“Average” means the small number of superwealthy are dragging the numbers way up, I assume
Dr Glass did a quick and dirty run of the numbers, and discovered that The Average American spent $67 a year on purchasing Fine Art. That’s almost $6 a month on unnecessary marble sculptures, Renaissance paintings and priceless antiques! Why, that’s $24 a month on Fine Art purchases per family of four - that’s absolutely ridiculous! I can’t believe the average American family WILLFULLY spends that much money in the fine arts market.
That could be cut out of your budget without noticing it! Nobody NEEDS to have Old Masters hanging in every room of your house, and until every man, woman, child and baby SAVES that $67 dollars each year instead of blowing it on priceless sterling silver soup tureens, they shouldn’t complain about being poor! EVERYONE is culpable in wasting money collecting COMPLETELY needless amounts of antiquities and modern masterpieces!
… if it isn’t obvious, the Average American (a population that necessarily includes babies, retired veterans, schoolchildren, broke students, minimum-wage workers, and folks of every walk of life) does NOT spend $6 a month on fine art. The numbers are dragged upwards by the 1% of Americans who do.
Anyway, I thought this was a super cute little exercise, and Dr Glass gave me permission to share it here. The numbers are quick and dirty.
First, he found a source for the statement that “the global art economy grew [in 2017] with $63.7 billion in total global sales.” [discussion article x] [published report x] (Note that the report it’s based on is easily found via the discussion article. Note that the lead economist is named and assigned responsibility. Note that the methodology is VERY clear.) The linked article stated that the United States accounted for 35% of this commerce. 35% of 63.7 billion is $22,295,000,000 - we will say $22 billion dollars for convenience. Therefore, the citizens of the United States spent a total of $22 billion dollars on purchasing Fine Art in 2017.
In 2017, the population of the United States of America was 325.7 million.
22 billion divided by 325.7 million is 67.
Therefore, each American spent an average of $67 on Fine Art in 2017.
As this apparently did not happen - as the average American is not in a position to buy many priceless antiques - then it must have been the stereotypical Upper Classes who bought the art.
From the source above: “Arts Economics teamed with UBS to survey 2,245 American millionaires and
billionaires (the kinds of people who don’t usually like to fill out
surveys), and found that 35% of them collected art and antiques in 2017.”
There you go. That’s who bought all the unnecessary fine art. The responsibility for “unnecessary” and “non-essential” spending of money should be assigned to the people who spent it, not distributed equally among the entire population. Because while you CAN say that the “average American spent an average of $67 on Fine Art in 2017,” those numbers are weaselly and unhelpful. They are not a reflection of individual experiences, and do not accurately convey the economic reality of the nation - so what good are they?
It’s fairly unclear how USA Today gathered their own numbers - they claim it was “research commissioned by Ladder and conducted by OnePoll” - but although I was eventually able to work out that Ladder appears to be a financial corporation with a life insurance arm, I was unable to find their original research in order to scrutinize their methodology. The supposed “report” is not easy for a trained researcher to find, it certainly wasn’t conducted by a named reputable economist, and they could literally be pulling numbers out of their asses, not publishing them anywhere, and sending a junk press release to a journo at USA Today.
To Quote a phrase popularized by Mark Twain: “There are three kinds of lies: lies, damned lies, and statistics.”
To Quote my English Teacher who should have been teaching math but he had a boner for Shakespeare: “If statistics ever provoke an emotion other than discombobulation, whatever’s being cited has, at best, been over-simplified to the point of uselessness, but is more likely pulled directly from someone’s ass.”
And as someone else pointed out, they buy groceries online. Does that count as “online shopping”? Is not really “non essential”.
…if the average American stopped spending $67/year on fine art, and instead donated it to Americans in poverty, then that’d be around $500/year/recipient (uncritically taking the first number I found in WP as the US poverty rate).
