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’s 5‑point arts fix up plan.
Pledges in these documents of new legislation to protect creative freelancers' rights and future livelihoods from poor employment practices and excesses of a digital and increasingly AI world are welcomed for their contribution to power shifts towards an equitable, justice-based society. There's a concern though that any practical application will have limited impact in the 'service-industry' framed arts where funded organisations' perennial cry is the need for 'more money' before they can do things differently.
The podcast also explored the relevance of Arts Council England's 5-point arts fix up plan to practitioners and their situated practices. Authored by ACE chair Nick Serota, its exhortation to artists to be 'free and fearless' is questionable when ACE's sole R&D resource for individual artists is under-resourced and over-competitive. (There's a killer stat to back this point, courtesy of artist Anthony Padgett's FoI request). Mindful of Shaparak Khorsandi's point in this Guardian piece, that 'it’s almost impossible to start from nothing, it's not - as Serota claims - not just the exceptional art seen in funded arts institutions but ALL art that takes artists time to make, .
My research which examined strategies during the pandemic in small organisations and cultural groupings where artists' interests are embedded found arguments for radical changes to arts infrastructures and calls for the government to devolve arts policy, funding and value-making to the grassroots. As
David Byrne - now Artistic Director of Royal Court Theatre - put it, to
have any chance of getting through the challenges in the long-term,
people at the helm of arts institutions need to get far better at
sharing out resources. 'They can't keep saying it's that thing over there that's the solution, and absolving themselves of responsibility for doing the hard thinking about future structures.'
Listen to the MIAAW podcast here - the bit where bees (don't) appear is towards the end.
References
Creating growth: Labour's plan for the arts, culture and creative industries (2024)
Britain needs a cultural reboot: here's my 5-point plan for the arts, Nicholas Serota, Guardian 14 July 2024 https://www.theguardian.com/cu...
Recommended reads
- Justin O'Connor's incisive critique of Creating growth: Labour's plan for the arts, culture and creative industries in Cultural Trends (free access)
- See also (and digest deeply) Justin O'Connor's book Culture is not an industry: reclaiming art and culture for the common good, Manchester University Press, 2024
- The State of the Arts
from Campaign for the Arts & University of Warwick, 2024 (free
access) advocates for addressing lack of legal and policy status for
arts freelancers on precarious low incomes as part of achieving the
sector's future sustainability.
- Research by Sustainable Cultural Future which identifies the 'heterogeneity' of creative freelancers concludes that absence of their 'voices' in policymaking contributes to sustaining their precarity.