[DocTomoe]

Remember: van Gogh was undervalued while he was alive. I guess he should just have thrown his stuff away early and become a baker. Mozart had virtually non-stop money troubles, even before he started becoming a party animal, and died a pauper who was buried in a linen sack in a mass grave. Guess he would have had a better life being a potter.

Art is something that may only be valued highly ex post facto, and which takes a long time of intensive training to get started...

[headmelted]

I get this with regards to Van Gogh, and I assume a thousand Van Gogh’s we never got to hear about or appreciate. I wasn’t suggesting at all that he should’ve given up if he wasn’t making money.

I’m just saying that there are easily hundreds of creative activities people do every day just for the love of it. Each of them could be artistically appreciated later. Narrowing in on this one subset, especially with taxpayer funding, seems not only unfair but also uninformative at large (we learn little about the economic impact of UBI as the U is missing here).

As others have said though, this appears to actually be an artist’s grant labelled as UBI, which makes the whole thing moot (these have been around for a long time with allocated funding).