Arts Jobs

Here's a great post from the always-edifying Andrew Taylor: "Do Arts Jobs Count As Jobs?"

...one of the sub-stories percolating around about the Big Stimulus Packages is the role, or rather, the lack of a role, for the arts in it. There's the infamous Coburn Amendment to the Senate version of the package, for instance, which explicitly bars museum and other cultual institutions from seeing any stimulus money. [by the way, if you live in the Philadelphia area and this gets your dander up, {and why shouldn't it}, you should sign up for the Greater Philadelphia Cultural Alliance's Advocacy Action Center . It's like a moveon.org for Philadelphia Arts.]

And one more plug for GPCA--they've been able to fight against the trend that Taylor points out in his blog post by giving real numbers for exactly how many jobs culture provides to this area. And the answer is 40,000, as of the 2007 "Arts Culture & Economic Prosperity" report.

There's an interesting question here about who's to blame for the fact the general public and its government don't think of the arts sector as providing jobs (at a very efficient rate, might I add)... I wonder if it's an unintended consequence of our putting the counter-cultural, cathartic, iconoclastic, face of the arts at the front of the parade, or rather, being ashamed of talking about the arts as an Industry.