A friend of mine recently nailed the dire reality of being an artist in Australia since the pandemic. Over tea, he said that he’d noticed something odd and pervasive: when artists get together, they don’t talk about art, they talk about money – their desperate lack of it.
Since that conversation, the pandemic’s impacts on the arts have eased and the most negligent government in memory has been voted out. So, what do we want from the new Labor government when it comes to the arts? And how exactly should we go about reversing a decade of deliberate funding attrition and neglect?
Artists are treated like gig workers, and it’s holding back our cultural capacity writes Lauren Carroll Harris.
I’m absolutely convinced that the best way for the arts to recover from this dastardly pandemic is through a basic income scheme for artists and arts workers. I’m also convinced that this injection of resources would result in a big-time renaissance of artistic energy that the general public could appreciate.
We often say we want to get past this feeling of being “stuck” in Australian politics. But when a bold new vision is offered, we tend to critique it as being too far-fetched, too unreachable. However, the fact that artists’ basic incomes are actually being trialled overseas shows us that this is a practical policy rather than a wild dream.
How might it work? There are a couple of viable models: Ireland’s Basic Income for the Arts pilot scheme requires artists, writers, dancers, theatre makers, filmmakers and authors to prove five years of creative practice and income, and/or membership to a professional organisation such as the Irish Writers Union. This drives down the risk that hobbyists or “creative industry” types like graphic designers will claim the benefits.
The scheme – in which the arts department issues €325 ($483) weekly to 2000 practicing artists – bars arts administrators, journalists, commercial gallerists, managers, agents and others who can earn a salary. It’s designed to get money directly to artists so that they can make things and live, and it will cost €25 million over three years.
That’s all most people really want, right? A bit of dignity and security in work and life. But despite the fact that we’ve had cultural policy in different forms since the 1950s, artists remain the Uber drivers of the art sector: a precariat of gig workers. The ones who create the value and are paid last, in the form of token fees.
The new Arts Minister Tony Burke says he recognises the need for job security for artists. He’s also talked about how cultural policy needs to focus “on the commercial significance of the sector”. The truth is that the sector’s financial success has been premised on artists’ unpaid and underpaid work. One artist I spoke with this year was paid a $2000 fee for a new commission by the Art Gallery of NSW, whose revenue in 2020-2021 was $206.4 million. This is the reality: taxpayer subsidy has instituted the highly unethical exploitation of unsalaried artists – including in government-funded arts spaces.
The Greens offer the least bad policy platform, but only because the bar is so low. They’ve raised the idea of an artists’ wage scheme, but it’s unclear how much they’ll fight for, if it’s truly a priority and how much bargaining power they’ll have in the new government. Both Labor and The Greens’ cultural policies lack a sexy, vibrant future vision: what kind of society do we want? I’m not interested in advocating for better cultural policy so that my friends and I can apply for grants or improve our career prospects. I want us to all understand what’s possible in this society and how to change this world.
New minister for the arts, Tony Burke. Credit:Alex Ellinghausen
We should be saying: we fund art because we all have a cultural birthright to access it, as part of a fully lived life. It’s a collective good, a part of public infrastructure and a civil right. Let’s have a cultural policy that doesn’t rely on artists being impoverished. We should also be saying: increase the annual budget for the national collecting institutions from $250 million to $350 million, double the Australia Council’s funds for small arts organisations and individual artists, increase the number of creative fellowships offered by the Australia Council to 300 a year – at the very least! – and dial them up to the median wage. We could even scale back the proposed Australian War Memorial to fund it all.
These things should be a given in one of the wealthiest countries on the planet. And yet, so far, much of the country’s arts have been provided on the cheap by unwaged artists. In any other sector, we’d call it a scandal. In the arts, we’ve attributed it to the romantic myth of the poverty-stricken artist. Now that we have a change in government, are we going to keep settling for that?
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