A Fracture in a Broken Crystal: Artists’ Precarity Under Crisis

Artistic work typically characterizes as highly precarious, both professionally and creatively. As crises tend to increase social inequalities, artists, who are already exposed to high degrees of precarity and so much unprotected, tend to experience an increase of such precarity under those conditions. The goal of this chapter is to explore knowledge, gained so far in different national contexts, mostly by social sciences research, about the impact of COVID-19 pandemic (2020-2023) on artists’ professional and creative precarity. Besides, there is also a focus on how some artists testified through their art a negative impact of the pandemic on their work, or somehow integrated this thematic in it. Specifically, the chapter considers how the pandemic crisis impacted on artists’ precarity, the professional and psychological consequences of such impact, and practical implications regarding ways of helping artists and improving the future of the art world.