Prilog teoriji izvođačkog ugovora

Abstract

For an artist at the earliest stages of his career, accumulating a stock of knowledge and skills can become the most important basis from which he or she might expect a higher income or ranking on the art market in the future. These investments can be seen as the direct costs of higher education in art, which together with other costs make a significant corpus of investment for the artist, from which some future return may be expected. According to the renowned theoretician of economy Ruth Towse, such investment can also be considered as a “percentage of personal income,” which can be understood as compensation for any interest that the artist would have realized in case he had effectively converted such investment into savings or invested in something else. Thus, the indirect costs of investing in art education are all those that we can consider as earnings that were missed during the training period, or period of knowledge accumulation. In this case, theorists will agree that such investment may be considered as an opportunity cost, which would have been compensated had that time been used for work, that is, invested in earning rather than learning. Therefore, in this paper, based on these dichotomy contributions, we will build on the general views of the contract theory as proposed by Richard E. Caves on the negotiating position of the artist, which in most cases constitutes an “incomplete contract” that cannot compensate for all the costs of art education and later the price and market value of his or her work. The need to pay special attention to this topic in the new conditions of political economy arises from a rather dominant and hypostatic form of cognitive capital on the one side, and the neoliberal model of cultural policy on the other.