Artist Zoë Coombs Marr busts open the myths about what happens to arts funding once a grant is successful.
I’m an artist and I’ve received grants. If popular opinion is to be believed, as I write this, I’m literally sitting atop a pile of cash, lighting cigars with your children’s futures. But berating artists for getting too much money is like berating Ralph Fiennes for attacking Harry Potter. As delicious as the outrage feels, it’s a fiction.
Being an artist is a job. Like any job, it requires training, skill, and hard work. Like many businesses, it occasionally requires funding. Like some jobs (apiarist, web coder, consultant) no one understands what the hell it is, hence that delicious outrage when it’s funded. Which is fair enough, really. Other people’s jobs are often baffling, and always boring.
My sister works in HR. I’d have no idea what she does, except I’ve had to ask. Otherwise, not only would family barbecues be profoundly more awkward, but left to my own devices, I could imagine any number of outrageous scenarios “human resources” describes. Producing electricity by feeding babies into a furnace, perhaps? But at least for anyone who has ever worked in a corporation, the functions of HR are pretty common knowledge. The business side of “the arts”, on the other hand, is not... Keep reading on The Guardian
I’m an artist and I’ve received grants. If popular opinion is to be believed, as I write this, I’m literally sitting atop a pile of cash, lighting cigars with your children’s futures. But berating artists for getting too much money is like berating Ralph Fiennes for attacking Harry Potter. As delicious as the outrage feels, it’s a fiction.
Being an artist is a job. Like any job, it requires training, skill, and hard work. Like many businesses, it occasionally requires funding. Like some jobs (apiarist, web coder, consultant) no one understands what the hell it is, hence that delicious outrage when it’s funded. Which is fair enough, really. Other people’s jobs are often baffling, and always boring.
My sister works in HR. I’d have no idea what she does, except I’ve had to ask. Otherwise, not only would family barbecues be profoundly more awkward, but left to my own devices, I could imagine any number of outrageous scenarios “human resources” describes. Producing electricity by feeding babies into a furnace, perhaps? But at least for anyone who has ever worked in a corporation, the functions of HR are pretty common knowledge. The business side of “the arts”, on the other hand, is not... Keep reading on The Guardian