The riddle of the rich-poor artist
| 28/11/2024, 00:51 (há 13 dias) |  | ||
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The riddle of the rich-poor artist
Data on visual artists' socioeconomic backgrounds shows why it's so hard to win public support for a cultural sector defined by day-to-day hardship
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A new survey of visual artists in the UK grabbed art-media headlines this week by putting hard data behind a widely understood reality: that most artists in Britain earn poverty wages. But also lurking in the study’s results is a seemingly contradictory finding: that most artists in Britain are not actually poor. By one measure, they’re far from it compared to the rest of the national workforce. In the space between these data points we can find a rupture that has sent public support for the arts into what increasingly feels like a death spiral on both sides of the Atlantic.
Commissioned by the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS) and conducted by the University of Glasgow’s Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy (CREATe), the report is full of distressing data for artists and art enthusiasts alike. For starters, among survey respondents who considered visual art their primary occupation, the typical median wage in 2023 was just £12,500. That’s around half the national minimum wage for employees who worked 40-hour weeks (£23,795), and around one-third the national median wage (£34,963).
It gets worse. After adjusting for inflation, the median income for responding visual artists in 2023 was only around half as much as the equivalent total in a similar study conducted in 2010. More than 80% of those artists surveyed last year also categorized their earnings as either “unstable” or “very unstable,” putting a qualitative label on the quantitative wound. If you were to print out the report and tape it to a wall, I’m reasonably sure you could throw a dart blindfolded and hit some other depressing statistic about life as a UK-based artist.
But there’s another side to this story, too. It turns out that more than half of visual artists who took the survey come from “a socioeconomic background associated with the highest levels of privilege—more than double” that of the overall UK labor force, according to the report. It also adds this context: “Due to low earning trajectories and instability of earnings month to month, many visual artists are subsidized by earnings from other members of their household (e.g., spouse).”
You don’t need to be a public relations savant to see that, to the UK at large, these findings leave artists with a severe image problem. A superficial reading of the data could paint them as any number of undesirable characters: posh slackers, poverty tourists, parasitic hobbyists. None of these would be a magnet for sympathy among the working-age populace even in the best of times. In our current era of widespread and worsening precarity, they could all be seen as outright villains.
To be clear, this negative typecasting depends on multiple misunderstandings about how art, artists, and data analysis actually work. But it explains a lot about the existential obstacles that contemporary art and other cultural sectors face in once-stable nations, like the UK and the US, that increasingly judge all outcomes based on literal profits and losses while stacking the deck against working people no matter how creative (or not) their jobs are.
Privilege versus policy
The study makes it impossible to deny that the economically fortunate are the most likely group to make art for a living. “The findings of the report show that there are clear barriers to entry for those from less-privileged backgrounds, creating a sector that is increasingly only accessible to those with the financial means to take on low pay and precarious work,” a spokesperson for DACS says. “Focus groups found that those who have managed to establish a career as a visual artist face financial pressures significant enough to lead them to consider giving up their practice.”
Still, when the study references “the highest levels of privilege,” what it means is less rarefied than what the phrase probably evokes. To measure their socioeconomic background (aka class), survey-takers were asked what the occupation of their household’s main breadwinner was all the way back when the survey-takers themselves were around 14 years old.¹ If the answer could be reasonably grouped into one of two broad categories—“modern and traditional professional” or “managers or administrators”—then the respondent qualified as privileged in the context of UK norms.
So, this doesn’t mean the 53% of respondents to the DACS/CREATe survey who landed in the “privileged” tiers grew up guzzling black caviar on private flights. It just means that their parents or guardians were more likely to be middle managers or other white-collar workers than clerical, technical, or manual workers (let alone jobless). It also means that, at least among these respondents, the share of UK-based artists that doesn’t have a financial life raft at their parents’ place (47%) nearly equals the share that does.
DACS, the spokesperson says, has a set of policy recommendations to remedy the imbalance. They include implementing the Smart Fund, “which proposes a one-off levy on devices used to copy and store creative content, generating much-needed income for artists, paid for by the manufacturers of tech devices”; appointing a Freelancer Commissioner “to advocate for the needs and interests of freelance visual artists and creative workers across government departments”; bolstering existing copyright protections; and standardizing the Artists’ Resale Right in trade agreements both within the UK and worldwide. Also on the list are “targeted financial relief, such as tax benefits or grants,” and initiatives to ensure access to affordable studio spaces.
These are all pragmatic, commonsense solutions for people who value not just visual art but its viability as a career for everyone, regardless of class background. The predicament is the silent majority on the other side of the issue. Only around 23% of the UK’s general population qualifies as privileged by the standards outlined earlier. DACS counts around 14,000 members (1,241 of whom responded to the survey), a tiny sliver of the roughly 42.5 million people of working age in the UK as of September 2024, per the Office for National Statistics. Britain is undoubtedly home to thousands more working artists unaffiliated with DACS, but not nearly enough to make the artist population more than a fraction of a percent of the national workforce.
This disparity means that realizing most of DACS’s policy recommendations requires convincing a bunch of lawmakers to prioritize the needs of artists over the broader needs of most of their other constituents, many of whom are in precarious conditions of their own—and with fewer resources to fall back on. Given the limited supply of available real estate and taxpayer funding, for instance, how many politicians will be willing to argue that rental subsidies or tax breaks should go to a small, self-selecting group with a disproportionate likelihood of getting a helping hand from their families?
And yet, if some legislators and other government employees aren’t willing to make that argument, visual art is only going to become an even less accessible career to less-privileged people. It’s a brutal Catch-22.
AI as punisher
Exacerbating this tension is the rise of generative artificial intelligence. The DACS spokesperson called out the “unauthorized use of works by AI programs” as a particular reason to strengthen the copyright protections granted to human artists, while the report states that “the advent of generative AI” has “the potential to displace, or dramatically reduce, artistic labor, risking its sustainability and diversity.” But what needs to be better understood is that these risks stem less from aesthetic preferences than from the same grim economic conditions that make DACS’s policy wish list a hard sell to the average British voter.
“While experiments show that people can be fooled by AI art creations, they also show that just thinking an artwork is generated by a computer causes people to view it as less pleasant—even if they are, in reality, looking at the exact same image labeled differently,” writes Ben Davis, the author, Artnet News critic, and friend of TGM, in his 2022 book Art in the After-Culture. Granted, a lot has changed in the realm of generative algorithms since then. But even though there are now a few (usually partisan) studies arguing the opposite, this preference largely seems to have held, all other things being equal.
The problem, however, is that all other things are no longer equal once the choice moves from a research lab into the real economy. The tech journalist Max Read recently argued that if most people do actually prefer AI art, it’s mainly because most people have bad taste. Although I broadly agree with him on this point, I also believe that in a lot of cases the issue is less about taste than about price. This is especially true for the 42% of respondents in the DACS survey who identified as photographers, illustrators, cartoonists, and graphic designers—all professions where work-for-hire and IP-licensing deals generate most of the revenue.
Many, if not most, businesses that need to commission or buy images entered a perpetual cost-cutting mode long before COVID intensified and institutionalized it. To a media organization with thinning profit margins, for example, the operative question is no longer whether your readers would prefer to see human-generated images or AI-generated images. Instead, it’s whether the company’s bottom line benefits more from paying, say, $300+ to license a single shot from a photojournalist for one-time use, or $30 for a Midjourney subscription that can generate an unlimited number of high-fidelity (if flawed) images for an entire month.
Working hand-in-glove with these financial incentives is the populist rancor toward privileged artists discussed earlier. It’s limiting at best to try to locate art’s place in the wider world without factoring in class resentment, particularly now that so many visually untalented or disinterested people have been handed such a cheap, easy tool to do a passable version of the work that previously made them dependent on a small group of specialists from disproportionately wealthy backgrounds. John Herrman nailed this dynamic in a New York magazine column during the Writers Guild of America strike in 2023, identifying a string of “AI threats made by people, against people, in which the specter of AI is wielded like a weapon.” Like Read before me, I think it’s worth quoting that column at length:
“In what is perhaps the genre’s defining post, a collage of cartoonish AI-generated bikini-clad women is tagged with the caption ‘It is SO over.’ The ‘it’ here wasn’t clearly defined—Women? Human desire? Some sort of incel concept of the sexual economy?—but viewers got the idea: Whoever or whatever this odd internet stranger didn’t like, AI was coming for it. It’s AI as a reckoning, a punisher, a revealer of frauds. It’s AI as a future vindicator of their hunches about how the world works, and as an extension of their politics. It’s AI as a cleansing force that humbles your enemies and proves you right—AI as economic rapture.”
Whether held by a CEO threatening to automate their creative workforce out of existence or just an anonymous social media user trolling a working artist they’ve never met, Herrman adds, this line of thinking positions AI “as a force for restoring a natural order, for keeping people in line, and as imminent proof that certain sorts of already devalued work—creative professionals especially but not exclusively—should be considered truly worthless, and the people who do it are living on borrowed time.”
In other words, generative AI is the magical blade that cost-cutting corporate hacks and class-obsessed philistines have been grasping at for decades. The technology is fueled by the sentiment, and overcoming the sentiment is the only way that organizations like DACS and their allies can implement the policies to reverse the long, steep downtrend in artists’ wages. That task is going to require a sweeping media strategy that gives artists, as a category, a complete makeover in the eyes of the average citizen. Quantifying their relative privilege was an important part of the process. Now the even harder work is figuring out what to do about it.
A spokesperson for CREATe and the University of Glasgow says this methodology is “accepted as a valid measure for many outcomes, including economic advancement” by the UK’s National Office for Statistics and other institutions. It also makes intuitive sense the more you think about it. People with stable, well-paying jobs may not be guaranteed to maintain or grow their assets over the decades to come, but more often than not they do. To tease out a general sense of the financial resources someone can draw on in tough times, then, you could do a lot worse than ask what their parents or guardians did for a living a few decades ago.
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