Poor artists in a welfare state: A study in the politics and economics of symbolic rewards¹

The first version of this article was presented as a paper at the 9th International Conference on cultural economics in Boston in 1996. I thank Georg Arnestad, Ruth Towse and David Throsby for positive comments on that version, and Anders Dedekam Jr. and Jon Øien for their comments to a draft. A Norwegian version of the Boston‐paper was presented at the annual conference of ‘Kulturpolitisk forskernettverk’ in Sandefjord i November 1996, at which occasion I received very useful opposition from Jørn Langsted. A revised version of the paper was published in Norwegian, as ‘Velferdsstatens fattige kunstnere’, by Norske Billedkunstnere, in 1997, and I again thank Jon Øien for his contributions to that. For the present publication I received many useful comments and corrections from Vera Zolberg, for which I thank her warmly. I thank Jan Carter for correcting my spelling, and for helping my old mother by shovelling the snow from her yard during the winter. But first of all I extend my thanks to Jon Ivar Elstad. Without his help in extracting out the proper data from his own research, and his willingness to combine my data about artists’ recognition with his data about artists’ economy, this article would not have been possible.

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Notes

The first version of this article was presented as a paper at the 9th International Conference on cultural economics in Boston in 1996. I thank Georg Arnestad, Ruth Towse and David Throsby for positive comments on that version, and Anders Dedekam Jr. and Jon Øien for their comments to a draft. A Norwegian version of the Boston‐paper was presented at the annual conference of ‘Kulturpolitisk forskernettverk’ in Sandefjord i November 1996, at which occasion I received very useful opposition from Jørn Langsted. A revised version of the paper was published in Norwegian, as ‘Velferdsstatens fattige kunstnere’, by Norske Billedkunstnere, in 1997, and I again thank Jon Øien for his contributions to that. For the present publication I received many useful comments and corrections from Vera Zolberg, for which I thank her warmly. I thank Jan Carter for correcting my spelling, and for helping my old mother by shovelling the snow from her yard during the winter. But first of all I extend my thanks to Jon Ivar Elstad. Without his help in extracting out the proper data from his own research, and his willingness to combine my data about artists’ recognition with his data about artists’ economy, this article would not have been possible.