Sustainability of Artists in Precarious Times; How Arts Producers and Individual Artists Have Adapted during a Pandemic

Abstract

Making a living as an artist, whatever the discipline, is challenging. In addition to skills and talents, artists need resilience, adaptability, creativity, and the ability to withstand endless setbacks and rejections. Most critically, they need an on-going, stable income. Several studies have demonstrated that the income of most artists is usually very low. To survive, artists often find other sources of income aside from their creative work. Ideally, they also need a place to work, the capacity to do their work and a sense of validation from others of their work. When your livelihood disappears over night because of a pandemic, how do you then sustain that creative work? Using multiple sources of data and a qualitative methodology, including case studies and interviews, this paper addresses the ways that artists and producers from different art forms have addressed these challenges in Australia. It is concluded that while the impact of the pandemic on artists’ lives has been considerable, some artists have been able to survive, adapt, and move forward.

Sustainable development of art industry and a statistical analysis of the factors that influence the gallery prices of contemporary artworks

“…Although art is one of the main links of socio‐cultural development and sustainability, in today's economic system, achieving financial stability is a major challenge for many artists and stringent economic conditions can deter them from pursuing their artistic productions (Caust, 2021; Greer, 1958). Hence, the continuity of artistic production, and accordingly socio‐cultural development and sustainability, depends on the ability of artists to generate certain amount of income from their artworks (de Propris, 2013; Nieuwland & Lavanga, 2021).…”