It’s no secret that the creative industry has consistently received less support, less funding, less respect, than other industries in the UK. But the question is;
Why?
Just cast your mind back to the start of the Pandemic, 2020, when the government were under fire for an advertising campaign they released whereby they encouraged people in the arts to retrain.
The advert (as above), depicts a ballet dancer tying her shoes, with the caption “Fatima’s next job could be in tech.’ There were many ‘memes’ created off the back of this, ‘Fatima’ being swapped for Boris Johnson; ‘’Boris’s next job could be anywhere else (and we’d all be better off)’, for which he/they (the Tories), had it coming… For, why was the creative industry targeted specifically? We know that the pandemic was a hard time for all businesses (in fact, figures suggest that nearly 400,000 UK businesses disappeared during the first year of covid), but, when the creative industry contributed £108 billion to the UK economy last year, why use the arts as a scapegoat?…
Because the arts/the creative industry is perceived as posing a ‘threat’ to capitalist ideals, this is why…
Art is based, not so much on logic but rather on feeling, serving to remind us of what really matters in life- humanity, connection, love. Serving to remind us of what it means to be human, not a wage-earning robot.
When art encourages people to look at the world differently, to imagine a different way of life, and to pass on what they find, artist to audience- that there IS a different way of life, this is evidently counterintuitive to the capitalist system within which we are all forced to live…
Art = Power
Can you imagine if everyone started producing art about anarchism and feminism and dismantling institutional racism and all the ‘isms?’ Challenging the status quo, there would be an overhaul of everything we know…
Great (for us),
a nightmare (for them).
And so, the government are hardly going to fund what would trigger their inevitable downfall, are they?, when they recognise the power that art holds. The power to transform society, this being an eventuality which terrifies them, posing too much of a threat.
What the government will do, however, is just neglect it. By neglecting the arts, cutting funding and ultimately making it impossible to live, artists are forced to quit before they reach their potential. Forever being dismissed/never taken seriously;
‘Yes, you might be working 12+ hour days, but when are you going to get a REAL job? (i.e. ‘When are you going to conform like the rest of us/stop pursuing this ‘woo woo’ hobby and become a wage slave/uphold capitalism like the ‘best’ of us)?’
Unfortunately for us creatives, all the preaching of anti-capitalism in the world cannot change the fact that we do live in a capitalist world, for which we have no choice but to earn money if we want to stay alive. And where money and creativity so often do not go hand-in-hand, especially since funding has been cut, pursuing creative careers is simply becoming less and less feasible, with people who do ‘stick at it’ perceived as being more and more delusional (with the exception of the lucky few, the artists who become famous, who are taken seriously. But that very much is [an exception].
With our desire for change alone being unable to pay the bills, many artists are forced to give up before they even turn 25, forced to contribute to the very economy which they despise…
So much wasted potential.
And this ^ is how capitalism gets upheld…
The people who do rebel, who want to promote change through art, fall short, every time. Because, ultimately, they are rebelling against a society which we are all a part of, and as much as we might hate it, if we want to stay alive, then we have to go along with it, becoming the very thing which we fight against in our art- blindly conforming wage slaves…
Where creativity is the antidote to capitalism, and doesn’t the system know it- funding cut, capitalism upheld- on and on the cycle goes, until we get a government* in who care more about people than profit.
*If such a government exists, for which, arguably, it doesn’t, hence the push for anarchism- the antidote to the antidote to the antidote of capitalism, and a system/an environment within which creativity is allowed to flourish.
People over profit,
a desire for change over a desire for greed,
ART;
~ the antidote to capitalism,
the healer of a sick society ~
Keep creating, and strive to be the change you want to see in the world, even (especially) in the face of capitalism.
❤
Portfolio of Hope 