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Staging the apocalypse

by Simon Tait
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Most theatres can’t open before the autumn and those that do will have to operate at 30% box office to meet social distancing requirements, producing an income that would be well below costs. Apocalypse.

Museums and galleries are making their collections freely available online, but the complications of distancing in exhibition galleries and making their earners, refreshments and shops, all but inaccessible will be beyond some and there will be casualties great and small, as the Arts Council’s Darren Henley concedes. Already Southampton’s Nuffield Theatre has gone into administration with the loss of 80 jobs and in Edinburgh the local authority owned Royal Lyceum (pictured forlorn here) has been forced into "hibernation" after running up losses of more than £700,000. 70% of venues will have run out of money completely by Christmas.

 

The RSC has lost 95% of its trading income during the lockdown. The National Theatre is in the same water-logged boat with its artistic director Rufus Norris saying that thanks to social distancing theatres are no longer viable businesses – they would have to play to 30% houses income from which would not be enough to meet costs. The Royal Opera House has lost 60% of its income – "Our level of subsidy is less than 20% and we need 95% occupancy to break even” said Covent Garden’s CEO Alex Beard. The Southbank Centre’s CEO Elaine Bedell said on Tuesday that it probably can’t reopen again properly until next spring, if then: “We join a number of other organisations and venues in sounding the alarm about the long-term health of UK arts and culture”. 
 
ACE has put together a £160m rescue trolley but Henley tells us this week that it’s not enough. He sees a three-phase four year plan working before we can hope for anything like normality. “It’s sadly inevitable, at this point, that many businesses in many sectors, will be unable to weather such a fierce and lengthy storm” he blogs. “And there is no evidence to suggest that the cultural sector will be any different. We know that there is far to go, and that challenges and further losses lie ahead. 
 
So the unthinkable has to be thought. “If we lose our performance culture we lose it for good” the RSC’s Greg Doran told The Observer this week – and for me an exhibition is as much a performance as a play or a concert. “It is really serious now”.

This is the artist talking apocalypse, and the government’s response has been to turn to business rather than creative brains for the way to avoid it.

The new culture secretary, Oliver Dowden, says “we need to find new and innovative ways for the arts to return in some form, without packing venues and risking a rise in infections” and to do that he has created an eight-person task force - chaired by himself - and making one of them a “recovery commissioner”. But they mostly don’t come from Doran’s side of the sector: “Experts in their fields, they’ll be instrumental in identifying creative ways to get these sectors up and running again” is Dowden’s indistinct pronouncement.
 
Tamara Rojo from English National Ballet is the only artist on the task force. Alex Scott was an Arsenal footballer and is now a sports broadcaster. Nicholas Serota is chairman of the Arts Council, ex-director of Tate. Edward Mellors is the founder of Mellors Group Events, “a market leader in the management and delivery of quality, creative events”. Neil Mendoza, the newly created Commissioner for Cultural Recovery and Renewal, is an entrepreneur, publisher and philanthropist. Michael Grade is a former chairman of the BBC and ITV.  Martha Lane-Fox founded LastMinute.com. Mark Cornell is CEO of the Ambassador Theatre Group, “a major international theatre organisation”.
 
Mendoza’s role as the “culture tsar”, as he is inevitably being called, is obscure: it is advisory, presenting “an expert and independent voice” on how UK culture and heritage can begin the road to recovery. He is expected to “garner the strongest, most innovative ideas for (the sector’s) renewal and present them to DCMS ministers and officials. He will initiate an ambitious philanthropic focus  - philanthropy to be the saviour again, but stuff for another blog - on arts and culture, and help ensure Arts Council England, National Lottery Heritage Fund and Historic England and other important bodies work together with DCMS to develop and deliver support to the sector” as they demonstrably already are.
 
But how does any of that that point to recovery for the arts?
 
The institutions are broke and they normally a rely on a workforce at least a third of which is freelance or self-employed; some but far from all have survived on the furlough scheme, due to end in August. The Job Retention Scheme in which the government pays 80% of wages works only if employers can make their 20% contribution, and they can't. For smaller organisations there is a Coronavirus Business Interruption Loan Scheme offering loans to small and medium-sized companies, but according to the Creative Industries Federation (CIF) 45% say they don’t even understand it, never mind benefit from it.
 
“Vast numbers of freelancers are missing out” Julian Bird of the Society of London Theatre and UK Theatre told The Stage. “The fact that anyone who wasn’t working in the 2018/19 tax year isn’t eligible has counted out an awful lot of people, including every single graduate from last summer.

“And, of course, you have lots of people who work between PAYE and self-employed. In our sector, the average wage of people not eligible for the SEISS (Self-Employed Income Support Scheme for which you need to earn less than £50,000 a year to qualify) is not £200,000. There are a lot of people whose net profit is just above £50,000 who are left with nothing

“We have a huge freelance community where the risks are enormous."

What the government is being told by theatre leaders - and this can broadly be applied to museums and heritage too, where on-going centrally-funded rate relief will also be necessary - is that they need:
 
*A major cash injection or loans
*More help for freelancers
*A new boost to the theatre tax credit scheme
*An extension of job retention scheme

The RSC is more specific, adding the need for a national task force of self-employed theatre and performance makers.

If those are the immediate criteria, the business approach is the right one - Covid-19 is not going to destroy creativity, but it will send into oblivion the means of expressing and enjoying it. Yet if Dowden’s approach looks right, the problem remains that the setting up of task forces and working parties and the appointment of commissioners is the signal that government departments are aiming for the long grass. 

There isn’t any. As the CIF’s Caroline Norbury – surprisingly not a member of Dowden’s task force - says: “The crux of it is that creative businesses need money now, and they can’t wait another month”.
https://www.artsindustry.co.uk/feature/2031-the-creative-crunch

“If you can’t come to art then art will come to you” says the artist Sam Harris, and never has that been truer than in this eerie Covid envelope in history. 

Artists, producers, actors, designers, poets - even archaeologists - are making culture come to you, and it might change the way we access and support the arts for ever. 

Theatres, galleries, museums, concert halls, bookshops, are shut, causing untold financial nightmares, and yet the resourcefulness of the cultural world has never been more evident - or more valuable – in equal measure with its generosity. What aren’t shut are the airways, audial, televisual and digital. 

So just to cheer us up artists such as Quentin Blake, Michael Craig-Martin, Gilbert & George and Damien Hirst have created downloadable posters, some specifically in support of the NHS. At every turn there’s a free concert online, a virtual exhibition tour, a live-streamed theatrical performance, all for free, or mostly, and many of them ask for participation so that there’s an active involvement. 

The National Theatre Live’s latest recordings, of Tamsin Greig’s Twelfth Night and Polly Findlay’s production of Treasure Islandwent out last night via YouTube from National Theatre at Home https://www.nationaltheatre.org.uk/nt-at-home. And yesterday the RSC marked Shakespeare’s 456th birthday with its largest ever audience by persuading people online to perform a speech, bake a cake, paint a picture, even serenade a neighbour over the garden fence in Shakespearean theme, and over 1,000 did video here. Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre has an annual inter-generational show by its resident Young Company and Elders Company, and the show will go on despite the lockdown, but bigger and better. Instead of the planned show, twice the number of people expected are involved in what is being called Connect Fest, “a theatre show, music festival and soap opera rolled into one”, 40 participants aged 14 to 82 getting together for a show that will be released daily on the Royal Exchange website https://www.royalexchange.co.uk between May 11 and May 15. It may be the model for the future.

The National Gallery already has a vast digital audience, but it grew by 2,000% after lockdown with a tour of the gallery’s pictures which has an emphasis on images of domestic life by staff speaking from their own homes. Artists are teaching, too, with special tutorials on the radio for home-bound kids. And heritage: other museums and galleries are open to those who log-on, with Historic England teaming up with the Council for British Archaeology and the University of Lincoln to offer Dig School, a series of free archaeology workshops helping families and children explore the past through their lap-tops  http://digschool.org.uk/

An important part of what’s been going on in the last month or so has been to do with supporting arts workers in their straits, despite a less than helpful attitude from the Treasury – the latest reflex twitch of its malevolent tail is to tell museums and galleries getting government grants they can’t offer top-ups to furloughed workers in the Job Retention Scheme which gives them 80% of salary, which is often basic national minimum https://www.artsindustry.co.uk/news/2017-treasury-blocking-museum-salary-top-ups.
 
The BBC was one of the first to step forward with its Culture in Quarantine initiative to commission new work for The Space that it runs with the Arts Council https://www.bbc.co.uk/arts. The Sam Harris of the opening paragraph has just launched the Online Art Show website to help sell the art for artists whose exhibitions have been cancelled. In a more catholic spirit, the German Turner winner Wolfgang Tillmans is selling posters of his artwork for £50 to support music venues and arts spaces at risk of going out of business because of Covid, and he’s recruited 40 other artists – including Andreas Gursky, Marlene Dumas and Betty Tompkins – to step in with his campaign “where a lack of audience is causing an existential threat”, and Tillmans is paying for the printing and shipping of posters.

But the TaitMail prize for the best initiative that not only keeps the art in the public eye but at the same time adds some financial relief to artists goes to a scheme dreamed up by a working painter in which artists can help themselves. This is Artist Support Pledge, devised in his Sussex studio by Matthew Burrows and aimed not at the Hirsts, Gurskys and Craig-Martins but the lesser mortals, the more than competent professional painters who survive by selling their work and whose livelihood has been cancelled by a germ. One of the artists, Elizabeth Hannaford emails: “We post five pieces of work at £200 or less each (incl in my case 10% to Mind) using the hashtag #ArtistSupportPledge and when we’ve sold 5 for £1,000 we pledge to buy another’s work for £200. I was thrilled that two framed postcard-sized w’colours sold within hours - to very good homes”.  There are no enforcements, it’s based on trust. 

And it has gone, to coin a phrase, viral. It started on March 17 and in its first week got 9,000 pledges, worth around £9m. “After about four days it went absolutely crazy and I didn't really have a lot of choice but to run with it because it was too big a wave to duck under” says Burrows. “The goodwill has been unbelievable from everywhere in the world—from El Salvador, to America, Germany, New Zealand, Italy and Australia”.

Alongside, and with his friend Keith Tyson, Burrows has created another Instagram outlet for what he calls “artist-on-artist generosity”, Isolation Art School https://www.instagram.com/isolationartschool/?hl=en. It’s free home-based projects for everyone, old and young, ranging from how to make table sculptures by Henry Ward to Isobel Smith making a wearable elephant’s head from  old newspaper, and to come there is flower arranging, painting with varnish, jewellery making to name a few, from the likes of Matt Collishaw, Nigel Cook and Sarah Pickstone. There is even a course for A level students whose schools are closed.

“I want to create an environment and a culture that has human beings attached to it. Not just this anonymous digital thing” says Burrows, and there’s nothing in it for him more than for any of the other artists. “What we are putting out into the world is a movement not a business. The formula is simple: you give generously, you receive gratefully and you give back. That’s it.”

And for the section allowing #ArtistsSupportPledge beneficiaries to give to a nominated charity (the first has been is Hospital Rooms, which commissions artworks for secure NHS mental health units) he has given a label that could be for all the gratis arts offering that has burgeoned in this blight: "The Gifted Keep Giving". 

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