“Being an artist is widely perceived as a matter of choice and a question of privilege, rather than one of sacrifice that merits financial reward. As Russell Martin, an artist and the director of Artquest said: ‘there seems to be an idea that if you enjoy your work [as an artist] you shouldn’t get paid for it.’ This perception exists even within the industry: an established curator who has worked in the field for several decades once told me, ‘I don’t know why artists insist on demanding to be paid. They don’t have to be artists.’ “Yet in addition to the many benefits made by the arts that do not register in financial terms, their contribution to GDP stands as evidence that the sector is lucrative; in 2017 arts and culture contributed GB£29.5bn to the UK economy.”