Arts: Government Support

Lord Freyberg Excerpts

Thursday 16th November 2017 Grand Committee

[Lord Freyberg (CB)]

My Lords, I too thank the noble Earl, Lord Clancarty, who made an excellent summary of the issues facing artists and the difficulties placed on them following the Brexit referendum, with a squeeze on funding and a rise in the cost of living. In the time I have I will concentrate my attention on the visual arts. In doing so, I declare my experience as a fine artist.

As the noble Earl said, probably the most critical issue facing the visual arts is the shrinking of arts provision in state schools due to curriculum changes and the concentration on STEM. This, coupled with the Government’s doctrinaire support of the EBacc and the absence of arts subjects within its metric, is steadily eroding the number of students who might wish to consider a career in the arts as the opportunities to be exposed to creative and arts subjects decline.

Given the extraordinary success of our creative industries, our world-class art colleges, the international calibre of our visual artists and London being the second-largest art market in the world, you would have thought it an astonishing own goal not to fund creative arts subjects to a level that reflects their importance to our economy. Yet that is exactly what the Government are doing. Aside from the cultural benefits of the arts there are direct economic benefits for this country. We must act to defend them and safeguard the next generation of workers for our creative industries. It would therefore be good to know what steps the Government are taking to support arts provision at primary and secondary level.

When thinking about this debate, I was particularly struck by a stark statistic provided in a parliamentary briefing by a-n, the Artists Information Company, in its 2017 survey. This is, as the noble Earl mentioned, that 41% of visual artists have a total income from all sources of less than £10,000 and only 27% achieved a total income of more than £20,000. In reality, the majority of artists in the visual arts are scarcely getting by, despite 80% of them being qualified to degree level and above. Consequently, for many of the 35,000 graduates who leave art and design colleges every year, the high cost of living in cities, particularly London, and the lack of affordable workspaces is a real and growing problem. A constant theme I heard during my research for this speech is the drain or loss of talent, as more and more artists can no longer afford to spend time on their creative practice because they have to work on whatever they need to do to pay for their workspace and materials. This is particularly wasteful given the huge resources and effort we put into their training.

Investment in glamorous venues, such as Tate Modern and the V&A, where audiences can see new work has overshadowed a lack of investment in the building blocks of artistic research—the workspaces where artists create their work. If workspace for creative people is considered important and we wish to retain our position as a beacon of artistic practice, we need to address how we support this. But time is running out. A 2014 GLA report on artists’ workspaces in London, for example, stated that some 28% of artists’ studios are under threat within the next five years,

“as operators do not expect to be able to renew leasehold/rental agreements to secure their premises, demonstrating the precarious nature of affordable artists’ workspace”.

That helps explain why lately a steady stream of artists has been leaving London for towns on the south coast.

The experience of other cities, such as New York and Berlin, in addressing this problem has been one of tactical interventions, such as planning protection, direct investment in under-occupied buildings, reductions in business rates and core funding to subsidise rent. Similarly, many councils, such as Hackney, are trying hard to set policy to deliver affordable workspace. It would therefore be useful to hear what plans the Government are putting in place to protect these workspaces, especially when in recent years there has been a great deal of commissioned research yet as of today, it is still not clear what action has been taken to deal with the problem.

London’s escalating rents and increasing land values have had other knock-on effects. The rise of commercial rents has squeezed many small and emerging commercial galleries out of business. In recent years cutting-edge galleries such as Nettie Horn, Carroll/Fletcher, Vilma Gold and Limoncello have all closed, which makes it increasingly difficult for UK-based artists to enter the commercial gallery world. International galleries such as the Gagosian, Hauser & Wirth, David Zwirner and the Pace Gallery all tend to take on artists who have already established themselves. So we have a conundrum in that as cultural consumers, London has never given us more access to the world of contemporary art through these extraordinary international art spaces but, for artists, there appear to be fewer routes for our home-grown talent and, by extension, for our gallerists and curators. It would be good to know whether this has been recognised and understood as a concern by organisations such as the Arts Council and, if so, whether there are any strategies in place to address this, as they are a vital part of the arts ecology.

National museums and organisations funded by the Arts Council also need to play their part. Too often, publicly-funded galleries pay artists almost nothing as a fee when they have spent months making work for an exhibition and borne many of the costs, such as studio rent. In some cases, the galleries pocket the entry fees from the public to visit such exhibitions. This effectively keeps many artists in poverty. As the noble Earl said, galleries should pay artists proper fees for their work as set out by organisations such as Artists’ Union England. I hope the DCMS and Arts Council England will look to formalise these payments as a condition of receiving funding. At the same time, artists who have benefited from the publicity and acclaim of showing in public galleries should expect to contribute a percentage of the sale of any exhibited artworks to reimburse some of the gallery’s exhibition costs.

The other big issue is Brexit. There appear to have been few discussions about what impact Brexit will have on our access to culture, specifically museum exhibitions, and how this may inhibit European international opportunities for UK artists, as well as for incoming artists’ shows. There is a real danger that we will become inward looking, not only in terms of visual arts. Related to that is the issue of visas, both for museums and galleries wanting to attract international artists and for art schools wishing to continue to attract large numbers of international students, as well as international artists who can enrich their programmes. Although welcome, yesterday’s announcement of the doubling of exceptional talent visas from 1,000 to 2,000 is merely a sticking plaster. It remains to be seen whether that will have any impact on artists, but it does not begin to answer how we maintain Britain’s reputation as an open and welcoming cultural hub. It would be good to know what the Government’s plans are in response to that.