What Makes Artists Happy? An Empirical Study on Artists' Job Satisfaction

Description

The artistic labour market is often characterized as having the following traits: workers have a relatively low income with a high educational background, relatively high job satisfaction with low earnings, multiple job holdings, and a high rate of self-employment. When it comes to the job satisfaction of artists, David Throsby’s 1994 work-preference model has been seen as a widely accepted theory in the academic discipline of cultural economics. This study aims to both investigate the applicability of Throsby’s work-preference model to the artistic labour market in South Korea and to move beyond the work-preference model by exploring the major determinants of artists’ job satisfaction. A large data set (N=4596) from the 2015 survey, Survey on Artists and Activities, conducted by the South Korean Ministry of Culture, Sport and Tourism, has been used to identify responses to both of these objectives.
The findings from this study demonstrate that artists’ willingness to supply artistic labour in South Korea supports Throsby’s work-preference model. This is due to the fact that artists derive higher job satisfaction from artistic work itself and aim to maximize their working hours spent on artistic labour. Nonetheless, this study also discovered that these part-time artists tend to invest more time out of their total amount of working hours towards non-artistic work, despite the fact that they derive higher job satisfaction from artistic work itself. This phenomenon appears to stem from part- time artists being incentivized to undertake additional non-artistic work due to low earnings from their artistic work as well as comparatively lower spousal/parental incomes.
Aside from this, a number of factors were found to play a significantly positive influence on the job satisfaction for artists: income from artistic work, the ratio of working hours for artistic work to the total amount of working hours, self-employment, having access to a separate workspace, and an awareness of the value for artistic work. Inversely, an awareness of economic, artistic, and external limitations played a significant detriment on the job satisfaction for artists.

Period	6 Jul 2021
Held at	21st International Conference on Cultural Economics
Degree of Recognition	International