Artists are getting poorer
Survey finds most earn less than £10,000 a year
MELANIE GERLIS
30th November 2017 08:03 GMT
via The Art Newspaper
The majority of artists in the UK earn less than £5,000 a year after tax—and below $10,000 in the US—according to a survey of 1,533 practitioners, conducted this month by the online artist-to-market website Artfinder.
Dubbed the “Artist Income Project”, this first survey of anonymous data across several platforms, including Artfinder, finds “artists are still not paid fairly. Or at all.” All the surveyed artists are described as “independent”, meaning they sell their art directly, rather than through a gallery.
In the UK survey of 823 artists, 55.1% say they earn between £1,000 and £5,000 net per year while 17.7% earn between £5,000 and £10,000. At the raw end, 9.3% of UK artists state their income as zero. This combined figure of 82.1% is worse than the findings of a previous survey of 1,061 artists, conducted by a-n, an artist data company, which in 2013 found that 72% of artists earned under £10,000.
