It's always nice seeing countries look to support their artists in building their cultural heritage.
These feel more like government artist in residence grants.
But, at the end of the day it's still worth close to nothing, right?
I enjoy art and music as much as anyone else but the reason those professions are so poorly paid is because the supply outstrips the demand considerably[1]. What value is there in asking taxpayers to pay for an increase the supply when there's already too much supply?
Sure, paying people for doing what they love even when you are going to, in effect, throw away whatever they produce is madness.
[1] I play guitar and sketch/paint. Of the other people (who do these things) that I have regular contact with, no one can make money of the things they produce. My rough guess is that for every 1000 musician/art supply, only 1 is demanded.
Or it may not. We can't tell objectively, because there is no metric to measure.
I suppose my point is, if you cannot tell that there is a benefit at all, why leap to the assumption that it's a large enough benefit to pay 25m euros for.
In its current form art market is looking more like tax break/deductibles market.
If anything, we need the ultra rich to fund this kind of thing based on their taste. That worked well in the past with the court musician/composer and patronage.
There are so many problems with this UBI idea. The medium is one that comes to mind. We have largely moved on from paint on canvas to video the way we moved on from sculpture in stone to paint on canvas.
Does the artist have the artistic freedom to start a youtube channel with the money? I would suspect not.
Most likely this goes to propping up outdated mediums of expression and will lack the complete freedom needed for a true artist to really express themselves.
Then of course you have to contend with those gaming the system to free roll by collecting old toilets from the trash to work on their homage to Duchamp masterpiece.
I suspect there is reason for the starving artist archetype.
Maybe the artist is making under-appreciated contributions, or maybe their work is just not good. It's subjective, which means criticism is subjective too, but it seems a poor place to start with any UBI scheme executed in good faith.
I would think it would have more value as an experiment to start with some of the poorest people in a society and then measure their quality of life and economic contribution throughout and after the programme. If you could show a net-positive economic contribution during the programme, and a net-negative contribution before and after (as unlikely as I suspect that is to achieve) it would make it substantially easier to get popular support for UBI.
Many artists that are highly valued today weren't in their times, with many dying destitute or never selling anything of note. Current valuation isn't a predictor on later appreciation.
But that's precisely the point of the subsidy. Society as a whole already expresses value judgements, every day, through money. If an artist is valued, he is successful and accumulates money, so he doesn't need subsidies; but the fact that an artist is valued or not-valued today, we know, is a poor indication of their overall value in the long run. Maybe their art will explode in value after death, maybe he will start a movement that will generate better artists and designers...
The point of universal income, surely, is exactly to remove the immediate value judgement from the equation. UBI is supposed to pay everyone, regardless of what they choose to do (except for raping and murdering, I guess; but ironically, convicts are among the first to actually "enjoy" an UBI of sorts already, although to the price of their liberty). In this sense, starting from art actually makes the most sense.
> it would have more value as an experiment to start with some of the poorest people in a society and then measure their quality of life and economic contribution
The minute you start measuring economic contribution, you are not really in UBI territory anymore - you are just subsidising the market at its fringes. That's already done in social democracies, in practice, through various means.
Art is something that may only be valued highly ex post facto, and which takes a long time of intensive training to get started...
I’m just saying that there are easily hundreds of creative activities people do every day just for the love of it. Each of them could be artistically appreciated later. Narrowing in on this one subset, especially with taxpayer funding, seems not only unfair but also uninformative at large (we learn little about the economic impact of UBI as the U is missing here).
As others have said though, this appears to actually be an artist’s grant labelled as UBI, which makes the whole thing moot (these have been around for a long time with allocated funding).
This isn't intended to start a UBI scheme, that's an embellishment from the article title. From the article text:
"The scheme [...] is meant to assist those working in the fields of arts [...] who suffered economically as the global Covid-19 crisis surged in-country."
From another source [0], it's also time-limited to 3 years.
I think the less hype reading of the news is that artists are struggling through COVID so the government is offering support to ensure they don't lose a good chunk of the industry.
> one could also argue that the reason a given artist is struggling is because their work is not highly valued in the first place.
Art that's not valuable now could very well be found to be valuable later. Van Gogh died broke and essentially unknown but now he's one of the world's most well-known artists.
[0]: https://news.artnet.com/art-world/ireland-basic-income-arts-...
If we had a true healthcare free market starting from scratch right now the money would go into blood panel sampling and building massive data sets to use machine learning algorithms for classification.
If I had a full quarterly blood panel sample that went into a database in 5-10 years the most trivial random forest would crush my doctor as far as classification.
Pushing 50 my visits to the doctor are not going to look that much different than when I was a kid in 1980 for my entire life.
Instead, with this bullshit system my doctor doesn't even want to do a full panel once a year. The government is not going to pay for that.
Even better, imagine a $200 dollar home device to do a full blood sample once a month with a $20 subscription fee for analysis. 2-3 years from now would be incredible.
Just impossible to have happen with this wonderful healthcare system the collectivist love so much.
Those people who have already managed to turn it into a fulltime job are more than sufficient to ensure that arts and culture exist. What exactly do you expect to see when more f/time practitioners are added to the existing mix?
If I single out musicians - where I am on the west of Ireland, the cultural impact largely comes from street buskers and trad sessions in small pubs - not the profitable acts filling a stadium once every 5 years.
Given that the local scene is a honeypot for tourists, where as stage tours breezing through town probably extract more than they bring, it might actually be an overall profitable investment - even if the individual artists aren't.
No, it's hardcore keynesism. You're still sustaining demand in the market for all their necessities, from food and toilet paper to brushes and smart LEDs; and you are supporting the overall quality of life in the country, which passes also through people getting involved in art in various ways (as critics, consumers, etc). The fact that you may or may not get valuable output at the end is relatively irrelevant; in the end, a couple of resulting unicorns could probably repay the whole operation just by publicity and goodwill flowing to Ireland.
The inflation targeting thing was an attempt to solve the problem in a less micromanaged way. In practice you still got the usual wealth concentration cycle that everyone knows from history.
Taxes should be spent in a manner that serves society and its people. The sharing of art benefits everyone. Even art you don't like benefits you, because there is a good chance an artist you like will be influenced by it. If you want a thriving art scene you need people making art. Much of it might get thrown away and never reach an audience, but gems will emerge from it.
Even if one takes a completely selfish approach to art (ie, only art that I like is good art), there is benefit in having more artists making more art. As someone who does not live in Ireland I enjoy some art made in Ireland. So even I benefit from Ireland supporting its artists.
This is a positive externality for landlords and a negative one for tenant. It's a zero-sum game between the two groups.
And rent-seeking is a net negative for society.
Even for tenants, it's not as simple as you suggest; most renters would rather live in a gentrified area than a run-down, crime-ridden one (which is exactly why rents are higher). Arguably the only category of people who definitely lose out are long-term, low-income renters with no protections, but they are relatively rare in Ireland.
Gentrification has its problems for sure but I know several people who grew up in formerly run-down areas that are now gentrified, and they would never want to go back to the way things were.
When "taxpayers" refuse to subsidize non-taxpayers, they run the risk of those non-taxpayers murdering them; the "value" is that it directly prevents death and revolt.
Some people just simply don't agree that people should have to die simply because there are too many people, either because they're (directly or indirectly) worried about revolt or because they're "good people" who think people have a right to life, dignity, and happiness.
But some people don't: either because they lie to themselves about what the ramifications of their decisions will be (or are simply ignorant to it), or because they believe in destiny -- that god, for example, wants some people to live and others to die.
What a peculiar thought: Is an artist still an artist if they stop being an artist?
> Come on, the alternative to taxpayers subsidising artists isn't that artists face a choice between death or revolt.
No of course not, yet artists committing suicide for being unable to create their art isn't exactly unheard of. And what I said is exactly true if you maybe think about things a little differently.
The reason for that is of course the impossibility of objectively judging the value of a work of art. It's all subjective, and hence "emperor's new clothes" kinds of situation are commonplace. Also, subjectivity heavily supports no-skill fields like conceptual or performance art - why work 10+ years to learn how to paint properly, when you can do abstract paint splatters, and instead work on marketing it, building a clique (an "art movement") with like-minded allied "artists" instead?
IMO it's all fair game until taxpayer's money are involved. I for one don't want my taxes to be paying a small fortune for an empty piece of canvas, the "artist"'s canned shit or a "performance" of an "artist" sitting on a stool and peeling potatoes.
The gov itself seem to speak about a basic income. :) Media...
we are all artists in that way.
I don't play or paint, but in my country I take care of some vineyard a couple of centuries old, at my expenses.
Of course I also enjoy the wine made from them and make no money out of it, I lose a little bit every year.
Should I be included in those that "build the cultural heritage" of my country, given that my country is the world's largest producer of wine?
Or am I simply adding a few thousand liters of wine to an already massive production, basically adding almost nothing to our "cultural heritage"?