Dynamic Models of Arts Labor Supply

In this paper two dynamic models of an artist’s behavior and arts labor supply have been developed. Both are based on a household production function approach and on the assumption that artists are multiple-job-holders. In the first model proposed here an artist is depicted as someone who is hired on the arts labor market and paid for his artistic time. In the second model an artist is described as someone who sells his products, like paintings for instance, on the market for artistic products. In order to make these models dynamic, an artist’s productivity is here supposed to be a function of accumulated human capital of the artist. Following the results of existing empirical research, previous experience and previous artistic practice are supposed to be the most important form of human capital accumulation. Once the analysis is expanded to capture this kind of the artist’s human capital accumulation, the supply of labor in the arts market appears as the result of an inter-temporal process of resources allocation. Both models end with the same result: the cost of producing a unit of an artistic commodity in a particular year should be equal to the sum of current monetary benefits, current nonmonetary benefits, a stream of future monetary benefits, and a stream of future nonmonetary benefits generated by production of a given artistic unit. This result appears to be pretty suitable for formalization of several existing hypotheses aimed at explaining arts labor market peculiarities. Especially, by referring to the stream of expected nonmonetary benefits, models developed here are able to formalize the most promising among these hypotheses according to which an artist’s need for self-discovery and self-actualization is the driving force in explaining the oversupply of arts labor.