What Artists Actually Need Right Now
And How the IACPA Will Help
When people talk about “supporting the arts,” the conversation almost always collapses into a single word: funding.
Funding matters, of course. But to imagine that money alone addresses the lived reality of creative and performing artists is to misunderstand both the depth of the crisis and the nature of the creative life itself.
Artists need many things right now, and some of the most important ones cannot be deposited into a bank account.
They need belonging.
They need protection of dignity.
They need moral recognition.
They need continuity.
They need a professional home that does not vanish when a project is over, a grant expires, or public attention moves elsewhere.
Across disciplines—for writers, painters, actors, musicians, dancers, craftspeople, and everyone trying to lead a life centered around creating or performing—the same quiet needs recur.
Artists need to know that their work matters even when it is not selling. They need to know that their struggles are not personal failures but structural realities. They need to know that someone is thinking about their welfare not episodically, but consistently.
One of the great misunderstandings about artists is that they are lone wolves by temperament. In truth, most artists are only structurally solitary. The work is solitary; their lives need not be. Yet many artists move through decades of creative labor without ever feeling professionally held. They belong briefly—to a production, a publication, a gallery, a residency—and then they are released back into isolation.
This absence of durable belonging has consequences. It erodes confidence. It distorts self-assessment. It makes artists more vulnerable to exploitation and less likely to advocate for themselves. It feeds the corrosive belief that if things are difficult, it must be because one is untalented, insufficiently committed, or secretly undeserving.
Artists also need advocacy, not just encouragement. They need public voices that speak clearly and credibly about the conditions under which creative work actually happens. The romantic myth of the artist who “just keeps creating” regardless of circumstances has done enormous harm. It has allowed societies to excuse neglect while praising perseverance. Perseverance is not a substitute for functional structures that support the creative life.
Artists also need shared language. Many suffer not only from external pressures but from the inability to articulate what they are experiencing. Is this burnout? Is this a crisis of meaning? Is this grief, disillusionment, maturation, or exploitation fatigue? Without a collective context, artists are left to privately diagnose public problems.
There is all the difference in the world between saying (and believing) “I’m suffering from the mental disorder of clinical depression” and “I’m experiencing existential despair because I’m not at all certain my work matters.” Knowing to say the latter leads to a very different conversation from believing the former.
They also need ethical standards—clear norms around contracts, credit, compensation, power, and respect. In too many corners of the creative world, abuse and manipulation are normalized under the guise of “opportunity.” Artists are told to be grateful rather than protected, asked to be flexible rather than respected, advised to be resilient rather than treated fairly. And fair treatment grows more problematic by the minute, as AI scrapes books and images and as open sourcing material becomes the custom of the trade.
Another urgent need is continuity across the lifespan. Most existing structures favor the young, the newly discovered, the momentarily fashionable. But creative lives are long lives. The mid-career years, in particular, are often marked by invisibility and instability. Without long-term professional anchoring, many capable artists quietly disappear—not because they lack ability, but because the cost of continuing has become too high.
Artists also need cross-disciplinary solidarity. The problems faced by a poet and a violinist may look different on the surface, but they are remarkably similar beneath it: precariousness, undervaluation, isolation, and a lack of institutional voice, to name a few. When artists are separated by discipline, their collective strength is diluted.
Finally, artists need recognition of the existential stakes of their work. Creative work is not merely occupational; it is a place of meaning-making. When artists are forced to abandon their work—not through choice, but through erosion—the loss is not only economic. It is psychological and existential. Their emotional health and wellbeing are worsened the more they find themselves prevented from making meaning via creating or performing.
To say that artists actually need these things is not to deny the importance of financial support. It is to insist that financial support alone is insufficient. Without community, advocacy, ethical structure, and belonging, money becomes a temporary patch on a chronic wound.
At this moment in history—marked by technological disruption, economic instability, political fracture, and a deep crisis of meaning—artists are not incidental figures. They are sense-makers. They are witnesses. They are companions to human experience. But they cannot fulfill that role while being systematically unsupported.
We hope that the International Association of Creative and Performing Artists will be able to help with some of this. Please subscribe to our free newsletter and see what we are doing.