When I received a copy of this research report in the mail, I was astonished by its heft: 140 pages of charts, graphs, and their explanations! These are preceded by an introduction by Dana Gioia, former chairperson of the National Endowment for the Arts, and brief summaries of ten key findings. This last section has provided good headlines for a few stories in the general press, like, “Nearly two million Americans are artists,” or, “Women remain underrepresented in several artist occupations.”

Understanding these findings properly requires study. After all, this is a report of statistics, not an interpretation of them. The place to start, though, is the pie chart on “artist occupations,” which reveals some important facts. The first is that the term artist bears little relationship to the meaning assigned to it by readers of caa.reviews. For the U.S. government, this classification includes actors, announcers, architects, dancers and choreographers, entertainers and performers, musicians, photographers, producers and directors, and writers and authors. While many of these professions are artistic, I cannot fathom why producers are among them. And the category of designers—which represents a whopping 39% of the total—contains such a wildly varied range of jobs that the designation seems less than meaningful. Fine artists, art directors, and animators are on the chart too, lumped together in one sub-category—presumably, because the numbers represented by these three professions are so statistically insignificant (11%) that accounting for them separately was deemed to be unnecessary. They represent 220,000 of the 2,000,000 total. This latter figure doesn’t include, however, any part of the additional 300,000 Americans who identify artist as their secondary profession—among them, surely, many teachers in colleges and universities. In fact, these 300,000 individuals are not accounted for in any way on the pie chart.

On another page, I learned that “artists” have increased from less than 1% to 1.4% of the labor force. Not only did the Baby Boomers grow up and go to work, but women have gotten jobs in far greater numbers. This leads us to that other key finding mentioned above: women remain under-represented in many artist occupations. Studying the pertinent graphs reveals that while this is true—almost two thirds of musicians, producers, and photographers are male, and 78% of architects—the total number of “artists” is divided in terms of gender in a way that mirrors the labor force as a whole, which is now 47% female (46% of artists are women). The real disparity is in terms of income. Category by category, women still make at least a third less than men. This difference is substantially greater than the male/female income gap cited for the total workforce, though roughly the same as the difference between the income of men and women categorized as “professionals.” Please note, however, that artists—even the producers, directors, designers, et al.—earn significantly less than “professionals,” even if as a whole artists are more likely to have a bachelor’s degree, and in some areas more likely to have an advanced degree. Artists are also far more likely to be self-employed, to work less than fulltime, and—my personal favorite—twice as likely to live in California as in New York. That’s right—there are roughly 42,000 “artists” in California, compared to New York’s 21,000.

Perhaps the most significant thing about Artists in the Workforce is the relationship of its compiled statistics to others that tabulate shifts in income, some related to education, in the United States over recent decades. The expansion of everything from manufacturing to colleges and universities in the post-World War II era translated into decent wages for car mechanics and professors alike. It was possible to own a house, put kids through college, and retire someday, on those incomes. But that era is over, according to a veritable flood of articles and news stories about America’s vanishing middle class, and about the diminishing returns of graduate degrees. For years, it has been noted that there are fewer and fewer families in the middle-income bracket in which most “artists” find themselves. Presumably, this shrinking is due to a number of factors, but whatever its cause may be, encouraging students to become professional artists (and art historians) should be accompanied by a clear description of their future economic prospects. Still, I find that even when I am appallingly honest about these things with my students, it is not much of a deterrent. And maybe that’s a good thing. We need artists—whatever that term really designates—in times like these.

Artists in the Workforce, 1990–2005 can be downloaded for free at http://www.nea.gov/research/ArtistsInWorkforce.pdf.