Basic Income for the Arts in Spain (BIA-S): Freedom, Dignity, and Cultural Justice

We are not asking for privileges, but for the conditions of possibility. — Basic Income for the Arts Working Group (BIA-S) / Technologies To The People™

All freedom needs a ground on which to stand. — Hannah Arendt, The Human Condition, 1958

Introduction

We address society from the most fragile place in culture: the studio that cannot afford electricity, the stage that is dismantled alone, the page written with one hand while the other issues invoices for survival. We come from a territory where art is celebrated in speeches but punished in real life; where the work travels the world while its creator looks for temporary jobs; where the word "vocation" has too often served as an alibi for exploitation.

For decades, we were told that art was a space of freedom. But what freedom can exist when economic urgency decides what can be said, when, and in exchange for what? What autonomy can one have when dependent on uncertain grants or a market that rewards aesthetic complacency over dissent? Precarity is not a romantic condition: it is a form of structural censorship.

We—artists, mediators, technicians, writers, cultural workers—demand a paradigm shift. We are not asking for one-off grants or sector-specific privileges. We are demanding a public infrastructure of freedom, a stable ground from which to create, dissent, and imagine. We ask that art cease to be the residual luxury of those who can afford risk and become, at last, a shared social right.

The Basic Income for the Arts (BIA-S) is born of this urgent need: to guarantee the material conditions for creative freedom. It is not a symbolic gesture or a distant utopia: it is a viable, empirically tested, and ethically necessary public policy. Its purpose is to correct a market failure that undervalues creation and overexploits those who produce it; but it is also, in a deeper sense, an act of cultural justice: to recognize that imagination is work and that every democratic society has an obligation to support those who think it, narrate it, and transform it.

In recent years, we have witnessed a painful paradox: Spain prides itself on its cultural wealth, on its international projection, while keeping a large part of its creative community in a subsistence economy. Symbolic prestige coexists with material precarity; media visibility with administrative invisibility. The state celebrates the achievements of its artists but does not guarantee their right to make a living from their work.

BIA-S does not arise as a theoretical whim, but as a response to evidence that no one can deny: the cultural market is a dysfunctional system, incapable of fairly redistributing the value it generates. Art produces positive externalities—social cohesion, mental health, collective identity, symbolic innovation—that benefit society as a whole but are not remunerated. In economic terms, this is called market failure; in human terms, structural injustice.

Our purpose is clear: to replace the paradigm of the competitive grant with that of institutional trust; to substitute intermittent precarity with creative stability; to move from a culture administered from scarcity to a cultural policy based on dignity.

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

The Diagnosis: A Culture Sustained by Precarity

Spain boasts of its culture, but it does not sustain those who make it possible. The tourism industry feeds on our symbolic creation; cultural institutions export national identity as a brand value; and yet the bodies that produce this symbolic capital live on the verge of collapse.

46.9% of Spanish artists earn less than €8,000 annually from their work, and more than 60% live below the minimum wage. The majority juggle multiple jobs: intermittent production, teaching, installation, hospitality, commissioned work. The result is not plurality, but fragmentation: a professional life chopped into pieces, where creation is relegated to leftover time.

The Statute of the Artist, approved in 2022 and revised in 2024, introduced undeniable advances—reduced income tax, cultural unemployment benefits, compatibility between pensions and creative work—but it still fails to address the core of the problem: the absence of a structural subsistence income. Meanwhile, social security contributions for the self-employed (RETA) penalize irregular income and force many to work in the informal economy.

The grant system, far from compensating for inequality, reproduces it. It rewards those who master administrative language and have the time and resources to submit projects; it leaves out those who cannot sustain the bureaucracy or who create from the social or geographical periphery. Cultural meritocracy is, in reality, a machine of exclusion.

Precarity, besides being unjust, operates as a mechanism of control. Censorship is not necessary when the fear of not making it to the end of the month is enough to tame the imagination. The artist who depends on institutional approval or commercial success modulates their discourse: they avoid conflict, they soften criticism. Economic precarity thus becomes a form of silent censorship, a structural violence that limits the right to aesthetic and political dissent.

The Basic Income for the Arts is, above all, a policy of emancipation. It decouples survival from the market and gives creators the real possibility of saying no: no to exploitation, no to self-censorship, no to servitude to institutional taste.

By guaranteeing a stable basic income, the state ceases to be a patron who grants favors and becomes a guarantor of rights. BIA-S does not ask for aesthetic or ideological loyalty: it asks for trust in the work of thought and creation.

The freedom to create is not decreed; it is built materially. — Silvia Federici, 2018

The Basic Income for the Arts (BIA-S) is based on a simple but radical premise: artistic creation is a public good and a cultural right.

It does not belong only to those who produce it or to those who can afford to consume it; it belongs to society as a whole because art generates thought, community, and meaning. And like any public good—education, healthcare, scientific research—it needs to be sustained collectively.

From a public economics perspective, culture produces positive externalities: social benefits that are not reflected in market prices. Every exhibition, every film, or every book expands the symbolic horizon of the citizenry, improves psychological well-being, and strengthens social cohesion.

But these benefits are not remunerated. The cultural market is an ecosystem where profitability is concentrated in the hands of intermediaries, not those who create symbolic value. The result is a structural imbalance that perpetuates inequality and expels from the system those who cannot bear the cost of time.

Public intervention, therefore, is not an exception but a democratic obligation. If the state funds education because educating everyone benefits everyone, it must also fund creation because imagining benefits everyone. This is not a paternalistic subsidy, but a redistributive policy of cultural rights: guaranteeing every citizen access to symbolic production and giving those who produce this wealth the possibility of doing so with dignity.

In 2021, UNESCO, in its Recommendation concerning the Status of the Artist, stated:

“The cultural development of a country depends on the material, social, and spiritual well-being of those who create.”

BIA-S responds to this mandate: to secure the material conditions for critical thought, symbolic invention, and cultural diversity. Guaranteeing a basic income for artists is not a concession: it is an act of cultural sovereignty. Because a society that cares for its creators invests in its own capacity to imagine the future.

Equality is not a starting point, but a practice. — Jacques Rancière, 1990

The art world has historically been a laboratory of inequality.

The figure of the solitary, free genius is a romantic construction that conceals the structures of class, gender, and race that determine who can risk, fail, or be heard.

The supposed neutrality of merit functions as an ideological curtain: it invisibilizes the privilege that allows one to take risks without losing one's livelihood.

When a young racialized artist, a mother with caregiving responsibilities, or a creator from a working-class background tries to sustain their practice without an economic safety net, the system does not demand talent from them: it demands resilience. This demand perpetuates structural exclusion, defining who can occupy the symbolic space and who is left out of it.

BIA-S acts as a tool for substantive equality. It redistributes creative risk, allowing research, dissent, or failure to cease being the privilege of bodies with economic and symbolic capital. It finances unproductive time—the waiting, the research, the error—that the market despises but on which all aesthetic innovation depends. That is why BIA-S does not subsidize products, but processes. It does not reward the outcome: it guarantees the possibility.

The equality we propose is not uniformity, but diversity. Art needs multiple voices, languages in conflict, unresolved tensions. Basic income does not seek to tame this plurality, but to make it possible. Only when material conditions are equalized can symbolic difference flourish.

A 21st-century cultural policy must protect the capacity to imagine. — European Parliament, Resolution on the Status of the Artist, 2023

BIA-S is part of a broader horizon: that of cultural democracy.

A democracy that does not guarantee economic freedom of expression—the real capacity to speak, to research, to question—is incomplete. There is no full citizenship without access to the collective imagination.

Art does not need privileges; it needs structural justice. And justice, in the 21st century, is also measured in time and stability. Guaranteeing time to think and security to live is not a luxury: it is the very condition of freedom. That is why BIA-S is more than a cultural policy; it is a human rights policy.

Traditional cultural policies have been trapped between two errors: on the one hand, treating art as an industry that must justify itself in terms of profitability; on the other, considering it a luxury dependent on public generosity. Both views reduce art to a commodity or an ornament.

BIA-S proposes a third way: to understand culture as social infrastructure. Just as roads allow goods to move, culture allows meanings to move. Without this symbolic network, no country can think about its own future. Art is not an expense: it is an infrastructure of meaning.

The smartest policy is one that invests in time. — Basic Income for the Arts Report, Ireland, 2024

The idea of guaranteeing a stable income for those who create is not a utopian fantasy; it is a proven practice.

In recent years, three experiences—in Ireland, New York, and Germany—have shown that supporting artistic work is not only possible but also profitable and transformative.

Ireland: Dignity Turned into Policy In 2022, the Irish government launched the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA): 2,000 artists, selected by lottery, received €325 per week for three years. The results were compelling: recipients dedicated eleven more hours per week to their creative practice than the control group; they invested an additional €250 per month in materials and workspaces; anxiety and depression were reduced by 16 percentage points; the rate of artists abandoning their practice nearly doubled in the control group, while it remained stable among recipients. For every euro invested, the estimated social return was €1.39.

The official report from the Ministry of Culture concluded:

“Guaranteeing the time to create is the most productive investment a state can make.”

Ireland understood something that the rest of Europe is only beginning to grasp: security is the new condition for risk. When fear disappears, audacity flourishes. When economic urgency recedes, imagination occupies its natural place: that of risk, critique, and invention.

Culture is an infrastructure of well-being. — Creatives Rebuild New York, Impact Report 2025

After the pandemic, the State of New York launched the Creatives Rebuild New York (CRNY) program, funded with $125 million from public and private sources.

For 18 months, 2,400 artists received guaranteed payments. It was not charity: it was a reconstruction of the symbolic fabric after a social catastrophe.

The results: – A 19% increase in hours dedicated to creation. – A 19% reduction in food insecurity. – 75% of artist-caregivers reported a substantial improvement in their work-life balance. – 91% stated they felt “recognized as an essential worker.”

The final report summarized the lesson:

Guaranteed income transforms the artist from a survivor into an agent of cohesion.

The New York model demonstrated that an alliance between the state and civil society can sustain mixed cultural policies as long as three pillars are maintained: unconditionality, stability, and trust.

“When income is secure, work is transformed.” — Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN), Study on Germany 2024

In 2021, Germany began a Universal Basic Income experiment (Pilotprojekt Grundeinkommen).

For three years, 122 people received €1,200 per month. The result was unequivocal: far from "stopping work," participants chose jobs more aligned with their vocations, invested in training, and reported greater well-being.

Germany also has a pioneering infrastructure: the Künstler Sozialkasse, which since 1983 has allowed artists to contribute to social security as self-employed workers with state support. The model demonstrates that institutional recognition of the specificity of cultural work does not create dependency, but rather professionalization and fiscal return.

These three cases—Ireland, New York, and Germany—converge on one lesson: economic stability is the prerequisite for creative freedom. There is no evidence that basic income reduces productivity; on the contrary, it increases innovation, well-being, and cultural diversity. Cultural policies should be measured by their ability to create conditions, not to evaluate products. Basic income does not pick winners: it redistributes the right to create.

It is not a matter of how much art costs, but of how much it costs us to do without it. — Montserrat Moliner, Sin Permiso, 2021

For every euro invested, society gains more productivity, more innovation, more mental health, more cohesion. But there is something that cannot be measured in euros: the expansion of freedom.

An artistic basic income not only redistributes resources; it redistributes the right to imagine. It returns culture to its status as a common good, breaks the cycle of inherited precarity, and opens a horizon where art ceases to be an exception and becomes a structure.

Institutions should not domesticate art, but guarantee the ground where it can be free. — Report on Cultural Democracy, European Parliament, 2023

The Basic Income for the Arts in Spain (BIA-S) is not an imitation of foreign models: it is a natural consequence of our own cultural history.

Spain possesses extraordinary symbolic capital and yet, a system that impoverishes those who sustain it. If Ireland proved that an artistic basic income multiplies productivity, we have the opportunity to prove something even greater: that art can become a state policy.

The Statute of the Artist opened a legal door; BIA-S can turn it into a structure. The former regulates the labor condition; the latter guarantees the vital condition. The former recognizes rights; the latter makes them possible.

Art is not just another profession: it is the laboratory where a society thinks about its time. Sustaining it is not an act of patronage, but of public responsibility. That is why we say that BIA-S does not fund works, it funds time. And funding time is investing in freedom.

It is not enough to protect the work of art; we must protect the time for art. — Art for UBI Manifesto, 2021

The model we propose is based on five fundamental principles: unconditionality and stability, compatibility, territorial equity, sustainability, and cultural democracy.

Unconditionality ensures that the income does not depend on success or bureaucratic obedience, but on the recognition of creation as socially necessary work.

Compatibility ensures that beneficiaries can combine the income with other sources of revenue, preventing the aid from disincentivizing activity. Territorial equity seeks to correct historical imbalances between the center and the periphery, bringing resources to rural areas and autonomous communities. Sustainability is based on scientific evaluation and rigorous piloting. And cultural democracy argues that BIA-S is not aid for an elite, but a redistributive policy that expands the right to create.

Figures are cold until they show a life sustained. — CRNY Report, 2025

The cost of the pilot, estimated at €43 million annually, is equivalent to 0.02% of the state budget.

An extension to 20,000 beneficiaries would cost around €288 million per year, just 0.05% of GDP. The social and fiscal return, according to projections based on Ireland, would exceed 65%. Every euro invested would return to the system in the form of local consumption, social security contributions, cultural investment, and healthcare savings.

Funding sources can be structured without structural difficulty:

– General State Budgets, through the Ministry of Culture and Sport. – A digital cultural levy applied to tech platforms, streaming services, and generative artificial intelligence that use cultural works without compensation. – European funds for digital transition, innovation, and territorial cohesion. – Partial reallocation of competitive grants towards a stable line of direct funding. – Collaboration with autonomous communities and city councils, which could co-finance territorial implementation.

The net fiscal impact would be minimal. But the symbolic impact would be incalculable: it would turn precarity into stability, dependence into autonomy, exception into norm.

The well-being of artists is a measure of the well-being of democracy. — UNESCO Declaration, 2021

With BIA-S, the state ceases to act as a patron dispensing favors and becomes a guarantor of creative freedom.

Public support no longer depends on aesthetic obedience or immediate profitability: it is institutionalized as a citizen's right.

Art does not need tutelage; it needs trust. BIA-S trusts in the intelligence and responsibility of creators. It frees them from the logic of survival so they can dedicate themselves to what society needs most: imagining other ways of living together.

The state gains legitimacy when it protects not only bodies, but also ideas. And culture is strengthened when those who sustain it can live without fear.

That is why we affirm that BIA-S is not a cultural policy, but a democratic policy. It guarantees the material infrastructure of thought, sustains the possibility of disagreement, and returns to culture its critical function in the face of power.

Spain now has the opportunity to become a European benchmark for cultural justice. A country that pays to imagine is not a wasteful country; it is a country that respects itself.

Imagination is a political territory. — Ursula K. Le Guin, 2014

Conclusion: Sustaining the Conditions of Freedom

Every society decides, in each era, who it supports and who it lets fall. The Basic Income for the Arts (BIA-S) is not just an economic tool: it is a declaration of values. It affirms that art is not a decorative luxury, but a vital necessity; that imagination is as essential as education or health; that creation is not an individual privilege, but a common good.

We demand the right to imagine without fear, to think without economic censorship, to fail without condemnation. We want a country that does not measure culture by its immediate profitability, but by its capacity to transform life. We want a state that understands that culture does not live in buildings, but in the bodies that sustain it.

Our proposal is not welfarist: it is constituent. It does not propose an exception for art, but a precedent for a new social contract where cultural work, care, and research share a common foundation of dignity. To begin with the arts is to begin with language, with the place where meanings are reinvented and ways of life are rehearsed.

We know that BIA-S will not solve all the problems of the sector. But it will open a horizon of possibility where today there is precarity. It will turn urgency into time, fear into freedom. And it will make visible what is so often ignored: that without artists, there is no democracy to imagine.

Art does not reproduce the visible, but makes visible. — Paul Klee, 1920

Epilogue: A Politics of Time and Care

We speak from a collective consciousness: that of those who have sustained culture from everyday fragility. We know that creating is not a gift or heroism: it is work. And all work deserves dignified conditions.

We advocate for a politics of time, because time is the scarcest commodity of the 21st century. We advocate for a politics of care, because culture also provides care. Caring for those who imagine is caring for the symbolic health of the country.

We imagine a future in which a young artist in Murcia, a musician in Lugo, or a performer in Tenerife can dedicate themselves to their practice without choosing between the studio light and the rent bill. We imagine a country where the state does not administer scarcity, but guarantees possibility. Where art is not an exception, but a structure. Where imagination ceases to be a privilege and becomes a common good.

Because freedom is not declaimed: it is guaranteed. And because when an artist no longer has to justify their right to live from their work, Spanish democracy will be more just, more complete, and more free.

Selected Bibliographic References

Andújar, Daniel G. “The Privilege of Breaking: Art, Dissidence and Structural Inequality.” Technologies To The People™ Archive, 2025.
https://danielandujar.org/2025/07/12/el-privilegio-de-romper-arte-disidencia-y-desigualdad-estructural/

Basic Income Earth Network (BIEN). German Basic Income Pilot Study Results. Berlin: BIEN, 2024.

Berger, John. Ways of Seeing. London: Penguin, 1972.

Federici, Silvia. The Patriarchy of the Wage: Feminist Critiques of Marxism. Madrid: Traficantes de Sueños, 2018.

Government of Ireland, Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media. Basic Income for the Arts Pilot Scheme — Interim Report 2024. Dublin: Government of Ireland, 2024.
https://www.gov.ie/en/department-of-culture-communications-and-sport/publications/basic-income-for-the-arts-pilot-scheme-reports/

Institute of Radical Imagination. Art for UBI (Manifesto). Venice / Berlin: Institute of Radical Imagination, 2021.
https://www.neroeditions.com/art-for-ubi/

Klee, Paul. Schöpferische Konfession (Creative Confession). Munich: Bauhaus Verlag, 1920.

Moliner, Montserrat. “Culture and Basic Income: With a Basic Income We Could Say No.” Sin Permiso, 2021.
https://www.sinpermiso.info/textos/cultura-y-renta-basica-con-la-renta-basica-podriamos-decir-no

European Parliament. Resolution on the Status of the Artist and Cultural Workers in the European Union. Brussels: European Parliament, 2023.

Rancière, Jacques. Disagreement: Politics and Philosophy. Paris: Galilée, 1990.

UNESCO. Recommendation Concerning the Status of the Artist. Paris: UNESCO, 1980.

Visual Artists Ireland / Creatives Rebuild New York. Impact Report 2025. New York: Creatives Rebuild New York, 2025.

Basic Income for the Arts Working Group (BIA-S) / Technologies To The People™ Madrid–Barcelona, October 2025

Basic Income for the Arts in Spain (BIA-S): Freedom, Dignity, and Cultural Justice