On 25 October, plenty of people will post a Picasso quote
Or a photo of someone’s paint-stained hands. International Artist Day invites that sort of thing. Chris MacClure, a Canadian painter, started it in 2004 and pinned it to Picasso’s birthday, 25 October 1881, in Málaga. There’s no treaty behind it, no ceremony, no minister cutting a ribbon. It is mostly a hashtag. That seems about the right scale to me, because the people it honours have always done their most important work without anyone asking them to. The category is wide, too. It takes in painters, photographers, sculptors, musicians, dancers, writers and actors, and Picasso himself also worked as a ceramicist, poet and playwright.
Start with how old the habit is
In the Chauvet cave in southern France, someone painted lions, rhinos and horses more than 30,000 years ago, in the dark, by firelight, with pigment they had to find and grind first. That is a lot of effort for people whose next meal was never certain. Whatever the paintings were for, ritual, teaching, boasting, grief, they suggest that making images wasn’t something humans got around to once the practical business was finished. It ran alongside it. Writing came much later. Contracts, scripture and tax records came later still.
The first thing an artist does for the rest of us is witness. Goya spent the 1810s etching what he had seen of the Peninsular War: bodies hanging from trees, mutilation, famine. He kept the plates to himself, and historians generally put that down to political risk. They weren’t published until 1863, thirty-five years after he died. In April 1937 German aircraft bombed the Basque town of Guernica, and within weeks Picasso was working on his answer for the Spanish Republic’s pavilion at the Paris World’s Fair. A newspaper told people what happened. The painting made them stand in front of it. Those are different services, and a society needs both.
The second job is memory, and it’s less glamorous than it sounds. Governments commission monuments all the time, but the ones that last tend to come from someone who understood grief better than propaganda. Constantin Brâncuși’s Endless Column at Târgu Jiu, finished in 1938, is a plain tower of repeating modules rising nearly thirty metres, part of a memorial to Romanian soldiers killed in the First World War. It names nobody and shows no battle. People still go and stand under it, which suggests the abstraction wasn’t a failure of nerve.
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Third, and hardest to measure, artists give private feeling a shape that can be handed to somebody else. Nina Simone described an artist's duty as reflecting the times, and she meant it as a job description rather than a decoration. Think about what people reach for at funerals, in hospital corridors, in the car after bad news. It's a song, or a half-remembered line of poetry, or a film watched forty times. In the spring of 2020, with theatres shut, neighbours on Italian balconies sang to each other, and countries that had never held a serious debate about arts funding suddenly noticed they were short of something. The same public that sometimes calls art a luxury treated it as a utility the moment everything else stopped.
Then there’s the role nobody puts on a poster
Artists are an early warning system. Censors in the twentieth century, across most of Eastern Europe and well beyond it, did not begin with generals. They began with writers, singers, cartoonists and the editors who printed them, because a person who can make a crowd feel something is harder to manage than a person who can only make an argument. When a country starts quietly punishing its satirists, that tells you something about the country, not about the satirists.
Artists also do slow, local work that never reaches a museum. The woman who runs the youth theatre in a town of forty thousand. The muralist who turns a blind wall into something people walk past on purpose. The music teacher who keeps six children from quitting the violin. Cities like to cite this kind of activity when they pitch themselves to investors. They are less keen to mention what follows: artists make a cheap district interesting, the district becomes expensive, and the artists leave. It is one of the oldest loops in urban life, and the people stuck inside it have noticed that “creative city” strategies rarely include a rent cap.
You’d expect the people doing the work to be treated as essential
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Given all this, you’d expect the people doing the work to be treated as essential. Mostly they aren’t. Income arrives in lumps, then not at all. Few have sick pay or a pension. The myth of the starving artist survives because it is convenient, since it lets everyone else read low pay as proof of devotion. Most working artists know someone who stopped, not for lack of talent or drive, but because the rent went up. UNESCO adopted a recommendation on the status of the artist as far back as 1980, asking governments to give artists the social protections other workers take for granted. Most countries have treated it the way people treat terms and conditions.
Ireland has tried something concrete. Its Basic Income for the Arts began as a pilot in 2022, designed to address the financial instability of working in the arts, with participants receiving €325 a week. It was the top recommendation of a task force on rebuilding the sector after the pandemic. Budget 2026 made it permanent, and a public consultation found 97% of respondents in favour. Participants in the pilot reported that the money let them concentrate on their craft and eased financial stress.
I don’t want to oversell it. This is a couple of thousand people in a country of roughly five million, and a minister’s claims about economic return deserve harder scrutiny than a press release can give. But the premise matters more than the numbers. The scheme treats making art as work, work that markets pay for badly and that a public might reasonably choose to keep alive. Plenty of governments quietly believe this. Very few say it out loud, and fewer still attach a weekly payment to it.
This year the question has a new edge, because anyone can now type a sentence and receive an image. I think that clarifies more than it threatens. Images are cheap. What remains scarce is a person who answers for the work: who chose it, spent years getting good enough to make it, put their name beside it, and can be argued with in a room. Artists have always been less in the business of producing pictures than of being accountable for what a picture says. Whether the market remembers that distinction is another matter, and the illustrators and translators already losing commissions would tell you it often doesn't. So skip the quote and the photo of the brushes. On the 25th, pay a living artist for something they made. A ticket to a Sunday gig, a print from the person at the market, a poetry collection from a small press whose print run is three hundred copies. Don't haggle. Then tell them it mattered, because they rarely hear it.
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