Artists’ Outlook: An Overcrowded Landscape : Employment: Studies show that with more people entering creative fields, artists are facing diminished opportunities.

Artists in all media confront a dreary future of more competition for diminished rewards, a collection of new studies finds.

Hamstrung by a decline in real earnings nearly five times that of professions in general and with more and more people entering creative fields, artists vanish uncounted and unaccounted for into such occupations as restaurant waiter or waitress and taxicab driver.

“What I see is massive numbers of the supply side (of arts professionals) coming out of our colleges and universities and very few jobs that are paying jobs and are available,” said Milton Rhodes, president of the New York-based American Council for the Arts, which is publishing the new results.

“The economist would say that’s the way supply and demand works, but the truth of the matter is that, if you aren’t discovered (in the arts), you never have a chance to really show your stuff and bring to the fore the talent that’s there.”

The studies also show that the disparity between earnings of men and women employed in the same or nearly identical arts jobs is greater than in the American work force at large. One study of earnings trends and patterns between 1970 and 1980 found that while 75% of dancers are women, they earned only 66% the amount male performers get, while women painters and sculptors average less than half of what men earn.

Moreover, the new research, which draws on government and private data, finds that available statistical tools have failed to monitor arts-employment patterns and trends to such an extent that reliable conclusions are often impossible to make.

For instance, government data released earlier this year by the National Endowment for the Arts show that unemployment among actors and directors increased last year from 7.7% to 10.6%, but was still down from a historic high of 15.7% in 1983. In contrast, a spokesman for the Screen Actors Guild said that 85% of the union’s members are out of work at any given time. The union says that 80% of its 110,000 members are forced to earn living expenses working in other fields.

California Institute of the Arts has played a pioneer role in the still-small movement to establish arts courses oriented toward business practices, money management and employment enhancement. The Valencia school said that a survey of its alumni found 90% reporting that they are doing at least some work in the arts. Underscoring how difficult it is to track how many artists actually earn their livings in creative fields, CalArts said only 69.8% of its graduates said they were actually employed in a field related to their majors.

The only existing national databases with raw materials for such surveys are maintained by the federal Census Bureau and the Bureau of Labor Statistics. But the official figures, experts involved in the new research agree, are flawed because do not identify many arts professionals who are not employed full time in creative fields.

They also include bizarre classification criteria in which, for instance, theater and motion-picture directors and actors are lumped together in one group but musicians are split arbitrarily between those playing in “restaurants and nightclubs” or “bands and orchestras” with no regard to which of them may be recording.

That the economic and employment picture in creative professions should be so unfavorable appears to defy otherwise healthy financial circumstances for the arts in general. But John P. Robinson, a sociology professor and director of the Survey Research Center at the University of Maryland, contends that the situation presents artists with a significant anomaly.

“This suggests an interesting and familiar trend as far as artists in America are concerned,” Robinson concluded in a new book of essays and reports on the condition of American artists. It is, he argued, “a trend which may be summarized as ‘more interest, less money.’ It might also be characterized as ‘more competition, less profit.’ ”

Robinson said it would be a mistake to place extensive trust in hard statistics on arts employment. He said the few figures that are available may be suspect because government statistical categories simply aren’t specific enough to evaluate what artists may be doing.

“This field is completely in a vacuum. There are no answers to many of the questions,” he said in a telephone interview. “How many people are recorded in the design field but who are designers of store windows? It’s very hard to know what’s been happening.”

The new reports, including one essay by the acting director of the research office at the National Endowment for the Arts, are included in “The Modern Muse: The Support and Condition of Artists,” a new anthology that grew out of a seminar on artist conditions held in Baltimore last year.

“Artists are unemployed and underemployed for longer periods of time than other kinds of ‘normal’ occupations,” said C. Richard Swaim, a government and public administration professor at the University of Baltimore and editor of “The Modern Muse.” “I think that we--meaning the American society--cannot envision the artist as a regular occupation, like a plumber or an electrician. We have trouble doing that.”

Specifically, the new studies found that:

The number of people working in arts professions--ranging from architecture and advertising to painting, sculpture and acting--rose 84% between 1972 and 1986, to 1.179 million, and is expected to increase another 31% by the turn of the century. The total civilian work force grew by 33% between 1972 and 1986 and is expected to increase by 19% by the year 2000.

The largest increases in arts professions between now and the turn of the century will be among restaurant and nightclub dancers and choreographers (42%), artists employed by advertising agencies (52%) and advertising and commercial art design (58%). Employment of actors and directors in the motion-picture industry will go up 33% and musicians as a group will increase 28%.

While pressure from the women’s movement helped to equalize wages paid to males and females for the same work, arts professions--sometimes perceived as a bastion of opportunity for women--lagged seriously behind the work force as a whole in wage equality. In 1980--in addition to the disparity between male and female dancers--women painters and sculptors, who made up 48% of the profession, earned only 48% as much as their male counterparts. Women musicians and composers--30% of the category--earned 45% of the wages paid to men. In the work force as a whole, 43% female in 1980, women got 70% of the pay for men in similar positions. In the arts, where women make up 38% of the work force, they got 42% of what men received.

The growth in people entering arts professions is likely to be matched by a continuing decline in real earnings among artists. The arts professions sustained an overall 37% decline in real earnings--the actual buying power of annual wages--in the 1970s. Real earnings trends for the 1980s will not be available until completion of the 1990 census, according to the NEA. For the work force as a whole in the 1970s, the decline was 8%.

Some artist categories were especially hard hit by the real earnings decline, with painters and sculptors recording an estimated 62% drop in their incomes during the 1970s. Actors and directors actually showed a 7% increase in real income--the only group of creative workers to do so.

The earnings decline for visual artists--designers showed an estimated 87% decline in real earnings and photographers went down 34%--occurred during an era in which the products of visual-arts media became perceived as market commodities. In turn, concluded Richard Harvey Brown, also of the University of Maryland Survey Research Center, “a star system developed among artists. Most were unemployed while a few became rich celebrities.”

Judy Baca, a prominent local muralist and director of the Social and Public Art Resource Center in Venice, said that the visual-arts star system has trapped many mid-career artists in poverty. The money in art, said Baca, has increasingly gravitated to young artists who become hot very early in their careers or to older artists who gain recognition late in their careers. Artists who fail to achieve instant stardom in their 20s, said Baca in an interview, face overwhelming odds of being mired in poverty during their most productive working decades.

Both Robinson and Tom Bradshaw, the NEA’s acting research director, cautioned that the trends observed in the new essays are the product of data that is, at best, of questionable accuracy.

But Robinson said that it is still possible to make valid general observations: There are likely to be more people going into creative fields in which employment will also increase, but not at a pace nearly quick enough to absorb everyone who wants to work in them, and probably with the result that economic competition will continue to undercut the financial life styles of artists.

The lesson, said Robinson, is: “Artist beware.”

EMPLOYMENT PROJECTIONS FOR ARTISTS In thousands Actors / Directors / Producers 1986: 54.6 2000: 73.5 Artists and Commercial Artists 1986: 65.5 2000: 89.5 Dancers and Choreographers 1986: 11.9 2000: 15.3 Musicians 1986: 119.6 2000: 143.1 Radio / TV Announcers / Newscasters 1986: 55.9 2000: 69.4 Source: Bureau of Labor Statistics’ Division of Occupational Outlook