New York – October 23, 2026 – Dominick DeJoy, founder of B2B paid media agency Osric Digital, has published an essay in Public Seminar, a public-facing journal of ideas and debate published by the Public Seminar Publishing Initiative at The New School. The essay, titled “The Artist Status as Managed Retreat,” examines Belgium’s Artist Status, a social protection system that provides unemployment benefits to freelance cultural workers between projects.
The essay opens with the spring 2025 political fight over the program. Belgium’s new federal coalition proposed applying a two-year cap on unemployment benefits to artists, a change that would have effectively ended the Artist Status. Cultural workers went on strike, a petition against the change gathered 23,000 signatures within days, and the government withdrew the proposal in April 2025.
DeJoy argues the program was worth defending, and that its recent growth points to a deeper structural problem. Coverage rose from roughly 5,600 workers to about 8,560 after a 2022 reform extended protections to technicians and support staff such as sound engineers and stagehands. Many of those workers had held permanent jobs at cultural institutions years earlier. The essay traces that shift through the dismantling of standing theater ensembles in Brussels, Antwerp and Ghent, the loss of roughly a thousand permanent positions at the Flemish public broadcaster VRT over two decades, and a decline in culture’s share of the Flemish budget.
The essay concludes that the Artist Status manages the consequences of cultural defunding without addressing its causes. That arrangement keeps the sector exposed to the same political forces that attacked the program in 2025.
DeJoy presented the research behind the essay at the ENCATC Congress in Nice in September 2026. ENCATC is the European network on cultural management and cultural policy.
“This essay came out of a lot of research into cultural policy and cultural labor in Belgium,” said DeJoy. “I went through budget data, union membership figures, the institutional histories of Flemish theaters and reports from the sector’s own advisory bodies and unions. Belgium protects cultural workers better than almost any country, which makes it a useful place to study what happens when institutions shed permanent staff and the state absorbs part of the cost. I wanted to show how the safety net and the defunding are connected.”
DeJoy sees a parallel between the essay’s subject and his own industry. “Digital media and advertising rely heavily on freelancers, much like the cultural sector the essay describes,” he said. “Many people in the field choose that freedom deliberately. But I also see firsthand how it leaves workers exposed. Income is unpredictable, and the social ties that once connected people to their colleagues fall away. The liquidity of the freelance market–gig workers are constantly available through digital platforms–creates a transactional quality to work relationships. Writing about the Artist Status was a way to think through a shift I watch happening in my own industry.”
The full essay is available at Public Seminar: https://publicseminar.org/2026/06/belgium-artist-status/
DeJoy’s research extends beyond cultural policy. Also in September 2026, he presented a paper on business influencers, hegemonic masculinity, and platform capitalism at the annual conference of the Media, Communication and Cultural Studies Association (MeCCSA) at the University of Leicester. DeJoy writes regularly about critical theory and media on his personal blog at https://dominickdejoy.com/.
About Osric Digital
Osric Digital is a B2B paid media agency that runs Google Ads, LinkedIn Ads and Meta Ads for B2B tech and services companies, including SaaS, fintech, legal, cleantech and professional services firms. The agency builds full-funnel paid media programs that cover brand awareness through demand capture. Founder Dominick DeJoy previously managed paid media and SEO in-house at Preqin. Osric Digital is based in New York. Learn more at https://www.osricdigital.com/.
Media ContactCompany Name: Osric DigitalContact Person: Dominick DeJoyEmail: Send EmailPhone: 6463891313Address:169 Madison Ave STE 2973City: New YorkState: NYCountry: United StatesWebsite: https://www.osricdigital.com/
