The Christian Science Monitor takes a deeper look at the unemployment stats for artists and sees more pain ahead:

Last week, the National Endowment for the Arts released research showing that artists are now unemployed at about twice the rate of other professional workers. Approximately 129,000 artists were out of work nationwide in the fourth quarter of 2008, according to the report – up 63 percent from the same period in 2007. The NEA estimated that the figures might have been worse had thousands of artists not left the workforce due to retirement, a desire to pursue outside opportunities, or general discouragement. And the forecast for the next few years is no brighter. Sunin Iyengar, the director of research and analysis at the NEA, said unemployment was a “lagging economic indicator,” and that the figures can still rise even months or years after a general economic recovery. Artist unemployment, for instance, did not reach its zenith until two years after the 2001 recession, when the markets had regained their strength. [ . . . ]

“There’s a reason for the severity of these numbers,” Mr. Iyengar said, referring to the NEA report as a whole. “Artists are entrepreneurs in terms of their employment character. They’re the equivalent of small businesses – they require a lot more investment up front. They’re already in a pretty precarious situation. And in a market like this, artists are really hit pretty hard.”

But Jesse Schoem, an actor living in New York, argues that artists have always soldiered through less than ideal economic climates, working when they can find work and waiting when they can’t. “It’s not like things have gotten so markedly worse,” Mr. Schoem says. “It’s more like that they’re always really bad, until you get famous.”

Artists in Survival Mode as Market Crumbles (Christian Science Monitor)