Art is not a luxury — it is a public infrastructure of imagination and shared meaning.

Art cannot flourish where life is mere survival. — John Berger, 1972

The Arts Basic Income is not another grant.
It is a political tool to redistribute time, value and dignity within the cultural ecosystem.
Below, we respond —without euphemisms— to the most common objections.

Why a Basic Income only for the Arts?

Because the cultural economy operates with a structural anomaly: art produces collective value (symbolic, educational, emotional) that the market does not remunerate.
The system undervalues labour and overvalues property, leaving creators in structural precarity.

The RBA-E recognizes that culture is a public good, and its maintenance requires public policy just like health or education.

Isn’t this a corporative privilege?

No. It is a measure of redistributive justice.
Artistic precarity is not an accident; it is the result of policies that externalize social costs.
While museums and festivals benefit from unpaid or underpaid work, creators subsidize the system with their own time.

The RBA-E does not create privilege — it corrects it.
It redistributes resources to guarantee equal access to creation, regardless of social or economic background.

Does it discourage work?

Quite the opposite: it liberates creative work from the blackmail of market productivity.
The Irish Basic Income for the Arts (2022–2025) pilot shows:
+88 % increase in creative hours, −57 % anxiety, +40 % improvement in mental health.
People don’t work less — they work better and with meaning.

Who would receive it?

Professional artists and cultural workers resident in Spain, with verified active practice, regardless of legal or fiscal form.
The RBA-E is compatible with other incomes and grants; it does not penalize multi-activity and respects professional autonomy.

How much would it cost?

A pilot of 3 000 beneficiaries at €1 300/month would cost around €46.8 M per year, less than 0.03 % of Spain’s national budget.
Funding sources:

• Reallocation of underused cultural expenditure.
• EU innovation and recovery funds.
• Fiscal return: for every €1 invested, the sector generates €1.3–€1.5 in activity.

Aren’t grants enough?

No. Grants reward projects, not processes.
The RBA-E funds time and continuity, not finished products.
It reduces bureaucracy and broadens diversity: it creates conditions, not constraints.

How is it allocated without clientelism?

Through an open call and weighted lottery, following the Irish model.
Eligibility (activity, residence, territorial diversity) is verified prior to the draw.
Transparency and equity are fundamental: no juries, no recommendations, no favours.

What are the benefits?

• Lower dropout from artistic professions.
• Greater diversity of voices and territories.
• More production and innovation.
• Improved mental health and wellbeing.
• Strengthened local creative communities.

Data from the CRNY Programme (New York State, 2022) show +68 % improvement in wellbeing and +58 % in artistic output.

How does it differ from a Universal Basic Income?

The RBA-E is sector-specific and strategic: a political laboratory toward universal basic income, while addressing a concrete market failure.
It does not replace the UBI; it complements it and helps make it viable.

Why a Basic Income for the Arts and not a Universal Basic Income?

The Basic Income for the Arts (BIA-E) is not conceived as a corporatist exception or a professional privilege, but as a sector-specific application of the universal principles of the Universal Basic Income (UBI).
Its purpose is not to fragment the redistributive horizon of the UBI, but to accelerate its feasibility and demonstrate its social effects in a strategic field: culture.

The UBI aims at structural justice — redistributing, unconditionally, the collective wealth generated by capital, labor, and automation.
The BIA-E operates within that same horizon, translating it into a concrete experimental field where its impacts on freedom, innovation, mental health, and social cohesion can be precisely observed.

Far from weakening the universal principle, it strengthens it:

• It functions as a political laboratory. As in Ireland, Finland, or New York, the BIA-E allows the measurement of a basic income’s effects within a highly intermittent and socially valuable sector.
• It demonstrates social return. International evidence shows that every euro invested in a cultural basic income yields more than €1.30 in social and fiscal return.
• It anticipates governance mechanisms. Its implementation helps design funding, traceability, and evaluation models applicable on broader, even universal, scales.

The sectoral approach is therefore not a betrayal of universality but a strategy of transition.
Public policies often begin as partial experiments: social security, unemployment insurance, and public health systems all started as limited frameworks before becoming universal rights.

In this sense, the cultural sector acts as a privileged testing ground, concentrating the very problems the UBI seeks to solve — structural precarity, discontinuous labor, the invisibility of unpaid work, and the generation of collective, non-monetized value.
If such a policy works here, it can work anywhere.

The BIA-E therefore does not replace or fragment the Universal Basic Income: it anticipates, tests, and legitimizes it.
Culture, as a field of symbolic and social production, offers the most fertile terrain to show that basic income is not a subsidy but a new social contract between the State and its citizens.

I. The market does not guarantee freedom or plurality

The current cultural market does not ensure freedom — it enforces structural dependence.
Those who produce culture without public support are forced to conform to the logics of visibility, profitability, and institutional compliance. Critical, experimental, or dissident creation — the kind that challenges power, dominant narratives, or economic interests — finds no sustainable space within a purely market framework.
Without public support, creative freedom becomes a class privilege.

The market neither rewards diversity nor risk — it punishes them.
For that reason, RBA-E is a policy of freedom, not of subsidy: it protects the right to dissent, to investigate, and to produce outside the demands of the market.
In this sense, it acts as a democratic antibody against economic censorship, that silent form of control exercised not through prohibition, but through suffocation.

II. Market failure and structural censorship

Culture generates collective value — educational, symbolic, civic, emotional — that the market does not adequately compensate.
This is a classic market failure: the positive externalities of art and culture benefit society as a whole, but are not remunerated to those who create them.
Cultural precarity is therefore not an accident, but the outcome of a structure that socializes benefits and privatizes costs.

This precarity also functions as a form of structural censorship.
Fear of economic ruin or dependence on institutional patronage limits freedom of expression more effectively than any decree.
The RBA-E addresses this structural failure by guaranteeing the material conditions for creative autonomy, just as public health ensures the right to health or public education ensures the right to knowledge.

III. Culture as a common good and public infrastructure

Culture is not a luxury or a commodity: it is a common infrastructure.
It sustains coexistence, memory, collective imagination, and critical thinking.
Its protection and funding must be assumed as a State responsibility, on the same level as healthcare or education.
Just as no one questions public investment in hospitals or universities, we must recognize that cultural production requires a stable system of protection and redistribution.

The RBA-E fulfills that function: it guarantees that culture remains a plural, open, and democratic space — not subordinated to the logic of profit or algorithms.

IV. Political laboratory and transition toward UBI

Far from weakening the universal principle, RBA-E reinforces and tests it:

• Political laboratory: Like pilot programs in Ireland, Finland, or New York, it allows us to measure the effects of a basic income in a highly intermittent professional group with strong public value.
• Demonstration of social return: International evidence shows that every euro invested in a cultural basic income yields more than €1.3 in social and fiscal returns.
• Model of governance: Its implementation helps design mechanisms of traceability, transparency, and evaluation applicable to larger scales.

Sectoral implementation is not a renunciation of the universal principle, but a transitional strategy.
The history of public policy is full of such precedents: social security, unemployment insurance, or public healthcare all began as partial projects before being extended to the whole population.

V. Culture and Basic Income: a new social contract

In the case of RBA-E, the cultural sector serves as a privileged testing ground because it concentrates the very problems that UBI seeks to solve: structural precarity, discontinuous employment, invisibilized unpaid labor, and the generation of collective non-monetized value.
If a policy can prove its effectiveness here, it can do so anywhere.

Therefore, RBA-E does not replace Universal Basic Income, nor does it fragment it — it anticipates, tests, and legitimizes it.
Culture, as a space of symbolic and social production, offers the most fertile ground to demonstrate that a basic income is not a subsidy but a new form of social contract between the State and its citizens — one based not on competitiveness, but on trust, cooperation, and freedom.

How is it evaluated?

Each cycle includes a public and open evaluation, combining:

• Economic data (activity, investment, fiscal impact).
• Wellbeing and diversity indicators.
• Qualitative analysis with universities and research centres.

And the market?

Today’s cultural market does not guarantee freedom or plurality; it ensures dependency on platforms and algorithms.
The RBA-E protects creative autonomy from extractive monopolies, returning symbolic and economic power to cultural communities.

What is the role of institutions?

To rethink their function: less exhibition, more infrastructure of rights.
Museums, art centres and universities can act as nodes for redistribution and knowledge, not merely as containers of production.

What does society gain?

A freer, more critical and representative culture.
A public network that sustains collective imagination.
Less economic censorship, more diversity and thought.

Art is not a luxury; it is a language of survival. — Audre Lorde

Data and Evidence

Conclusion

The Arts Basic Income is a State policy to guarantee the right to imagine.
It does not seek to protect artists from the world — it seeks to protect the world from silence.

Further reading

• See International evidence → /en/evidence
• Full Archive → /en/archive
• Spain proposal → /en/spain-proposal
• Join / Support → /en/join

Quick FAQ

Note: All texts of the Basic Income for the Arts (RBA-E) project are published under the CC BY-SA 4.0 license.