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When there is free space for people with cultural and creative skills to develop ideas and create, good business and regional policy effects can also occur. Culture is thus useful because it exists, culture does not exist to be useful. On the other hand, the individual creative company’s goal is usually something else, such as realizing an artistic idea. We assume that culture and creative practices bring social benefits, as an effect.

We don’t think that culture is something that should exist because of economic reasons, or, as the Swedish Agency for Growth formulates it on their web page: It is unclear how the report came to the conclusion that this should be the purpose of the Culture Ministry’s arts policy, rather than the goal of the Ministry of Enterprise and Innovation. It implies that arts policy is about supporting the market’s commodification of art as the primary way to get paid for working as an artist. 4 According to the proposal, artists would in this way learn to be better at protecting their copyright and get payed for the use of their work online.įrom our perspective, this strategy appears both strange and provocative. The most “radical” solution to the problems identified in the report is the suggestion to take SEK 100 million of the SEK 225 million in the arts budget that is earmarked for specific actions, and give the money to The Swedish Agency for Economic and Regional Growth 3 to support “digitalization”.

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The point of departure for the project “Artist’s Salary Now!” was the government report about Swedish artists’ work conditions, titled Konstnär-oavsett villkor? (Artist-regardless of conditions?) 2 It describes how artists, while they typically spend a long time in education, as a professional group have some of the lowest incomes in Sweden.

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Previously we have collaborated in different constellations, most recently in “Performing the common”, an exhibition and seminar series in relation to a research project on participatory methods in city planning. The context of the project is our artistic research group Work a Work at the Royal Institute of Art in Stockholm, consisting of five visual artists and one musician, who since 2017 have met to explore the notion of work from different perspectives regularly in seminars and workshops, and in relation to our own artistic practice. And, since we claim that society is art, it is up to each one of us to define what society is. Unlike a universal basic income, it is intended for a specific purpose: our shared society. A modest salary based on the modest needs of artists. As a result of the project we propose an artist’s salary as a pilot for a future basic income, a salary that eventually will be for everyone, not only artists: a salary to allow for time to take care of our commons and existential issues. In this report we describe the ideas behind the project and the discussions as they evolved in the talks and interviews with artists. The talks engaged activists from the universal basic income movement, politicians, researchers and artists. The exhibition also provided space for a series of semi-public talks in which the question of a possible basic income for artists was further developed.

Over a period of a month, a group of artists performed a think tank and set up a campaign headquarters as a means to provoke discussion. “Should we spend our time filling out forms or making art?” was the rhetorical question that acted as a starting point for “Konsnärslön nu!”, a series of events at Gallery Tegen2 in Stockholm in September 2018. Additional contribution by Shiva Anoushirvani, Åsa Andersson Broms, Nils Claesson, George Kentros, Per Hasselberg Artist Salary Now, campaign work 2018, Karin Hansson

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