Artists fall at funding hurdles

Artists are increasingly taking up paid employment to support their practice, and those artists working in digital media or performance are the most likely to be earning little or no income from their artistic work, according to the Big Artists Survey, a major new piece of research into the lives and work of artists in the UK. Commissioned by a-n, the Artists Information Company, and AIR, the UK membership body for artists, the survey reflects the views of 1,500 respondents, almost a third of whom earn less than £5,000 from practice, and whose average turnover last year was around £9,000. The key gap felt by artists in their professional development is for help with meeting commissioners and curators, and securing resources and funding.

This resonates with the findings in another new report from a-n, which indicates that few individual artists apply for funding in their own right, and even fewer are successful. The report, ‘A Fair Share?’, which examines direct funding for individual artists from the UK arts councils, reveals that only 1,033 applications from individual artists – about 5% of all England’s artists – were made to Arts Council England’s (ACE) Grants for the Arts fund in 2009/10: of those who did, 485 were successful. These figures were found to be typical across all four of the UK arts councils, although the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI) showed the highest level of involvement with individual artists. Author Dany Louise concludes that while ACE has the largest sums to invest, it has “what appears to artists to be the most opaque system”. By contrast, she found that the Arts Council of Wales (ACW) and ACNI have lesser funds and fewer artists to share them around, but have “better-structured programmes for supporting the development trajectory of individual artists”. Commenting on the report’s findings in his blog, consultant Mark Robinson, a former Executive Director of Arts Council England, North East, said: “My sense is that in England the application process as a whole has become less supportive of individual artists over the years since Grants for the Arts was first introduced… When it began, significant emphasis was placed on supporting artists to have their own big ideas… each revision of the scheme introduced new layers of absolute consistency and greater need to create what you might call ‘project-shaped projects’ rather than, say, artistic investigations.” He added that the increased requirement to “evidence demand” was also more difficult for individual artists.

The findings of both these reports draw into question the extent to which ACE’s Turning Point Network – part of its 10-year strategy for the visual arts, is serving the needs of artists. The Big Artists Survey found that artists continue to feel that they are not sufficiently represented in decision-making bodies involved in culture. Three-quarters of those surveyed had not been consulted by a UK arts funding body, and of those living in England, fewer than 1% were a member of a regional Turning Point network committee. Nearly half of artists in England said they “did not know at all” about the Turning Point visual arts networks or aims, and 67% saying they would like to see more artists serving on these networks’ committees and to be able to participate in policy-making. A final evaluation report of the Turning Point Network for ACE by consultant Annabel Jackson observed that the different regional steering groups differ in their structure and composition, some with strong representation of artists, and others not. She suggests that “regional groups need to develop clearer mechanisms for reaching and serving the wide range of artists in their region”.