Breaking down the false divide

There is a story (which may be apocryphal, though I have heard it from several sources) that after the Arts Council of Great Britain was granted its Royal Charter in 1946, it was discovered that the document was slightly too big for the glass frame that had been bought to display it. In order to fit it into the frame, the bottom section, which referred to the Arts Council’s role in encouraging access and participation in the arts, was folded over and hidden from sight for 60 years. Whether or not this story is true, it is certainly the case that Arts Council priorities have had, for a long time, a deliberate focus on professional artists and arts institutions. This is perfectly understandable and justifiable: limited public funding available for the arts needs to be used as effectively as possible. In most cases, amateur arts groups are reasonably self-sufficient, raising enough money through the subscriptions paid by their members and ticket sales for their performances or exhibitions to break even. My concern is not that arts councils should suddenly divert all their funding from professionals to amateurs but that an exclusive focus on supporting ‘professionals’ has led to a situation where the phrase ‘the arts’ now seems to be used only to mean those artists or arts organisations subsidised by the arts councils.

AMATEUR ARMY
Across the UK, approximately 57,000 amateur arts groups stage plays and operas, festivals and concerts, put on exhibitions and run classes and workshops every week. Amateur arts groups are rooted in almost every local community. For most people across the country the real value of the arts is in the emotional, intellectual and developmental qualities they bring to everyday lives. And for millions of individuals, this quality is significantly enriched by the experience of directly participating in artistic activity. Writing in Newsweek at the end of December 2009, Joshua Levine said, “The global recession hasn’t crippled the entertainment industry, as some feared, but it has hastened its embrace of the do-it-yourself movement. From neighbourhood theatre troupes to bookstore readings, amateur performers are taking their place onstage. It’s less a new development than a return to an old way of life.” While the economic crisis has certainly spurred people to start thinking more about the things that give life meaning, I think attitudes were shifting even before the recession: the false divide between professionals and amateurs was already breaking down.
I am an amateur musician: I play the French horn in the Northampton Symphony Orchestra. When I look around at our rehearsals I see an interesting mix of people including a wide range of ages and occupations. We employ a professional conductor and leader, but a significant number of the members of the orchestra are professional musicians (including peripatetic music teachers) who make their living from music but who choose to play in our orchestra for no payment. There are a number of other people in the orchestra who are professionally trained musicians, but who decided to pursue careers as software engineers, doctors or accountants. There are also those who are not at employment age – children still at school and retired people. And then there are those, like me, who were not professionally trained and are not earning a living through their music but who, nevertheless, aspire to the highest possible musical standards. So who are the amateurs and who are the professionals?

A COMPLICATED BUSINESS
There are plenty of people who would describe themselves as professional artists who do not manage to earn a living from their artistic activity. And an amateur artist does not automatically become a professional when he or she sells their first painting. ‘The arts’ is a complex spectrum incorporating overlapping and constantly changing notions of professional and amateur. The concept of a pyramid of participation requiring a mass of grassroots involvement to develop the pinnacle of elite achievement is common currency in sport but applies equally to the arts.
Royal Shakespeare Company artistic director Michael Boyd has called on theatre professionals to take amateur performance more seriously, and said, “There has historically been, I think, a tragic split between doing theatre as a community and a group of specialists – professionals – who do it for a living.” Arts Council England, North East Executive Director, Mark Robinson, wrote on his ‘Arts Counselling’ blog in January, “I tend to agree that the emphasis on paid arts production as the entirety of ‘the arts’ has meant something has been lost to the overall, and leads to some of the feelings of exclusion some people describe, and that a continuum is both more accurate and healthy culturally.” Isn’t it about time we stopped thinking of ‘the arts’ as something done by a few highly paid professionals and started recognising the amazing contribution of millions of participants across the UK?