An excerpt from a post on Gary Steuer’s blog:

With all the financial challenges arts workers are facing these days – struggling to balance the budgets of their organizations, or dealing with salary and benefit cuts on compensation that was modest to begin with – it is easy to view the sacrifices people make to work in this field as being entirely financial.

Not to minimize the financial sacrifices – they ARE significant – but I would argue they are probably no more significant than a wide array of professions where people choose to devote themselves to the pursuit of “making the world a better place”. This includes early childhood workers, teachers, social workers, the whole world of NGOsworking in challenged communities, both domestically and abroad. And the sacrifices all these workers make are also not just financial. We all work long hours, and often under trying and unglamorous circumstances (though to outsiders arts work can seem glamorous).

No, I think the more significant – and unique – sacrifice arts workers make is that we lose the capacity for full, innocent and glorious enjoyment of the very art that our passion for drove us to make our life’s work in the first place.  What do I mean by this?  Think about your earliest experiences with the arts, your first encounter with Matisse, or Chuck Close; your first time in the audience for Sondheim, or Verdi; that time you first saw Baryshnikov on stage, or Judith Jamison. Remember that childlike joy – even if you were not a child – that total immersion in the art where the whole world disappeared and you were unaware of time, of the person chewing gum next to you? Now tell, me when was the last time you felt that?  Sure, you are still passionate about the art form or all art forms, you still go to museums, or opera, or theatre, but something has been lost. Admit it.

Read the full article here:  Arts, Culture and Creative Economy: The Greatest Sacrifice Arts Workers Make for the Arts.