$1,000 a Month to 2,400 Artists. No Strings
Here in New York they gave 2,400 artists $1,000 a month for eighteen months. No conditions. No obligations. No need to explain anything. $43 million in total, funded mostly by the Mellon Foundation. 22,000 applied. For 2,400 spots.
The same line always comes up on guaranteed income. Give people money and they stop working. They sit down. They wait for the transfer. That’s not what happened.
The artists kept working. They changed the kind of work. They dropped the side jobs (the bartender, the shop clerk, the waiter) and went back to what they had actually trained for: painting, writing, playing, teaching art in Brooklyn neighborhoods.
Total income dropped, on average, by $11,600 a year. Almost exactly the amount they were getting from the program. Those $1,000 a month turned into time. Time to make art instead of serving coffee. A painter I know in Bushwick told me that once she stopped chasing the next paycheck, she got back the hours to think about the next painting.
Here in the United States creative work is quietly being hollowed out. Midjourney makes ad images instead of photographers. ChatGPT writes technical copy instead of copywriters. Suno produces music instead of musicians. One job at a time.
Artists are a particular category, driven by reasons that go beyond a paycheck. Guaranteed income doesn’t fix everything. But those $1,000 shifted their time onto the work they actually wanted to do. And while machines are eating creative jobs for breakfast, giving people the hours to stay creative is a real possibility. Obviously they have to be truly creative and not just freeloaders, which is a whole other story.
What do you think?
#ArtificialDecisions