It was difficult and complicated, but you told us what it feels like to be working class and work in the arts.

Last year, after much umming and ahing, hand wringing, and conversation amongst ourselves and with peers, we published a strand of articles under the title Class IS A Big Deal. The series set out to elucidate the problems faced by working class people when trying to access and sustain a career in the arts.

We were very conscious of the fact that, although this is something that has begun to be discussed, you very rarely hear directly from people who have first-hand experience of the issues, challenges, barriers and concerns that can loom so large; namely, networks, opportunity, perceptions, self-image, time, confidence and money – or a lack thereof. No, you’re not moaning, whinging or complaining without cause, so don’t apologise: it’s crucial to hear your views on this. As you can see from the responses, below, class deeply, irrevocably influences the way we behave and feel about ourselves.

Note that we received private messages via email and social media from people who wanted to comment on Class IS A Big Deal, but felt uncomfortable doing so publicly. After all, how can we talk about class issues without talking about our own, very personal experiences? Similarly, feeling ready to do so, is a personal choice. We (Laura and I) were also anxious about dissecting what it feels like to be ‘working class’; a conversation that often includes our backgrounds, home lives, family, early rebuttals and closed doors. It didn’t help being directly told last year, by an arts professional peer we asked for advice, that anyone who talks about class in the arts has a chip on their shoulder (yes, that happened).

Once published, Class IS A Big Deal nonetheless triggered loads of responses online. We wanted to scoop them together and give a concerted voice to the people affected, because it’s (really) okay to raise such concerns. This conversation, and more like it, are happening now, and people are listening. Ultimately, together, we hope to be able to take it further, to discuss and propose solutions. Who’s accountable and to what exactly? Tonight, we’re at the Preston Playhouse for Art and Class: Is Everyone Welcome?, a free, public event organised by artist Rebecca Chesney. We want to continue to be involved in other, critical discussions like it this year.

Below are a selection of your responses to our Class IS A Big Deal strand, drawn from various conversations. Thank you for speaking up.

Glen Arthur Meskell Brocken: Ah at last. This is something I’ve been tackling and talking about for years and little to nothing ever gets done, except in a tokenistic sense. Mainly because the people asking the questions aren’t working class or from a lower class. So great to see you, Danny Leigh, Arts Emergency and others changing that debate in recent years. I’ve worked in the arts for over 10 years now (not as an artist I have to add) and I can see how difficult it is for working class artists and arts workers to make it and advance within the industry. And it’s not just about networks and not knowing people to put in a good word or open a door, that inevitably helps. It’s also psychological as well.

Almost everyone I know from my background get to a certain position in the hierarchy and suddenly suffer from the dreaded ‘impostor syndrome’ – a syndrome which is caused by striving to get to a career completely different than their peers from school or family and feeling alien in an environment which is organically structured for ‘others’. Getting over that hurdle can sometimes be more difficult than the ‘privilege’ that comes from being simply born into a different class.

The Double Negative: Can you name the barriers (working class bingo)?

Gordon Dalton: Class, money, pay, access, mental health, time, illness, parenting, family, location, elitism, self entitlement, less opp, profile, confidence, back slapping, perception of success, perception by public, perception of ourselves.

Alice Mildred: Is there a distinction between working class and skint?

It is so fuzzy. I grew up mainly in a council flat with an 1st gen immigrant single-mother, lots of asbo style family problems. But I grew up with books. I grew up with ideas and expectation to do well. My accent is more middle than working class. Always skint, cockroaches, cold beans, new stuff may have been stolen. We moved around a lot, so no fixed community to identify with. Never comfortable with any class (or is that just other people?), never ‘accepted’ in either fold either. Did 1 year of Uni as a teen. More recently topped it up with some self-financed open university. What class would you put me in?

Laura Pilgrim: I noticed in my teens that the only people with my accent at a gallery that I was involved with (in their Young People education programme) were the installation team/technicians.

I remember asking them about their jobs and them saying “oh well we only get work here about every 8 weeks” and thinking that it didn’t seem enough (as a teen trying to make life/work decisions).

Also as always identifying as working class from childhood but then went to uni. Getting a Gallery Job, then one day while discussing class with someone they said “you’re middle class. You work in a Gallery, you and everyone who works there are by definition middle class”

Can relate to comments above about not feeling working class or middle class.

Mel Connell: I was a working class artist. Now I’m an imposter… been lifted up through meeting the right person, becoming middle class through partnership.

Prior to this the main things that stopped me being successful when I was working class was working! Having a minimum wage job working all hours in overtime to afford rent I couldn’t afford to buy paint, fabrics, canvas, card, fix my computer for digital work, or even get a set of pencils. I also didn’t have time to produce good quality work or a surface I could dedicate to art (heck I didn’t even have a dining room table).

I couldn’t afford to go to art classes or have the time to commit to go to them on a regular basis. (If they were there, as there wasn’t any that I knew of).

It wasn’t by chance that I did networking and met the right people who showed me where to find and apply for opportunities, it was from pure determination to find out about the local scene and attend every free event that I could.

It did help that I quit my job and went to uni and then progressed onto a teachers degree, that meant I could get more money per hour of work therefore work less and do Art more.

Michelle Dee: I think it is partly about face fitting, if you look like them and sound like them you will get on, if you don’t you won’t. #allthebloodysouthernersinthenorthgettingallthecontracts…

And if they do throw you a bone you better be grateful, if you decide to accept and if you do accept, just make sure you haven’t entered into a Faustian pact that comes back to bite you later in your ‘career’.

Also it’s money, maybe not vast sums of actual money but the smell of money and if you come from that kind of family, you can pull that illusion off with ease. Also sex, if the person handing out the dosh quite fancies a roll in the hay with you then you might get on. #culturalcastingcouch

Chantelle Bennett: The biggest barrier, through experience and observation, is financial. As a teenager it wasn’t the ‘posh’ kids who were the better artists, but they were the ones whose parents paid for tuition, materials, rent, cultural trips and internships etc. My parents actively discouraged me from pursuing art as a career as it wasn’t “for the likes of us”. I’m not talking about fifty years ago, I mean in the mid-nineties! Sadly, I listened to them…

Eugene Evans: If the image fits – it really doesn’t matter where you come from or what social class you position yourself in society.

Sian Hill: As a working-class artist amongst other artists, you’re always made to feel the need to pipe down and get off your soapbox by your more privileged peers. Class seems to make many artists uncomfortable. It’s being laughed at whilst being a student because you can’t go on the study trips because you don’t own a passport because your parents have never taken you abroad and you have never been on holiday anywhere, let alone abroad. It is being treated like the odd one out because you come from a town with so-called bad reputation. As a working-class artist, you are treated like an oddity because to them the working classes aren’t supposed to be cultured and have an interest in anything other than going to the pub and watching the football.

The acceptance of unpaid work within the arts supports inequality. The art world itself is very exclusive and has a hierarchy that the working class simply don’t fit into. Art is dominated by those from affluent backgrounds who went to the right schools and who have the economic capital to work for free.

The Double Negative: Are we actually talking about wealth, specifically wealth inequality, when we talk about class?

Glen Arthur Meskell Brocken: I’m not sure we always are. It’s an important element of class of course, but there’s more a mentality when it comes down to class as well. If you are from a working class background your mentality on how and where you should be in the world is affected. You grow up surrounded by parents, adults and peers who go on to work in industry or services which some might say are less ambitious (although that could be portrayed as patronising view). So if your career is wildly different than those around you it can sometimes affect mentally your perception of if you really should be doing that.

Being an artist, or working in the arts, you see it as a career, whereas your peers and the older generation you grew up with do a job. And there is a difference, it is the language and perception of what you do for work is understood. Is it a job or a career?

Going through schools from a working class background, the type of jobs ‘careers advisers’ traditionally have told children should head towards are more secure work and not careers. Although, I’m sure, done with good intention, that careers advice simply prepares the working classes to become the factory fodder, the service workforce. In more middle class – grammar schools and above – the pressure is put on that a child needs to go into a career, further and higher education.

Both school classes present a level to a child which says “this is what you can achieve” and they are completely different things. So when a child from a more working class background breaks away from that structure and attempts to have a career say in arts (or even if they strive to lets say become a lawyer) mentally there is a real struggle about whether they are doing the right thing, and most importantly whether they are entitled to be going into that sort of career.

Children from a more middle class schooling and background hardly question if they are entitled to go into different career areas, simply because it is the norm (they may question their academic ability or artistic ability but that is universal and not connected to class as much). But it just doesn’t stop at those first steps onto the ladder in a mentality sense.

As mentioned above, once there is a level of achievement there is the ‘impostor’ syndrome chipping away in the mind of an artist or art worker from a working class background. A feeling of “how am I in this position”, “those people are more qualified than me”, “they’ve had more experience than me” and a feeling that you have somehow got into the position by accident or just pure luck.

All artists and art workers (see even I’m doing it calling people with careers in the arts workers instead of professionals… damn) have mental struggles around their ability but I think there is certainly a mental struggle going on with artists and those with careers in the arts (there I said it right this time!!) from a working class background which joined with monetary worries and opportunities increases the barriers to success and longevity in those careers. (sorry I do go on a bit)…

Mike Pinnington and Laura Robertson

Read all the articles in this series via #classisabigdeal

Do YOU have a story (short or long) to share with our readers? Submit your experiences to laura@thedoublenegative.co.uk and mike@thedoublenegative.co.uk, or on Twitter, Insta or Facebook #classisabigdeal

This series was conceived after long conversations with our writers, including Denise Courcoux and Kenn Taylor. We’ve written about our own experiences, and sometimes have suggestions for what can be done to improve opportunities for people in our sector.

Photo by Werner Du plessis on Unsplash

Perma-skint, exhausted, disenfranchised… We need to talk about why working class people aren’t getting ahead in the arts. And as we rarely hear directly from working class people themselves about the obstacles they face, we decided to start asking. Here, artist Wayne Burrows writes from the perspective of a “maker of culture”… 

“The catch is that we understand exactly what must be done to achieve success while being aware that success on the terms available guarantees the failure of the art itself by its own most important measures.”

From A Thousand Empty Bowls (A Provocation), 2017

(i)

Class is a fraught subject in general, but when applied to the arts carries a lot of distorting baggage. By far the most elephantine trunk in the luggage-set is a Catch 22 sense that simply by having an interest in art – let alone attempting to work in the sector – we forfeit our working class credentials almost by default. There’s an assumption shared by both the media and the managers and bureaucrats of the art world itself that the working class is at least partly defined by its lack of interest in art, its inarticulacy on the subject, and this manifests in both a lack of any committed coverage of the sector in non-specialist media and an attitude in discussions of widening access that see us as untapped ‘hard to reach’ audiences and occasional unpaid participants in community projects rather than active makers of culture on our own terms. Among administrators, journalists and much of the public – even many of those working in the ‘social practice’ sectors that set out to engage us with notions of Great Art For Everyone and Cultural Democracy – there remains a defensive but prevalent assumption that if we are sufficiently articulate to challenge the preconceptions on which these things operate we are also, by definition, not ‘really’ working class and can therefore be safely ignored on those relatively rare occasions when the subject comes up for debate.

(ii)

During a recent conversation about work with a relative, he said something along the lines of “…but I suppose you went into the arts while I have to live in the real world.” It wasn’t meant maliciously, simply thrown in as a casual aside, but it clearly reflects a deep-rooted belief that the arts aren’t generally regarded as real work, or real life. This is possibly why arguments about lack of payment and poor working conditions for artists rarely fall on sympathetic ears: if the arts are not for ‘us’, and those we do see participating are not visibly short of resources, why would they? Any article raising the issue online will immediately attract strings of angry comments that suggest regular salaries, pensions, paid sickness and annual holiday leave, all largely taken for granted as entitlements among the holders of salaried ‘real world’ jobs (let’s say, for the sake of argument, jobs in digital marketing, corporate law, consultancy, PR and Human Resources, sometimes even at the more secure levels of arts management and administration) are perfectly reasonable expectations until applied to artists. If people want to indulge themselves in making art, the argument usually goes, we should fund it ourselves by getting proper jobs, do it in our spare time, and if in the process we somehow manage to sell enough of our work in the open market to cover basic living expenses then that is exactly as things should be.

(iii)

There are numerous problems with this position, of course, not least that the market is far from open and the kinds of ‘proper jobs’ – in teaching, copywriting, illustration, journalism, retail and the like – that might once have played this role for artists have in recent years seen their pay rates, terms and conditions eroded to a point where they now mostly run on zero hours contracts, vast quantities of unpaid time spent on applications and speculative meetings, and prove no more reliable than making art as sustainable sources of income. Where salaries and some notional job security do remain, the idea of these jobs providing any spare time to develop a viable practice alongside the job itself is mostly a distant memory: the realities are long hours, exhaustion and 24/7 stress. To view the situations of artists, writers, musicians, film-makers and performers in terms separate from the situations of cleaners and factory workers, shop and bar staff, teachers, nurses and security personnel, whether skilled and unskilled, in the public or private sectors, is a mistake. We have all been subject to the same engineering of political and economic forces over the last 30-odd years, undermining our conditions of employment and income security to a point where the gig economy has, in places, managed to reintroduce conditions last experienced by dockers, labourers and factory hands during the 1930s. These things are connected precisely because making and experiencing art, like unpaid care work, maintenance of community, cooking, gardening, playing sports and sustaining family life in general, always depends on having the free time and space, the physical and mental energy, to pursue them.

(iv)

To talk about the role played by class in the arts in terms separate from its operations in these wider contexts is counter-productive, then. Perhaps it’s also worth noting, given the tendency to view class through a cultural filter – something expressed mainly in preferences for ITV over HBO, tabloids over broadsheets, lard over olive oil and the rest – that if we consider ‘working class’ solely in its traditional Marxist sense, meaning that we are defined by our dependence on waged labour for day-to-day survival, large segments of the formerly middling ranks of the old middle class have long been stuck aboard this leaky boat alongside us. True, some might still enjoy marginally more cushioned berths, accessed through family connections and accrued cultural capital, and many remain in denial about diminished status despite the fact that their children’s mountainous debts and zero hour, short term contracts continue to depreciate, but we are all subject to similar political forces. The distinction between working and regular middle class is now maintained largely because an even more precipitous decline in conditions is taking place further down the social scale. However bad things get in the cubicles and open plan offices of traditionally white collar sectors, they are worsening even more rapidly for the cleaners, warehouse hands and low-end production line workers whose shifts and working conditions are dictated by the outsourced agencies now routinely used to supply their labour to employers.

(v)

My own experience of these kinds of employment agencies in the latter half of the 1990s – working on pet-food canning and oven chip factory production lines, or unloading containers in vast out-of-town warehouses – was of a sector where low pay, short payments, unrecorded shifts, lump sum deductions for unsupplied safety gear and many other abuses were rife, and a few days – or in a few cases weeks – in which there would mysteriously be no available shifts invariably followed any complaints or corrections. Punitive restrictions on benefit claims had already removed most employees’ ability to walk away. These conditions have become far more widespread and general in the years since, and the employment ecosystem has long since doubled down, then doubled down again, on its tendency to reward roles in inverse proportion to their proximity to actual delivery and production. If teaching is a career dead end within academia, actual nursing a dead end within hospital trusts, then in the arts, too, the roles that command salaries, status and influence are largely reserved for institutional directors, the CEOs of national and regional bridge organisations, re-branded quangos, arts agencies, consultancies, educational bodies and other intermediaries, each with its own inevitable layer of internal management and administrative support system. These intermediate managerial and strategic bodies function all too often in ways that are closely analogous to the outsourced agencies of the wider employment sector.

(vi)

One factor since the later 1990s has been the emergence of distinct professional networks tasked with Cultural Leadership. As a concept this has been refined to a point where organisations like Clore Foundation operate codified, almost Scientology-like, selective programmes where the values of the Business School MBA and Silicon Valley tech sectors combine with a veneer of social and ecological concern across a range of key positions throughout the arts. The holders of these positions tend to draw their language, strategies and approach more from models supplied by corporate lobbying, privately financed think tanks and TED talks than connections to working artists or potential audiences, operating as a kind of managerial nomenklatura on the strategic, conference and consultancy circuits. Subscribing to lists such as Arts Jobs confirms this trend, making it clear on a daily basis that the work most valued even within the arts sector itself consists mainly of administrative and managerial posts, lightly punctuated with walk-on roles for artists themselves. Where artists’ roles are paid, which is far from guaranteed, the advertised commissions and opportunities tend to be highly prescriptive in terms of age limits, medium, process, content, approach and required result, often amounting to contract work under the direction of project managers’ briefings rather than art-making in any more recognisable sense.

(vii)

One clue as to the precise nature of this shift in employment relationships can be seen in the relatively recent change to ‘practice’ as the standard term to describe artists’ work. As a linguistic usage, ‘practice’, intentionally or otherwise, repositions artists within a model provided by sectors like law and medicine, where long specialised training is followed by placements with recognised institutions before licenses to practice independently are issued – licenses that can, of course, also be refused or revoked by institutional authorities. This adoption of a descriptor for artists’ activity from the tightly controlled middle class professions seems far from accidental, occurring as it does during a period when increasingly expensive qualifications have become crucial to artists’ chances of exhibiting and thereby being considered artists at all. Defining ourselves as artists by the act of making art is a universally accessible possibility, whatever the results might be, but to be considered an artist only when trained and licensed to practice by selective institutions – seeing our work judged by its provenance rather than its existence, substance or effect – marks a kind of back-door contemporary return to the kind of nineteenth century Academic Salon systems usually supposed to have been discredited after the 1830s. This is nothing new, insofar as provenance and context always shape the reception and reading of an artist’s work, but as a marker of this shift in power from artist to institutional manager the use of ‘practice’ to define our activity warrants more suspicion than it is usually given.

(viii)

If this wasn’t enough, there has also been a structural shift in the economic base of the arts, with artists not only decreasingly often paid, or paid at lower rates than others in the sector, but all-too frequently expected to pay for access to potential platforms as well. The obvious example of this is the increase in fees required for study since 2012, with many degree and MFA programmes selling themselves with an implicit promise of access to otherwise closed networks and opportunities restricted to graduates of recognised institutions. It also covers subscriptions, membership fees, artist-financed exhibitions, donations of time and labour, travel, and much else besides. Given the insecure condition of many teaching staff within universities and the necessity for unsupported students to go into deep debt while simultaneously working multiple part time jobs to cover basic rent and living costs in the high-cost cities where most institutions are based, odds stack heavily against eventual success in taking the costly gamble of attending a university in the first place: even successful artists can remain dependent, even decades into high visibility careers, on a succession of insecure part time teaching contracts whose terms and conditions continue to erode.

(ix)

It needs to be noted that this does not happen because these artists have no audience or demand for their work. It happens because fees paid to artists for making exhibitions and delivering projects are too often barely sufficient to cover the expenses and costs of fabrication, materials and research, with time factored in at hourly rates that can only be justified as legal by being grossly underestimated. It’s not unusual for temporary roles paying superficially generous hourly rates for two days per week to require expensive travel and carry work-loads that demand three or four days each week to deliver without compromising quality or neglecting co-workers and students. It happens because access to markets is frequently decided on a ‘pay to play’ basis, whether in the form of hire charges, commission or competition submission entry fees, requirements to network that incur travel and accommodation expenses, unpaid residencies that – even when nominally supported and not actively charging submission or accommodation fees, as many also do – still demand an ability to take anything between a week and six months off other work to participate in. There is a proliferation of paid-for courses offering networking support and advice on how to ‘be creative’, on how to navigate the art world’s all-too opaque systems, sold on the basis that we need to ‘invest in ourselves’ while omitting to note that these opportunities are unlikely to cover the costs of the financial investments made under these prevailing conditions.

(x)

It might be argued, correctly, that much of this is about wider questions of pay and insecure employment rather than class in some more specific sense, but if class is not about the unequal distribution of resources at a systemic level then it is not class we are talking about. The lack of pathways into the art world capable of supporting even a basic standard of living without the aid of parental or institutional support forms by far the steepest barrier to entry and progression. Many of the schemes and strategies aimed at improving this, without addressing the fundamental issue, have a tendency to generate further, usually unintended, discriminatory effects. Age-restricted programmes for emerging artists offer one example, mainly benefiting those from backgrounds where opportunities are clearly signposted and the need to access highly specialised networks is understood at a young age. Those left to figure it out by trial and error tend to get started later, now further disadvantaged by no longer being the youngest things around. The expectation that artists should establish themselves early has a well-documented gender bias, but this less-readily acknowledged class bias is a factor too. Counter-examples and anecdotes in the traditional ‘rags to riches’ idiom are sometimes used to deny this, and it’s true that outliers with temperaments suited to the hustle, with knowledge of where the doors are and the confidence or sense of entitlement to push at them, who are gifted in self-promotion or happen to wander into the right place at the right time, might occasionally succeed despite these heavily stacked odds. But this rarely relates to their potential or actual achievement as artists, and still comes with the proviso that the likelihood of success rapidly diminishes the further from a financially supportive and already well-connected social background that artist begins.

(xi)

If all this is the case, it might seem paradoxical that we are also in a period when inclusion, widening access and broadening the remits of art are explicitly stated priorities among funding bodies and within institutions at all levels, as evidenced by a mountain of consultation papers, panel discussions, strategic documents and mission statements. But perhaps it shouldn’t be too surprising that – when analysed in systemic terms – the moment when previously excluded demographics defined by class, race, disability, sexuality or gender begin to gain some tentative access, as artists, to the institutions of the art world, we also see their arrival coincide with a shift of rewards and power within that sector to a professional class of ‘cultural leaders’ and institutional managers whose transfers around the art world’s administrative infrastructure are more lucrative and influential than the seemingly interchangeable works of the artists put on display within it. This is not to question anyone’s good intentions, or infer cynical motives, simply to acknowledge that the arts are not insulated from the kinds of structural changes in employment conditions and distribution of resources – notably widening inequality and the erosion of wages and job security taking place under ever-increasing administrative supervision at the hands of a disproportionately rewarded higher management – that, since the latter half of the 1980s, have afflicted every other sector of the wider economy to one degree or another as well.

(xii)

Nor is this to claim that things are uniquely difficult today, despite the fact that many things have demonstrably worsened under the reverse redistribution of resources sold as ‘austerity’ since the systemic market failures of 2008. There was no Golden Age, and in many ways the situation has incrementally, if unevenly, improved for individual artists relative to bodies like the Arts Council since the days when resources were allocated mainly on the basis of proofs of existing success within fairly narrow cliques, or vast sums were thrown at dubious quangos to pursue the instrumentalisation of the ‘creative industries’ in the name of speculative redevelopment, large scale civic vanity projects and technocratic education. In campaigning for better representation and distribution of resources we will always need to be careful to not simplistically define ourselves or fall back on reductive cultural representations of our lives by way of cults of ordinariness, reflexive anti-intellectualism or obsessions with trivial cultural markers, even where these moves might buy access to institutional spaces, where we will necessarily remain not only replaceable but among the lowest-paid occupants. We need to acknowledge our roots in autodidacticism and self-definition as much as our traditions of place and community, and embrace the imaginative transformations of William Blake, Madge Gill and Mark E Smith as readily as the socially embedded realisms of Andrea Dunbar, LS Lowry and Handsworth Songs, all while refusing attempts to file the strongly-correlated issues of class, race, disability, sexuality and gender in discretely competing boxes. This requires an approach that resists populism without falling into cultural snobbery and remains conscious of the difference between making demands for resources to be set aside for what we are assumed to want or need by others and taking those resources into our own hands.

Wayne Burrows

Read all the articles in this series via #classisabigdeal

Do YOU have a story (short or long) to share with our readers? Submit your experiences to laura@thedoublenegative.co.uk and mike@thedoublenegative.co.uk, or on Twitter, Insta or Facebook #classisabigdeal

This series was conceived after long conversations with our writers, including Denise Courcoux and Kenn Taylor. We’ve written about our own experiences, and sometimes have suggestions for what can be done to improve opportunities for people in our sector.

Perma-skint, exhausted, disenfranchised… We need to talk about why working class people aren’t getting ahead in the arts. And as we rarely hear directly from working class people themselves about the obstacles they face, we decided to start asking. Here, creative director and writer Kenn Taylor scrutinises a lingering climate of fear, and the uncomplicated solutions that would nevertheless require huge change…

Is wanting to be an artist of any kind, or otherwise work in the cultural sector, stupid? It’s often poorly paid, if at all, and achieving ‘success’ can be arbitrary, unfair. If you’re from a working class background, it’s even harder. So why would you bother?

For me, art and culture are about ideas. If you control ideas, you control everything. If only a narrow stratum of society controls the ideas, only their views and experiences will be reflected in systems of communication and power. And a far worse society, especially for those with the least power, will result. Art is too important to be left to a privileged few. Yet year by year, it seems to get harder for people from working class backgrounds to find their space in culture, the media and the arts.

It can be a risky option for anyone, but the risks are compounded for those without family money or connections to fall back on. For those who somehow have to generate an income to support themselves and perhaps others. Those who’ve probably been told quite often in life not to dare to imagine other worlds they could enter because of the risks involved.

When architect of the NHS, Nye Bevan, wrote a book about the foundation of the welfare state he called it In Place of Fear. Over the last few decades, what has increased exponentially in this country is fear, and not accidentally. Fear helps to keep people in their place and too overwhelmed and frightened to try to challenge the limited parameters forced upon them. Part of that, despite lip service to the contrary, is to return culture to a field dominated by a narrow circle.

It was difficult enough when I entered the cultural sector in the 2000s. The child of an railway fitter and a cleaner, I grew up on benefits when my dad got sick, in a disadvantaged industrial town in Merseyside. I was the first in my family to go to university. In that era, I got help. I lived in one of the pilot areas for Education Maintenance Allowance. The Connexions service helped with university applications when I’d left education to work. There were waived university fees and top-up maintenance grants for those from poor backgrounds. After uni, paid entry-level arts jobs were available, like the one I got – albeit a low paid and zero hours one.

Now, so much of that has gone, it’s unreal. I can’t imagine I’d have been able to get to where I am today without any of those opportunities – yet working class people in 2018 get none of this support.

The issues are not just economic. It’s important to talk about the invisible barriers that exist on entering the sector and remain even when you’re in. At its best, the cultural field can be a place that welcomes those from different backgrounds; creative, open-minded, full of ideas. However, sadly, at its worst it can be too convinced of its own radicalism that it can be blind to the prejudice and structural unfairness that exists within it. Despite some progress, too many cultural organisations suffer from the ‘groupthink’ that comes from being dominated by people with incredibly similar backgrounds and educations. Earlier this year, the Higher Education Statistics Agency revealed that key British art, music and drama schools are more elitist in their student bodies than Oxford and Cambridge (full report here). This doesn’t surprise me, but it’s a damning indictment of inequalities in the sector.

Many people who have experienced an elite education from a young age are given constant reinforcements of their confidence, get taught how to network and how to ‘sell themselves’. Sadly, some of these things are more respected and important to success in parts of the cultural sector than talent and depth. I mentioned ‘imposter syndrome’ recently to a few people in the sector from a similar background. There was mutual acknowledgement of this and past experiences of being made to feel inadequate, talked over, or willfully ignored by those who think you can’t benefit them in their own ambitious trajectory in the arts.

This is, of course, not to privilege class over other forms of structural injustice within the arts. Intersectionality is vital when looking at diversity in the sector. However, class has been an area ignored for too long, especially as it cuts across other areas of inequality yet is not covered by the Equality Act 2010. Similarly, I don’t mean to privilege one class over the other. Working class cultures at their own worst can be oppressive, prejudiced, and suspicious of difference, but it’s clear that working class people are not well represented enough across the sector. In addition, while thankfully it’s a minority, the sector still has too many people from comfortable backgrounds ‘slumming it’. That is, adopting performative tropes of being working class in some strange grasp for authenticity, who then drown out the voices of people who have actually come from such backgrounds.

It’s important to note it’s not just big cultural institutions that have these issues. The artist-led grassroots sector is not immune. Often relying on tight, cliquey networks and people with huge amounts of free time, it can also be blind to its own unspoken exclusions and prejudices. The self-confidence of members from elite backgrounds often dominating groups despite their supposed ‘fluid’ or ‘no hierarchy’ structures.

Now I am the director of a small arts charity, part of the establishment, albeit at a low level. The air is even thinner in terms of those from working class backgrounds when it comes to leading organisations. Though as I’ve chosen to work regionally and in a socially-focused field, not as much as in some other areas of culture. I have achieved a modicum of ‘success’. What does sometimes keep me awake at night though, is, do I do enough to make a difference for others from disadvantaged backgrounds to be heard in the arts? Is it all just a waste of time when there are so many huge structural inequalities in society over and above that in the cultural sector? Especially now things are even harder than 15 years ago. This is perhaps again an anxiety that comes from being working class. You think that you can never do enough even as those leading some of the largest organisations pay lip service to diversity.

So, what can be done to make a difference? It’s not actually that complicated, but it would require change on a large scale beyond just the cultural sector itself. For example; free higher education at the point of access; arts schools reserving spaces for those from disadvantaged backgrounds; a stop to the stripping out of the arts from school curriculums; the Arts Council continuing to push organisations to diversify (while other areas of culture such journalism, film, publishing, games and heritage should do the same); ensuring volunteering is only supplementary support to paid jobs; serious government funding for multi-year creative apprenticeships and an end to the qualifications arms race in the sector – let’s have proper respect for on the ground experience and not raise the bar too high for entry level jobs.

Listen to people who are working class; employees, artists, fans, participants, visitors and especially those trying to enter the sector. What they have to say is crucial. It’s time to ensure people from all different backgrounds are given decent opportunities. It won’t just be better for individuals and society, it will be better for art.

These things might seem utopian now, but that’s how far we’ve fallen. I spoke to an older man once, who as a young working class boy had applied to art school. He never heard back. So, he got a job, only getting into art after his retirement many years later, to his sadness. Only after his father had died did he find the letter of acceptance from the art school that his parents had hidden. Whose fault was this opportunity being denied him? His parents? Or this country, for creating the climate of fear that to work in the arts is to be destitute and especially dangerous if you’re working class? And here we are in those times again. Let’s start to say no more. Now.

Kenn Taylor

Read all the articles in this series via #classisabigdeal

Do YOU have a story (short or long) to share with our readers? Submit your experiences to laura@thedoublenegative.co.uk and mike@thedoublenegative.co.uk, or on Twitter, Insta or Facebook #classisabigdeal

This series was conceived after long conversations with our writers, including Denise Courcoux and Kenn Taylor. We’ve written about our own experiences, and sometimes have suggestions for what can be done to improve opportunities for people in our sector.

Perma-skint, exhausted, disenfranchised… We need to talk about why working class people aren’t getting ahead in the arts. And as we rarely hear directly from working class people themselves about the obstacles they face, we decided to start asking. Here, our 2018 Fellow Denise Courcoux identifies the dire lack of museum jobs as a major obstacle…

Reflecting on my personal understanding of class, I was surprised to conclude that I don’t think I had much awareness of it until I entered my career in museums and galleries. Everyone I knew growing up in Coventry attended a comprehensive school like me, and even at university, most of my friends had similar backgrounds – and if not, no matter, as shared houses and cheap nights out made uni a wonderful leveller. I did my degree in that too-short window in the early noughties when tuition fees were means-tested, rather than the £9,000 a year routinely charged now.

Class quickly became an issue, however, when I started working in a sector typified by low-paid, precarious work. My own path ‘in’ came through volunteering on my days off from a call centre job; eventually securing a paid front-of-house role in a gallery, and from there, getting my first exhibitions role. That was nine years ago, and this year I secured my first permanent, full-time museum job since then.

I want to be clear that this isn’t a moan about my own position. Working in museums and galleries is always interesting, mostly rewarding and varied, and sometimes positively joyous, and I feel hugely lucky to have hung on in there. I want these opportunities to be available to all. I’m also aware than there is no shortage of white, able-bodied women in the sector, and others have more than financial constraints holding them back. However, I’ve not always found it easy to keep working in museums, and I see some of the issues behind this getting worse, so it’s an important conversation to have.

The lack of diversity in the UK museums workforce is well-documented. The comprehensive Character Matters report (commissioned by Arts Council England, Museums Galleries Scotland, Museums Association, and the Association of Independent Museums) in 2016 was damning in its summary:

“The workforce lacks diversity with regard to gender, ethnicity, disability and education (as workers are very highly educated with the large majority over-qualified for their job role). Although there is little or no data on social class, the combination of the existence of unpaid work to get into the sector, high levels of formal education, and higher than average levels of attendance at fee paying schools also suggests that the sector recruits most regularly from a narrow strata of society.”

An action plan, published earlier this year in response to the report, promises that Arts Council England will prioritise social mobility. But whilst class remains outside the Equality Act’s ‘protected characteristics’, it remains difficult to define and quantify.

There are numerous barriers in the way of people from working class backgrounds getting ahead in the arts; from over-qualification as described above, to less tangible issues such as a lack of confidence, something I struggle with. However, the dearth of good jobs in the sector is, for me, the biggest barrier to people from working class backgrounds. In recent years, there has been an alarming erosion of entry-level positions in museums and galleries. Like many of my contemporaries, my foot in the door was via a visitor services role. The employed gallery invigilator is an increasing rarity, replaced by volunteers in many organisations with squeezed budgets.

Unpaid internships continue to be an issue, with positions such as ‘volunteer project manager’ still appearing in sizeable institutions. For those of us who need a regular income to live, the time commitment demanded by such unpaid roles is impossible to manage, and the opportunities opened up are placed out of reach to all but those who can afford them.

Low pay, static salaries and precarious work may be commonplace, but shouldn’t be accepted as par for the course. I know a number of abundantly talented people who have left the sector for these reasons – taking permanent, better-paid jobs so they can live without the nagging stress of job insecurity. I don’t blame them for a moment, and it’s something I’ve contemplated myself. In a previous museum role, the tantalising prospect of a permanent job being withdrawn hit me hard. I realised that bound up in that fantasy job was not just being in secure work, but being able to plan for the future. Not for the first time, I found myself wondering if pursuing a career I am passionate about was worth it.

As a sector, we are rightly concerned with the diversity of our audiences. How do we reach those visitors who think museums aren’t ‘for them’? How do we challenge the idea of the museum as an all-knowing establishment, and become truly inclusive organisations? How can the work we produce be meaningful to all kinds of visitors, who each bring a rich mixture of life experience, knowledge, feelings and motivations?

These same questions should be applied to museum workforces as well as their audiences. Having a diverse workforce shouldn’t be considered a box-ticking exercise, or some token act of generosity. Having a mix of people creating exhibitions and experiences – with that diversity of life experience, knowledge, feelings and motivations we want in our audiences – isn’t doing the workers a favour, but rather the institutions.

I don’t expect that it will be easy, with a funding crisis that is hitting regional museums with particular force, but the sector must do better. Enabling passionate, talented people who don’t have a financial safety net to develop and sustain careers is essential to ensuring the relevance and perhaps, ultimately, the survival of our museums and galleries.

Denise Courcoux

Read all the articles in this series via #classisabigdeal

Do YOU have a story (short or long) to share with our readers? Submit your experiences to laura@thedoublenegative.co.uk and mike@thedoublenegative.co.uk, or on Twitter, Insta or Facebook #classisabigdeal

This series was conceived after long conversations with our writers, including Denise Courcoux and Kenn Taylor. We’ve written about our own experiences, and sometimes have suggestions for what can be done to improve opportunities for people in our sector.

Perma-skint, exhausted, disenfranchised… We need to talk about why working class people aren’t getting ahead in the arts. And as we rarely hear directly from working class people themselves about the obstacles they face, we decided to start asking. Here, Mike Pinnington invites readers to share their experiences of an industry that is a long way from being fair or diverse…

“She came from Greece she had a thirst for knowledge,

She studied sculpture at Saint Martin’s College,

That’s where I,

Caught her eye.”

– Jarvis Cocker, Common People, 1995

“Common People is not a song about a spoiled condescending female, however vivid the character. The song – part poem, part manifesto – is about Cocker (back then) and people like Cocker (as he had been): the long-term disfranchised and perma-skint, who spend their lives feeling broke, scared and hopeless, without a safety net… Crucially, it’s a story about a penniless working-class student rather than a rich slumming one, and in an increasingly polarised one-note cultural landscape, this sort of distinction seems ever more important.”

– Barbara Ellen, the Guardian, 2015

When we were in the planning stages of the inaugural The Double Negative Fellowship, central to our thinking was eligibility: who should apply and why? Who needs it most? We quickly concluded that a fellowship should benefit those writers who, through no fault of their own, had hit an artificial, metaphorical ceiling in their upward trajectory. In a nutshell, this boiled down to people whose access to key networks was limited – not by their talent, ambition or endeavour, but by their immediate, often geographical, circles. Ideally, the successful candidates also wouldn’t necessarily be able to recognise themselves in the current critical writing landscape. We condensed this further, calling for the discovery of “daring new voices from the North of England”.

This thinking fell in close parallel with, rather than being directly informed by, findings published by Create London and Arts Emergency in their study: Panic! Social Class, Taste and Inequalities in the Creative Industries (full report here). The report looked, in particular, “at the social class background of the workforce, and how this intersects with other issues, including attitudes and values, experience of working for free, social networks, and cultural tastes”. The report found that the percentage of people working in music, performing and visual arts with a working-class background is just 18.2%. Fundamentally, this only confirmed what any of us not granted a silver spoon or golden ticket conferred by privilege already knew: that things would have to change if “the idea of a fair and diverse industry” could take hold and become a reality.

Increasingly, questions of this nature are being posed and explored across the arts spectrum. Back in July 2016, Nikesh Shukla, the editor and author of The Good Immigrant, proposed via Twitter (where else?) that: “Someone should do a Good Immigrant-style state of the nation book of essays by writers from working class backgrounds”. Quick as a flash, Liverpool-based Dead Ink Books replied: “We would publish the crap out of that.” For the indie publisher, this instinctive response was akin to dropping a pebble into a lake, and those resultant ripples continue to be felt as readers discover the watershed collection of essays, Know Your Place.

More recently, writing about what he considers a crisis of the working-classes in the film industry in October’s issue of Sight & Sound, Danny Leigh speaks of our living in “a moment of gross inequality”, and asks the question: “What happens to working class talent in British cinema?” The answer, it’s safe to assume, makes for difficult reading.

One of the contributing authors to Know Your Place, Kit de Waal (a vocal figure on this issue), thinks that “the notion of social mobility has always smacked of: ‘How can we help you to be more like us?’ It seems to say that to be working class is to be a failure”. Leigh, meanwhile, recounts that his proposals for a project to celebrate working-class figures in film to a roomful of industry movers and shakers were met with bemusement. The consensus of the great and the good being that any such spotlight was unnecessary. But Leigh and de Waal, among others, are at least beginning to find traction and momentum in their respective fields.

The impact of these growing reports, publications and articles – and one feels this is just the tip of the iceberg – has been significant. For many, it’s led to an awakening of both consciousness and pride in their working-class status. Of course, for some this was never in question, and has proved crucial – along with perseverance, talent and, perhaps, anger – to sticking around long enough for a chance at success. It is, of course a nuanced, at times fraught, issue, and conversations absolutely need to be developed.

The world of visual art – where the problems outlined in the Panic!… study are deeply felt but rarely acknowledged – seems yet to have truly found its voice. In January of this year, we spoke to artist Larry Achiampong. Asked about the issue of class, Achiampong said: “I can be frank: class is such a big deal.” He reminds us:

“Even on the basic level of resources, the working-class person is going to have to do crazy amounts of work simply to survive, versus someone who has that privilege who can really just wait for an opportunity. People of privilege can use their connections. I don’t think that kind of conversation is opened up. As a result, you tend to have conversations with people who don’t think it’s anything really to do with class, it’s just how hard you work. Excuse me, but this is bullshit.”

One feels the visual arts could do worse than look in the direction of and listen closely to what Achiampong, an artist increasingly enjoying popular exposure, is saying.

In that vein, The Double Negative hopes to foreground this conversation. Over the coming days, we will publish opinion pieces from writers currently employed in the arts, based in the North, who identify as working-class, including 2018 The Double Negative Fellow Denise Courcoux and Kenn Taylor, who is a writer and creative director. We’ll also be looking to publish YOUR stories. What are the obstacles you’ve faced and continue to grapple with? How do you relate to recent reports? Are you worried, angry, or optimistic? Make your voice heard.

Mike Pinnington

Read all the articles in this series via #classisabigdeal

Do YOU have a story (short or long) to share with our readers? Submit your experiences to laura@thedoublenegative.co.uk and mike@thedoublenegative.co.uk, or on Twitter, Insta or Facebook #classisabigdeal

This series was conceived after long conversations with our writers, including Denise Courcoux and Kenn Taylor. We’ve written about our own experiences, and sometimes have suggestions for what can be done to improve opportunities for people in our sector.