Owen Kelly critiques Artists’ lives: ecologies for resilience in a MIAAW podcast. In particular, he considers the efficacy and social resonance of the study’s research methodology which — unusually for the arts — is qualitative and longitudinal. He judges its value as provision of a unique and detailed examination of the kind of lives artists live when culture is seen politically as an industry rather than as a social responsibility.
“Artists’ lives: ecologies for resilience is an unusual report – it doesn’t finish with a set of policy recommendations or conclusions about a way forward because it’s not that kind of report – it’s something else. The main body consists of fourteen anonymised portraits of specific artists, each at a different stage of their life, and each beset by a more or less unique set of responsibilities and obligations.
“Each of the artists’ portraits begins with a short paragraph summarising the individual’s position. Written in the first person and discussing that artist’s life in their own words, it’s an attempt to ask the artist to explain everything they want to explain, in their own terms, about their life as they’ve lived it to date. These portraits differ from each other in the specific situations they describe and the particularities of the lives lived. Taken together, they offer a broad view of how visual artists in Britain who are not famous, not superstars, nonetheless manage to continue their practices. Although the report concentrates on visual artists, I think more or less similar stories would almost certainly emerge if someone were to interview individual musicians or authors or actors or dancers.
“The report talks about the fourteen artists as being representative. I’m not entirely sure about this… or… what they’re supposed to be representative of. I’m also not sure if it really matters. It seems to me that what they really represent is the impossibility of wrapping up artists’ lives into neat categories and then trying to deal with them as though they were examples of the categories into which you put them. The artists taking part in the study all have aspects of their lives in common, and these are well worth looking at, but none of them are simply the sum of those aspects.”
Listen to Owen Kelly’s review of Artists’ lives: ecologies of resilience in the Meanwhile on an abandoned bookshelf category in the MIAAW podcast series on https://miaaw.net, also available on any podcast channel including https://podcasts.apple.com/gb/podcast/miaaw-net/id1453675276?i=1000729854035