My wife has won multiple prestigious awards for her writing (novels, memoir). She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of. She got paid about $100k for her last novel, which took maybe 5 years to complete. It works out to less than $20k/year, after paying her literary agent. The publisher encourages her to spend her own money on PR (~$20k).
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.
I earned about $10 for the last quarter for the second edition of a technical book I wrote--which actually earned out royalties. With rare exceptions, writing a book makes basically no sense unless you're on the clock for a company anyway and the book comes with lots of other benefits.
So effectively what you're saying is that institutions are willing to reward her with attention, but people are not willing to pay for her art after all?
> She's published by huge multinational corporations you've heard of.
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?
Sure, but you could say the same thing for teachers, foodservice workers, nurses, etc.... yet they are unable to avail of this program, for reasons I don't understand.
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.
Sure, but in practically every other non-essential situation (i.e. food, medicine, housing) that gap would be considered supply in excess of demand and allowed to work itself out.
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.
Then don't count that money in a fake economic justification. Just say "the bureaucracy would like to assign people your tax money based on vague criteria" and leave it at that.
I think you need to solve the gap the other way, by bringing down the "amount people need to live", ideally to zero, and not by directly paying people.
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 is possible that there can be a gap between "the amount people are willing to pay" and "the amount artists need to live on (food, housing, etc)"
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.
Most artists don't make enough, though? Isn't that famously well known? Picasso was never rolling in it, burned his paintings to stay warm, and had trouble even eating.
Worse still, you're perpetuating a debunked myth of a starving artist. 99% of the artists you've heard of were able to support themselves with their craft - those that weren't stopped producing and that's why you've never heard of them (a prime example of survivorship bias). Van Gogh is an extreme outlier.
This seems both a) vague and b) based on a sample size of n=1. 85% of all visual artists in the U. S. make less than 25k/year [0]. Also, don't forget that most artists work in companies (again: visual art), like making story boards for anime etc.
Could be interesting to try negative tax on works from small artists up to a certain value. So when you buy a painting from some person of little name recognition the goverment pays like 20 percent extra up to 2,000 Euro, 10 percent up to 5,000 Euro, and over 10,000 Euro taxes are paid as normal for luxury goods.
Of course you'd need a bunch of bureaucracy to avoid it getting abused, but it would help artists make a living.
Seems like it could be an "infinite money glitch" if the artist and customer are in cahoots. Churn out alot of cheap artworks, even just fake ones, then split the profits. The bureaucracy capable of preventing this would be so onerous, would anyone still be interested in the dole for it?
> If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.
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.
There is a lot of value in reducing risk, variance and up-front costs for artists. Enough value that, to somebody barely scraping by, it makes the difference between a show/exhibition/etc being doable and not.
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.
> 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?
If people are willing to pay for their art then artists don't need a welfare check.