Constructing a Social Reality of Luck in the Art World

This article examines how artists attribute luck in their everyday lives and careers, and in particular to their artist lifestyle. Drawing on Berger and Luckmann’s Social Construction of Reality and Becker’s concept of art worlds, the study reveals the artists’ references to luck are socially meaningful acts and create a social reality of ‘being lucky’. It demonstrates that this social reality is shaped by and reinforces cultural narratives of what it means to be an artist. Based on interviews with artists performing at an international arts festival in Tasmania, Australia, this research offers new insights into the role that referencing luck plays as a discursive strategy to create and attribute value, reframe identity, and navigate contradictions between the symbolic status of artists and their idealised lifestyle and the structural precarity and economic instability of creative work. The research contributes to cultural sociology by foregrounding artists’ lived experiences and meaning-making practices, highlighting how luck is performed and ‘made real’ within the art world.