I’m an artist and an organizer.

Over the past year, Michaela Pilar Brown and I worked with 300 Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) artists. We offered forty hours of workshops and community conversations such as Sustaining in a Time of Change, Not Doing It Alone, and Generating Opportunities Locally and Beyond.

Michaela and I do this work a lot in person and online. Over eighteen years, Artists U has worked with 8,000 artists nationally. These CRNY conversations were different, and they have shifted and expanded our thinking. Here are three lessons and one wish I am taking away.

Guaranteed income profoundly respects artists in ways most funding does not.

Normally in our Artists U work, our first task is to build a conversation respectful of artists and artistic labor. This is especially true when we are brought in by a funder; we often have to undo layers of condescension, competition, and precarity that underlie most artist funding.

Most artist grants:

• Are framed as charity: You are lucky to receive the benevolence of these resources.
• Pit artists against each other: You beat out other artists to earn this resource.
• Ignore our day-to-day financial realities: You may spend these dollars only on approved project expenses; your overall financial survival is irrelevant.

This “undoing” was not needed with the Guaranteed Income artists. Their choices, their labor, and their self-efficacy had been valued from the beginning. Guaranteed income tells the artist: We respect your practice and your decisions. Here’s the money, do what you see fit.

I cannot tell you how rare that is, even with institutions that ostensibly honor artists.

The artists used their guaranteed income brilliantly.

Artist project grants are often tiny and rarely allow us to pay ourselves for our time and labor. I have seen many artists (myself included) get a $5,000 grant and build a $25,000 project, ending up in a worse financial situation than before. One choreographer told me: “If I get any more of these project grants, I’m gonna go bankrupt.”

On top of that, artist funding is usually earmarked for a limited range of expenses. I’ll never forget the grant that stipulated: Funds may not be used to pay artist fees. Um, what? Imagine a grant for medical research that stipulated: Do not pay any researchers.

Guaranteed income is different. It trusts recipients to allocate the money where it is most useful.

These artists did it brilliantly. 

Some took care of expenses that, in a more humane economy, wouldn’t be expenses: deferred health and dental care or caretaking an elder. Others invested in their artistic process, renting a studio, buying equipment, or taking time away from money earning work to make art. Others made long-term financial moves: buying property, paying off debt, putting money toward retirement. 

The dollars had, according to the artists themselves, an outsized impact on their wellbeing, stability, and capacity.

If you look at these artists as mission-driven ventures, as social profit small businesses, you would say: They made discerning, shrewd investments with those dollars.

They were trusted. And they acted trustworthy.

Conversations that include the broadest range of artistic practice allow artists to question their assumptions.

No one finds all the artists. That’s not possible. But CRNY found more of the artists than any large-scale program I have ever seen.

The range of practice, intentions, cultures, and contexts was breathtakingly vast. I do not say this lightly. It’s taken Artists U two decades to build the networks and skills required to convene truly broad circles of artists.

One transformative (and dizzying) effect of this breadth is the realization that there is no “Art World.” There are, rather, vast ranges of practice, partnerships, and possibilities. Whatever I might consider the “Art World” is, in fact, a contingent set of agreements and assumptions held by a specific network of artists and structures, organizations that are neither permanent nor perfect.

All arts organizations are made and maintained by well-intentioned, fallible, self-interested people doing the best they can with what they understand in the moment. However, artists often carry a punishing sense that these structures aren’t temporary or human, rather that they hold a kind of truth, that they are arbiters not just of their own granting programs but of art and artists in some deep and final way. Many artists see the approval of these institutions as a verdict on their art, a final and authoritative validation.

All of this is made visible—and thus changeable—when a broad range of artists gather. The hip-hop choreographer launching an education program, the experimental filmmaker working with analog technology, the culture bearer keeping alive old stories and ways of telling, and the community-based installation artist obsessed with front stoops: When these four are in dialogue, there is no monolithic “Art World.” A powerful and playful awareness emerges that we make our art worlds and, therefore, we can change them. We can revise our assumptions. We can see structures as potential partners, not saviors, and grants as resources and not verdicts on our work.

Freed from the idea that there is one approach to making an artist life in one monolithic Art World, we borrow thinking, tools, and inspiration from each other, just as we do in our artistic work.

My wish: a non-competitive application process.

I believe guaranteed income is an optimal approach to artist funding. It respects artists. It is dependable and long-term. It funds artists’ proven ability to build our art, our lives, and the delivery systems for our art.

Because pilot programs like CRNY are limited in scope, artists apply and compete for guaranteed income. If this process involved qualifying rather than competing, guaranteed income could truly move American arts beyond the lottery approach.

Qualifying means there is a set of criteria artists must meet. As with other public benefits such as Medicare or the recent Pandemic Federal Unemployment Assistance, if you meet the criteria, you’re in.

Guaranteed income liberates arts funding from condescension to respect, from scarcity to sustainability. A selection process based on qualification rather than competition would make it truly transformative.

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Andrew Simonet is writer and choreographer in Philadelphia. From 1993 to 2013, he co-directed Headlong Dance Theater, creating dances like CELL (a journey for one audience member guided by your cell phone), and This Town is a Mystery (dances by four Philadelphia families in their homes). Andrew left Headlong to write fiction. His novels Wilder (2018) and A Night Twice as Long (2021) were published by Farrar, Straus, and Giroux.

In 2006, Andrew founded Artists U, an incubator for helping artists make sustainable lives that has worked with 8,000 artists. His book Making Your Life as an Artist — now available in Spanish and Farsi — has been downloaded by 200,000 artists worldwide and is a textbook in dozens of courses.

Andrew lives in Philadelphia with his wife Elizabeth, a theater director, and their kids, Skye Wolf and Jesse Tiger.

Andrew is actively withdrawing from our voluntary surveillance and propaganda state by staying off of corporate social media. He does write regularly about artists, sustainability, and power, and you can get on his email list here.

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Photo by SKYE SIMONET.