The “Starving Artist” is an infamous narrative that often drives people away from creative careers and the indispensable world of art and culture. A notable example of this negative reinforcement can be seen in the government’s scrapped Cyber First advert in 2020, featuring an image of a young ballerina and a text that reads, “Fatima’s next job could be in cyber (she just doesn’t know it yet)”.
Visual Arts Scotland (VAS), a leading platform for contemporary artists, is partnering with Edinburgh University’s Students As Change Agents (SACHA), to gain insight on how to “change the narrative around creative careers to reinvigorate the arts in Scotland”. This has turned out to be a deceptively difficult challenge. I have found, after weeks of following the SACHA programme and VAS hosts Kam Chan and Amanda Airey, that rebranding the professional landscape of the Scottish arts scene could just start with spreading more crucial awareness on what art really does for our society.
“We started from a position of challenge,” explains Kam, a practicing artist based in the Edinburgh Futures Institute. VAS initially started as The Scottish Society of Women artists in 1924 by William McDougall, who wanted to support his daughter Lily, a talented artist prohibited from exhibiting at other societies because she was a woman. The arts organization has come very far in supporting national and international artists, hosting graduate showcases and big initiatives such as their annual Residency Open Calls – a programme that emerged after the COVID-19 lockdowns when artists’ needs for time and studio space to develop their work became starkly apparent.
But galleries and exhibitions are not enough to sustain artists anymore, argues Amanda, a freelance development manager for VAS. “It’s important to us to find ways and mechanisms to enable people to sell their work, show their work, be able to continue as a creative career and not have a kind of drain”, she explains to SACHA participants. “[But] people think Scotland isn’t the place where [they can] survive as a creative practitioner. “I need to go to London,” or whatever it might be”.
This emphasises the issue with funding cuts and narrow salaries. “Funding cuts [are] cultural recession, and we seem to be in a [very vulnerable] situation,” points out Amanda. A bomb was dropped in the middle of last year’s Fringe Festival, as Creative Scotland, the government’s arts body, closed its Open Fund for Individuals due to financial instability. Headlines raise critical concerns for the arts sector in Scotland, warning of the risk of “death by slow cuts”, galleries being at “crisis point” over major funding gaps, and the declining enrollment in creative further education. The future of artists “hangs in balance” ahead of the Scottish budget. Christian Zimmerman, CEO at DACS, said, “the widespread low pay and precarity artists face today pushes talent out of the sector, and limits the creativity of our artists”.
“Reinvigorating” the arts means to ensure we aren’t experiencing this cultural recession in five years time. Because in case you haven’t connected it, there is no art without artists. There may be no more artists if there is no more hope.
Creative businesses generate spillover effects, wherein the overflow of ideas, knowledge, skills and different types of capital compound additional benefits to local communities, wider society and the national economy. The creative industries’ activity triggers supply chain spending; new ideas encourage innovation, supporting other sectors; creative facilities or places attract skilled workers and visitors, increasing value and connections. Not to mention, Scotland’s undeniable wealth in cultural tourism.
But culture isn’t just an economic asset. It’s the glue of communities, the tool for dialogues, inclusion and healing. There’s magic in the arts sector in how it graciously spills over to other sectors. With a MSc in Medical Art from the University of Dundee, Emily Fong proposes novel ways to witness anatomy. Her artist residency at the Centre for Regenerative Medicine, Edinburgh BioQuarter, amplifies the beauty and significance of observing the world at a microscopic scale. In the same vein, what seems like a tiny sector has giant, tangible powers.
If we regenerate hope in the arts by demonstrating its value and potential, we can convince the Scottish Government to invest more seriously into the sector. This means having more faith, having artists to share their stories, and holding nothing back. The world is our canvas, and we’ll prove it with what we have.
“ATC – ‘dont panic’ – traded” by Sarabbit is licensed under CC BY-SA 2.0.