Creating visibility: bridging the gap between Policymakers and Creative Freelancers

Artist and Researcher Charlotte Warne Thomas explores the challenges of measuring and evaluating creative work, to enable visibility to policymakers.

The pandemic years might be behind us, but for those who were among the UK’s 5 million freelancers at the start of the 2020 lockdown, the announcement on 20th March of the furlough scheme for employees only, left many self-employed workers fearing they’d been forgotten. While news the following week of the Self Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) assuaged that fear, subsequent analysis indicated that only 2.9 million individuals claimed SEISS, leaving 2.1m who were either ineligible, chose not to claim or could not claim.

For those who do manage to make some income from their art practice, the high overheads of materials, equipment, studio rent, and the rising cost of living are likely to bite substantially into even healthy turnovers. The result is low profits – often barely breaking even on paper. However, the pursuit of profit and economic growth is rarely an artist’s primary motivation – if even a motivation at all. Rather the incentive is often just to keep going as an artist, which is at odds with the common conflation of the self-employed as free-wheeling entrepreneurs making a killing by monetising their ideas.

Industria’s recent report Structurally F~cked (2021) highlighted the epidemic of low and no pay for artists in the publicly funded sector, which forces many into taking on other jobs to support themselves, juggling portfolios of low-paid, precarious roles [1]. It is not uncommon for artists to have two, three or more jobs simultaneously to support their low/un-paid practice.

Whatever their income source(s), visual artists’ earnings are notoriously meagre and unstable, with average annual incomes standing at £16,150 pa of which only £6,020 (36%) is derived from art practice [2].

So how to improve matters? Of course, calling on the new Labour government to reinstate arts funding to pre-austerity levels is a good start, with per-person spending on culture, heritage and libraries by English councils almost halved since 2010. But with finances tight, we must also look to other measures that might help address the sector’s structural inequalities.

One of these is a problem with the ‘measurability’ of artists’ labour, which can appear unproductive in the fiscally-focused data capture events that inform government policy. When artists declare earnings from multiple sources, their artistic incomes are often side-lined or overlooked, resulting in their artistic labour becoming invisible [3].

Even amongst specialist arts organisations, data on artists’ working lives and livelihoods is notoriously hard to come by. This is due in part to there being no singular definition of an artist, no established career trajectory and no one route to, or definition of, success for artists. With such an enormous variety of approaches to sustaining a career as an artist, the nuance of artists’ working patterns, pay and conditions is easily overlooked, partly because it is so varied when compared with workers in other sectors. Of course, the real value that artists create is a lot less tangible than their economic contribution in income tax revenue. But measurement of artists’ intangible assets and creative capital is not so easily captured in the quantitative surveys favoured by economists [4].

Visual artists’ role as a central cog in a complex and dynamic arts ecosystem, that punches well above its weight in terms of global recognition and innovation must be acknowledged so that it can be properly valued. Numerous studies highlight the positive contribution that engaging with art provides to both individuals and communities in terms of health and wellbeing and the sector must do its best to persuade the state that this less quantitative data is as vital to valuing the nation’s output as that relating to pounds and pence.

The appointment of a Freelancer Commissioner to advocate for policies sympathetic to the unique circumstances of creative freelancers would be a vital step towards solving the mismatches in how artists’ work is valued and funded. The role might also oversee funding allocation to ensure resources allocated to the Visual Arts actually reach individual creative practitioners, and are ring-fenced from spending on ‘bricks and mortar’ arts organisations, which has previously been prioritised over support for those who actually create the work to fill the galleries. It is heartening to see Labour’s Creating Growth plan for the arts recognise that: “People make art, policy doesn’t. The way that Labour will ‘do’ arts policy will recognise that and focus on enabling the conditions in which people can create, not dictating what they create.” A Freelancer Commissioner would ensure the realisation of this admirable goal.

There are other policies which they might also aim to instate. In Ireland, results after the first year of a 3-year Basic Income for the Arts pilot, which has seen 2000 creative freelancers (selected by lottery from a pool of 8000 applicants) awarded €325 p/w, have been promising. Thus far, those in receipt of the funding spent on average almost 8 weekly hours more on their practice, and were over 9 percentage points more likely to be able to sustain themselves from their arts/creative work alone, compared to the control group, significantly easing many of the problems caused by low and insecure pay. A Freelancer Commissioner could make the case for this level of radical policy design to become part of a revitalised UK Visual Arts sector, unafraid to embrace innovative ideas in supporting its creative freelance workforce. Their input would also be helpful in the introduction of the Smart Fund, called for by DACS, which would see a small levy on the sales of those tech devices that enable the circulation of creative content. Spent well – overseen by the Freelancer Commissioner for example – this potential revenue would bring substantial additional funds directly to the self-employed artists whose content circulation has been so essential to the growth of big tech. With the promise of taking pressure off already-stretched state subsidies, whilst easing issues of exclusion caused by precarious work, the prospect of growing the cake might at last be on the horizon.

Read more

• What the appointment of a Freelancer Commissioner would mean for the UK Creative Industries
• The Creator Remuneration report by the Culture Media and Sport Committee supports the establishment of the Smart Fund