Retraining for apocalypse: we can’t afford to lose the arts to the Tories

Should art be measured according to its profit margins? Consider Housekeeping, the DJ collective headed up by a notorious London property developer: is their contribution to art greater than the combined efforts of everyone who’s ever given music a go without amassing a fortune sizable enough to seize Brixton for themselves? Is tearing down parts of a neighbourhood and replacing them with luxury accommodation itself an artform? No. Purely on artistic merit, they are lower than vermin. They are amoeba that cling to dirt on a rat.

Of course, it’s entirely possible to read this and think “Uhh, I quite like Housekeeping…” A wonderful thing about art and culture is that it allows for all sorts of individual responses, according to who’s experiencing it, how, where, and when – and if the stylings of musical war criminals Housekeeping inexplicably get you through your day, then more power to you.

For an extremely long time, however, there has been a concerted effort to reduce culture to objective metrics. Box office returns, chart positions, ad revenue, ticket sales – it’s all a financial Rotten Tomatoes. I would contend that one of the very worst ways to consider the value of culture to a society is through the prism of economic interest. Unfortunately, we live in Tory Britain, buoyed by an ongoing global health crisis, which demands that we must. 

Neoliberal hegemony does not care that culture might benefit a society in ways which do not make Line Go Up. So while I deeply wish this wasn’t the case, it feels slightly futile to try and appeal to our society’s present custodians, the Conservative Party of Great Britain, in anything other than the most cynical capitalistic terms. 

So how much is culture worth? According to the government’s own figures, the creative industries contribute £111.7 billion a year to the economy. While the state is scarcely able to supplant the entire sector, this puts the Tories’ crowing about their £1.57 billion ‘cultural recovery’ programme into some perspective. Against their own figures, the sector takes all of 5.1 days to contribute this back to the economy. So why is it being allowed to sink?

Already this year, we’ve witnessed the permanent closure of an unprecedented number of venues, both independent and big chains – cinemas, theatres, concert halls, nightclubs, comedy clubs, galleries – unable to bear the financial burden or risk of operating under indefinite permutations of lockdown. Hundreds of thousands of jobs have already been lost. As we enter a winter and the near-enough complete withdrawal of furlough, it will take something miraculous to prevent this spiralling into the millions. 

Yesterday, a tweet from the ITV News Politics account attributed a quote to Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak, in which he suggested that those in the creative industries should simply retrain. Though this was misleading – Sunak was speaking more generally about a need for people to adapt to the economic climate, rather than cheerily instructing the cast of Wicked to learn to code – the consequences of the Tory’s indifference to and inaction around the sector’s fate is hardly less callous.

“Where the creative industries are specifically concerned, it’s been true for quite some time that a select few are actually able to draw an income primarily or solely from their art”

This holds true for other industries under similar threat; the job losses will be devastating, both financially and mentally. Having Sunak effectively shrug and tell you “Your career is no longer viable, find another,” as your entire professional livelihood abruptly immolates in front of you is not much of comfort. Realistically, we are entering a monumental recession that will necessitate many people trying to find alternative avenues of work, but it’s a necessity made sharper by the Conservatives' completely inadequate, punitive-by-design welfare system. This is compounded further still by the sheer volume of people being made unemployed at once, competing in a jobs market already experiencing a severe shortage of work, given that entire industries are becoming obsolete. People should retrain as… what, exactly? The beneficiaries of hereditary privilege? 

Where the creative industries are specifically concerned, it’s been true for quite some time that a select few are actually able to draw an income primarily or solely from their art. It’s relatively badly paid, for the most part. Those who do succeed are often drawn from an exclusive milieu – those whose independent wealth means they are either able to sustain a career as a lark, or hone their craft over time without the pressures of needing to draw much of an income, until their breakthrough. Having attended the same private school or been produced from the same ballbag as an influential industry gatekeeper rarely hurts either. 

The likelihood of this class composition improving under the economic climate is pretty low. Yet, it’s exactly because of this that the Tory hierarchy are so insouciant towards the arts. It’s not that they object to this class composition – after all, it mirrors their own – it’s that the arts are perceived to be an amusingly self-indulgent hobby, pursued by those of their peer group not suitably serious enough about the business of making money. According to this perception, the victims of the arts industry going extinct would be the idle rich, forced to forego their juvenile daydreams of becoming folk singers to manage hedge funds instead. If dear old Bertie and Rupert really must carry on their quaint little pastime, they can jolly well find ways to fund it themselves – the subtext of Sunak’s insistence that “new business models” must emerge, such as holding plays over Zoom. 

“Artistic endeavour matters, even if only to the extent that it brings you fulfillment and joy: that’s if you’re painting by numbers, fumbling through Ableton tutorials, or performing with your local am-dram group”

This is an utterly garbled way of thinking, even when parsed through the logic of unscrupulous money-making and financial interest. The collapse of cultural production would have a disastrous domino effect on all manner of interdependent industries, including those that the Tories traditionally hold dear. If the physical spaces where people go to enjoy culture wither and die, then it’s not just artists or the thousands employed by venues who will suffer: all manner of restaurants, cafés, and pubs rely on custom resulting from the footfall of nearby cultural institutions. If there’s nothing to actually do in city and town centres, if all that’s left is rotting in front of Netflix, why will people bother to leave the house, let alone frequent the high street? As businesses struggle to survive, commercial rents will take a battering, because what use is a prime location if nobody can afford it? It’s not unlikely that vulturous developers will try to take advantage of this situation, swooping in to claim the abandoned buildings and land for redevelopment, but property needs to retain value for these schemes to work. Cities are looking nowhere near like the safest long-term investment they used to be for real estate; huge swathes of the previously captive workforce have just been rendered unemployed, or else discovered they can work remotely, and there’s little incentive to stay when the cost of living remains astronomical and the cultural offering is being laid to ruin.

Having to argue in favour of the arts in terms of rent-seeking, capitalist endeavour is exasperating, especially when more tragic consequences are at stake. Artists who were never employed full-time in the arts could suffer several times over. They could be losing any additional revenue stream that they currently derive from their art, on top of their primary income – and then be forced to retrain for a hyper-competitive ‘jobs market’ they were already a part of, their remaining free time to devote to art decimated. Beyond the individual, allowing the remaining venues spaces where people can produce, perform, or experience art and culture to go under will do untold damage to civic life.

“Culture is more than an entry in a ledger, a zero in a bank account, a harvested revenue stream, and a glint in an unscrupulous shareholder’s eye. Culture allows us to make sense of our lives, to savour it, and share it with our fellow human beings”

Artistic endeavour matters, even if only to the extent that it brings you fulfillment and joy: that’s if you’re painting by numbers, fumbling through Ableton tutorials, or performing with your local am-dram group. You absolutely do not have to draw a salary in the arts to participate in them, nor does a lack of contribution to the wider economy negate a contribution to culture. However marginal the returns may be, art can be miraculous – as a space to express ourselves and experiences in ways otherwise inarticulable or unsaid, to give us an excuse to congregate among one another; to shape local community or even wider culture; to move and be moved. We must refuse any course of action which will see it further ring-fenced by and for the elite.

Culture is more than an entry in a ledger, a zero in a bank account, a harvested revenue stream, and a glint in an unscrupulous shareholder’s eye. Culture allows us to make sense of our lives, to savour it, and share it with our fellow human beings. Culture is a small recourse to an otherwise miserable existence which would have us wake every morning only to try to make efficient use of ourselves as a unit of capital, a vessel by which this hellish joke we call ‘life’ becomes tolerable, maybe even meaningful. By any measure, it’s not something we can afford to lose.