The Economics of Creativity: Rethinking How Artists Earn
The arts occupy a peculiar position within the contemporary economy: culturally central yet economically fragile, perpetually undervalued yet more widely consumed than at any previous point in history. We have, in effect, built a civilisation that cannot stop posing next to artworks while the people who make it go bankrupt.
Having peaked at approximately $65 billion in 2023, the art market has since contracted: in 2024, global art market sales reached an estimated $57.5 billion, a 12% decrease year-on-year, constituting the third-largest contraction of the global art market in the past fifteen years, exceeded only by the 2009 recession and the 2020 pandemic.
What’s worse is that the structural condition of the working artist remains largely unaltered across successive generations. The painter, the sculptor, the photographer continue to confront an income problem that empirical study documents demonstrate with consistency. The most authoritative recent evidence base for the UK is the UK Visual Artists' Earnings and Contracts Report 2024, produced by the Centre for Regulation of the Creative Economy (CREATe) at the University of Glasgow and commissioned by the Design and Artists Copyright Society (DACS), drawing on a survey of over 1,400 practitioners. Its central finding is stark: visual artists earn a typical (median) self-employed income of £12,500 per year (64.2% lower than the median UK worker's income and 47.5% lower than full-time minimum-wage earnings). To put it plainly, one could abandon art entirely, take the first job offered, and roughly double one's income. This represents active deterioration, amounting to a 40% decrease in earnings since 2010 and currently, 51% of visual artists supplement their income with additional work, yet even then earn a median of only £17,500 a year, still significantly below the national minimum wage. The second job is a prerequisite and even the combination falls short of what the law considers the floor.
These figures further reveal that the inequality is not solely vertical: women earn 40% less than men, disabled artists earn a median of just £3,750 and over 80% of respondents described their earnings as unstable or very unstable. Precarity is distributed unequally even among the already-precarious: a hierarchy of disadvantage.
The institutions tasked with mitigating this fragility are themselves under sustained strain. Public arts funding across the United Kingdom has experienced repeated retrenchment since 2010, while the fixed costs of practice (studio rent, fabrication, production, and exhibition) have risen sharply, particularly in metropolitan centres where artistic communities have historically concentrated. The cost base of practice has inflated precisely as the public subsidy underwriting it has thinned: the rent rose and the grant fell.
And yet demand has not contracted. Audiences for art galleries and art fairs recovered strongly after the pandemic, in many cases surpassing pre-2020 levels. The appetite for art, measured in attendance and participation, has rarely been greater. The paradox is therefore sharply drawn: extraordinary cultural vitality at the surface, and a hollowing-out of the economic foundations beneath it. More people than ever wish to consume art; fewer than ever can afford to produce it professionally or work in the art world.
This has created a wave of experimentation in how artists are financed. I am of course fully biased having created one of them myself 11 years ago...
The first concerns resale royalties and the principle that an artist's economic interest in a work ought not be extinguished at the point of first sale (the faintly maddening arrangement whereby a painting bought for hundreds and later resold for millions enriches everyone in the chain except the person who painted it). The doctrine of droit de suite: artist resale royalties ensuring creators earn a percentage each time their work is resold at auction, mandated within the EU for sales above €1,000 and the UK's Artist's Resale Right administered by DACS extends a comparable mechanism domestically. Its digital extension is significant: platforms such as SuperRare automate royalty payments for digital works, enabling an artist to earn a fixed percentage on each secondary sale and thereby generating a recurring income stream. At the level of policy, the proposed UK "Smart Fund" advances an analogous logic at the scale of the sector rather than the individual transaction, envisaging collective licensing revenue distributed to creators.
The second concerns membership and direct-patronage infrastructure. Subscription platforms have matured into a durable income layer for many practitioners. Patreon, the most prominent, enables artists to earn recurring income by providing rewards and perks to subscribers, charging a commission of 8 to 12 percent, while project-based platforms such as Kickstarter persist alongside it. It is necessary to register the critique embedded in this model: that crowdfunding platforms tend to favour those with access to wealthier networks and campaign skills (just like investment’ first rounds) which suggests that direct patronage redistributes opportunity unevenly, rewarding the artist with the best address book rather than necessarily the best work, and cannot, in isolation, constitute a structural remedy.
The third reimagines the grant itself. Funders such as Creative Capital have moved toward unrestricted project funding combined with professional services, while emerging research initiatives explicitly interrogate new resource-sharing models. There is a particular bureaucratic comedy in funding structures that will pay an artist to make something new but not to pay last month's rent or, heaven forbid, to rest. The CREATe research itself advances policy instruments to this end, including the appointment of a Freelancer Commissioner alongside the collective-licensing proposals already noted.
A fourth model concerns business-to-business revenue: the cultivation of brand partnerships, corporate commissions and collaborations across the digital, urban and entertainment sectors. Where the first three models largely draw income from collectors, patrons, and public funders, B2B partnerships open an entirely separate channel: one funded by corporate marketing, brand, placemaking and content budgets, which are typically an order of magnitude larger than the discretionary spending of individual buyers. Structured deliberately rather than pursued opportunistically, such partnerships can support artists with something the primary market rarely offers: predictable, contracted income, professional production support, and audiences reached at a scale no gallery wall can replicate. The value lies not in any single commission but in building these relationships into a repeatable, systematised pipeline: establishing artists’ agencies as a reliable intermediary between artistic practice and commercial demand. This is the logic we developed at MTArt Agency: treating B2B partnership as a deliberately structured revenue stream in its own right.
What unites these solutions is an attempt to decouple the artist's income from the single, narrow channel of primary sale, and to construct instead a portfolio of revenue streams encompassing resale participation, recurring patronage, reformed public support and business to business revenues.
It is precisely this tension and the structural precarity of the art world that my own work has addressed for the last twenty years, both through MTArt's endeavour to open new revenue streams for artists and to challenge entrenched visual inequalities through my academic research. I hope you will join me on this journey.
To learn more about MTArt's work supporting artists through brand partnerships, commissions and new revenue models, visit MTArt Agency. You can also connect with Marine Tanguy to continue the conversation around building a more sustainable future for the creative industries.