Guaranteed Basic Income for Artists
The "starving artist" schtick is getting old. It's time for something new.
Arts funding is largely administered through one-off, project-based grants that support the production of a final “deliverable”—e.g., a film, a book manuscript, a play. Foundations and funders tout their portfolios, highlighting the artistic achievements of the beneficiaries of their grant programs and fellowships. Struggling artists compete with each other to obtain these highly selective awards so they can create new work and add another line to their resumes. This is the model for arts funding across many disciplines, and it has been this way for decades.
Houston, We Have A (Structural) Problem
As the executive director of an arts nonprofit that strives to support marginalized and underrepresented artists, I have found that project-based funding falls woefully short of providing anything like career sustainability. A sustainable career in the arts, simply put, means a career that affords the artist some modicum of economic stability, if not security. But most artists today are trapped in the grind of a gig economy that provides tenuous work with no benefits. Living paycheck to paycheck is rough, even more so when your paycheck doesn’t come from full-time W-2 employment, but a patchwork of 1099 contractor gigs without health insurance.
Even with support from project-based grants and fellowships, most working artists live precarious lives, often without basic needs met in a reliable and ongoing way. My nonprofit works with independent filmmakers who survive by doing everything from driving Uber to sex work to rummaging through rich people’s trash. They couch surf, live in their parents’ basements, and sleep in their cars because they cannot afford to pay rent. The ingenuity and resourcefulness of these artists is remarkable, a testament to their commitment to creating art, no matter the cost.
But the costs of this model are considerable and compounding. Realistically, who can “afford” to live like this? A life committed to art-making is increasingly only accessible to those with external financial support—i.e., from wealthy parents, a gainfully employed spouse, or a well-paying day job.
This is especially true in the world of independent film. Long derided as the province of trust fund kids, filmmaking is a highly speculative pursuit with costly barriers to entry. Because the cost of even trying to pursue a career in film is so high, it excludes and discourages people without means. Many people of color, young people saddled with student debt, working mothers with small children—basically anyone who cannot “afford” to live the life of a starving artist—give up on their artistic pursuits faster and at a much higher rate than people with resources and privilege. We are losing their stories. It’s no wonder that the independent film landscape is dominated by straight, white, childless men in their 20s and 30s. This problem is not solved by another Crazy Rich Asians or Black Panther. This is a structural problem, not a content problem.
Until there are sustainable pathways for a wider range of people to commit their time to developing an artistic practice, the underlying or “root causes” of inequality remain intact. Traditional fellowships and grants—even those specifically targeting women, people of color, and LGBTQ creators—support the production of art, but not the sustenance of artists. These are not the same thing. Something needs to change.
A Possible Solution: Guaranteed Basic Income
One straightforward way to address artists’ lack of financial stability would be to provide them with a guaranteed basic income, a no-strings-attached automatic cash transfer every month that they can use to pay for whatever they want. To put it more succinctly, the best solution to a lack of cash is cash.
In 2022, my nonprofit aims to pilot a guaranteed basic income program that will support one emerging filmmaker. The program will put $1000 per month directly into the selected filmmaker’s bank account for a period of ten years. There will be no reporting requirements, no requirements for producing a certain amount of art, no “deliverables” owed to us by the artist. The program is built on trust and out of a belief that the artist is fully capable of making decisions about the use of their time and money in a manner that makes sense for their practice and life circumstances. It recognizes that their timeline should not be determined by funders, and it attempts to remove the paternalistic power dynamic that is built into the structure of most artist grant and fellowship programs.
Why ten years? This may seem like an excessively long time, but this decade-long support is crucial. It allows for long-term planning, risk-taking and experimentation, and project development at a scale and scope that is impossible on shorter timelines. A decade is enough time not only for the creation of new work; it allows for an artist to come into their own—to develop their voice, find their tribe, build an audience. It allows them to define their own success, and to pursue it with the assurance of an important financial backstop that provides some predictability in an otherwise wildly unpredictable industry.
Rather than creating yet another small project grant that will result in yet another one-off film, this program adopts a fundamentally different approach. The money is awarded to the artist not with the specific instruction to “go make a film,” but an open-ended missive to “go build a career.” Yes, this approach means that fewer people can receive support. But not everyone needs or deserves to have a career as an artist. Let’s give a smaller group of artists a fighting chance, rather than a larger group virtually no chance at all.
The Challenges of “Free” Money
In recent years, there has been increasing public discourse on the potential of a universal basic income, or UBI, to alleviate many social ills and provide an equitable economic floor for the entire citizenry, regardless of socioeconomic status, race, gender, etc. I won’t rehash all the various arguments for or against UBI, but it may be worth addressing some of the common misconceptions about a basic income:
Free money will make people lazy.
Basic income experiments have shown, time and time again, that a guaranteed monthly cash transfer does not disincentivize people from working. On the contrary, it can allow people to be more selective about the work they do. It presents the possibility of seeking and taking on work that is meaningful and fulfilling, rather than working just to pay the bills.
$1000/month is not enough to live on.
The point of a guaranteed basic income is not to cover all of a person’s living expenses. The goal is to create an economic floor that is roughly at the federal poverty line. It’s not a radical form of socialism or “handouts” gone off the rails. It’s capitalism where income doesn’t start at zero.
A basic income program is too expensive and cannot be scaled.
Volumes have been written about the cost of a truly universal basic income policy that includes every man, woman, person, and child. Setting those debates aside, within the more restricted realm of artist support, the cost of a basic income program is very much within reach. The money that foundations and arts funders currently spend on existing grant and fellowship programs would more than suffice, especially if all of their arts funding and artist support programs were restructured for this single purpose. It would also reduce bureaucracy and the many expenses related to administering grants and fellowships.
Final Thoughts
I close this essay with a confession. For most of my adult life, I have been the recipient of a form of guaranteed basic income. From the age of eighteen, I have received a modest but meaningful sum of money every month from my family, no strings attached. I say this neither with pride nor embarrassment; it is just a statement of fact.
It is also a fact that I would not have been able to do most of the things I have done in my life without this financial support. I would not have moved to Los Angeles upon graduating college to work in the film industry in an entry-level job that paid less than minimum wage. I probably would not have gone to graduate school. I would not have poured thousands of dollars into starting a nonprofit that could not pay me a salary for years. And I would not have produced dozens of social-impact films that have little to no chance for commercial success. In short, I would not be working in the arts.
This experience has made me a believer in the potential power of a guaranteed basic income. Far from discouraging work, it broadens the horizon for what type of work is possible, approachable, and imaginable. It can fundamentally alter the decision-making matrix of your life. It provides a wider and longer runway, so you can falter, make mistakes, and get back up and try again. The ability to approach life in this manner should not be a privilege enjoyed only by those who are lucky by birth. It should be a right enjoyed by anyone born in the “richest nation in the history of the world.” We can afford it, and if we can do this for “starving artists,” it would be much more of a corrective for social inequities than project-based grants and fellowships.
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