Why are the arts so undervalued?

It was the longest to ever affect Hollywood but, after 146 days, the Writers Guild of America strike action is now over. While the specifics of the deal reached between the unions and the studios have not been made public, it is believed that many of the demands – including fair pay, minim staffing numbers and protection against AI – have been met. The actors strike, however, which developed soon after the writers', is still ongoing.

What fascinates about these moments in Hollywood is how far reaching their implications are. The questions raised by the strike action, and the vast scale of them, are profoundly resonant to the arts in general and how much we value them – or don't. Because if we no longer ascribe any intrinsic worth to the people who have meticulously crafted what we read, watch and enjoy, what does that say about how highly we think of the arts in society?

When I was younger, I wanted to be an actress. My parents were supportive but I got the impression that they wanted to prepare me for the less glamorous aspects of the job. They made me watch Fame and Withnail and I, and they only bought me the actor biographies which strenuously detailed a life of rejection and hardship. My mother cut out a comic strip for me, which remained pinned to the cork-board behind my desk until my early twenties when (spoiler alert) I gave up this dream. It showed a man knocking on his neighbour’s door. "I’m an actor and I’ve just moved in next door," he says. "Can I borrow a cup of money?"

When we think of actors, we perhaps think of the Hollywood stars living a life of luxury, where Golden Globes are displayed in their downstairs bathrooms and Architectural Digest pops over for house tours. But what the recent strikes make clear, is that these 'stars' are a slim minority. The overwhelming preponderance of those working in the arts – from writers to actors – are the kind who might move in next door to you, and ask for a cup of money. The sad fact is that, more than 20 years after my mother gave me that comic strip, this joke is still an accepted truism. If you work in the arts – be that as a singer, painter, writer or actor – don’t expect to make any money.

Margot Robbie is among the many famous faces who have joined the picket lines in Hollywood

"When I was at school there was a really clear distinction made to me between working in a creative field and making money," says Mishki Vaccaro, a writer and director who currently works between Toronto and LA. "Obviously, I wanted to have the sort of financial freedom to live a good, comfortable life and to support myself. But if my motivating factor wasn't to make all the money in the world through business, then I felt, even at that age, that my point of view wasn't valued."

What Vaccaro explains is that a binary had been laid down between a job that would bring fulfilment to her life, and one which would financially remunerate her. It was as though she couldn't have both – and was, in fact, being punished for having the audacity to pursue a career she might enjoy. "But I would also argue that what I do has its own very important value in society, and I don’t understand why so many people in my industry are still underpaid or – worse – asked to do it for free," she says. "It shows just how much people actually value what we do, even as they consume it every day."

The strikes pertinently occurred in a post-Covid era, after a pandemic in which the important function of art in society had never been more appreciated. What did we do at home for months, if not consume the work that people like Vaccaro had meticulously created? While we clapped for the NHS workers who kept us alive, there was also a quiet, unspoken but collectively recognised understanding that artists were also keeping us alive – in a different way. It was songs, books, films and TV shows that nurtured our spirits during those long months of panic and insecurity. It would make sense if both industries would see this renewed appreciation as a fiscal turning point. They did not and, ironically, both are now striking.

"I think it is important to look at the value of the arts in light of this current wave of unionisation," says Sam Ladkin, senior lecturer in creative and critical writing at the University of Sussex and editor of the 2016 book, Against Value in the Arts and Education. "It is easy for people to see the arts as something light when actually, this is a clear, old-fashioned labour dispute. This is the relationship between capital and labour, to the detriment of labour."

Cultural institutions, like Tate Modern, are intrinsic to our society’s social health and wellbeing

Ladkin is erudite when she speaks about not just the value of the arts in society, but the fundamental problem with how we make that value judgement. Art is, after all, a famously subjective medium. One man’s Picasso is another man’s trash. So, if you can’t really measure the merit of individual art itself, how can you track its broader impact?

"Art is a victim of audit culture," he says. "By this I mean we are always trying to justify art by translating it into a different form of data. So, the ambiguity and the complexity of the arts and the experience of the arts gets reduced down to the kind of commodified things the consumer might buy." Art is, therefore, placed within a system that measures it by a yardstick that doesn’t quite apply. "What’s wrong with how we judge the arts is the fact that we believe something is justifiable only if it can be translated into money."

Ladkin compares this to the unpaid labour of caregivers (disproportionately women) whose work contributes to the smooth running of society but, because it cannot be quantitively measured, is not valued. Vaccaro sees this an equally gendered problem, as "arts and artistic pursuits are generally coded as feminine versus maths and science, which are coded as masculine". It goes some way to describe why STEM subjects are foisted upon girls as a way to readdress the gender pay gap. While this is valiant, it fails to consider the fact that it's underpinned by a fundamentally flawed value judgement. Instead of recognising that the arts are outrageously underfunded and underpaid, we just push people away from them.

Kristen Stewart filming ’Seberg’ in 2019

"It shows that we do not value the things that are not quantitatively measurable," says Vacarro. "But we work in a qualitative field: we work in narrative, we work in storytelling, we work in research, we work in relationships. You can’t measure that in the same way, and so tragically we are seeing huge underfunding to arts education and arts programmes in the States and in the UK."

This is why Arts Council England – which aims to invest more than £467 million of public money from the government and an estimated £250 million from The National Lottery each year to help support the sector – does attempt to measure the value of the arts differently. "We strongly advocate for the value that investment in culture creates for England," their spokesperson tells me. "This includes producing research on the social and economic benefits of creativity and culture, and making the case for investment to the government and the public." Through their meticulously researched 'Let’s Create' plan, they look at something called 'creative health', which encourages us to see art in the context of health and wellbeing. "By 2030, we want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish."

The holistic value of the arts is something long neglected or, perhaps worse, relegated to a state of unimportance. But pushes from the likes of Arts Council England and the visibility of the strikes in Hollywood might just force a broader cultural conversation about our fatal misunderstanding of its significance. Both Ladkin and Vaccaro are hopeful that the strikes will prove an eye-opener to the reality of life in the arts, especially thanks to the endorsement of huge celebrity names on the picket lines, and the postponement of major projects and award ceremonies.

"Storytelling is our is our first language – from the first caveman paintings, through mythology, and now to where we are in this industry – and it remains the way we make sense of the world," says Vaccaro. "These strikes are a fight to preserve the humanity in storytelling and I’m hopeful that this will be a wake-up call to everyone; a reminder that the mark of an enlightened society is its ability to make art."

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