Helping artists, policymakers and employers understand how artists work, career development opportunities, and building equitable processes

Model House, by artist Paul Greenleaf
Model House, by artist Paul Greenleaf

Artists and how they work are widely misunderstood inside and outside of the art world. Even artists themselves have difficulty in describing how the peculiar mix of non-arts employment, artistic practice, freelance activity and funding combine to make an artist’s career. This contributes to ongoing difficulty in making the importance of their work legible to those in a position to help them – funders, policymakers, other businesses, banks – and limits career progression and opportunity.

Artists are:

  • Largely invisible to policymakers through a lack of actionable data, as well as the legal misalignment of their activity as business, but the fruit of their labour as charitable.
  • Not well understood by finance, where business or startup loans could be sought for specific suitable projects.
  • Missing out on income generating opportunities by tending to conflate ‘funding’ with ‘income’, perhaps due to a lack of financial or business education in art schools.
  • Generally reticent think of their work as a business, despite a long history (and present) of artists running, developing, expanding and seeking investment in their business activity.
  • Often unaware of their freelance employment rights how to effectively negotiate, and the potential for solidarity with artists and other precarious workers.

What is the business model of an artist? Looking at many artists careers, it would be hard to work out: unlike many businesses, artists tend not to be focussed solely on income generation or motivated by a clear value proposition. Our Applied artist workforce data shows that 68% of artists report a lack of income from their art career as a major barrier, with 53% reporting a lack of time due to needing to take on other jobs. We know from other research that only 36% of artists (2015) claim to be motivated by income, and that artists median earnings from their practice (2024) is £5,000.

Taken at face value, it could be claimed that in general, artists do not have much a business model at all.

Our approach

This research will take seriously the idea that artists do have a business model, despite the initial evidence to the contrary. Even though most artists do not consider themselves businesses, believing themselves to have quite different motivations for making and showing work than a company might, it should be possible, using a variation of the Business Models Canvas, to show the essential elements of an artists practice. After all, all but the wealthiest need to make money from somewhere, all create value, spend money, and show their work in some way –  even if not in their practice, even if not in the arts, and even if only through self-funding.

Can a business model exist that rejects, like artists say they do, the economic demand for growth, even if they still need an income?

Outcomes

To begin, we plan to create template business models about artists working lives to allow artists to recognise themselves, think critically about their careers, and ultimately feel empowered to make business as well as creative decisions.

Building on the Business Models Canvas, this work will aim to demystify practice for funders, policymakers, and artists themselves, acting to ‘translate’ artist motivations and income between cultural stakeholders.

It aims to encourage artists to understand how the different areas of their work interact with and support each other, changing the unhelpful binary of ‘arts / non-arts’ work decisions, and the alienation of business administration from creative practice.

Outcomes should also be of value to higher education as the basis for new curricula for student artists to explore the lived experience of practice and begin to make professional decisions and understand their employment rights well before graduation. We seek to empower artists to understand themselves as workers with legal rights, helping them stand up for better working conditions and call out bad practice, such as low / no fees or unsafe conditions.

Methodology

In order to define business models for artists, to make them more legible for policy, government, finance and funders, we plan to:

  1. Create and review a number of broad-brush business models based on the experiences of artists we work with and our Applied data, and begin initial development with our Advisory Group, UAL colleagues, and other art world professionals.
  2. Refine these initial business models through interviews with individual artists at different career stages, in different artforms, with different approaches, as to their suitability and legibility: do they see themselves and their peers in the models?
  3. Based on this work, further refine the business models through small online group discussions with arts professionals, including funders, gallery workers, commissioners, and policymakers.
  4. Finally, we will survey our wide pool of artists, including UK and international members of Artquest Exchange, to gather comments and insight into the refined versions before publication.

We will seek to work with academics and/or business schools who already consider freelance or creative careers during this research, distributing the final business models and a developed business models canvas for artists, with guidance on how to use it. The final result would enable artists to compare their working styles with others, identify career and income generation opportunities, and build solidarity around more equitable working conditions and rights.

We anticipate conversations on related themes in artists practice during this work, including on notions of amateur and professional practice, making artists career progression visible, and the impact of privilege and disadvantage on artists careers. We will seek to make these conversations public where capacity and resources allow.