Pete Hindle

Part one of some, in which you can read me espousing in a generalised year-end type way.

The other day, a very clever man explained to me about careers and learning curves. He was saying that every two years we complete another learning curve, take a look around at the career we’ve been having, and say to ourselves “has that worked? Do I really want to keep doing that for another two years, or longer?”

I’ve had a similar conversation with a few different artists recently, except that there seems to be one essential difference between the art world and the world of regular work, which is that people who work in the “straight” world (please excuse the crass generalisation) don’t really see themselves as having a choice about what they do. Whereas people who work within creative fields such as art often find themselves drawn there and stuck there by internal pressures.

It’s this pressure to make that I find interesting. Although make isn’t really the entire description: it’s also dance, sing, perform, paint, sculpt, install… any selection of words that you want to use to talk about creative work. The fact that we don’t have one single word that can sum up the creative span says a lot about our attitudes as a culture to anything outside the narrow band of work-in-an-office-sense-of-the-word work. Because these creative fields are work.

And, while it’s well known that these creative fields are not the most well remunerated, it’s still something that people want to make a living doing. Hans Abbing, the dutch economist who studied the artistic population of Holland, noted that when art stopped being the primary concern of the creative types, they often got more interesting jobs in related areas. This would be the raft of gallery, museum, and university-level jobs that enable cultural creativity to continue in the local area.

As pure conjecture, I would say that it’s impossible to rely on that raft to keep the creative economy going in any one area. For instance, the remit of universities and galleries is actually very different to what artists need. These large institutions need a constant foot-fall of visitors that they can show to funding bodies in order to qualify their existence. Artists need a way of producing work and being supported while producing work. Sometimes these two needs overlap like a venn diagram, but there will always be an overabundance of creativity that cannot be supported.

Continuing with my conjecturable musing, 2009 promises to be the start of penny-pinching times for a lot of organisations. Contrary to most people who are (like me) spouting unasked for opinion in a textual form, I can see some great upsides to this, such as finally encouraging people to take a two-year look around themselves and ask if they truly are happy at the end of their learning curve. I also think it’s a great time for people to ask if they are getting what they want from floating along with the raft.

The next section will have some thoughts on what is around apart from clinging to the raft, and will also get round to the question of mavernship in cultural circles.