Why Are Culture and Artists Treated as Soft Charity or a Systemic Burden When Entire Global Economies Depend on Them?
Artists and cultural workers are treated as a cost even as tourism and creative industries power global economies. A Countercult case study in paid local cultural work.
Why are culture and artists treated as soft charity or a systemic burden when entire global economies depend on them? This is not only a question about arts policy. It is a question about whether economic development understands where demand comes from and who is actually producing the value that places sell.
The World Bank estimates that travel and tourism contributed US$10.9 trillion to the global economy in 2024 and supported around 357 million jobs. UNESCO estimates that cultural and creative industries account for approximately 3.1% of global GDP and 6.2% of employment. UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Outlook reported US$1.4 trillion in creative services exports and US$713 billion in creative goods exports in 2022. These figures use different methodologies and should not simply be added together, but they make the scale of the relationship clear. Culture, creativity, hospitality, experience, and place are already part of the economy at a serious scale.
The strange part is how often the people producing that value are still treated as a funding problem. Artists are asked to make places attractive, give destinations a sense of identity, create experiences, bring audiences into venues, and make brands feel relevant, then they are discussed as if paying them properly is a charitable act or a burden on the system.
The economy uses culture, then pretends it is optional
A destination wants visitors because it has something people might care about. A venue needs a programme that makes people want to show up. A city wants a cultural identity that is more convincing than a brand campaign. A hotel, institution, agency, or local business wants access to the people and references that make a place feel specific rather than interchangeable.
None of those things happen without artists, musicians, independent spaces, organisers, makers, curators, and cultural workers doing the work. Yet the economic value is often captured further up the chain, while the people creating the atmosphere, the reference points, and the reasons to gather are left to argue for scraps.
That is not a cultural contradiction. It is an economic failure.
The problem is not a lack of demand
The demand is usually already there. The venue has an audience. The destination has visitors. The business has a reason to commission something. The city has people making the place interesting. What is missing is a useful connection between the demand and the local cultural capability that can meet it.
This is where economic development through culture becomes practical. The work is not to add an artist at the end of a strategy so the project can look human. The work is to identify the need, find the right people, define the brief, pay them properly, and build a relationship that can continue after the first commission.
Klunkerkranich, Berlin: a small case study
The Klunkerkranich collaboration shows the mechanism at a small scale. The venue already had the demand, the audience, the setting, and a reason to create a strong night. Countercult had an existing network of artists, musicians, and cultural workers, along with the relationships and cultural knowledge needed to connect the programme to the city around it.
The point was not to invent a creative identity for Klunkerkranich. It already has one. The point was to connect a real venue need to people who could make the programme more specific, more local, and more valuable to the public.
The artists were paid. The invoices were sent. The average rate was around €50 per hour per artist. The programme created a public experience, but it also created direct economic transactions between a venue and local creative workers.
Our events also consistently generate more gigs and jobs for Countercult and for people who attend them. Someone meets a venue operator, a musician gets recommended for another programme, an artist is introduced to a client, or a conversation becomes a commission later. That is not a nice extra around the event. It is part of the economic value of putting the right people in the same room.
The proof is not a moodboard about cultural value. The proof is who got paid, what they were paid, and what work became possible afterwards.
This is not charity, and it is not a burden
Calling this charitable support gets the exchange wrong. The venue receives a programme and a public outcome. The audience receives an experience. The artists receive paid work. Countercult receives a commission and builds further relationships. The people attending gain access to new work and new opportunities. This is an economic exchange with cultural intelligence at its centre.
It is also not a burden on the system. A cultural budget that pays artists, strengthens local operators, improves a visitor experience, and creates further work is doing exactly what economic development budgets are supposed to do. The issue is not whether the money creates value. The issue is whether the budget is designed to reach the people creating it.
The question is distribution and scale
One event does not explain an entire global economy, but it can show the mechanism clearly. Demand exists. Cultural capability exists. A connector makes the relationship possible. People are paid. The public gets something more specific. Further work emerges.
The next question is how to make that mechanism easier for venues, destinations, institutions, and local development teams to use without flattening the relationships that make it work. That means better cultural intelligence, better commissioning, fairer budgets, and a public record that makes local people easier to find without turning them into extractable content.
Economic development has a culture problem because it keeps treating culture as an output instead of recognising it as one of the ways local economies create attention, relationships, work, and value.
The task is not to make every place look creative. It is to help places recognise the people and practices already creating local value, then build practical routes for that value to become more visible, more connected, and better paid. That is the work Countercult is building around.
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Countercult Studios works as a contractor or specialist delivery partner on research, mapping, cultural strategy, campaigns, experiences, commissions, archives, and production.
An original Countercult field note on economic development through culture, paid local creative work, and the Klunkerkranich collaboration in Berlin. Macro figures referenced from the World Bank’s Tourism overview, UNESCO’s Re|Shaping Policies for Creativity report, and UNCTAD’s Creative Economy Outlook 2024: https://www.worldbank.org/ext/en/topic/tourism, https://www.unesco.org/reports/reshaping-creativity/2022/en, and https://unctad.org/publication/creative-economy-outlook-2024
This piece was informed by Shona Neary’s writing, conversations, and thinking around independent culture, artists, and place.
editorial process: Our Journals are pulled from our writings over the years to get information out as quickly and as widely as possible, and to get to what matters: finding each other and claiming our seat in the circular economy. Some ideas overlap between Shona Neary's work on cultural infrastructure and their artist practice as Sketchy Shona. AI is a tool for infrastructure, not for creating Journal writing or artists' work. We welcome original reporting and pitches from journalists and independent publishers.