> The frustrating thing about this program is that it is not possible to avail of this unless you are ALREADY an artist.

Frankly we don’t know the selection criteria for the program this year. It will be only released in April.

But we know the selection criteria for the pilot program, and for that this was not true.

> So if you gave up art because you had bills and kids and needed to support yourself or a family, you're SOL.

Again we don’t know the full program’s eligibility criteria yet. Under the pilot program there were two separate streams. Those who were recently trained, and those who were “practicing artist”.

Your hypothetical “artist who gave up art” might fall into the “recently trained” stream and thus be eligible.

Or if they gave up on art a long ago (more than 5 years), there are ways they can get back to it. They can start practicing their art on the side again, produce a portfolio of work and thus become eligible again. They don’t need to be full time artist for this.

> The only person I know getting this money

In the pilot program they randomly selected 2000 participants from those who where eligible. So to get the money in the pilot program you both needed to be eligible, have applied for it, and be lucky enough in the lottery.

Because of this lottery whoever is getting it today is not representative of who is all eligible for it.

Additionally i would argue that in every such programm there will be people that abuse the system. Just because gp knows one such person, does not mean that everybody will be doing that.

The article also mentions that overall the program had a positive impact.