Artists are our canaries in the coal mine: for better or worse, they always go in first

At the beginning of COVID in March 2020, my husband lost three gigs in succession. I started seeing our other artist friends on Facebook saying the same. One friend asked point blank who’d lost gigs and a stream of comments followed. A few friends tried to keep shows going and keep spirits up, but ultimately had to cancel because people weren’t able to come.

Then SXSW was canceled. Then Coachella. The domino effect that followed left most artists and creatives with little to no income for the rest of the year. If you want to know the next hot neighborhood to live in or whether to take a global pandemic seriously, just follow the artists.

I moved to Bushwick, Brooklyn in 2008. When my cousin from Vancouver visited me that year, she told the cab driver where she was headed and he said, “Oh no, you don’t want to go there. That’s not a safe neighborhood.”

The Opera House Lofts opened up in Bushwick a few years before, one of a number of affordable places specifically designed for artists to move in. The OHL had a huge basement set up that included a gym and rehearsal studios. It was grimy as hell, but many a rager was thrown in that basement.

The first wave of artists who lived there integrated themselves into the neighborhood, hosting weekly art nights where kids from the block would come and draw and paint, going to local diners on weekends after long nights of partying, and buying all their apartment needs at Fat Alberts. They also brought bars and cafes and nightlife into the area that would push out local businesses and change the DNA of the neighborhood.

Six short years later in 2012, when my husband moved out of his apartment, the next lease holders were given an unusually short five-month lease and then promptly kicked out at the end of the term so the landlords could gut the apartment and double the rent. Our artist friends had made Bushwick trendy and safe and were now getting pushed out too.

Art is a profession that is simultaneously worshipped and maligned in our culture. It’s usually the first thing to go when it comes to budget cuts, if it was ever in the budget at all. The defunding of arts programs in schools have relegated them to electives or optional after school programs that rely on outside funding to have a presence.

These programs are often taught by underpaid teaching artists who are working several gigs to cobble together some kind of livable income, teaching during the day, playing for drinks and meal tickets at night or working the bar. Artists were the gig economy before there was a gig economy.

Then COVID-19 happened. The schools closed. The yoga studios shuttered. The bars and cafes and restaurants shut down. And all the artists who we relied on to edu-tain our kids and entertain us lost their income and still had to pay rent somehow.

When we found out Tom Hanks and Idris Elba had coronavirus, it made it feel real for a lot of us, like it had finally invaded American living rooms. During the entire pandemic, we’ve used art as a way to escape, cope, give us a break from our kids.

Yet we only seem to value art that’s rooted in celebrity and capitalism. The entertainment industry generates hundreds of billions of dollars of revenue and that money tends to only funnel one way — up to the executives. Our culture has created a starving artist/superstar dichotomy that has pitted artists against each other and pitted artists against the people consuming their content.

Twitter exploded in anger when the Democrats added a $35 million allocation to the Kennedy Center — these were the same people who were totally fine giving the airline industry $50 billion (or really $50-thousand million if we’re doing a direct comparison). The lack of nationalized investment on the arts and the cultural stigma against spending money on artists ultimately allowed our current capitalist system to decide what art we consume.

Art has the ability to create narratives that oppress and subjugate populations without having to use force. Our own American history has images, stories, movies, and books that continuously reinforce the belief that black and brown people are lazy, uneducated, and should have no reason to complain.

The CIA admitted in the 90’s that they used artists like Jackson Pollock, Robert Motherwell, Willem de Kooning and Mark Rothko as unwitting weapons in the cold war: “in the propaganda war with the Soviet Union, this new artistic movement could be held up as proof of the creativity, the intellectual freedom, and the cultural power of the US.”

Art also has the ability to start movements and end oppressive regimes. The French Revolution, which lasted for decades, can be traced to artists creating images at critical points in the revolution to guide citizens towards what a modern, post-monarchical society could look like. The Underground Railroad was built on songs and music that were filled with codes for how to escape slave masters.

Look back at every major historical turning point and you’ll find artists embedded in the movement on both sides. Our systems tightly control what art becomes part of our collective consciousness and we’ve been taught that art and artists are useless because governments know how powerful art truly is.

If you’re an artist, you’ve been fed an impossible narrative for too long — that you should take what you can get for your art and that you’re a failure if you’re not making 100% of your income from your art. This leads many artists to perpetually maintain temporary, low-paid gigs, be forced to work for “exposure,” and operate from a place of survival and scarcity. If you’re an artist, reclaim the power you have to change minds, create movements, and build communities.

A friend of ours and cofounder of ArtBuilt, Esther Robinson, asked us a profound question recently — what would your art look like if you stopped putting pressure on it to make money? What if your art didn’t have to be your primary source of income? The power of art lies in removing it from the engine of capitalism.

We are living through another major turning point in our history. The pandemic has revealed cracks in our system, in our environment, in our culture, in our personal priorities, that have come to a head. We are feeling the effects of wage stagnation, the racial wealth divide, a broken healthcare system, burnout culture, corporate bailouts past and present, and an administration that cares more about the stock market than saving lives.

We’ve been using artists as canaries in the coal mine for too long. It’s time we start using artists as guides to light the way.

(And pay them for it, dammit!)