Undertow: Stability and precarity in a shared system
In the first three posts of this series, I examined misalignments between ambition and support, the ways application formats fail to engage artists' modes of cognition, and how budget structures conceal real costs. Here, I want to look at artists and the institutions that support them as parts of a single organism working toward a shared cultural aim.
In theory, energy and insight would move reciprocally through that entity. But bodies depend on balanced systems. When one side bears more weight than the other, circulation shifts. The imbalance may not be immediately visible, but it shapes the currents that determine what rises into visibility and what is pulled below the surface.
Institutional staff positions are typically structured for stability and continuity. Salaries and benefits provide some degree of regular baseline security throughout the year. The organizations they work for maintain reserves, cultivate diversified funding streams, and distribute resources across multiple initiatives. Even when institutions face pressure, it is absorbed collectively and distributed across a portfolio. A single project’s outcome rarely threatens organizational continuity or staff livelihood. The administrative infrastructure remains intact.
Most generative artist work is project-based. Income fluctuates. Because basic needs are not reliably secured through artistic labor, artists assemble many unique solutions: teaching, academic posts, inheritances, partner incomes, unrelated jobs, and sometimes precarity itself. If a project falters, the artist’s reputation is immediately implicated. If funding falls through, the artist rearranges their labor and personal life. If audience development underperforms, it is often the artist who recalibrates outreach, absorbs financial loss, or renegotiates compensation with collaborators.
The system depends on the artist’s devotion and endurance. The desire to make the work is so strong that artists routinely absorb stress and instability in order to bring a vision into form. This devotion is extraordinary. It reflects something deeply human about creative impulse and meaning-making. What we see, in our system as it exists, is that devotion becomes part of the infrastructure that allows institutions to project innovation and vitality, even when the underlying conditions remain uneven.
When one part of a shared system is consistently less buffered and more exposed, feedback does not flow freely. Artists experience the consequences of design decisions immediately, but often lack the leverage to influence those designs. Institutional leaders, insulated from direct exposure, do not encounter the same pressures in their daily work. As a result, information that could refine and strengthen the system circulates incompletely. The field loses adaptive capacity.
To compound this imbalance, the implicit “job description” embedded in many grant agreements includes not only the responsibility to generate innovative new work, but also to manage funds, pay collaborators, track expenses, cultivate audiences, gather participation data, document outcomes, meet reporting requirements, navigate tax implications, and ensure required public recognition of funders. The same individual whose new work has been selected for support is often the one who must then administer it, measure it, market it, and account for it — tasks that primarily serve institutional requirements rather than artistic development.
If arts funding structures aspire to generate civic vitality, enrich public life, deepen dialogue, and expand cultural imagination, then circulation between artists and institutional staff matters. When devotion is taken for granted and misallocated labor becomes normalized, it is reasonable to ask whether the design reflects the capacities of the people inside it. And whether, in the long term, that design strengthens or constrains the very cultural vitality it claims to champion.
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