When Your Life Is on the (Financial) Chopping Block
Artists Metabolizing Financial Cutbacks and Political Interference / Indifference
My center - The Green Room - is in Cologne, a city that is currently drawing a lot of negative attention for vicious cultural budget cuts, threatening the extinction of beloved festivals like Acht Brücken and the Cologne Jazzweek. The pain rippling through the freelance scene is incalculable. I see it in my clients, my colleagues, and in my own work as the director of a cultural center. From 2022 to 2024, about 15 - 25% of The Green Room’s costs were covered by cultural project funding. In 2025, that number has dropped to zero.
Meanwhile, across the ocean in my homeland, Trump has obscenely planted his greasy ass atop the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts in Washington, D.C., a self-crowned monarch of American culture. The message to artists in the U.S. and beyond is clear, if not yet fully comprehensible in its extent: Your work has no value. And, simultaneously: I control you.
There is a heavy atmosphere of dread, disillusionment, and discouragement.
The Arts Used to Be Relevant (at the very least as instruments of war…)
In Germany, since the end of World War II, the arts have been regarded as vital—a space for diverse opinions, political discourse, and a necessary check on power. Some highly visible artists squandered this trust, engaging in tiresome enfant terrible antics meant only to provoke and reinforce the cliché of the artist as a spoiled, troubled adolescent. But most artists worked in good faith, their work was deemed relevant and they themselves believed that their voices contributed. This belief becomes ever more difficult to sustain as dark forces keep chipping away at it.
Frances Stonor Saunders’ Who Paid the Piper? The CIA and the Cultural Cold War reveals how, during the Cold War, the U.S. government covertly funded intellectual and artistic efforts, viewing “soft-power” - cultural influence - as just as crucial as military power. Through private foundations, the CIA funnelled millions into anti-communist cultural initiatives. In essence, the CIA operated as a Ministry of Culture, both in America and abroad, ensuring that the arts served a social-political purpose. Germany’s cultural landscape benefited from this influx of funding, reinforcing the belief that the arts were essential to maintaining democratic systems and cultures.
That belief system has eroded.
The COVID-19 pandemic marked a turning point. Artists were told their work was not system-relevant. The term nicht systemrelevant was a gut punch many who had devoted their lives to art. The divide between employed and freelance artists widened, with freelancers always getting the short end of the stick.
How to Live in a World Where Twitter (X) Is Relevant, but Art Is Not
Art is demanding. It requires time, attention, and openness—qualities increasingly alien in a world oversaturated with noise and junk. The arts, with their inherent sense of quietness, feel ever more distant from current realities. Please let me state firmly: the arts ARE relevant. I can’t emphasize that strongly enough. We just live in a time in which that felt sense of societal relevance can be ever more elusive. Perhaps it’s a good thing that arts are not viewed as proxies for bombs anymore.
But artists who built their lives around a certain system are left in the lurch. So, what now? Does one fight—insisting that the arts remain essential to societal health? Or does one withdraw, like the monks of the 5th and 6th centuries who, as the Roman Empire crumbled, retreated to protect and preserve precious artifacts of culture in isolation?
There’s no answer, only a personal choice: Do you draw energy from the fight, or can you endure a sense of irrelevance, without suffering too much from isolation and loneliness?
For me, loneliness is worse than anger. So, I fight. It takes a lot of energy. Most days, I feel ragged.
And yet, in navigating the spectrum of accepting realities and committing to change, I wonder: would a little more acceptance serve me? Not as surrender—god forbid—but as a strategy for self-preservation. A burned-out Heather isn’t really that helpful to anyone.
ACTing (Without Performing)
Acceptance and Commitment Therapy (ACT) suggests that psychological flexibility—the ability to acknowledge what is, in all of its imperfection, while still moving toward what matters—can be a way through. One of its first steps is clarifying values: What do I stand for? If the world stopped listening tomorrow, if there were no more grants, no more platforms, no more institutions left to fight for—what would I still do? Naturally, this question is often stripped from its socio-economic context. Many artists are financially tethered to their art, needing it to pay for rent, living expenses, childcare, and more. This economic pressure often makes the question of what to stand for even more complex, as it has to navigate both artistic integrity and survival. But even within these constraints, one can still ask: What do I stand for?
Then comes committed action, which means aligning what you do with what you believe. Fighting for the arts can be an expression of values, but so can stepping back, conserving energy, creating quietly. The hardest part is distinguishing between inaction—paralysis, despair, burnout—and intentional non-action, a choice to disengage from the fight in order to nourish what remains. The choice isn’t always clear, especially when financial pressures weigh heavily. But finding moments to restore and recalibrate is crucial.
And then there’s acceptance, the one I struggle with the most. Not the passive kind, not lying down while the Alpha Dogs and Musk-Rats run wild, but the willingness to sit with loss, uncertainty, irrelevance, and still keep one’s head above water. It means making room for all of it—the grief, the rage, the exhaustion—without letting an overwhelming emotion hijack the whole system. It’s the difference between I am drowning and I am in deep water, but I can swim. The financial reality of an artist's life often amplifies this struggle. The fear of losing everything can cloud the space for acceptance, but acknowledging this fear without letting it dictate all actions is crucial.
The arts are in deep water. We all are. But what if we could hold the paradox—that the world seems indifferent to art and that art is still worth making? That there is no guaranteed audience, no funding assurances, and yet we continue making art? That irrelevance is real, and financial precarity is a daily reality, but still, our voices matter—even if only to ourselves and our little Davidsbündler?
“Through all tones
In the motley earthly dream
A soft sound is drawn
For those who listen secretly.”
Maybe this isn’t a question of fighting or retreating. Maybe it’s about staying present, staying awake, and refusing to be swallowed by either despair or delusion.