Art Is Essential — So Why Is Paying Artists Still Optional?

Artists are freelancers — among the most underpaid and structurally unsupported. What happens in the arts is a mirror of what happens across the entire freelance economy.

Why Art Matters
Without art, we lose what makes us human.  Art generates meaning, but what is less acknowledged is that meaning is the foundation of what we choose to invest in. Without meaning, any possibility of sustainable profit collapses.

Growth Requires Resources
Making art demands growth. Growth requires resources. Ask a corporate worker to leave a stable 9–5 to start their own business and see how destabilizing that transition can be. Ask an author what it takes to write a book. Art requires this kind of transformation continuously. It challenges comfort, identity, and power. Questioning whether art is essential often exposes an inherited, hidden belief that growth itself is optional.

A System Built for Visibility, Not Sustainability
Funding structures frequently favor individual output and institutionally visible work — while projects rooted in social impact, mental health, and community transformation face steeper barriers to sustainability. Another part of the arts ecosystem is sustained through regranting and tax-deductible donations. While generosity is vital, strategy becomes secondary to dependability. Art is celebrated rhetorically, but structurally devalued, leaving collective and employment-based models under-resourced, despite their potential for long-term stability and urgent impact.

How Precarity Takes Hold
As a result, long-term employment weakens and prestige replaces worth. Fundraising narratives and high ticket prices — often normalized by institutional productions — become mistaken for markers of artistic legitimacy, while artist compensation is quietly displaced from structural budgets to ticket sales and fundraising. Over time, precarity becomes internalized. Artists feel pressure to fit in, to endure, to accept unpaid or underpaid work because “the mission matters.” And while it does — mission is routinely framed as sufficient compensation, as though meaning could replace wages. Free labor becomes a moral expectation rather than an ethical gap that demands systemic rethinking.

The Human Cost
When precarity is internalized, it affects artistic identity. Artists substitute survival for value, and this erosion creates separation and friction within communities. Trust breaks down. Collaboration gives way to resentment. Over time, chronic underpayment erodes discernment itself. Artists lose the ability to distinguish between exploitative extraction and genuine opportunities for growth or long-term investment.  They pull away from one another — not because they lack generosity, but because they feel misused, exhausted, and disposable. As opportunities contract, artists redirect their attention toward maintaining relationships and staying present in the ecosystem, often at the cost of sustained creative development. Even when artists are compensated, the absence of sustained resources and infrastructure can make long-term stability impossible.

A Framework Built for a Different Era
Much of this damage is embedded in how arts funding is designed. 

The funding models we rely on were shaped for an earlier era of the arts — one centered on objects, exhibitions, and individual authorship. That work is still vital, and it continues to shape culture in meaningful ways. But those structures haven’t fully adapted to the kinds of work communities need today: work that is relational, long‑term, and rooted in collective wellbeing. This isn’t about fault; it’s about fit. When the system doesn’t evolve alongside the people it serves, gaps appear — not because one form of art is more valuable than another, but because the framework wasn’t built to recognize the full range of artistic labor happening now.

Creative Entrepreneurship Is Real Work
The current arts funding system often treats entrepreneurship as unprovable, favoring familiar frameworks and predictable outcomes.

True entrepreneurship isn’t reckless — it’s an inherently experimental process of trial, iteration, and long-term vision.

And when we talk about creative entrepreneurship, we're talking about artists who are building new models of problem solving within their communities — work that often has no precedent to point to. Because this kind of work unfolds gradually, it can be difficult for existing systems to recognize or support it. Many funding and overhead models were designed for projects with clear deliverables and short timelines, not for long‑term, relational work that grows in stages. As a result, the structures meant to support artists and small organizations often fail to reflect the realities of contemporary creative work, leaving both artists and administrators navigating unnecessary risk.

The Cost of Stagnation
This is how stagnation takes hold. Organizations remain locked in survival mode, repeatedly reapplying for funding rather than deepening and evolving alongside the communities they were meant to serve. Expansion becomes impossible. Sustainability is postponed indefinitely.

What Must Change
Institutions must treat artist pay as a primary operating cost, not a discretionary expense. Artists are not beneficiaries; they are labor. No executive salary, production budget, or institutional mission exists without artistic work at its center. Budgeting artist compensation first is not idealism — it is ethical infrastructure.

At the same time, artists must begin articulating the value of their labor beyond visibility or internal processing alone. This includes getting specific about their positioning within the arts ecosystem — not just what their work does and who it serves, but how it generates growth over time.

When art shows clear evidence of progressive change, it must be resourced accordingly. Presence and exploration alone don’t automatically equal impact. Intellectual property, labor, and long-term contribution are. 

These dynamics do not affect all artists equally. Women — particularly those leading organizations or working in care-centered, community-based art — are often expected to absorb financial instability in the name of mission, from leadership to administrative roles. 

A Future Artists Can Stand In
Despite these challenges, artist-led models are beginning to emerge. These models integrate intellectual property, professional development, compensation, impact, and sustainability into a single framework. These models endure because they offer a future where artists are not expected to sacrifice dignity.

Art evolves society. But imagination alone can’t sustain an ecosystem. If we want real growth, the value artists create must be the foundation of the structures that depend on them.

The question is not whether art is necessary — it’s whether our systems are actually designed to support the growth artists make possible.

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