Why Artists are Struggling to Make a Living From Their Art (and the Activists Fighting Back)

The current model that exists, where a few artists are superstars and everyone else barely struggles to exist, is bad for everyone, and bad for creative evolution in general. Art shouldn’t be about elevating certain creative people to a higher status than the others: rather we should recognize that creative people make important contributions to the world, and are valuable purely for our creative input, just another member of a diverse network of people with many different skills and abilities that make up a community.

I am happy in who I am as an artist, a creative person, but I don’t think that being an artist is a more important job or a higher calling than any other thing that someone could do in the world: being an accountant, an administrator, a contractor, a mortician, a maid, a brick layer, an architect. All of the labor that needs to be done in the world has value and the laborers deserve to be compensated; artists are a little different from laborers, but in this very flawed capitalist system, we should still be compensated for our contributions.

In my opinion, it would be ideal if artists would be paid more in the way that teachers or civil servants are paid, so that we can offer our work for more people to be able to enjoy, instead of having to sell our work thus making it inaccessible to people who can’t afford it.

Read the article here:

https://frieze.com/article/why-artists-are-struggling-make-living-their-art-and-activists-fighting-back?fbclid=IwAR2b7QWTRGTmUer9mHYFBKPXM_rNrESbACdH5-EuwKQME9wFCks3rd17Pgw