“We are not asking for privilege. We are reclaiming the conditions of possibility.”
1) The present
We live in a paradox: never before has culture been so widely consumed —
and yet those who produce it live in systemic precarity.
The cultural system normalises intermittence, competition and self-exploitation.
Visibility is rewarded, continuity is punished.
Innovation is demanded without securing the means that sustain it.
In this context, Arts Basic Income is not a utopia —
it is a rational response to a structural failure.
2) Culture as work
Art is not an exception. It is work — but also thinking, research and care.
Its value lies not only in outcomes — exhibitions, works, events —
but in the socially necessary time to think, create and connect.
Guaranteeing that time is not charity; it is economic democracy.
3) Political context
Spain has advanced with the Artist Statute and the Sectorial Council.
Yet a crucial step remains: recognising the right to continuity of artistic practice.
While the “creative economy” becomes a brand, artistic labour remains exposed.
ABI links to global debates on universal basic income,
but translates them into the scale of culture and the commons.
4) The urgency of time
Ecological collapse, digital acceleration and the inflation of images
have placed culture before an essential question:
What does it mean to create when time is running out?
Against the attention economy, ABI proposes an economy of care and time —
an investment in slowness, reflection and imagination.
5) Call to action
Precarity is not a glitch — it is design.
And every system can be rewritten.
Arts Basic Income is a shared line of code:
it opens space for error, for rehearsal, for imagination.
“Art doesn’t ask for permission — it asks for conditions.”