What drives people to make art? This is a hard question to answer, as many people would argue that the desire to create art is inherent in all of us, as a reflection of the things we see in the world around us. Opposite factors can be used to say why someone might make art; for example being poor could drive you to make art as an escape and struggle of your hardship, whereas being wealthy could drive you to make art as you likely have much more time and resources to allocate to that pursuit. Being young could make you want to create art about teenage angst and growing up, or being old could make you make art about looking back on your life and reflecting on it. But whether or not that desire to make art is within all of us inherently, not everyone spends an equal amount of time creating art. So what groups of people tend to create art the most, and why might that be?
Various studies have provided views on what groups are statistically most likely to create art. A study called “The Origins of Creativity: The Case of the Arts in the United States Since 1850” found that it was more wealthy people who tended to go into arts, as with artistic jobs tending to pay a lot less they would need more financial support from their family in order to pursue art as a full time job. However, this seems to primarily support creating art on a professional level, rather than also an amateur level. But by using time use data, we can see not just what people are creating art on a professional level, but more specifically how much time the average person spends on art on any level.
This time use data showed a very similar trend to what was found in the study. The data was unimodal and heavily negatively skewed, with people making $150,000 or more spending 8.7 hours a week on average making art, an increase of 5.2 hours a week from the $5,000-$7,499 range of people. It’s worth noting that while the data has an almost perfectly positive progression, the one outlier is the less than $5,000 group, which spends more time making art than the averages of the next three income groups. Perhaps these are the people who are creating art as part of their career, and struggling to find money in it. Overall though, this data heavily supports the notion that wealthier people tend to spend more time creating art, as they have the freedom to do so.
But what about the relationship between our age and art output? A book by Martin S. Lindauer called AGING, CREATIVITY, AND ART, A Positive Perspective on Late-Life Development found that art output increases as you get older, peaking at age 60 and staying consistent well into your 70s. This could be for a multitude of reasons, including more time and money as you get older, especially when you retire. This could also be due to reflecting back on your life, and with your maturity being able and having more of a desire to create more art.
This time however, the time use data did not support this claim, with a very different distribution. The graph was a lot messier than the previous one, but there was still a very clear peak with 16 year olds spending a surprising 9.2 hours a week making art. The next three highest points belong to 15, 20, and 21 years old with 49 year olds being the only outliers able to compare to younger artists, creating an average of 8.2 hours a week of art. The decline in hours as age increases isn’t necessarily steady, but it is there. It seems that these people tend to spend less and less time creating art as they get older.
Overall, it seems that there are pretty significant changes in the amount of time that we spend making art both as we get older, and through what our income levels may be. While we can speculate about what might create these changes, we cannot however draw any conclusions on the “why” of this data, as all we have are the numbers. Additionally, an issue with the data could be related to what people consider “art” to be. Some people might have a broad definition of art, including making music, movies, or writing in that definition, while others might purely be talking about visual art like painting, and so wouldn’t include their arguable forms of making art. However, we can still see what these trends look like through age and income, and it can be a very interesting look into our psyche and inspire us to ask further questions.
