A Basic Income for Artists, or How to Build an Artist-led Economy
Debates around Basic Income and the potential of the Public Purse have moved from the margins to the mainstream in the last five years. However, across the deluge of think-pieces, op-eds, and TED Talks on these ideas, their potential impact on the arts, cultural industries and cultural labour more broadly seems to have been largely overlooked. That is, until the pandemic thrust these already under-resourced and over-stretched sectors out of the frying pan of poor public policy and into the bin fire of lockdowns, zero funding support, and the mass exodus of experienced workers (Pacella, Luckman, and O’Connor 2021). Since then, calls for a Basic Income for Artists (BIA) have grown to fever pitch (Caust 2022; Harris 2022; Pledger 2020). Following what has been a monumental shift in the realities of what is possible for the role of public policy post-pandemic, I wish to discuss a simple idea: giving free money to artists to do their work.
Work in the arts, cultural sector or so-called “creative” industries is commonly viewed as desirable because it supposedly offers less alienating work, characterized by aesthetic and professional autonomy; a less formal and hierarchical work environment than traditional employment; and greater levels of social prestige. Alternatively, many argue that the reality of creative work is one marked by insecurity, high levels of (self) exploitation and the corrosion of work-life demarcations, as the social networks of friends and family are put to work for business purposes (Luckman 2017; Banks and Hesmondhalgh 2009; Blair 2009). Moreover, the extension of freelance and contract work in the cultural sector has affected the expectations of a new generation of young aspirants seeking to establish a career in the sector (Christopherson 2011, 2009).
It is important to note that cultural labour is never homogenous. Indeed, the effective funding and resourcing of creative labour is a particularly unique problem. Heterogeneous and describing many styles of ‘work’, creative labour—as both a) creative conception (e.g., writing a piece of music), and b) creative reproduction (e.g., performing that piece of music)— limits the potential to effectively style a ‘one-size-fits-all’ economic model to suit all creative practices and types of cultural production, as the mediums and working patterns of cultural workers differ wildly.
However, it is useful to think about how these labour practices are resourced. Whether you are a graphic designer or a classical musician, all creative labour needs to be resourced, which involves an initial and often ongoing outlay of either time, capital, or both. What we can identify from this as being specific to cultural labour is spare, unmitigated, and unimpeded time to pursue one’s work, as well as the tools and space to do it. Therefore, any economic model that seeks to resource the arts broadly needs to keep this in mind. In an attempt to achieve this, a radical yet simple idea is being trialled in Ireland right now: giving free money to artists.
The Republic of Ireland has recently instituted a new scheme to provide three years of support to up to 2,000 individual artists (Cole 2022), piloting a form of basic income. While this does not meet the criteria of ‘universal basic income’ given its limited application within a specific sector of society, it does provide an opportunity to consider what artists are capable of when they are financially resourced simply for being artists.
While the Irish trial is the largest of a basic income for artists in recent times, with similar limited trials being offered in San Francisco (Small 2021) and New York City (Lalljee 2022), direct support for artists dates to the days of medieval patronage (Mellor 2017), which has been adapted by digital platforms such as Patreon to fund individual content creators. However, the key difference between the patron model, which promotes the production of culture favoured by those with spare capital lying around (i.e., those with privilege), and a Basic Income for Artists is that the BIA prioritises the artist and places no conditions on the types of culture to be produced. Indeed, the beauty of a basic income scheme is not the income it provides, but the way in which it empowers individuals to make choices about how they want to spend their extra time and capital.
Such an expansion in our ability to make, to create, to play, to entertain and to be entertained is really the end goal here. Not only because it would teach us to value cultural labour and to engage with it more readily, but because it would also greatly expand our general wellbeing, our sense of civic engagement, and our capacity to build shared values and stories. And although art may not be as badly needed now as vaccines, universal health care, or a rapid decarbonisation of our economy, funding artists to produce work that reflects these goals and our shared culture may heal a few other sicknesses in our communities.
Or to quote the motto of The Travelling Symphony, an itinerant Shakespearean theatre troupe performing to the sparse inhabitants of a post-apocalyptic former United States in Emily St John’s Mandel’s novel Station Eleven: “Because Survival is Insufficient”
References
Caust, J 2022, ‘Australia should have a universal basic income for artists. Here’s what that could look like’, The Conversation, May 2, https://theconversation.com/australia-should-have-a-universal-basic-income-for-artists-heres-what-that-could-look-like-182128.
Harris, LC 2022, ‘Australia could unleash a cultural renaissance by paying artists a living wage’, The Sydney Morning Herald, July 20, https://www.smh.com.au/culture/art-and-design/australia-could-unleash-a-cultural-renaissance-by-paying-artists-a-living-wage-20220719-p5b2vc.html.
Luckman, S 2017, ‘Cultural policy and creative industries’, in V Durrer, T Miller, and D O’Brien (eds) The Routledge Handbook of Global Cultural Policy, Routledge, London, pp. 341-354.
Banks, M, and Hesmondhalgh, D 2009, ‘Looking for work in creative industries policy’, International Journal of Cultural Policy, 15(4), pp. 415-430.
Blair, H 2009, ‘Active Networking: Action, Social Structure and the Process of Betworking’, in C Smith and A McKinlay (eds) Creative labour: Working in the creative industries, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 116-134.
Christopherson, S 2011, ‘Connecting the Dots: Structure, Strategy and Subjectivity in the Entertainment Media’, in M Deuze (ed.) Managing Media Work, Sage, Thousand Oaks, pp. 179-190.
Christopherson, S 2009, ‘Working in the Creative Economy: Risk, Adaptation, and the Persistence of Exclusionary Networks’, in C Smith and A McKinlay (eds) Creative Labour: Working in the Creative Industries, Palgrave Macmillan, Basingstoke, pp. 72-90.
Cole, M 2022, ‘Ireland is Offering $355 a Week for 2000 Selected Artists in New Basic Income Program’, My Modern Met, 20 April, https://mymodernmet.com/ireland-basic-income-program/.
Lalljee, J 2022, ‘New York is Launching the Biggest Guaranteed Income Fund for Artists in the US, giving 2400 residents $1000 per month’, Insider, February 16, https://www.businessinsider.com/new-york-launches-biggest-guaranteed-income-fund-artists-entertainers-ubi-2022-2.
Mellor, J 2017, ‘But What Exactly is Arts Patronage?’, Sputnik, September 22, https://sptnk.co.uk/2017/09/22/but-what-exactly-is-arts-patronage/.
Pacella, J, Luckman, S, and O’Connor, J 2021, ‘Fire, pestilence and the extractive economy: Cultural policy after cultural policy’, Cultural Trends, 30(1), pp. 40-51.
Pledger, D 2020, ‘The case for a Universal Basic Income: freeing artists from neoliberalism’, ArtsHub, June 19, https://www.artshub.com.au/news/opinions-analysis/the-case-for-a-universal-basic-income-freeing-artists-from-neo-liberalism-260583-2367657/.
Small, Z 2021, ‘San Francisco and Other Cities Try to Give Artists Steady Income’, The New York Times, April 6, https://www.nytimes.com/2021/04/06/arts/design/san-francisco-artists-income.html.
