Examination of Witnesses (Questions 1-19)
8 MARCH 2005
MS REBECCA
SALTER, PROFESSOR
GERARD HEMSWORTH,
MS SUSAN
JONES, MS
HILARY GRESTY
AND MS
MARJORIE ALLTHORPE-GUYTON
Chairman: Good morning. Thank you very
much for coming to see us today. By either a curious symmetry
or circularity, the very first inquiry over which I presided in
1992, the old National Heritage Committee, was on the art market,
and here we are again. I am very pleased, quite apart from the
distinguished witnesses that we have, to see such a good attendance
in the public area as well. This is a very important subject.
Derek.
Q1 Derek Wyatt: I do not mind how you
answer. You do not have to answer each question, but if some of
you feel you want to answer, please feel free to do so. Can I
ask you where you all stand on droit de suite, please? Does anyone
have any view?
Ms Salter: As yet undecided, although
I did find the submission from DACS quite persuasive, I have to
say, particularly the experience of Sweden where they felt it
almost became a loyalty, almost like a fair trademark, that artists
were getting a percentage of the sales.
Q2 Derek Wyatt: Do you have feeling about
how low you should go? For instance, I understand in France it
is 30 euros, in Germany it is 50 euros?
Ms Salter: Yes. I suspect that
would come down to administrative costs. I am not an expert, I
am an artist, but—
Q3 Derek Wyatt: We do not make a difference
in libraries between authors. We do not say they can have 8% or
5%; they have the same. Should Europe have the same system or
should Britain just have a free system? In other words, should
we be the lowest? It should not be set. Do you understand what
I am saying? No-one has a view?
Ms Gresty: I think that we would
feel that there are other ways of supporting, if you like, the
emerging and less established artists and perhaps that also needs
to be looked at.
Q4 Derek Wyatt: Tell us what that should
be? This is what the whole investigation is supposed to cover.
What do you suggest?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: Perhaps I
should give an Arts Council view. As you are aware, we have been
aware of this problem since 1994. We produced a major report on
implementing droit de suite in 2002, where we have, I think, scoped
the major issues. In principle the idea that artists should benefit
from resale of their work is a good one, but there are major difficulties
in the directive, not least the definition of practice because
contemporary art covers such a wide range of media. Computer generated
work is not eligible, and that is going to pose a difficulty;
moving image work is not eligible and a lot of artists make film,
video, limited editions which form a major part of works that
are sold on the international market, and the Directive, of course,
includes a lot of three-dimensional work—furniture, jewellery,
crafts—and artists make work in batch production. The idea
and the notion of defining what is authored and what is original
and what is not is going to be quite difficult for the Directive
in terms of clarifying some of those major issues. In terms of
the threshold, I think that the issue will have to be looked at
in terms of administrative cost and, finally, benefit to artists.
Certainly at the time that we did the report of the 11 countries
where it is in force, only eight actually really enforced the
directive, and in France, if my information is currently correct,
it is only enforced in auction sales, not in all sales. All of
those issues, of course, will be ironed out, I am sure, through
the consultation process and through discussion with the body
that will in the end be decided to implement the Directive in
terms of the collection of the right; so I think it is a question
of balancing administrative cost against benefit to the widest
number of artists. As my colleague has said, there are many, many
ways that artists can be helped other than through resale right.
Two million euros, I think, is collected in France, which actually
is very little in terms of the numbers of artists involved. We
have a lot of things to consider in terms of shaping how the Directive
will be managed and implemented.
Q5 Derek Wyatt: You are a little elusive
about what we need to do more. What do we need to do more to help
young talent develop? What is it that we need to do? What would
you recommend that we write in our report?
Ms Jones: Can I suggest that a
number of motives need to be put into place that support not only
the young artists, or new artists, but artists at a particular
stage of transition in their career, or their life or their work.
One of the things I think I am aware of is the fact that we need
to listen far more to the artists themselves about the things
that are important to them, and we need to recognise the kind
of mixed economy, this scope of what an artist does nowadays,
which ranges from making objects that may sell to a commercial
market or, indeed, to a domestic market. They also provide a huge
range of services and community activity which enriches our life,
our education, our health service, social systems altogether and
therefore we must look at the entirety of those things and try
and segment things that will help a lot of artists rather than
a few of them.
Ms Gresty: Another thing I would
say to back that up is that at the moment we have very inadequate
statistics on what artists do. There is no way of actually quantifying
their contribution to the economy through these services that
they provide. The Arts Council have some, my colleagues from The
Artists Information Company have some, but it is not built in
to top down statistics from DTI or the Audit Office. In addition,
as within the creative industries, arts and antiques is the only
category we have. We do not have a category for contemporary practising
artists and the income that is generated through their sales,
so I think a root and branch review of some of the ways in which
artists actually contribute in quite a substantial way to the
economy is needed.
Q6 Derek Wyatt: You mean The Arts Council
has never done that?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: Analysing
the impact that artists have—
Q7 Derek Wyatt: It sounds like a sort
of Ofsted that you want?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton:
We do a great deal of work in that respect. We have currently
entered into a partnership with the Arts and Humanities Research
Board to look at the impact in terms of the role that artists,
not just visual artists but all artists, have in a number of spheres
in the public realm. This year we are taking forward a major review
of the way that people see and access contemporary visual arts,
which has to be taken in the broader context because visual artists
work not only in the contemporary gallery but also in the museum,
the heritage sector, in the wider public realm, and we are in
relation to that piece of work looking at very strong examples
where artists have had a major influence on a health care environment
or in the education field, and we are producing a series of exemplars
or illustrations to demonstrate the role that they have had. I
think there is a problem, and I think our sponsoring body, the
DCMS, fully acknowledges this, with analysing the qualitative
impact of arts activity. It is more a question of what we call
longitudinal studies. It is very difficult to get hard outcomes
because they are soft. A child can see in a relationship with
an artist in a school, for example, how their lives can be changed
through working with artists, through making their own art, but
that effect might not really manifest itself until they are having
their own children. These things are lifetime experiences, gathering
hard data is quite difficult, and so we are looking at soft outcomes
and how they can be demonstrated in a clearer way as well, but
in terms of support for artists, as I think the evidence that
we provided demonstrates, artists need a number of things. First
of all, they need to be aware while they are still in education
of what the business of being a professional artist means and
what they need to equip themselves with to become artists if that
is the route they wish to take. The other is work space. We have
done a great deal to use part of our lottery money to help artists
have better work space. We have spent about 70 million to date
in order to allow artists to buy their freeholds or to manage
their own buildings in which to work, because the provision of
work space that is affordable is very important. We have seen
in London, particularly where artists were really responsible
for regenerating huge swathes of Wapping, Hoxton, they are squeezed
out because inevitably, as soon as property is developed, artists
have to move to the margins, and that is being repeated throughout
the country. It is not just London we are talking about, it is
city centre regeneration countrywide. We want to look at ways
that local authorities can help artists through preferential rents
and rates on low-cost buildings in which to work. That is one
issue, and I think there are a whole raft of issues, particularly
to do with tax and benefits, which need to be revisited in a way
which would be helpful to young artists in their working lives.
Q8 Derek Wyatt: In the Department for
Education there is a will to create schools that are not quite
open 24 hours a day but 18 hours a day and will have a different
management set up at four o'clock when the school closes, and
I have one in my community. What I have noticed is that once they
are fingered to be one of these, healthy living standards suddenly
appear, GP's surgeries appear, lots of things appear. What I have
noticed is that everything else except art and music seems to
be involved in these schools that are going to open 18 hours a
day. I am struggling to understand why the community is last in
this hierarchy where they are wanting to develop on site community
needs. Art and music should be there, why is it not there?
Ms Jones: I would posit the view,
as I mentioned earlier, that there is not enough actually listening
and talking to artists. We have spent quite a considerable time
since 2002 doing that very thing in order to establish the things
that would really make a difference to artists, and we did that
by asking artists themselves what their practice was like and
what it was going to be like in five or 10 years' time; and we
looked at things that would really make a difference whereby artists
can talk to other artists about their work and find out whether
it is any good, for example, find out which galleries might be
suitable to show it, find out where the studios are, where the
affordability is, share studios, share knowledge and experience.
The issue that you have just raised about schools and their usage
is an interesting one. When I was a school age child in my village
the school was not only quiet after school hours, it also had
a whole block that was not used at all, and we looked at the notion
of using that for artists' studios for a particular period of
time. Of course the infrastructure did not allow that to happen
for various reasons, and so we have to look at ways, if you like,
by which artists can infiltrate into other areas where they can
use provision that might otherwise not be available to them: because
however many studio buildings we might build, only 17% or so of
the artist population at the moment is in those spaces.
Q9 Derek Wyatt: Last week Sir Peter Hall
said that he had been successful in Kingston upon Thames of persuading
the local authority of using a section 106 which created Kingston
Theatre. Is there any success anywhere in Britain using a section
106 in planning that has created an artists studio, or an arts
centre or anything that is of mixed use?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: The 106 has
frequently been used to provide just that throughout the country.
Q10 Derek Wyatt: Can you give us an example
of where so we can look at it?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: I cannot
bring that immediately to mind, but we can give you that information.
Q11 Chris Bryant: Moving on to slightly
different issues, some of the people who have written in have
talked about fair dealing. It is one of the concepts of copyright,
obviously, that is quite important. Do you think artists get a
fair deal from their dealers?
Ms Salter: I suppose my interest
is in this particular area, because I am very aware as an artist
and as a teacher that certainly art schools are turning out huge
numbers of artists every year, and, in my view, a lot of them
are ill-prepared for the market they are going to meet. Although
there is a professional practice module now, it does not seem
to be delivered in the same way in all art schools and so the
level of knowledge cannot be guaranteed when they graduate. There
is what I can only call a quaint but slightly alarming naivety.
A lot of students when you ask them, "What will you be doing
in a year's time?" come up with a model of making a living
which functioned when I was an art student but which barely works
now. The model is, "I would like to teach a couple of days
a week, do my own work in the studio and sell my work in a gallery."
The model of teaching a couple of days a week in an art school
has almost completely disappeared. That almost disappeared in
the '80s. This leaves an artist trying to work out how to make
a living, how to support a studio, how to approach a gallery,
and my narrow concern is when a student or a young artist does
find a gallery to work with it is the power relationship between
the dealer and the artists. Once the artist becomes very famous,
then the power relationship to some extent evens out, but young
artists, "There are plenty more where you came from",
are incredibly vulnerable and the practices within a lot of galleries
are not transparent. The vulnerability for the artist is that
you retain legal ownership of your work but you relinquish physical
possession to the gallery, and you may or may not either get your
work back or get paid. I feel that a code of practice, a code
of conduct, which could govern that to some extent would be a
tremendous help for young artists, particularly when they are
starting out.
Professor Hemsworth: That is not
quite my experience. I think when artists are graduating they
tend to have one thing in mind, and that is how their practice
as an artist is going to be made visible. The business of being
an artist tends to be very much in the background. I think that
artists graduating now tend to be quite smart. They are aware.
Colleges and universities tend to work in two ways in terms of
professional practice. There are courses. In universities where
they have a lot of part-time teaching, professional practice may
well be embedded in the programme. When artists graduate there
is not a direct relationship in terms of what galleries they go
to. They could go with an emerging dealer who was very much on
the same level as they are, or they may be spotted by somebody
who is very established. That is a decision that they have to
make. It is not the same for everyone. I think that, by and large,
young artists are smart enough to get their paper work in order
with dealers. There are very few dealers where it is just a shop,
so they do build-up a relationship with that artist, and there
is a dependency for both artist and dealer. I am not saying that
people have not been stung over the years, but that is quite a
good learning curve.
Q12 Chris Bryant: You do not necessarily
want to go on that learning curve, do you? Of itself it is not
a good thing?
Professor Hemsworth: I think it
only happens once.
Ms Salter: I do not know.
Q13 Chris Bryant: The evidence that we
were given by some French people involved in the market was that
they felt there were a lot of dodgy deals done by dealerships
which put the artist at a great disadvantage in terms of consignment,
and, because the droit de suite at the moment does not apply to
dealerships in France, only to auction houses, they felt that
bringing in droit de suite for the dealers as well would tidy
up the relationship so that, for instance, when an artist consigns
their work to a dealer they would be told when the art work had
been sold?
Professor Hemsworth: I think there
was a difficulty here and it has to do with dealer management.
For example, one thing a dealer has to absolutely make sure is
that if a client comes back to them and says that they have changed
their mind they have to be able to return the money, otherwise
they are going to lose their client. Sometimes there is a period
of time, and I am talking here about young and up and coming dealers,
there is often a period of time when that money is floating, they
do not know, they are not sure they have made a sale. It looks
like they have made a sale. They may inform their artist, but
quite often they do not inform the artist because it may not go
through. I think that most artists are very clear with their dealers,
they have an arrangement with a percentage and they are generally
kept informed.
Q14 Chris Bryant: I think Hilary wants
to come in?
Ms Gresty: I was just going to
reinforce to some extent what Professor Hemsworth has been saying,
that a good dealer will often have a very long-term and nurturing
relationship with an artist, so it is a relationship, and although
codes of practice will help to establish parameters, they have
to be sufficiently light touch for those relationships. A dealer
very often will invest a lot of their own time and money, which
is why young artists often do not have established relationships
with dealers because they are too much of a risk, and that is
to some extent where the public sector has a role to play in supporting
younger artists. Yes, as Gerard has said, this relationship may
very often be with an emerging dealer who has perhaps come out
of art school himself or herself and is setting up as a dealer
and so they are working very much as a partnership. We must not
forget this very important contribution that dealers make as well
as the financial transactions.
Ms Salter: I think also it would
be helpful if there were some kind of guidelines, because at the
moment, generally speaking, there is a 50:50 split between the
artist and the dealer. Certainly when I first started working
people who were in the art world, for example, as art consultants
but did not have the overheads of premises, would take a smaller
percentage because they could then work in partnership with dealers,
but I have noticed recently they are now wanting 50%, which means
that when they work with dealers that money has to come from somewhere
and that puts again the artist's 50% under pressure. I think,
as you say, a light touch code of conduct or code of practice
would help to clarify some of those divisions.
Chairman: I am going to have to move
on. Frank Doran.
Q15 Mr Doran: The debate is fascinating,
because it seems to me, when I read some of the submissions, particularly
Rebecca Salter's, I saw an oppressed minority. I am a lawyer and
a trade unionist and we are used to oppressed minorities, but
listening to and looking at other papers and submissions it seems
to me that no matter what side of the spectrum you are on—oppressed
artists or dealers trying their best—there is uncertainty.
How do we deal with the uncertainty?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: We are looking
particularly with a mind to emerging dealers and, as Professor
Hemsworth has said, some of them have been artists themselves
and have decided to represent their peers and are becoming dealers
and entering the market. They find it very difficult to work internationally
because of the cost involved, certainly to represent artists at
international trade fairs, which is the major infrastructure for
the market, so we are looking at the feasibility of a trade association
for contemporary agents and dealers, which, of course, would enable
not only representation, perhaps to the DTI, for help to work
internationally, but also to look at issues like protocols. I
have to say though that—
Q16 Mr Doran: Everyone who trades in
the market, and art is a market, in every other market they have
contracts. You have a contract when you get on a bus and buy a
bus ticket. Why cannot artists have a contract?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: Some artists
do have contracts.
Q17 Mr Doran: Why is it not the norm?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: Certainly
in other spheres of business an awful lot is still done on agreements
and trust, certainly in some areas of business, due diligence
and whatever, consultancies, a lot of work is done without contracts
but it is on trust and agreement and verbal assurances. This still
works. Being a dealer is a very complex business.
Q18 Mr Doran: I understand that.
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: But artists
also have to represent themselves and they have to argue. If they
want 50%, they must ensure they get 50% whether the dealer sells
it for more or not—they must argue their position—and
that is what we hoped to try and help artists to do through supporting
agencies that can give artists advice.
Q19 Mr Doran: How do you bring into the
relationship transparency and accountability if you do not have
some legal basis to the relationship?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: I think that
is something that would need much closer discussion with the market
and with the agencies, because they have to operate in an international
environment where transparency is an issue, but the market is
smoke and mirrors. It often has been the case, and I think there
will be a challenge to that in terms of intervening in this country,
when it is not an international protocol.
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