Dear Artists, Please Don’t Quit
It’s been a really bad week, and a really bad year, to be an artist.
On Tuesday, ITV News claimed on Twitter that British Chancellor Rishi Sunak said ‘musicians and others in [the] arts should retrain and find other jobs’ when he announced a universally detested new jobs scheme which would protect ‘viable’ jobs only.
Rishi then got upset and claimed he was misquoted.
What he actually said when asked whether people in the arts and music should get a job in another sector was “that is fresh and new opportunity for people. That’s exactly what we should be doing.” Which is worse, because it implies his abandonment of an entire sector - who pay taxes just like everyone else - is actually a good thing.
Then the Fatima meme started doing the rounds. It’s an image of a woman of colour who is a professional ballet dancer (or possibly a model) lacing up her pointe shoe next to a message that reads “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet)”.
I’m not posting the image here. I can’t bring myself to when the battles black ballet dancers in particular still go through to secure a professional dance career they know will be brief are so hard won.
Dancers Marie Astrid Mence & Ebony Thomas. Photo by ASH for Ballet Black, a UK ballet company you can support here.
Oliver Dowden claims the Fatima graphic didn’t come from the government. It doesn’t matter. The screenshots of suggestions generated by people using the retraining assessment tool the government built were even more dystopian.
The Fatima meme perfectly illustrates the painfully callous message the government have been sending artists since the beginning of the Coronavirus crisis.
A huge number of artists have lost their entire incomes, been rejected from the pitiful freelancer support scheme, missed out on Arts Council emergency funding and watched venues who supported them close permanently, whilst the billionaire CEO of a music streaming company told them to release music more frequently and their own government told them their jobs weren’t viable.
All of this is unfolding whilst the possibility of moving to another country which does support artists like Germany or France is rapidly closing, because Brexit is looming (you’ve still got until December 31st!).
Here’s the thing: the Coronavirus crisis is temporary. We don’t know how temporary yet, but it is temporary. Every single industry is in a state of flux and no one knows what the ‘new normal’ will be, so telling people retrain or enter a new sector (which one?!) now is terrible advice.
Blithely suggesting artists pour millions of pounds worth of professional training, invaluable expertise and years of experience down the drain permanently because of the government’s inept mishandling of a temporary crisis that needs an urgent solution doesn’t even make economic sense.
An arts career is like planting a field of avocado trees*. Each avocado tree takes five to thirteen years to bear fruit. Some of the trees you plant and tend won’t bear much fruit, but other trees will flourish, it’s just hard to say when.
This is the policy equivalent of telling every avocado farmer they may as well bulldoze all of the avocado trees in the country because there’s been a bad winter, whilst gesturing vaguely towards the countryside and muttering ‘plant something else?’. Plant what exactly? Apples? Corn? Wind turbines?
If there’s going to be no financial support for artists from this negligent government, sensible advice might be to use your transferrable skills and creativity to try to pivot to temporary work which is not too distant from the work you usually do; teaching, consultancy, project production and management etc.
Or try a different job in the creative sector that might help your career as an artist later down the line. Or a temporary job that leaves your brain enough space to focus on your creative ideas. Or not working and claiming Universal Credit (which carries a bizarre stigma in the UK when in much of the rest of Europe it’s seen as perfectly normal), whilst using the time to do additional training or research to get even better at the job which is your true calling. Or just do whatever you can bring yourself to do, even if that’s mostly crying and sleeping, because this year has been terrible.
None of those options are ideal, but most artists improvise and take less than ideal work (or have had to at some point) in order to survive.
None of which mean arts jobs aren’t viable.
“The UK’s roaring creative industries made a record contribution to the economy in 2017, smashing through the £100 billion mark”
- The UK Government
It simply means the government are continuing to prioritise subsidy of other industries, because they don’t care about the arts and we don’t have strong enough unions.
Not only are the arts viable (I refuse to write a long justification about what the world would look like without any art when we all know it would look desperately bleak), the arts are actually one of the safer long-term career paths.
The Coronavirus crisis is temporary, but automation is coming and it will be permanent. The slow, ungainly waddle towards the digital revolution many industries have been resisting has now been accelerated.
This crisis has forced us all to consider which aspects of our lives are vital, and which were just habits we couldn’t be bothered to change.
If there’s one thing we’ve had the chance to test thoroughly during this period, it’s the fact that nothing can replace experiencing art in person, with other people. The plethora of recent digital arts options is wonderful, but it’s clear it’s a different experience.
Don’t you want to just want to watch Tobe Nwigwe’s “The Pandemic Exerience” live, with the instruments plugged in?
Economists and futurists have predicted for years (see the much cited study The Future of Employment by Oxford University academics Frey and Osborne) that jobs with a high level of creativity would be those most likely to withstand the coming changes to the economic landscape.
Even former Conservative MP Amber Rudd claimed that automation would make the jobs of the future more creative as recently as May 2019. Rishi Sunak’s recent statements and actions are stealing confidence and hope from the very people who’ll need it to help fight to rebuild the arts industry of the future.
There will be a future for the arts, it will just look different. If that prospect is too overwhelming and tenuous to believe in right now, no one will blame you for feeling like quitting.
This is just a reminder that being an artist is not a niche hobby for the rich, making art is valuable and viable work.
Artists will be needed and wanted in the future, and even if you do feel you have to quit we will be waiting if you decide to return. But please don’t quit. Please keep fighting, even though you shouldn’t have to, this is your calling and you have a right to pursue it no matter what a heartless rich idiot with a red box says.
*Thank you to my friend the dancer, actress and poet Cindy Claes who turned my dry explanation of compound interest in to a beautiful analogy about avocado trees.
