> audience engagement with the arts generated €16.9 million in social value, based on public willingness-to-pay for cultural experiences.
If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.
If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.
Many of our friends in the literary circles of NYC end up teaching in MFA programs (Columbia, NYU, New School), but then they have very little time for their own work and the pay isn't great (she's been offered $4k to teach a course for the semester at Columbia MFA). Of course we do have friends that have gotten $1 million advances, but that is exceptionally rare and you have to be a bestseller at that point.
So, that's all to say, you can have an artist that from the outside looks wildly successful because of the awards and articles written about them, but they're in reality poor.
Publishers have an interest in publishing stuff that doesn't sell as long as ticks some other check-boxes to appear prestigious or politically correct for the time.
Should society bear the costs of maintaining artists who produce things that are not in demand or have low value?
These are mostly employed positions, where employees have procedures to negotiate their salary with the employer (which might be the government itself).
Most artists otoh are self-employed, and the government decided that the country at large would benefit from giving some of them economic support. You can argue with the modalities but the reasoning does not seem that opaque to me.
How is that different than being an “artist” whose art isn’t consumed by anyone willing to pay for it.
I kind of see the reasoning to some extent but then also e.g. “full time gardeners” if their yards are visible from the sidewalk should be paid.
It's a cultural norm. Extending it to other generally penniless artists is too.
When universities in other countries start running courses on Irish food service workers we can reasonably expect them to be included.
There is no numerical value of UBI that makes any sense in Canada. Rent is expensive and toys are cheap.
You need universal basic services with income being a thing you use for toys and vices. So this hypothetical artist should instead get paid what other people are willing to pay but need $0 in pay for basic food, water, healthcare, and housing.
It's possible. It's possible that there can be a similar gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount I need to live on while I pursue my career in snail sniffing". So what? That's why my snail sniffing is purely a hobby.
This feels like it violates the social contract where we all produce things other people want/need, and in return we get the things we want/need. It feels wrong that artists get a special carveout there, where they get to produce things other people don't want (at a livable price) and everyone else is forced to create the things they want/need anyways.
This would be different to me if it were a full post-scarcity thing that everyone gets because the prior contract is based on a scarcity that doesn't exist anymore. This feels wrong because it both acknowledges that scarcity still exists, while taking money from the people producing those scarce goods to fund creating goods that are overabundant to a degree where the creators are destitute.
If we were collectively creating so many car tires that they were being sold below marginal cost, the solution would be to make fewer tires and have the workers go make something else. It reads wrong to me that for art the solution is just to levy taxes and continue making more than the market can bear.
Plenty of artists become very, very wealthy.
[0] https://www.contemporaryartissue.com/art-world-statistics-ev...
Of course you'd need a bunch of bureaucracy to avoid it getting abused, but it would help artists make a living.
Copyright, and, to less extent, ticketed events, are a system of artificial scarcity, would be cool if this had a public domain aspect. At least a limited form within the nation subsidizing it.
It also changes the distribution. I'd say it's a net positive if a bunch of artists get enough money to live on their art rather than the vast majority not making enough and a tiny fraction making the most. It's just a matter of correcting for structural factors that otherwise push towards an exponential distribution of income.
Why is this a thing that needs "correcting" in any field, and why anyone would start with art, a thing my children can do with their fingers and some paint?