Basic Income for the Arts in the Age of Artificial Intelligence

Sustaining the Conditions of Freedom

By Daniel G. Andújar

I. Introduction: Art Facing the Algorithm

We live in a historical moment when artificial intelligence seems capable of producing any image, text, or sound in seconds. The real cultural challenge today is not to generate more content but to preserve the capacity to create meaning.

Industrial culture and algorithmic automation move toward homogenization: they produce more, but think less. In this context, the Basic Income for the Arts (BIA) is not a welfare policy but an infrastructure of resistance.

In an era marked by technological acceleration and chronic cultural precarity, the BIA must be understood as a structural investment to protect creative autonomy and guarantee the right to aesthetic dissent. It is not only about sustaining cultural production, but about securing the very existence of spaces where society can think critically about itself.

II. Precarity as Structural Censorship

Economic precarity does not merely impoverish artists; it functions as a mechanism of political control. In a system that equates insecurity with invisibility, creative freedom becomes a privilege. Those who cannot pay rent cannot afford to be inconvenient. Those who depend on institutional calls or juries for survival measure every word, every gesture, every critique.

This is why I describe precarity as the invisible censorship of our time. It requires no decrees, no persecution—only the economic pressure that forces creators to self-silence. In this sense, the Basic Income for the Arts does not buy conformity—it buys freedom. It funds the unproductive time, the research, the waiting, and the ability to say no.

III. BIA as a Funded Politics of Dissent

The BIA funds what the market punishes: experimentation, critique, and difference. Against a market that values what is easily reproduced, the BIA invests in what is non-replicable—that which cannot be automated by AI. It is a policy that redistributes risk, enabling more bodies—feminized, racialized, peripheral—to occupy the space of rupture.

I have written before that “the privilege to break” is not universally distributed. Art history celebrates transgression but forgets that the privilege of risk belongs to those cushioned by wealth or symbolic capital. The BIA corrects that asymmetry by democratizing the possibility of breaking, of experimenting, of dissenting without disappearing.

IV. Artificial Intelligence and the Crisis of Mimesis

Generative AI has pushed the idea of originality into crisis. Its logic is that of infinite reproduction, the automatic remixing of existing data. In such a context, human art must move in the opposite direction—toward the invention of the invisible, the unpredictable, the unquantifiable.

As Paul Klee wrote, “Art does not reproduce the visible; it makes visible.” That principle should guide cultural policy today. AI can replicate style but not experience. It can imitate form but not intention. The BIA guarantees the time and stability required to make visible what algorithms cannot imagine.

Art sustained by basic income does not compete with AI—it challenges it. It does not seek efficiency but depth. It does not optimize what exists—it invents the questions technology cannot yet formulate.

V. The Distribution of the Sensible in the Data Age

Jacques Rancière defined politics as a dispute over what is seen, what is heard, and who is allowed to speak—the distribution of the sensible. AI, trained on the data of the past, tends to reinforce consensus and the hegemony of what is already visible. Without human intervention, the digital future will be nothing but an amplified past.

Here the BIA plays a decisive role: funding what breaks consensus, sustaining voices that do not fit the datasets of the present. Against the algorithmic order—the new police order, in Rancière’s terms—the BIA guarantees the production of what exceeds the model: what disturbs, what cannot be labeled.

VI. BIA as Critical Infrastructure in the Age of AI

The advent of AI redefines the very concept of cultural policy. It is no longer just about funding museums or exhibitions—it is about ensuring the continuity of human intelligence against the artificial.

The BIA functions as critical infrastructure because it sustains the human capacity for action, in the Arendtian sense: the power to begin something new.

Hannah Arendt distinguished between labor (subsistence), work (the making of durable things), and action (the founding of the new). The BIA allows artists to transcend labor and move into action: the space where artists act freely, create meaning, and reconfigure the world.

VII. Beyond Subsidy: Toward an Economy of Use

The BIA also opens the possibility of rethinking authorship and property. When subsistence is guaranteed, artists can free their works from the fetish of scarcity and explore open circulation models, shared licenses, and social returns.

In the AI era—where algorithms extract and monetize cultural data without reciprocity—the BIA can be the first step toward a new cultural contract:
reciprocal licenses, dataset traceability, remuneration for AI training, and public models trained on consented cultural corpora.

Value will no longer be measured by price, but by the intensity of social use.

VIII. Conclusion: Sustaining the Conditions of Freedom

The Basic Income for the Arts is not utopian; it is a strategic necessity for the twenty-first century. It guarantees the right to create in an age when creation itself risks absorption by automation.

It is not a gift to artists—it is an investment in cultural sovereignty. In a world governed by invisible infrastructures—platforms, algorithms, corporate networks—art remains the last space capable of questioning power directly. But that space must be sustained.

The BIA is the last defense of the human against the automation of meaning.
It is a policy that funds the possibility of imagination.
And without imagination, no democracy can survive.

Note: All texts in this section are published under open licenses (CC BY-SA 4.0) and form part of the open repository of the Basic Income for the Arts (RBA-E).