
Image: © ABGlavin / Canva
In November 2020 in Ireland, the Arts and Culture Recovery Taskforce announced its recommendation for a three-year pilot of a universal basic income (UBI) for artists. The Greens backed the idea and began looking for cross-party support for a pilot scheme to deliver self-employed artists a weekly baseline income of €325 ($520), above which they can make further earnings from their art.
In Scotland, the national arts agency is contributing funds to research the feasibility of a Civic Basic Income pilot. It knows this kind of universal basic income scheme will benefit artists immensely, and consequently considers it a key part of cultural policy.
France’s régime salarié intermittent à employeurs multiples (system for intermittently salaried workers with multiple employers) was introduced in 1936 to support technicians in the film industry. It gives beneficiaries the right to publicly funded unemployment payments for each day that they are out of work. Now, it is accessed by dancers, artists, musicians and the like who have done a minimum of 507 hours of paid work during a one-year period.
In the Netherlands, the Mondrian Fund (a public fund which receives most of its investment from the Ministry of Education, Culture and Science) issues a stipendium for established artists. The stipendium amounts to €38,000 for a minimum of 24 months paid in four instalments, and can be awarded once every four years. The Netherlands also has a support scheme for freelancers, with allowances for low-income earners, maternity leave, childcare and national insurances like the aged pension. A similar scheme for freelancers operates in Belgium.
These policies are not grants or prizes or occasional fees. They are not mentorships or ‘opportunities’ or exhibitions or professional development programs. They are ways to build a livelihood. They are forms of employment support—to reliably, steadily, earn a living as an artist.
In Australia, it is sometimes said we need to ‘think big’ in the arts. Arts advocacy is almost always framed in terms of needing more funding—which, sure. But we also need to remember some other fundamental ideas that those working in other sectors take for granted: wages, superannuation, sick leave, holiday leave. I have been thinking about this increasingly since becoming someone who commissions new art: grants, which are really short-term funds for projects that encourage expenditure on the services of others, are not enough. We need jobs.
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Despite almost seven decades of cultural policy, there remains no economic framework for most people working in the arts to earn anything resembling a full-time, liveable wage. In that time, arts policy has often been framed as supporting participation in the arts as a civic right. But what of the rights of those involved in making the work itself? Since the 1990s, Australian cultural policy has embraced the idea of the ‘creative industries’—the arts’ contribution to prosperity, innovation, jobs and economic growth in publishing, visual arts, gaming, entertainment, screen production, performing arts and music. It’s commonplace to see arts advocates and journalists justify the case for more arts funding by trying to prove the economic value of creative arts.
Arts advocacy is almost always framed in terms of needing more funding—but we also need to remember some fundamental ideas that other sectors take for granted: wages, superannuation, sick leave, holiday leave.
This has led to an unthinking celebration of ‘jobs’ without analysis about the insecurity and indignity of the types of jobs available in the arts. A report in May this year in the Guardian Australia gave the usual broad figures, claiming that, since the pandemic, the arts has created more jobs than the mining sector. ‘For every additional $1bn in turnover in the mining industry, an additional 472 jobs are created. For every additional $1bn in turnover in the building industry, 1,242 new jobs are created. In the arts and entertainment sector, however, 4,297 new jobs are created with each $1bn in additional turnover.’
These appeals to liberal economics are something of a callback to the Hawke–Keating years, and that government’s Creative Nation policy in 1994, but the growth-and-business argument is ill-equipped for today’s politics—how can anyone expect such ideas to persuade contemporary governments whose politics are ideologically wrapped around border protection, free trade and big business handouts?
More recently, the Media Entertainment Arts Alliance—the biggest union for creative professionals—created well-meaning, viral social media tiles heralding that ‘the arts sector creates six times as many jobs as the construction sector per dollar of turnover’. Why, then, are artists hurting so much, and dependent on the generosity of GoFundMe and Patreon, friends, family and Centrelink? Too often, these sorts of raw numbers relating to arts ‘jobs’ are touted positively. But what kind of arts jobs are being offered? Are they permanent positions? Are they salaried? Or are they merely artists’ fees for occasional projects? Are they casual arrangements without a contract?
It’s yet another bad-faith, misguided argument: nobody could deny that mining currently offers better income and benefits, and a more stable career path than the majority of arts jobs. What these figures in fact represent is arts workers continuing to subsidise each successive funding cut with their own free labour—and as such are nothing to celebrate. How can we reconcile a shallow jobs argument for better arts funding with the fact that artists are among the most insecure, lowest-paid workers in the country? How long will we continue this ruse—which is neither truthful, nor is it effective at compelling successive governments to raise their support for art and culture?
How can we reconcile a shallow jobs argument for better arts funding with the fact that artists are among the most insecure, lowest-paid workers in the country?
Even if Australia Council funding was replenished to its pre-George Brandis levels, artists would remain in financial turmoil, and the arts would still function in such a way that the thing at the centre driving it all—artists’ labour—is remunerated last. Artists have been humiliated and left in chaos by those meant to be representing them. Traditional sources for artists’ incomes—teaching and grants—are waning. And in the wake of deep policy and funding neglect, the art sector has fallen into the gig economy. A recent report, Creativity in Crisis: Rebooting Australia’s Arts and Entertainment Sector After COVID, found that ‘in February 2021, around 45 per cent of all employees in arts and recreation services were in casual roles (defined as employment without access to basic paid leave entitlements, like holiday and sick leave, and superannuation).’ The arts sector’s embrace of a flexible labour market hasn’t just undermined the livelihoods of its practitioners. It has also been used as an excuse by Government to exclude its members from JobKeeper. But hey. Wages are so 20th century. Artists are still being fed the individualism of the genius myth, that their talent will allow them to outpace the gig life, even as that myth has betrayed them. Much of Australia Council’s new digital funding encourages artists to digitise their practice, but few artists can simply set up an e-retail store and expect a liveable wage to result from it, particularly when the art market and culture of buying is so weak. But then again, why have a wage when you could dream of being a star?
Evidently, the creep of neoliberal ideas into the arts is much deeper, much more corrosive than the arts’ often progressive rhetoric suggests. Rather than spouting the kind of faulty logic that we imagine governments want to hear, it’s time to try a new approach: an artist-centred cultural policy, one founded on employment for arts workers.
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Who gets to work in the arts, and under what conditions? The era of the single employer and the single workplace is over. For that reason, the Victorian Government is introducing a pilot for up to five days of sick leave to casual and insecure workers in priority industries—but will it cover arts workers? Because jobs are scarce, low-paid or non-existent, there is a lot of undeclared class privilege in the arts sector. Most people subsidise their way into the arts: by parental generosity, by inherited wealth, by spousal support, or by working in some other industry to pay their way. Class is its own safety net; those who are demographically inclined toward self-funded security are more able to steer their way successfully through the arts’ patchwork landscape of fees and grants. Too often, diversity is approached primarily as a question of the art sector’s internal values, or the literary world’s editorial values, or of gatekeeper’s proclivities and failures. These things are important. But beyond them, this society is growing increasingly unequal—in the distribution of wealth, in the ownership of resources, in the market’s power to make decisions for everyone.
Evidently, the creep of neoliberal ideas into the arts is much deeper, much more corrosive than the arts’ often progressive rhetoric suggests.
Some people say that a UBI is a utopian fever-dream. Others, referring to its individual disbursement, say it is a form of privatisation—but I believe it is better understood as a form of wealth redistribution that relieves the psychological disturbance of surviving the free market life. Indeed, the short-lived Coronavirus supplement, which doubled Centrelink’s JobSeeker rate, provided many artists with their first taste of a stable income—without the free, wasteful labour of grant applications—in 2020. A UBI would also, as argued by John Lanchester in the London Review of Books, make it easier for people to turn down unwaged or pitifully paid work, if they wished. For artists, it may subsidise their unwaged and pitifully paid work. Such is the reality of living in a country with an art market that is historically small and currently flatlining.
A UBI may feel distant. Rising mainstream support, including from Anglicare and a new cross-university Australian Basic Income Lab, may bring it closer. But there is one thing that arts organisations, major museums and galleries could do now: put artists on a salary. Cultural institutions of all kinds—festivals, university-backed literary and publishing groups, regional galleries, arts centres, arts precincts, the national broadcaster, art schools, state-based writers’ centres, libraries—employ administrators, producers, program officers, funding officers, marketing officers, communications officers, social media officers, digital producers, public program coordinators, partnerships managers and payroll staff. Maybe it’s time to start employing the people who directly produce the art, the poetry, the prose, the books, the exhibitions and the performances.
Historically, cultural policy during disasters has adopted the language of public works. In the USA, the Federal Writers Project (alongside similar projects for artists, musicians and theatre-makers) grew out of the class struggles of the Depression era—million-strong strikes, mass industrial action—to employ out-of-work writers to produce everything from city guide books, social history projects and oral histories of slavery. Such struggles are not evident in contemporary Australian politics: there is no Writers Union or Unemployed Writers Association (TV writers in the US, for example, have highly structured agreements negotiated by their union). The structure of work has quaked; cultural policy does not treat artists like workers. With the encouragement of entrepreneurialism, individualism and careerism, and with a splintered, un-unionised workforce of sole traders, it’s hard to see how such a struggle will emerge. That’s why I’ve come to believe the medium to large organisations and major arts institutions, museums and galleries—many of which benefit from multi-year funding, from both state and federal sources—have to take the lead in restoring some stability to artists’ work by modelling the alternative.
Does the scale of reform I’m proposing lie beyond the bounds of possibility? This isn’t heart-over-head thinking—it’s returning to how work should be defined. There are many different ways in which artists could be payrolled, dependent on the particularities of each organisation. Next Wave—an arts organisation for emerging artists, and a former biennial festival—has recently announced its recruitment of eight artists from around the country to share an artistic directorship. For a term of two years, using a fee-based model, the group will straddle arts management tasks; it’s a concrete example of an organisation making moves toward broadening its staff to include artists, in a way that makes sense with its existing operations. Next Wave also has committed to paying artists superannuation.
Other organisations already offer year-long fellowships and artist-in residence programs; theatre groups and musical companies already follow a model whereby artistic staff are employed in a company. Their labour is central, after all, to their employers’ activities and programs. Similar positions could be provided by a combination of philanthropy, partnerships and targeted Australia Council support. These positions would help organisations meet their KPIs for job creation and investment in artists’ practice, and salaried artists could be included in arts organisations’ general programming of exhibitions and events. They could follow fixed terms, to provide up to several years of ongoing employment with all the attendant benefits that much of the rest of the population expect and receive. They would bring prestige to both institutions and artists.
Alone, a strategy for salaried artists at cultural institutions would not be enough. The danger of repeating the tertiary sector’s folly, of a salaried workforce moored above a swamp of casuals, is too great. That means that the imperative remains to advocate for the kinds of labour legislation honoured by the French, Dutch and Belgian governments to protect freelancers. This is a more far-sighted solution than lobbying for more stimulus funds—much of which will be exhausted keeping artists on the same low-paid treadmill.
The arts cannot flourish without a full reimagining of labour and care. It needs to actively create an economy of belonging for its practitioners—regardless of what is happening in federal politics.
But when funding is cut, the political imagination of the arts sector shrinks. Timidity strikes. Survival mode becomes normal. In a state of fear, we forget how to imagine what the community could look like. I want to render the possibility of artists’ jobs vital, because I fear that the arts sector has become so brow-beaten that it has forgotten what to even expect. It has been trying to swim with the neoliberal riptide with non-cultural reasons to fund art, rather than rejecting such rhetoric and going onto the front-foot. It has made weak pleas about the arts’ contribution to GDP or the supposed need for a new peak body, forgetting the core idea of supporting the cultural workforce—centring artists, prioritising artists, with fair work and pay embedded into a national cultural strategy. The arts cannot flourish without a full reimagining of labour and care. It needs to actively create an economy of belonging for its practitioners—regardless of what is happening in federal politics. Then, what we will really be doing is fighting for artists’ basic inclusion in the public’s imagination.
The government-funded exploitation of JobKeeper by pandemic beneficiaries like Harvey Norman represents one of the biggest transfers in intergenerational wealth in this country since the introduction of the GST. Most stimulus efforts were directed at self-funded retirees, property owners, business investment and incorporated companies. Meanwhile, two-thirds of workers in our industry are casually employed or freelance, a rate double that of the general Australian workforce. We’ve learned that there are no true free marketeers in a pandemic. I think, in this context of mass public (mis)spending, we can fund some basic jobs for artists. After all, the art sector’s talk about progression, decolonisation and diversity will mean nothing until it creates dignified jobs for its practitioners.
Recent years have seen an upswing in conceptual interest in systems and structures alternative to the one introduced by colonialism on this landmass—collectives, post-capitalism, futures of equity. But the terms of employment in the arts haven’t changed. We make art about these ideas, and rarely enact them. Will the arts sector stop regenerating the norms of gig work? Or, to riff on the Gen Z meme, do we just dream of labour? For years I have self-subsidised my own involvement in the arts by working as a freelance journalist, casual academic, research assistant and copywriter. I worked across three sectors—arts, public media and academia—that have all bowed to funding neglect by embracing short-term contracts. Eventually, during a series of failures to relocate overseas, I met someone who grew up and lives on a farm, and when the pandemic hit, I moved in with him. I began to exhale. On stolen, stricken land, the farm subsidy has allowed me to detach from gig life by granting me that most precious asset: time. Over the course of three weeks, I wrote this essay for $350 plus GST.