Passionately or reluctantly independent? Artistic and non-artistic self-employment compared

The stereotypical example of an intrinsically motivated person is an artist who creates art for art's sake. In line with this, a frequently expressed argument is that many of these artists opt for self-employment to develop their artistic career and stay in control. Recently, in this journal, Feder and Woronkowicz in Journal of Cultural Economics 47 589-607, 2023, reported findings from a comprehensive study with US data in which they comparatively examine the motives of artistic versus non-artistic self-employed. Indeed, one of their key results is that artists are less likely to seek self-employment for economic compared to other reasons. We examine the generalizability of their findings by conducting a similar analysis on a sample of Dutch artistic and non-artistic self-employed. We add four further variables-two experience and two risk-related-to explore the extent to which these may provide further insight in artistic-non-artistic motivational overlap. Moreover, we examine a wider set of potential self-employment motives to explore finer-grained differences between artistic vis-& agrave;-vis non-artistic self-employed. Our main findings of this extended replication study are threefold. First, we generalize (Feder and Woronkowicz in Journal of Cultural Economics 47 589-607, 2023) main result regarding the lower importance of the economic motive for self-employed artists. Second, we show that the added experience and risk variables are more influential than (Feder and Woronkowicz in Journal of Cultural Economics 47 589-607, 2023) set of demographic variables. Third, we prompt serving the 'community' as a new and underrated motive that may fuel the passion of artists, specifically those who are female or lower educated.