As Scotland designs its minimum-income pilot for artists, Creative PEC Research Fellows Doug Noonan (Professor, Indiana University Indianapolis) and Joanna Woronkowicz (Professor, Indiana University Bloomington), look to Ireland and New York for lessons.
Scotland is designing a minimum-income pilot for artists. The government there has formally committed to the pilot and is now working through its design. They are rightly pointing to Ireland for lessons since Ireland has already established an ongoing Basic Income (BI) scheme offering 2,000 artists €325 per week for three years.
We evaluated a guaranteed income programme for artists in New York State, the results of which can help us take stock of what we know. More importantly, our experience also helps us ask the harder questions about what we don’t know about providing basic income to artists, and who benefits.
What we have learned
In 2022, Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) launched a Guaranteed Income for Artists programme, which paid $1,000 to 2,400 randomly selected artists (more on this later) every month over the course of 18 months.
In evaluating the programme, we found that artists who participated in the programme reported being able to experiment in their work more, engage more actively in professional development, and participate more in community-based artistic work. We also found that recipients of the guaranteed income shifted their time from working outside of the arts toward artistic work. They changed how they worked, not how much.
Our evaluation also showed that participating artists’ total income rose only by about $33 per month relative to the control group after counting the money they received from the programme. In other words, the decline in their earnings – due to having cut back on other sources of income outside of the arts – offset nearly all of the payment. And so, if the purpose of the scheme is to support artists’ financial wellbeing at a given moment in time, it may not be deemed highly successful. However, longitudinal evaluation would be needed to assess whether the programme supported greater income in the long term by giving the artist the space to test commercial viability and make industry connections that support long-term financial success.
The money artists received in a guaranteed income programme mainly purchased a more satisfying working life in the form of time spent on art, but it did not significantly improve their overall income.
Which precarity?
A safety net, such as a basic income, can enable artists to take more risks for a period of time, but it cannot eliminate the risk of being an artist altogether. Imagine a musician with a guaranteed income who chooses to substitute their reliable work outside of the arts to work on developing an album. The payment helps make her album project more feasible; however, it does not make the audience and reception of the album more predictable. Although it could be argued that the breathing space provided by the guaranteed income enables the artist to test the waters with the album to see if it has commercial viability. What remains clear is that the process and outcomes of creative production are inherently uncertain.
Yet there are other sources of precarity for artists arising from the ways that artistic work is organised, such as contractual arrangements and how we compensate artists. For example, a guaranteed income might help an artist be able to afford to refuse poorly paid work that eats into time for their artistic practice, but it could also make poorly paid work more affordable to accept. Which effect do we think matters more?
We can think about a basic income as a way to provide more opportunity to take on the risk embedded in an artistic career. The artists in CRNY’s guaranteed income programme reported more fluctuating earnings after receiving the payments, suggesting that the greater time spent on art resulted in more financial uncertainty, at least in the short term.
We also don’t know how guaranteed income for a selected number of artists affects other artists today or tomorrow. Guaranteed income might allow some people to persist in artistic careers, but without creating more paid work opportunities it might also intensify the struggle that other artists who do not receive the support experience.
Who qualifies, and why?
Both the Ireland and New York programmes used lotteries to choose who received the guaranteed income payments, which may seem ‘fairer’ than judging artists based on merit. Yet, even using a process that might seem random on the outside does not avoid having to make decisions about who should qualify, how many artists will receive support, or why some people will be excluded. In our experience, those questions are much harder to answer than they initially seem.
In the CRNY programme, eligibility criteria included financial need because one of the goals of the programme was to relieve financial hardship for selected artists. A programme without the same goal would probably not include financial need as an eligibility criterion. The CRNY programme also defined artists in a particular way in order to avoid having to apply merit criteria to judging applicants’ artistic work. Applicants had to identify as artists, culture bearers, or culture makers who regularly pursued an artistic or cultural practice and intended to continue doing so, irrespective of any professional success, sales or formal training. However, in practice there were many grey areas that program managers had to make decisions about to determine if a person was eligible.
The point is that a lottery system is only as random as the eligibility criteria that come before it. Our research shows how different criteria will produce different groups of artists.
How to look beyond the payment
A larger question concerns how basic income programmes for artists translate to societal benefits. A programme could improve recipients’ lives and generate broader benefits, but it could also improve recipients’ lives without changing much for anyone else. That distinction can only be resolved by designing expansive ways to evaluate the effects of programs that map onto stated programme goals.
If improving labour conditions is the goal of the programme, evaluations should track pay, contract terms, bargaining outcomes, and career paths among artists who do not receive the basic income. If greater equality, diversity and inclusion is the goal, they should track not only art created by recipients and the audiences encountering it, but also what would have happened if the programme did not exist. With good evaluation methods designed alongside programme criteria, these kinds of ‘counterfactual’ outcomes are difficult, but not impossible, to track.
Deciding on the goals for a programme also leads to comparisons with other policy instruments that can achieve those goals, possibly more effectively than basic income programmes. If the goal is to provide household financial security for artists, broader government income support programmes might be more effective. (See this report for examples on supporting freelancers.) If the goal is to improve audience access to culture, then funding commissions, new venues and community provision of the arts could be a more efficient use of resources. Or if the goal is to improve labour conditions for artists, policymakers could target policies around contracts and bargaining arrangements. And if the programme is designed to allow artists a window to test the commercial viability of their work, then appropriate evaluation would be needed to assess this.
Lessons for Scotland
The wellbeing of artists is important. The basic income boosted participants’ professional development and autonomy, but its $46 million price tag over 18 months was more than the private philanthropic funding could sustainably afford. Fortunately, even though it sunset in 2024, we can still learn from it. But a five-star rating of a programme like Ireland’s or New York’s from the people who receive the money tells us very little about its effects on everyone else.
Scotland gives us a new opportunity to help answer questions that we cannot yet answer with the evidence we have about guaranteed income programmes for artists, such as how long programmes should run for, how much artists should be paid, and who should be eligible. It also gives us an opportunity to try and understand the wider impact of these programmes, provided that the pilot builds in a smart evaluation design.
The New York case may not decide for us whose aspirations deserve public support or how many artistic careers society should sustain. Each community chooses its own policy on this. But the Scotland case, if done well, can help answer questions about whom to prioritise, duration of support, and wider effects. Investing in artists has the potential to help them and improve everyone’s cultural life. It’s worth getting right.
The Scotland case doesn’t seem to be able to help society decide who should be prioritised and who gets support and who does not. These are the decisions that are the hardest to make but likely matter the most to understanding how basic income programmes for artists reflect the value that society puts on artistic careers, and our cultural lives.
