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The worst of times, the best of times

by Simon Tait
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Thanks for the bundle, Rishi, but what about the workers?
 
After the relieved welcome for “the biggest ever one-off investment in UK culture” as the government calls its £1.57bn arts fund announced on Sunday night, comes the reckoning. How will the money be divvied up? What about the freelancers the creative industries rely so heavily on? What precisely are the crown jewels? Why so late? Where does Neil Mendoza fit in all this? Whatever next?
 
What we know is that England is to get £1.15bn of the pot, Scotland £97m, Wales £59m and Northern Ireland £33m. The English money will be handed out in grants (£880m) and loans (£270m) “on generous terms”, with £100m going to cultural institutions (and since the national museums and galleries are directly funded by DCMS non-national museum curators fear the lion’s share won’t be going their way) and English Heritage, and £120m in investment to restart capital projects stalled by the virus. The decisions on who gets what will come from “expert independent figures” at the likes of ACE, Historic England, the National Lottery Heritage Fund and the BFI. So plenty of overtime to be had there.
 
Nothing about the workforce, 700,000 of them, some of whom have been getting their redundancy notices in the last few days. According to the Creative Industries Federation (CIF) 2017 report Creative Freelancers, freelancers represent 47% of creative workers compared with 15% of the workforce as a whole. That’s nearer 70% in the theatre, reckons the former Royal Court artistic director Ian Rickson. “What people don’t know” he adds “is that a really high proportion of these workers live below the poverty line”. 
 
So the hope was that the other bit, the further extension of furloughing that would allow particularly theatre and concert hall staffs to stay and work towards the sometime reopening, would come on Wednesday with Sunak’s summer statement, #PlanforJobs. Zilch – “we cannot afford a lengthening of furloughing across the board” and of course “there can be no exceptions”. It ends in October, just as rehearsals for a life-saving panto season should be starting.

The unions were the first to burst the bubble. The response of Bectu’s Philippa Childs to Wednesday’s announcement was that if this uniquely talented and hugely undervalued group don’t get urgent and special attention “the future of the £100bn sector is at risk as highly skilled freelance and self-employed workers are forced to seek work elsewhere”, presumably in  the hospitality industry which, it turns out, is what #PlanforJobs is really about. “Creative workers need action from the government and they need it now” she declared. At Equity Christine Payne said her hardship fund was being nibbled at by 30 destitute actors a week: “It’s all well and good having fabulous buildings but if you have no-one to work in them, to perform, whether it's the National Theatre, the Mill at Sonning, the Bolton Octagon or a club in the north…. You need people” she said. 

“Alongside support for job creation, government should further unlock the creative potential of the next generation by supporting new start-ups and freelance work, and by introducing greater flexibility to the apprenticeship system” said the CIF’s Caroline Norbury. Perhaps it will, but the fact remains that while, as Nick Hytner says, it’s deemed safe now to sit side-by-side strangers on trains and aeroplanes for hours on end, we cannot sit next to anyone else in a theatre or concert hall for 90 minutes. These places can earn nothing until audiences are allowed back, and while fantastically imaginative digital versions of drama, music and dance are delighting us, no-one has yet found a satisfactory way of making that pay. VAT is being cut for theatres from 20% to 5%, but only until January and that will be no use while theatres are closed.

On Monday Oliver Dowden, the culture secretary who has to get some credit for the rescue fund even if it really belongs in the deeper recesses of No 10, gravely allowed that not all jobs/organisations could be saved, and that theatres opening was “still some way off”. The priority had to be “the crown jewels such as the Royal Albert Hall”, which actually creates nothing at all, so the crown jewels seem to be the places tourists have heard of, with the Bolton Octagon way down the list.

Theatres, then, have closed and many more have already made redundancies because with opening still vaguely some way off they can earn nothing to pay wages. None of this needed to have happened if this decision had been made a month ago, says the administrators at Southampton’s collapsed Nuffield Theatres, so why wasn’t it? Because the government can only react, and having already made a decision and had to change it when the blindingly obvious had become unavoidable, it takes a while to turn the tanker around.

As to Neil Mendoza, the Commissioner for Cultural Recovery and Renewal appointed by Dowden six weeks ago, he has been hugger-mugger with the boffins of the Arts and Humanities Research Council looking beyond rescue with the AHRC’s Boundless Creativity programme to build a new, so far unnamed, project - also announced on Wednesday - that will explore how the arts can use the new digital technologies they didn’t know existed in March. The £1.57bn package, Mendoza says, has been months in the making and is a “huge endorsement” of the cultural sector, which has been doubly creative just in learning how to survive. He says the committee he’s co-chairing with the AHRC’s Andrew Thompson is working on the blueprint for the sector’s digital future, “what works, what hasn’t worked – and what can be monetised”. 

Audiences have been coming to plays and concerts in numbers never imagined, but online and for free. Creatives have been learning how their traditional skills can be adapted to new requirements. Partnerships are being discovered and exploited. The “knowledge economy” is being explored. Producers are finding out how to blend live and virtual performances.

The work of universities and agencies such as King’s and Nesta, and slightly shadowy quangos like the Industrial Strategy Challenge Fund (which among many other disparate things is looking at audiences of the future and clusters of creative industries) is being corralled to create a report which will be published in a year’s time. Mendoza’s project will also be looking at other things that have emerged lately and that could be affected by a broader, even global, creative community, like climate change, racism, diversity and cultural education. 

It's exciting blue skies thinking, or would be if the horizon wasn’t so overcast by worries about how to earn a living, not just in the creative world’s new digital future but now.

Welcome as it is, a bundle of money alone is not the answer: there needs to be transformative thinking characterised by what the creative industries have achieved these last four months, but involving long-term financial commitment involving investment, devolution of funding decisions to local and regional level, tax breaks. Let’s believe that they will be part of the blue skies thinking too.
 

“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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