Let’s forget about starving artist for a moment and get right to a more accurate, and ominous, conjugation: The artist in America is being starved, systemically and without shame. In this land of untold bounty—what is usually called, in a kind of blustering spasm, the richest empire on earth—the American creative class has been forced to brook a historic economic burden while also being sunk into sunless irrelevancy. When it came to artists, Comrade Stalin knew all about a bounty of a different sort—he stuck it on the heads of those whose pens and brushes might transgress against his galactic hubris. Remember Osip Mandelstam’s quip about how Mother Russia reveres her poets enough to murder them? Well, with our consummate lack of reverence, we in America kill our poets in quite another way: We ignore them to death.

Here’s a paragraph grim enough to wreck your week, a sortie of distressing numbers about the arbiters, facilitators, and creators of culture: Between 2008 and September 2012, there were 66 No. 1 songs, almost half of which were performed by only six artists (Katy Perry, Rihanna, Flo Rida, The Black Eyed Peas, Adele, and Lady Gaga); in 2011, Adele’s debut album sold more than 70 percent of all classical albums combined, and more than 60 percent of all jazz albums. Between 1982 and 2002, the number of Americans reading fiction withered by nearly 30 percent. In a 1966 UCLA study, 86 percent of students across the country declared that they intended to have a “meaningful philosophy of life”; by 2013, that percentage was amputated by half, “meaningful” no doubt replaced by “moneyful.” Over the past two decades, the number of English majors graduating from Yale University has plummeted by 60 percent; at Stanford University in 2013, only 15 percent of students majored in the humanities. In American universities, more than 50 percent of faculty is adjuncts, pittance-paid laborers with no medical insurance and barely a prayer to bolster them. In the publishing and journalism trades, 260,000 jobs were nixed between 2007 and 2009. Since the turn of the century, around 80 percent of cultural critics writing for newspapers have lost their jobs. There are only two remaining full-time dance critics in the entire United States of America. A not untypical yearly salary in 2008 for a professional dancer was $15,000.

Renovate that bromide making ends meet and you might be nearer the mark: Members of the creative class are meeting their ends. What does it mean when the middle-class makers of art are relegated to a socioeconomic purgatory? The dearth of public funding for the arts mirrors the dearth of public ardor for the arts, and yet, somehow, we’re awash in dilettantes decanting their wares on the midden of American culture. Everyone, it seems, is an artist. Toss a stone into any crowd and you’ll hit someone who’s writing a novel. (Yeats once opened his address to the Rhymers’ Club with: “The only thing certain about us is that we are too many.”) The vestal and very simple concept of supply and demand will not be debauched out of its simplicity: When everyone’s an artist and no one spends money on art, art is stripped of any economic traction and serious artists can’t earn a living. Couple that with a population that overwhelmingly doesn’t mind if art and artists go extinct and you have, ladies and gentlemen, what can be fairly called a crisis.

In an important analysis of this mess, Culture Crash: The Killing of the Creative Class, Scott Timberg delivers a potpourri of bleak statistics and appalling personal stories of talented and once-thriving artists reduced to penury or making-do. (All but two of the above statistics are culled from Timberg’s research.) Although Timberg reports no incidents of literal starvation, you shouldn’t doubt that whole throngs of onetime stable middle-class artists have been pummeled into a class where they feel the fangs of hunger. Culture Crash unloads information so soul-stomping that you read on hardly able to suppress barks of disbelief. You begin Timberg’s book suspecting that things are bad—you finish it convinced that they’ve never been worse.

One of the personal stories he relays is his own, the plot points of which have become agonizingly familiar. In 2008, “a risk-taking real-estate mogul” purchased the limping Los Angeles–area newspaper for which Timberg reported, and soon after, this mogul pile-drove the paper into the foreboding nullity of Chapter 11. Then hundreds were laid off, Timberg among them. For several queasy years he hobbled by, writing “for less and less money,” until his tiny home was foreclosed upon by a bank whose girth is global—a bank that was lavishly rescued from oblivion by tax money, and one that wouldn’t stoop to negotiate with a plebeian journalist in order to stay the foreclosure on his home. There’s a gut-jabbing scene in which he has to tell his five-year-old son that they are losing the only house he’s ever known, and the child asks, “But then we’ll come back, right?” Following the foreclosure, the locksmith who showed up to bar Timberg and his young family from their home drove a car “fancier and substantially newer” than Timberg’s own “seventeen-year-old Honda.” This is our shining world now, how we prioritize: Locksmiths earn stabler livelihoods than the makers and chroniclers of our culture.