The New York Times reports on how the Irish experiment in giving some randomly selected artists a small guaranteed income (while also observing a control group of artists not included in the program) is going:
Lydia Mulvey, 47, a screenwriter, said that she quit her job in a telecommunications firm as soon as she heard she’d made it into the program. Now she spends her time writing pilot scripts for thrillers and sci-fi shows, rather than trying to squeeze that into evenings and weekends. “I knew it’d be transformative and give me my life back,” Mulvey said, although she added that, if she didn’t already own her own home, she’d struggle to live on such a low income, especially in Ireland’s squeezed property market.
Mark McGuinness, 31, a photographer, said that before receiving the basic income he had spent the whole week seeking commercial photography work to pay his rent and the cost of supplies, and had let his artistic practice slip away. Now, he’d “clawed back” two days a week to make work for exhibitions, he said.
Despite anecdotal evidence of success, no data on the program’s impact is available so far. Ireland’s government is sending recipients questionnaires every six months that ask about the state of their finances, artistic career and health, with the first scheduled to go out in April. Last year, those taking part received a survey to collect baseline data. It asked if they could adequately heat their homes, replace worn furniture or “afford a meal with meat, chicken or fish every second day.”
How this turns out will be interesting. But …
Would we expect that artists who were chosen for the scheme get a chance to make more art? Of course. It is an income effect that gives artists some room to substitute out of humdrum day-jobs, and for at least some, this is bound to lead to more time for art-making.
But policy analysis needs something more. Generally we assess a policy intervention by first asking (1) what is the desired outcome? and then (2) what are the most effective means to achieve that outcome?
If the desired outcome (among many possible policy goals of arts policy – increased arts participation by audiences, for example) is “more and better art produced by Irish artists” then we would go to the next step of asking how we most effectively get there, which could include a lot of options, including the more traditional one of peer-reviewed selection of grant recipients.
In other words, there will be a long way to go before we can assess whether this is actually an effective use of arts policy funds.
The difficult part will be assessing “better art” – post-modernism basically destroyed generally-agreed-upon critical standards for artistic merit. “More art” is easy to quantify the achievement of, by contrast.
But it’s the “better” that is the interesting question – how will that be defined and measured? More unproduced, unshown, unknown artworks in closets and drawers won’t improve artists’ long-term economic outcomes in the end. Is economic success what now makes some artworks better than others?
New bodies of artistic work by these subsidized creators won’t necessarily address the needs of those who control the mechanisms of production in film, stage, visual, and print media. There has always been a huge gap between the art artists want and need to make, and the art that the public wants to encounter, consider, and consume. With the avalanche of creative content available to anyone with an internet connection, there’s no guarantee at all that the “best” art will rise to the level of public awareness.