Wages for Socially Useful Work

In order to encourage the arts, the government should provide both a space and a wage to any person who wishes. 

Specifically, the minimum wage should be provided, for up to 20 hours a week, to anyone willing to spend those 20 hours in an appropriate facility, engaged in art, science, research or sports.  Ideally, the government would also provide some limited equipment, subsidised materials, database access and so forth. 

The 20 hours would take place during normal business hours, because as well as encouraging the arts I'm also trying to destroy productivism, allow us to hunt in the morning, fish in the afternoon and so forth.

When I think about the arts and sciences, some of them do require expensive materials and equipment, and I understand that it might not be affordable to let everyone to work with ceramics, make jewellery, or run a particle accellerator.  But writing, dancing, linguistics, pure maths: the biggest inputs to these are time.  With digital technology, this expands to animation, film-making, music, journalism, programming. 

I also believe that this would be a better way of paying creatives than the current IP system--rather than seeing massive benefits accrue to a few superstars and large corporations who can lock ideas away behind legal walls, we would see people paid directly for doing the creating. 

Imagine if, instead of giving huge stacks of cash away to Peter Jackson to make some tedious Tolkein blockbuster; we gave tens of thousands of people a little cash, a little freedom, a little dignity, and we got a hundred low budget films, books and radio plays, all freely available on a local server.  I'm sure most of them would be terrible, but isn't that also true of most of what's on Netflix right now?