Artists on Basic Income: Beyond Precarious Livelihoods
This report is a companion to Basic Income: An Artists’ Commission, a two-day online event that took place in January 2021, nearly one year into the COVID-19 pandemic. At this gathering, a cross-section of artists in Canada delivered public testimony in which they described their working and living conditions and imagined how the introduction of a basic income program would transform their livelihood, practice, and sector—and our society.
The commission was initiated by an affinity group of artists and cultural workers and was financially and logistically supported by the Media Arts Network of Ontario (MANO) and other sponsoring organizations. For this collective act of witnessing, the affinity group circulated an open call for artists willing to share testimony. The organizers invited the participation of twenty artist-testifiers cutting across disciplines, career stages, social locations, and regions.
The authors of this report were invited by the affinity group to serve as commissioners. In addition to producing this report, our role involved developing, in consultation with the organizers, the questions that were provided to testifying artists to assist them in preparing their statements. On January 30th and 31st 2021, the testifiers, organizers, and commissioners assembled over Zoom for the hearings, which were advertised and open to the public. Each artist-testifier delivered an approximately 15-minute statement, then responded to follow-up questions from the commissioners.
This report is a narrative summary of artists’ testimonies and responses to commissioners’ questions. Artist-testifiers’ contributions were marked by openness, vulnerability, and a capacity to envision their work and sector otherwise. Our process of preparing this report began by reviewing the transcripts of the testimonies and Q&A periods. We next generated a list of themes that emerged from this review, and then we coded the transcript content, a process of sorting the material by theme to surface patterns on common topics. We then condensed these themes into the table of contents that structures this report.
Basic Income: An Artists’ Commission was an artist-led intervention amid the COVID-19 pandemic. From the onset of this crisis, artists and other cultural workers whose livelihoods depend on in-person interaction, and whose work is not easily performed remotely, experienced a sudden and severe loss of income. For countless artists, lockdowns, venue closures, and project cancellations meant the disappearance of paid work opportunities. Worsening their financial strain, cultural workers often have limited social protections: artists who work project to project as freelancers generally lack access to established income protection benefits, like Employment Insurance, which tend to cater to workers in a more or less stable employment relationship.
While this commission was a community response to COVID-19’s impact on artists’ livelihoods, it is widely understood within this community that the pandemic had exacerbated, rather than single-handedly caused, artists’ precarious conditions. Precarity is a longstanding, unresolved structural feature of work in the cultural sector. Indeed, economic marginalization is repeatedly observed in a steady output of studies of cultural work.
The initiators of this commission were driven to shift the conversation from artists’ precarity to alternative possibilities. They targeted policy measures that hold potential to meaningfully, and lastingly, improve artists’ income security. This impulse reflected the reality of an economic emergency that had been made widely visible in the pandemic’s first months. But in its specific focus, this commission reflected and contributed to one of the pandemic’s most striking effects on public discourse about social policy—the heightened profile of the basic income proposal.
Image credit: Better Creative
