Artistic Creation and Intellectual Property

Abstract

Promoting high-quality artistic creation requires sorting the most talented people of each generation and developing their skills. This paper takes a professional-career perspective in analyzing the determinants of artistic creation. The paper builds an overlapping-generations model of artists with three features: (i) the number of highly talented artists in a given period is positively linked to the number of young artists starting the career in the previous period; (ii) artistic markets are superstar markets; iii) promotion expenditures play an important role in determining market shares. In this framework, the paper analyzes the consequences for high-quality artistic creation of changes in the length of the copyright term, increases in market size, and progress in some communication technolo- gies. It is shown that increasing superstars’ returns do not always increase the expected return to starting an artistic career. As a result, in the long run, longer copyrights do not always stimulate artistic creation.