INSIGHTS 42
The projects that you work on don’t
get the profile or the critical
reviews. They remain quite invisible
(Artist, 21A)
Socially engaged artists aren’t very
visible to each other because they’re
working in contained ways. They don’t
tend to have studios where they’re all
together (Artist, 8A)
For most, this was linked to a lack of opportunities to
reflect on social practice as an aspect of contemporary art,
including a paucity of critical writing, long-term funding and
opportunities to showcase social projects in art world settings:
I don’t think it gets enough critical
writing… in journals or magazines or
newsletters that we all tend to read. I
think it’s really important that it’s
not just those artists that are more
fine art, more gallery-based that are
securing all that important coverage
(Commissioner, 6B)
There’s not large-scale funding for
projects… they tend to be smaller pots
of money that are side lined for other
things (Artist, 3A)
Others referred to a lack of dedicated training opportunities
or university courses and the absence of formal awards or
recognition for excellence in social practice:
It would be nice if we were invited to
teach in mainstream art schools on an
equal footing, to share the successes
of our project with the wider art
community (Artist, 9A)
There’s no equivalent of the National
Portrait Gallery competition, or Taylor
Wessing Prize for portrait photographers
(Artist, 3A)
In addition, funding systems which demanded a continual
process of grant capture were felt to work against the creation
of a lasting and visible legacy for social projects:
I think organisations and staff are
under a lot of pressure. Many of them
are under-resourced and therefore
they’re time-poor and stressed and
understandably they’re more focused
on delivery and the next project…
than supporting the current artist
(Artist 21A)
Overall, many respondents emphasised that social artists
faced similar issues to many others working in the arts, often
advocating wholesale system change to assure a living wage
for artists and to address current levels of inequity in the wider
arts sector:
Universal basic income
would be fantastic (Artist, 2A)
We’re basically just fighting over a
very small pool [of money] and there’s
a much bigger pool of the population
that should be touched by something
other than money (Artist, 16A)
STATUS IN THE ART WORLD
The lack of support, infrastructure and visibility led some
artists to feel like second-class citizens in the art world:
I guess some people wouldn’t realise
this is art, they wouldn’t see me as an
artist (Artist, 22A)
For some, this was a direct result of their conducting social
projects outside of the conventional spaces of the art world. In
particular, working in ways that overlapped with other forms of
(undervalued) labour such as social work and social care. Doing
so put pressure on artists to be able to move easily between
different sectors and to effectively communicate the role and
value of their work to disparate stakeholders:
The practice intersects with so many
other things, whether it’s youth work
or community engagement or activism…
You have to be able to speak the right
language and because you’re working
in lots of different sectors, you’re
using lots of different languages and
you can’t ever be fluent in all those
languages… I sometimes worry that means
we aren’t taken seriously in any of
those sectors (Artist, 3A)