A National Endowment for the Arts survey shows the unemployment rate for artists was double that for other professionals for the last quarter of 2008, leaving 129,000 artists out of work. While the labor force grew by 800,000 that year, the artist work force shrank by 74,000.
The loss of a job for an artist isn't just the loss of a paycheck and benefits. An artist's career is built on vision and self-belief. It's seeing a world different from the one everyone else sees and believing not only that he can capture it in paint, but indeed that he must.
Artistic visions are singular things. They can't be outsourced. They can't be handed off to a lower-paid colleague or wrapped into someone else's job descriptions. Each time a talented artist walks away from his calling, there is a hole in the firmament no one else can fill.
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