Knowledge of artists’ individual experiences of making progress, sustaining art practices and of their livelihood choices over time is vital to understanding what makes the lives of artists liveable. This new qualitative research which examines what artists are doing all day and why contributes to understanding what are the most supportive infrastructures and ecologies for contemporary visual artists over their life cycle.
In this MIAAW podcast, Owen Kelly — author of Cultural democracy now, Routledge, 2023 — and I discuss implications for artists of the (now) Labour government’s ‘promise little’ pre-election arts policy with its misplaced reliance on creative industries rhetorics and in the context of social change, cultural democracy and lack of bees in my garden, and identify flaws in Arts Council England’s5‑point arts fix up plan.
The combination of pandemic impacts on the public sector and high cost of living means that while every effort has been made to protect and stabilise arts institutions and staffers as any of a veritable glory of surveys of artists — including Industria’s expose — conclude, artists’ social and economic status is in systematic decline. And as new published plans from the Labour Party and Contemporary Visual Arts Network (CVAN) reveal, responsibility for flourishing sustainable futures for practitioners is destined to remain firmly out of artists’ own hands
Although artists’ livelihoods depend on their agency and capacity to create and capitalise on their social and economic assets, there’s an inevitable — and unenviable — struggle between the intrinsic motivations underpinning their art practices and the ‘small business’ expectations of a self-employed status.
The basis for artists’ livelihoods is holding agency and capacity to create and capitalise on their economic and social assets. But as this text shows, it’s the eternal struggle between the intrinsic motivations driving art practices and the “small business” expectations attached to self-employment status that is root cause of their continually precarious situation.
Policy and many of the programmes intended to be supportive of artists’ development and careers may lack insight into the nuance of artists’ lives and how they pursue art practices. By collating data from a range of authoritative sources, this new independently produced resource provides a demographic and economic profile of artists as an aid to those committed to aiding artists’ to survive and (maybe even) to thrive, a bit.
Podcast discussion with Owen Kelly and Sophie Hope in the MIAAW series exploring the impossible infrastructure for artists’ practices and livelihoods.
In conversation with Art Monthly’s Chris McCormack, Susan Jones considers the implications for artists trying to make a living from art practices in an “impossible arts infrastructure”.
This presentation addresses the problematic conditions for artists’ practices and lives that define and confine their contributions to contemporary visual arts and society. The aim is to inform sectoral and political discussions on future remedial policy interventions, strategies and infrastructures that ameliorate barriers to artists’ multiple contributions and secure their social and economic status.
An independent review demonstrating the severe impacts of the pandemic on the social and economic circumstances of visual artists reveals the divergent perspectives at national and local levels in England about what artists and the arts are for, and on how and where future arts policy should be made and implemented.
