A few months ago we praised the UK for it’s culture-wide curation of the arts. The news we have today isn’t good but at least it’s attracting attention for an issue which, if the same study were published stateside, would be met with a shrug from the public at large.
The Guardian reported, based on a survey by the arts organization Create and Goldsmith’s University, that the UK’s creative industries are dominated by middle class people. That has implications not only for artists of working-class backgrounds but also for artists of different genders and ethnicities.
The findings prompted leading figures to express their concerns that the lack of diversity means the arts is becoming the preserve of the rich.
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Almost 90% of the 2,539 respondents had been required to work for free at some point in their career, creating an environment that is unaffordable for those who do not have other means of financial support. Of those who did get paid, more than a quarter said they earned less than £5,000 a year. A further 18% earned £5,000-£15,000, and 38% did not have a contract that provided job security.
This imbalance was found to affect women more than men, with the latter earning an average of £7,000 a year more and having a mean income of £29,000 compared with £22,000 for women. The inequality was persistent across all sectors of the arts, and regardless of how long people had worked in their career.
The survey was published as further arts cuts were expected to be announced during the government’s spending review on Wednesday.
The Guardian chose to illustrate its point with this picture of actor Eddie Redmayne with comedian Miranda Hart, stating that Redmayne was “singled out” as one of the affluent people “dominating performing arts schools.” This feels a little unfair to Redmayne, even though he does look exactly like one of the evil rich kids in every summer camp movie we’ve seen. Photograph by Tom Jenkins for the Guardian.
The Guardian quotes Create’s director Hadrian Garrard, who said that the UK was in danger of returning to a pre-1950s era when art was a closed-off playground for the wealthy. Compared to the last few decades, which Garrard called a “golden era,” that idea is pretty alarming. Suddenly the survey’s title, Panic! makes a lot more sense. The findings excuse the alarmist title. They are, according to Create:
- Those that earn over £50,000 p/a are most likely to believe that they got there through hard work, talent and ambition. Those earning under £5,000 p/a are most likely to believe that it’s not about what you know but who you know.
- The majority of white people in the arts don’t acknowledge the barriers facing BAME (black, asian and ethnic minorities) people trying to find a foothold in the sector.
- Women are more likely than men to have worked in the arts sector for free and once paid are generally paid less than their male counterparts.
- 30% of BAME people think ethnicity is very important to getting ahead, whilst only 10% of white people believe ethnicity is very important to their chances of getting ahead.
- 32% of women are likely to have done unpaid internships as opposed to 23% of men.
- On average men working in the cultural industries earn 32% more then women working in the sector
Even if you don’t subscribe to the absurd notion that people deserve to be paid for the work they do, this survey still doesn’t bode well for the arts. Art is valuable as a dialogue between the artists and their culture. What kind of dialogue can one hope for when the people talking all come from one narrow segment of society? Stagnation. An ineffectual elite endlessly glad-handing one another while other talent (perhaps more talented) is ignored due to the accident of its socioeconomic background. Suddenly the people arguing for further cuts to art funding start to resemble barbarians, sacking the country’s museums before the museums could be built.
We want to hear what our readers think of this study. How would you untangle this mess? Is the survey alarmist or does it predict a culture in danger of becoming stagnant. What does this mean for contemporary ceramic art in the UK?
Let us know in the comments.
Bill Rodgers is the Managing Editor of cfile.daily.
Since you asked what readers think and no one has chimed in I will give you my thoughts:
People have been making art long before it was a job to make art. The contemporary profession of art making is just the tip of an iceberg that is spread throughout the whole of society and the entirety of our history. We have praised the professionals for entirely justified reasons, but perhaps in doing so have taken our eyes off the creativity that is a natural part of being human. Of course most people don’t get paid for being creative or even do it as a means of exposure, so we tend to push the work of professionals into the limelight. Professionals are visible because there is an industry supporting their work. There are institutions for art that thrive in the limelight. But as with any light shined, there are shadows and areas simply not covered.
Of course it is easy to have strong biases for the masterful work of professionals, but when we say ‘art’ we are not simply saying ‘good art’. And its usually only ‘good art’ that gets exhibited and praised on a cultural level. As someone who teaches hobbyists, amateurs, and children I have to recognize that there is so much more to art than simply making a living from it. There is so much more to art than striving for excellence. There is so much more to art than its commercial value or cultural impact. For every big name artist being shown in galleries there are a thousand kids with drawings on their parent’s fridge. For every talented actor on the big screen there are millions of kids playing with dolls acting out scenes from their imagination. For every published author there are enough natural story tellers to spin every yarn many times over. For every prime time musician there are countless people singing in showers crooning along with songs on the radio.
There is something known as the survivorship bias, where we take as representative the ones who ‘made it’. This gives a very skewed perspective on what things matter. The truth with the arts isn’t simply that the survivors in the limelight are just the ones who developed a successful career and that the rest of the landscape is littered with failure. No. There is more to making art than simply having a successful career. Most people making art will never even attempt to make a living from their creativity.
I’m not going to question that coming from a middle class background, being white, and being male all have something to do with how well a person is able to play the system of earning a living from their art. Disputing that is like questioning why more poor people don’t drive Cadillacs and live in mansions. Society has rigged things in favor of its biases for as long as we’ve had culture. The point I am making is that art has more to do with natural human creativity than simply earning a living. Equating the arts with professionalism is such a narrow construal as to be quite laughable. As if art were invented when the first person got paid for creating something!
The danger as I see it is not necessarily that many people’s paths are obstructed in reaching career level involvement in the arts. Yes, we need to do as much as we can to make that more equitable. Rather, its that we so devalue our native creativity that we see as valuable only those things which can be bought and sold in an arts marketplace and are visible in the larger cultural landscape. Looking at it like that we have put all our chips on the bet that the arts are only extrinsically valuable. In arts advocacy this has hampered our message and done very little to sway outsiders to an actual appreciation for the arts. What we have lost in this gambit is the knowledge that often making art is its own justification. We have lost sight of the intrinsic value of art for the value it has in social benefits and simple marketplace worth. Art is so much bigger than those things. Perhaps it is time we honored art in its full breadth and humble glory……