Friday, May 11, 2007

Art / Show Me the Money

Getzels and Csikszentmihaly (1976) found that most artists were drawn to painting because it allowed social isolation. However, aspiring painters have to promote social relations with art critics, art dealers and buyers to gain notoriety, increase the demand for their art and generate sufficient sales for full-time artistic activity. Failure to do so forced many of the best artists to take another job unrelated to painting.
From "The Role of Deliberate Practice" in The Cambridge Handbook of Expertise and Expert Performance (link to PDF file at Freakonomics review). The reference is to The creative vision: a longitudinal study of problem finding in art, by J.W. Getzels and M. Csikszentmihaly (must find this book).

3 comments:

Languagehat said...

Sadly, Cambrige UP seems to have misspelled Csikszentmihalyi (one of my all-time favorite names for some reason, even though it means nothing more romantic than "Saint Michael of [the Transylvanian province of] Csík [now Romanian Ciuc]).

Helen DeWitt said...

No, no, CUP is blameless, just my careless typing. It is a fabulous name.

Helen DeWitt said...

Anyway, we now see why copy-editing would be so much better done if texts were simply released in beta version online, where anyone with relevant expertise could spot bugs and draw them to the author's attention. One difficulty with the conventional system is that copy-editors tend to cherrypick the easy bits -- the bits they THINK they know are wrong because The Chicago Manual of Style or Strunk & White says they're wrong (though if copy-editors spent more time on Language Log they would throw away their CMS), skipping all the difficult bits as things they couldn't possibly be expected to know.