and lead study author Robert Kleinhenz told KPCC. That’s great – unless you’re one of the many actresses or writers who actually are starving.

The more comprehensive studies of the larger situation for artists – performing, visual, literary and otherwise — is the NEA’s Artists in the Workforce, and in the visual arts, the survey by the group WAGE. These show something that most of us work the non-corporate side of culture know all too well: The majority of creative folk are struggling, or at least treading water: They are at best members of the shrinking middle class. For many, the recession has not lifted. The majority of folks working in the arts are not making six figures. In fact, if money is the only motivation, students should go to business school.

You don’t have to be a pure and rigid art-for-art’s-sake type to feel a bit queasy whenever the arts are asked to justify themselves this way.

This all said: The California Arts Council is using the report as a way to urge more arts funding. If this study has gotten the attention of politicians who will restore the arts council to its early-‘80s funding levels, though, I’m all for it. A press release that came out just minutes ago shows state Senator Ted Lieu, D-Torrance, urging increased funding because of the Otis study.

“No matter how you paint it, California ranks 48th in the nation in per capita spending on state art agencies, or about 3 cents per resident,” Lieu said. “This is an insufficient investment in the state’s art programs, and it means art programs and art-related businesses are unable to thrive, or in some cases, to even exist.”

Here’s what we need to keep in mind. The value of learning music, theater, painting and so on – and having a life deepened by reading novels, going to plays, and other cultural commitments – goes beyond the economic consequences. If we don’t remind ourselves of that, we become purely utilitarian, like the characters in Dickens’s Hard Times, and the arts will lose. If we measure everything in dollar terms, or in terms of GDP, we’ve lost our values completely. And if we read this study in a superficial way it says, Everything is okay. They’re not.

So let’s be glad for this study, but keep it in context.

ALSO: Ever since reading the memoir Exile’s Return in college, I’ve been a serious fan of the man-of-letters Malcolm Cowley. (The loss of the public intellectual, who could write accessibly about serious matters, is something American culture can surely use more of, and he was one of the best.) So it gratifies me to see this excellent review by Dwight Garner, of Cowley’s selected letters, that gets at Cowley’s role in the careers of Faulkner (whose books were mostly out of print before Cowley revived his career), Fitzgerald and Kerouac, his political swerves, and his witty assessments of the literary scene over many decades. (To Cowley, creativity wasn’t all about the revenue it generated.)

FINALLY: The issue of severe income inequality has now been acknowledged on both sides of the aisle politically, though politicians and commentators of different stripes interpret it differently. One of my favorite observers on the subject is Robert Reich, who points out that the American public has caught up with the problem and is not persuaded by those who tell us we should simply consider it all “inevitable.” As he writes:

A new CNN poll asked Americans whether “the government should work to substantially reduce the income gap between the rich and the poor.” The answer is “yes” by a margin of 66% to 31%, better than two-to-one.

Income disparity, as I’ll get into over time, has an enormous impact on the lives of the creative class, especially those who are not earning six figures at digital media jobs.