Lockdown: sanitising the arts

Few would deny that the effect of lockdown on the arts has been severe. But lockdown measures have not treated all the arts equally. Some of the arts have boomed during lockdown; stuck indoors, many of us have turned to streaming services, for TV, film and music. Reading has grown, and print books, even while bookshops have been shut, have boomed.

But the arts that have suffered during lockdown are those which depend on physical space and an audience free to decide where it goes and how it spends its free time. Visual art – found in every kind of building from Tate Modern and swanky London commercial galleries to the smallest artist-run storefront pop-ups and art college galleries, and the scores of mid-sized regional art centres and galleries – has, for the best part of a year, been put into cold-storage. For all the talk of ‘recovery’, the government’s response has been at best unimaginative and reactive, at worst ignorant of the complex and often precarious economy on which much of the visual arts – and many visual artists – rely. While the sector tentatively begins to reopen, it will be unlikely to return to ‘business as usual’ and the result is likely to be a battered, cash-strapped and pared down visual-art culture.

Emergency funding

The government’s response – propelled by the widespread alarm of many in the arts and cultural sector as the first lockdown pushed into June – was in the first instance to throw money at keeping arts organisations from going bust. Alongside this, more limited funding has been made available by the arts councils for direct grants to artists. Cutting across these sector-specific schemes, the Coronavirus Job Retention Scheme (the ‘furlough scheme’) and the Self-Employment Income Support Scheme, have sustained both employees and freelancers across the subsidised and commercial arts sector.

While this emergency funding was widely welcomed, it has also revealed the longstanding structural vulnerability of many publicly funded visual-art institutions to the loss of commercial income, as well as the interdependencies between commercial, public and non-commercial economies in the visual arts and the wide arts and culture sector. Many state-subsidised arts organisations, especially in London, now generate a significant share (sometimes the majority) of their income from sources other than their DCMS or Arts Council funding. For example, the Tate Gallery group’s income in 2019/20 was £130.7million, of which only £36.7million was government grant-in-aid. This shift towards self-generated income is a direct result of government funding cuts in the wake of the financial crash, and a policy push since then to encourage arts organisations to find more of their own funding. In the visual-arts sector, survey data of the income of Arts Council England’s (ACE’s) National Portfolio Organisations (those receiving regular core funding) shows that in the three years to 2019/20, the share of earned income in visual arts organisations grew by 15 per cent (ticket sales, café and shop revenue, etc) and contributed income (donations etc) rose by over 18 per cent. Meanwhile ACE grant income, as a share of total income of organisations, fell by 12 per cent.

For as long as galleries and arts organisations could function normally, the shift from public to private income could be welcomed by those in government keen to reduce the ‘dependency’ of the arts on the state. But because of this increased dependency on earned income, arts organisations have been badly exposed to the effects of the lockdowns. At the same time, the commercial forms of the arts have been similarly hit; normally solvent businesses in the arts and entertainment sector have had to go begging to the Cultural Recovery Fund to stay afloat.

Art on hold

The closure, reopening and closure of galleries, art spaces and venues has meant that art programmes have been put on hold. But this means that exhibitions have been put off or cancelled, and artists not commissioned or paid for new works. As is typical of the wider arts and entertainment sector, many working in the visual arts are not permanently employed by organisations but are self-employed. However, few artists earn their income exclusively from the proceeds of their freelance work as artists, with the result that many artists have fallen between the stools of government and ACE support schemes. ACME, a long-established visual-arts studio provision charity, outlined in its submission to parliament’s DCMS committee inquiry on the ‘Impact on Covid-19 on DCMS Sectors’ that artists habitually draw their income from various sources, shared across sales, teaching, other cultural freelance work and non-art related activities. As arts researcher Susan Jones has pointed out, ‘the criterion to show at least 50 per cent of income from self-employment made three-quarters of visual artists ineligible for the government’s Self-Employment Income Support Scheme (SEISS) and Arts Council’s Emergency fund for individuals’.

The lockdowns have disrupted business-as-normal for arts organisations, while largely abandoning artists to fend for themselves, as both the exhibition economy and the informal gig economy on which many practitioners also rely has been put into induced coma by the lockdowns. Equally disruptive has been the effect of Covid restrictions, during the brief window of reopening during the summer of 2020. Widely reported, the Association of Leading Visitor Attractions’ (ALVA) figures for 2020 show a collapse in visitor numbers for galleries of upwards of 70 per cent. Notably, outdoor venues, which had been able to reopen earlier and with fewer restrictions during the summer months (these mostly not galleries and museums), fared somewhat better, demonstrating the stark impact not only of total closure but of the effects of ‘Covid secure’ regulations on indoor public culture.

Lockdown rules

During the few months of ‘Covid-secure’ reopening, commercial and independent galleries struggled valiantly to accommodate the new rules: online booking systems with timed appointment slots were hurriedly implemented, to book visits for exhibitions that one would have previously casually dropped in to. Public galleries and museums fared worse: saddled with more complex public-liability duties and much more dependent on the free flow of visitors (and ticket income), they became victim to the government’s risk-averse caution over any space where too many people might gather. The prospect of a timed 15-minute entry window for a visit to Tate Modern, for example, would have been a deterrent to all but the most committed visitors. It is not just closure which had mauled the visual art sector, but the COVID-secure restrictions which have caused chaos for indoor venues. Empty galleries may have been one of the luxuries for the committed few, but the disappearance of visitors means that for many venues which now increasingly rely on visitor spend as much as ticket sales, staying open without losing money has become a serious concern. So concerned is the sector that the National Association of Museum Directors, alarmed by the likely administrative burden, commercial impact and social consequences of proposed vaccine passports, has come out in opposition to these, arguing that ‘museums are committed to engaging and involving the widest possible audiences, therefore measures that create additional inequalities of access, particularly for audiences who may be already less engaged with culture cannot be supported’.

Woke arts

Lockdown has been calamitous for the visual arts and all the arts, whose meaning and value is located in the civic culture of public gathering and free movement. The complex system of interdependent public and private economies which sustains both institutions and artists has been badly disrupted, first by outright shuttering, then by attempts to reopen based solely on the mitigation of health risk. The government’s response, via furlough scheme and via its Cultural Recovery Fund, has only really achieved the mothballing of organisations that would have otherwise gone bust. This is only putting off the day when we have to reopen the galleries, theatres and concert halls for good. But then what? The ongoing effects of restrictions on travel will have a dire impact on our larger, mostly London-based institutions. Already the Tate and the Victoria & Albert Museum have announced significant restructuring and redundancies in their permanent staff. Falling revenues cannot but have a significant impact on the quality of exhibitions, curatorial expertise and scholarship.

The looming problem is that the funding crisis which the lockdowns have provoked will not magically disappear post-lockdown. Organisations increasingly reliant on trading income, ticket sales, corporate sponsorship and philanthropic donations will face the reality of poorer visitors and fewer tourists on one hand, while corporate and private philanthropy will either withdraw or demand greater influence in the programmes of institutions. (Already big brands such as Chanel are bringing the ‘woke corporate’ agenda to bear, for example in their support of the National Portrait Gallery’s curatorial project Reframing Narratives: Women in Portraiture.)

The government’s emergency response, channelled by the Arts Council, has been to shore up the base of client institutions it has cultivated over the past quarter of a century, underwriting buildings and staffing costs while largely ignoring the downstream consequences on artists and other freelance practitioners. The Arts Council has recently published its latest ‘delivery plan’, in which it admits the failure of its reliance on a ‘trickle down’ model to support individual artists. And yet, while it makes vague noises of support for individual artists, the Council’s delivery plan looks forward to what is in effect more straitened finances for organisations which will need to find ‘more flexible business models’, ‘an increased focus on efficiency… including mergers, shared services, and new partnerships with organisations and people inside and outside the cultural sector’. Reading through the policy-speak, this is code for public funding that will make more demands on arts organisations – imposing its buzzword preoccupations ‘inclusivity’ and environmental responsibility – while supporting them less.

Pushback

The visual arts need to reopen fully, without the trammels and constraints of ‘Long Covid’, audience restrictions of vaccine passports, social distancing and timed entrances. Only then will visual art stand a chance of reconnecting with its audience, while creating new places for artists and audiences to come together. Light touch, not over-regulation, will give artists the best chance to make things happen.

But at the same time, the government and its agencies must be made to take responsibility for the damage their lockdown policies have caused. This will mean a pushback against ‘inevitable’ funding cuts, but also against the continual creep of the top-down micromanagement culture of funding bodies like ACE, dictating how artistic activity is to be organised and what its purposes and goals should be. While the ‘trickle down’ model of funding has failed to support artists, the ‘pour down’ model of policy direction coming from ACE is alive and kicking. Unchecked, it will make the visual arts even more culturally subordinate and dependent on government policy (‘arm’s length’ or not), being made responsible for the failings of a policy model which has sought to reduce funding while maintaining the funder’s veto on the independence of artists’ organisations.

If the government and its clients really wanted to support the arts, they should first commit to paying artists equitably when receiving public funds, and then back off – allowing the arts the room to create and develop the art, the cultural spaces, and the audiences, needed to restart life after Covid.

JJ Charlesworth

Writer and art critic

JJ Charlesworth studied art at Goldsmiths College in London in the mid-1990s, before turning to writing criticism. His reviews, articles and commentaries have appeared in publications including Art Monthly, Modern Painters, Time Out and The Spectator. Since 2006, he has worked on the editorial staff of the London-based international art magazine ArtReview, where he is one of the editors. His doctoral thesis, completed in 2016 at the Royal College of Art, is a study of art criticism in Britain during the 1970s.

Follow JJ on Twitter: @jjcharlesworth_