Budget me this: A UBI for artists?
Liverpool gets 'up to £2m' for another Beatles attraction (potentially), while Ireland's artists get paid
To some, pledging up to £2m for a new Beatles attraction on the Liverpool waterfront is a perfect way to both fossilise the great city’s culture and show how little one knows or cares about contemporary art happening there.
It is proof, if it were ever needed, that although the government has money, and it can make bets on ventures, it just chooses to make ones that sidestep actively supporting new artists in favour of sanctifying past ones.
But to the UK government, it is the very essence of levelling up the country, ‘protecting our unique culture and heritage’. The idea that the Beatles need protecting is laughable: some have pointed out that there is already a Beatles museum and if it needed funding, Sir Ringo Starr and Sir Paul McCartney could do it themselves. And after all that, the proposal doesn’t necessarily mean a new attraction will be built.
The artists of today – maybe even the next Beatles, I dare say – need the money more, given the precarious post-lockdown state of the creative industries in the UK. Who knows? Perhaps, away from the pandemic induced funding support many people in the UK have received, if (about 500) artists were given a monthly stipend (of say, about £300) to help ease the pressure off the cost of living, then any one of them might do something so brilliant that it not only bring international renown to the city and the country, but also boost GDP, filling HM Treasury coffers, the multiplier effect, blah blah blah…
Meanwhile, following Ireland’s budget, their minister for arts Catherine Martin announced that applications for an unconditional weekly income of ‘something close to’ €325 for 2,000 artists and arts workers will open in January 2022 and that she expects the scheme to be up and running in spring (Journal of Music).
Some Liverpudlian artists may be wishing they were on the other side of the Irish Sea right now and I wouldn’t blame them if they decided to emigrate to further their careers, which would be one way of emulating the Beatles’s history. It is well-known and documented that the Fab Four toured Hamburg, Germany for extended periods – as many UK acts did – before they got famous (Journal of Music), and one of the main reasons for doing so was the money: ‘The group were to be paid about £100 per week, which was much more than promoters in Liverpool paid’ (Wikipedia).
But doing next to nothing to retain creative talent to the point that artists leave for other cities may be the government’s curious (but historically consistent) way of ‘protecting our unique culture and heritage’. In which case, I’ll expect to see our culture minister unveil a government-sponsored yellow submarine floating on the Liverpool Waterfront in the next few years.