Yancey Strickler

I realize all these objections, all the reasons the world says exploring your feelings, making art, not acting as a capitalist value creator is wrong.

Despite all those things, I'm still going to do it, because actually maybe that makes it even more meaningful.

But those have been helpful, just like, what's the pulse of things?

We also did a survey we haven't yet published, we're about to, with Artist Corporations Foundation, where we had an online survey that 1,600 artists answered.

It's very deep about the financial situation of their practice, what's hard for them, what they're trying to do, how they're structured.

And that revealed something pretty stark results.

About half of people were working alone.

Half of people were part of multiple people working on a project together.

About half the people had no legal structure for their work.

They were just operating as an individual.

Half the people had tested out some sort of form.

No one, most people struggled to get access to money.

Most projects were self-financed or through debt.

Extreme pessimism about philanthropy, a great desire to move beyond that.

And really what emerged was like, we had one question, which was like, would you like to see, you had to rate these different things.

And one was, do you want a special tax break for artists?

Very few people chose that.

Instead, what they chose was they want a way to share ownership with collaborators.

They want it to be easier to find sources of investment or funding.

They want to have health care.