Examination of Witnesses (Questions 20-29)
8 MARCH 2005
MS REBECCA
SALTER, PROFESSOR
GERARD HEMSWORTH,
MS SUSAN
JONES, MS
HILARY GRESTY
AND MS
MARJORIE ALLTHORPE-GUYTON
Q20 Mr Doran: The vast majority of people
who are artists and selling their artworks in this country are
not operating in the international market. You have to reach a
certain level before you get to a point where that is an issue
for you?
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: Yes. That
is the second point I wanted to make and one that we were at pains
to draw out, I think, in our submission. Many artists are not
interested in the traditional market. They are working in the
public realm in many different ways, particularly in terms of
communities, local authorities commissioning their work, and they
are not only commissioning their work but they are commissioning
their services. They are working in schools, and there they work
for daily rates—they are paid fees—and we are just
as interested in how they are supported with good contracts in
that contractual relationship as we are with the traditional market.
Q21 Mr Doran: I understand that, but
it still does not deal with the basic point I am making. Of all
the professional relationships that we have in the UK, why is
it that artists do not have proper structures?
Ms Jones: I think there are two
reasons for that. We are dealing with a huge size of market here,
and we are dealing with a sector of people who have a lot of different
aspirations for their work. Obviously some artists will look towards
selling work through the conventional markets and others will
look at it in a different way. My colleagues here have talked
about the fact that you have also got a huge number of people
going through fine art courses now. There is a huge ballooning
of numbers of people going into that field, and there was a 71%
increase in artists over a 10 year period as a result of that;
so the size of the market and therefore the competitiveness amongst
the artists in it does contribute to perhaps what might need to
be called a lack of good practice, in the sense that artists are
scraping and pushing to get an opportunity. We know, just by looking
at our own records, that about £7 million worth of work is
advertised a year for artists. That is by no means all the work
that is available, but we also know that 38% of that is based
around exhibitions, but there is very little level of reward for
it at all. The artists are having to subsidise and think of how
to make their work visible by hook or by crook, and the new artists
who are joining the profession are doing that with the student
debt that they bring with them. For the artists later on in their
careers, they are also doing that looking at what they are going
to live on when they get to pensionable age. In a sense the size
of the market has a great skewing effect upon it. What we are
trying to suggest is that there are some very basic planks that
can really make a difference to a lot of artists, and although
we cannot force the private sector to adopt good practice in terms
of transparency, we can in the public sector and the Arts Council
and colleagues here who are in a position, if you like, to encourage
the employers of artists to endorse good practice through using
a code of practice, through accepting the rates of pay that we
have outlined as being more suitable levels of reward for those
public service areas. It will take time for those things to filter
through, and we always have to be aware of the fact that things
sometimes go backwards a little bit before they go forwards simply
because of this big balloon of people who join the profession
every May.
Q22 Mr Doran: It sounds as though artists
need a good trade union.
Ms Jones: I would say they have
it with us.
Q23 Mr Doran: I gave you the opportunity!
Article 9 of the Directive on droit de suite has an interesting
provision, that is that art market professionals must disclose
any information necessary to enable payment of royalties if a
request is made within three years of a sale taking place. I am
not sure how that will operate in practice, but it strikes me
that is a possible building block to get more certainty into the
market? I would be interested in hearing your views.
Ms Salter: The Arts Council, I
believe, have had a scheme called Own Art, which I think is operating
outside London at the moment, but I believe that for the galleries
that sign up for that there are certain guidelines as to the relationship
between the artist and the gallery. It is a very, very complicated
business. You cannot legislate for this, but all I would hope
is that we could introduce a little bit of transparency, as you
say.
Mr Doran: Do others feel that Article
9 is a potential building block for more information and more
clarity? No? Okay.
Q24 Alan Keen: I was astonished to read
amongst our research papers that artists are not necessarily even
given access to the invoice that the gallery sends on to somewhere.
No other part of the economy would put up with that. How on earth
is that allowed to happen?
Ms Salter: I spoke to the gallery
I show with in New York and he was quite surprised, because I
do not know about other experiences in America and it would be
interesting to find out, but he implied that it was standard practice
to send the artist a copy of the invoice. One of the other problems
is that if you do not have a copy of the invoice also you lose
track of where your work has gone because it has been sold and
you have no idea who has bought it, which means that in 20 years'
time, if somebody did want to put together an exhibition, it is
very hard to find where the work has gone. I spoke to a gallery
in Germany. They again seemed to think it was fairly normal, standard
practice to tell the artist who bought the work and how much for.
I do not know, is the answer. That would be a major step forward,
some transference of—
Q25 Alan Keen: A basic step.
Professor Hemsworth: Can I add
to that, if I may? I think when an artist works with a private
dealer they make a deal. Some people make better deals than others.
Some people tend to be very precise about how payment should be
made, and so forth. For example, it is common practice for dealers
to give certain organisations discount and it is fairly common
practice for that discount to be shared between the dealer and
the artist. I know a lot of artists—certainly myself—where
if the dealer gives a discount that comes out of their cut. I
have to make that quite clear before I enter into engagement with
them, because they see it as common practice.
Ms Salter: I think it would be
helpful if those practices were clarified, because younger artists
may not be in a position to actually ask that, because they are
very aware that there are thousands more where they came from,
and if you are feeling vulnerable and it is your first opportunity,
your first exhibition, it is terribly hard to stand up to that
kind of pressure.
Q26 Alan Keen: I probably know more about
football than I do art, although I think football and my watercolours
are probably of the same low standard! In the football business
we do not like football agents, but it sounds to me as though
artists could do with agents. Is it not part of the system?
Ms Salter: In many ways a gallery
is an artist's agent. They represent your career.
Q27 Alan Keen: Except in a way they are
selling on the paintings at a profit and they do not show you
the invoices. They are not really representing the artists, they
are representing themselves. At least football agents, even though
nobody in the game likes them, are working for the footballer
themselves.
Ms Salter: If an agent was introduced
again in a sort of relationship between an artist and a gallery,
that 50% then has to be cut another way, and galleries have expenses—they
have to maintain premises, put on exhibitions, go to art fairs—and
so that 50% is quite fair for the work the gallery does in representing
the artist and so it would be hard to know how an agent would
fit in.
Q28 Alan Keen: It is the transparency,
is it not? I hope you do not mind if I come to the broad issue.
We have just been doing an inquiry into the theatre, and one thing
that bothered me was anyone who has been to school has been an
artist at one point. My grandchild gave me two works of art on
Saturday, and I said, "Thanks for the paintings", and
he quickly corrected me by saying, "It is crayons."
But where do the artists go? Where do the people who come to art
school go to? Some do not make it as professionals, do they? Where
are the 60 million artists who were at school? How can we encourage
them? Before you answer, can I say I was very pleased to hear
somebody from Wales, when we were doing the theatre inquiry, saying
that the Welsh Assembly are encouraging local authorities to form
arts councils, for performing arts as well as visual arts, to
get that connection with the public and to encourage them to get
involved in this and to link the different amateur bodies together.
I am sorry to get away from the art market for the moment, but
we do want the public to understand how fulfilling it is to produce
their own art. What can we do to do that? Can you give me a quick
answer? How can we encourage those people?
Ms Salter: This is again a very
basic example. I work in a studio in North London and every two
years we have open studios and we very often have an education
day, which has been very poplar, but there are schools in the
borough that have terrible problems and staffing problems. It
ends up that the schools that need to come most cannot afford
to rent a bus or cannot afford the other teachers to come, so
we always get the schools from the better parts of the boroughs,
and those children probably have parents who take them to art
galleries anyway. The children who we would want to come to our
open studios are the children from the part of the borough who
would never see an art gallery. They are the ones we need. Whether
there is a way of working more closely with schools—it is
probably money—I do not know.
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: Can I contribute
to that? This is, I think, where Creative Partnerships, which
is a very large Government funded project, is having an extraordinary
impact with bringing artists into schools, which was always an
initiative that was taking place but not on the scale which it
is currently, particularly in areas of deprivation, where, as
Rebecca Salter said, children are not normally going to go to
an art gallery. As you say, 45,000 artists, which is very much
a notional figure, because we are not sure of the precise number
of professional fine artists, do many things. If they choose not
to carry on being artists, then they are extremely influential
in the media, they go into other creative industries, they also
as artists do find other ways of practising; particularly in the
museum and heritage sector, they are doing a great deal with animating
the museum for school children in educational work and becoming
kind of mediators really. An art school education is not simply
to create the next generation of artists; it is a liberal education.
It is like doing classics or even mathematics. You do not go on
being a mathematician normally for the rest of your life, but
you do have an enormous contribution to make through what you
learn. What it does give you, having been involved very closely
with art schools, is a very critical mind and a sense of self
determination and motivation. You have to work alone as well as
within teams, and it gives you a great deal of self-reliance,
which is a great transferable quality, in whichever field you
want to work, to contribute.
Ms Gresty: I would like to position
it a little bit from the side of the public sector. We have a
tremendous network of public sector galleries throughout the country,
not least large local authority funded museums and galleries that
are beginning to get a little bit of central government support
through the Renaissance in the Regions programmes, but nothing
like enough to do the job that they can do. They are not a statutory
responsibility. The relationship that they are building with schools
is phenomenal, but if we look at it from the other end, do all
local authorities, all county councils have culture as part of
their education development plans? Are schools being given a policy
framework that enables them to then take up and expand the opportunities
that are offered by a vast range of the public sector museums
and galleries? I think that I can certainly supply you with a
lot of examples. The National Society for Gallery Education has
a burgeoning membership all working with schools in a very professional
and sophisticated manner, and so I think we need to look that
infrastructure.
Ms Allthorpe-Guyton: I would add
to that the importance of public collections. I believe you have
had an insight into France where there are 22 FRACs, as they are
called, which are regional collections of contemporary art. That
is a major way of supporting artists, but also growing the market,
because unless you have a decentralised market, to some extent,
with a greater regional spread of commercial galleries, you will
not be able to support the artist properly. In order to grow the
market you need strong public collections, and our regional local
authority museums are not placed at the moment to do that. They
do not have the acquisition funding and they do not have staff
skills. We have tried to help that with the Contemporary Art Society,
which has had a major impact with the help of lottery money to
help grow local collections of contemporary art, this is a major
lever to grow a wider commercial market beyond London.
Q29 Alan Keen: Susan was just about to
give an answer?
Ms Jones: I am a testament to
somebody who used to be an artist who is doing something very
useful instead, which is helping to run an arts business which
makes 80% of its income. The reason it does that is that we employ
artists all the way through our operation, so it is a little bit
of an antidote to the lack of part-time, well paid work elsewhere,
and in a sense just to posit this as a view: if local authorities
and art institutions actually thought a little bit more about
dividing some of those full-time jobs into part-time well paid
jobs with professional development opportunities, because, after
all, artists get very few formal professional development opportunities
as a self-employed sector and we in the employed sector benefit
from that every day. I think there are many ways in which we can
recognise that artists make a very positive contribution to society:
they are problem solvers; they are creative thinkers; they are
project managers; they find resources when they otherwise are
not available. Even if they do not make art any more, I still
think that education equips you for the world today, and as Chris
Smith said, we need people with good ideas in all walks of life.
Chairman: Thank you very much indeed.
We are most grateful to you.
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