English Language Learners Stack Exchange is a question and answer site for speakers of other languages learning English. It only takes a minute to sign up.
Sign up to join this community
It is something artists has to deal with.
It is something artists have to deal with.
What should the auxiliary here be? The sentence has both a singular and a plural subject before the verb.
I would like to know how the proximity rule and the subject-verb agreement works in this particular case.
It is something artists have to deal with.
"Have" is correct.
There is no need to invoke a "proximity rule". The sentence consists of two clauses. There is an optional "that":
It is something that artists have to deal with.
"Artists" is the subject of the subordinate clause.
