Finland/ 8.1 Support to artists and other creative workers  

8.1.2 Special artists funds

The main legal provision for the direct public support to artistic creativity is the Act on State Artists' Grants. This law was enacted in 1969 and after numerous amendments was substantially altered in 2010. As Table 16 illustrates, this and some minor provisions are implemented by the arts council system, which provides the following forms of direct support:

Grants for individual artists:

The core scheme in this category is the working grants for artists in all art fields. The grants are for a kind of salaried period lasting from 6 months to five-years; there are also similar but longer-time (up to ten years) grants to highly merited artists. The art professorships were tenured posts of higher pay, received on the basis of artistic excellence. After the recent amendment of legislation in 2010, professorships are now slowly replaced by the above mentioned longer term grants. In contrast to individual grants, the state prizes are one-off recognitions honouring important artistic contributions.

The rest of the grant schemes in this category have been established as compensation for the loss of copyright income caused by free public use. They do not compensate individual artist's losses, but are really grant schemes based on competition and refereed decisions.

In the 2010 state budget, the amount of the monthly grant was specified to be 1 558.55 EUR. After a recent amendment to legislation, this sum also includes the same social security fee that regular income earners pay as tax-payers. It has been estimated that about 3% of Finnish artists are working as grantees at any given time.

Project and travel grants for individual artists or project groups:

Table 16 indicates that the project grant scheme covers all the main art forms and four special purposes, children's culture, multiculturalism, international and Nordic cultural operation and artists in residence activities. If we assume that supply of grants reflect demand, children's culture is a high demand project area and multiculturalism (directed at foreign born artists and their projects) the least.

Grants for developing arts and culture of collective bodies:

These development grants can have three types of purpose. Firstly, their applicants / receivers can aim at developing high quality or avant-garde products (e.g art films, experimental music, new types of choreography); secondly, they may try to affirm the position of new art forms (media art, multidisciplinary art forms, circus as a form of art) and thirdly they may look for new creative impulses through transnational cultural cooperation (artist in residence programmes). The same functions can be found in R&D activities of science and technology.

The last category, regional arts councils, refers to the second part of the national arts council system. Its purpose is to alleviate regional inequalities in the whole system. Table 16 tells us that the grant schemes maintained by the regional arts councils are the same as those of the main system, but the funding (4.4 million EUR in 2011) is only 13% of the total funding of the whole arts council system (33.3 million EUR in 2011).

There is also an extraordinary artist's pension system, formerly managed jointly by the Ministry of Finance and the Ministry of Education and Culture and since 2011, managed by the Ministry of Education and Culture independently. It provides flat monthly payments to the recipients and, in addition to being a social security instrument, functions also as a long-term grant for senior artists still active in their creative work. When the expenditure of this pension scheme (17 850 000 in 2011 budget) is added to other support, the central government's total direct grant allocation to artists and arts amounted to 50 million EUR in 2011.

Table 16:   Support of the Finnish system of art councils to artistic activity, in EUR, 2011

*               Including 10% (EUR 289 430) for non-fiction writers.
**             Grants for 0.5 to 5 years. Includes long-term artists' grants valid in 2011.
***           Incl. support for drama literature EUR 230 000 and quality support for publications of photographic art EUR 76 000.
****         Incl. quality support for film productions EUR 455 000.

Table 17 compares the support expenditures of the arts council system in 2005, 2009 and 2011 by art forms. Understandably literature and visual arts, have the top position in the art form rankings, although the first rank position is different in national and regional distributions. In the six-year period the allocation structure has remained stable with only minor losses in literature and more significantly, changes in the contents of the category "other" (see footnote * after Table). The latter change can be seen as a sign of increased art form diversity.

Table 17:   Support granted by the national and regional art council systems by art form (%) in 2005, 2009 and 2011

Source:     Paula Karhunen 2012, Support granted by the Arts Councils 2011. Facts and Figures 1/2012, Arts Council of Finland.
*               In the 2005 and 2009 statistics the category "other" contains media art, circus art, critics and unclassifiable recipients. Since 2011 the category "other" contains only unclassifiable recipients and critics, with media and circus art listed as their own art form categories.

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