Estimates suggest that half a million public sector jobs will be dissolved by 2015. The DWP is looking sadsack. VAT is in the ascendant. House prices are in the descendent. The cost of day to day living is growing. The graduate job market is shrinking. Every second week the unions cry industrial action, and, only recently, an entire generation was told that their education is no longer a right, but now a privilege.
Lord Browne’s fees reform has created a three-tier higher-education system: premier universities – Cambridge, Oxford, Imperial, LSE and all the others – will be able to charge top-dollar for their services, turning them, effectively, into public schools for the moneyed elite; other universities – Manchester, Bristol, Leeds et al – will be able to charge premium fees to their students; ex-polytechnics like London Metropolitan University will have to keep their tariffs low to beat the competition. You don’t need me to tell you all this, but there you go, that’s where we stand.
It’s legislation that prices most people out of the good-education market, and a sad day for social egalitarianism. That we’ll see less doctors, lawyers, engineers, architects and nurses graduate is, obviously, dangerous and disgraceful. If nobody can fix broken bones, mend a pipe, cure cancer, balance the company books, fly a plane, design buildings that are structurally sound, present cases in court or any of the other myriad things that make our world function on an operational level, then things will get very weird indeed. And if we’ve less people contributing to the intellectual and cultural life of our country, we’ll atrophy until we wither away. But if we stop for a moment and look past our pinko outrage, the Fees Crisis highlights another, broader problem. One that is less about our right to an education, than how we use it in the first place.
Last year 52,382 people matriculated as students of Creative Art & Design in the UK.[1] The Arts are the second most subscribed of all subject-groups, after Business and Administration, and represent well over ten percent of all accepted places. Subjects like Medicine, Science and Architecture look anaemic by comparison.
To look at the figures, then look at the world in which we live, then, finally, back to those figures, one’s prompted to ask: just what the fuck is going on?
Illustration agents are losing money. Six year-olds know how to use Adobe Creative Suite. The ‘art economy’ is one giant, dipshit mirage. The film council has been dissolved for good reason. Television will eat itself. The entire textile design industry consists of five people who use ‘lush’ as a positive exclamation. Fashion, since Karl Lagerfeld devoted his life to vomiting up pellets of mental illness onto his Twitter account (quote “I think I’m going to have a dinner party where no one speaks” unquote[2]) now belongs to Top Shop, Dov Charney and his chain store, the humdrum-but-wearable American Apparel. The music industry is buoyed up by the prayers of A&R men – it’s still haemorrhaging money like it’s cool. And, let’s face it, there are just no jobs left. Anywhere.
It’s almost a given, nowadays, that if you study a nichey craft – like painting, music, sculpture or any of the others – you won’t end up practicing that craft to make ends meet. The Arts are among our most popular subjects, but they’re also the ones that have no application in the workaday reality of adult life. They don’t teach skills that are transferable – like the humanities – or that are useful on any kind of functional level. So why do we devote our lives, and now money, to studying them? Is there some kind quirk in our brain chemistry that demands we go forth and create? Is this some kind of protest en masse? A big, generational slacker-love-in, a la John and Yoko’s Bed Peace?
Answer: probably not.
When people think of the death of collectivism, they think of the 1980’s. And they’re right, in a way. Yup, it was a horrible decade – a cultural mulching machine that valued the accumulation of individual wealth and individual power above everything else – but it was in the 1990’s that the cult of The Self reached full maturity. That was the decade that gave us Chicken Soup For The Soul[3] and legitimised Meditation; but it was also the decade of personal development programmes, image consultancy and entrepreneurship, Thai green curry, balsamic vinegar, olive oil and the last great art boom. It was 1980’s ‘Me-Me-Me’ culture regurgitated, remodelled and shot through the prism of Hippy Sentimentalism and the ‘second summer of love’. It was also the decade that most of us were born into, or came of age in, and the decade which shaped and informed our expectations of life.
What looks, in retrospect, like a time of much creativity and touchy-feely attitudes, saw, in fact, the rise of ruthless Individualism as a viable political and economic position.
(Evidence: Do you remember Natural Born Killers and the coded ‘we’re all in it for ourselves’ message it espoused? Do you remember the giant, glitter-ball lemon built at great expense for U2’s Zooropa Tour[4]? Do you remember Starbucks first incarnation, as a rebellious Seattle coffee-shop that accidentally went global, and just how much we loved it? Do you remember New Labour? Do you remember Cool Britannia? Do you remember Damien Hirst? All of them are quite quite strange, when you move in close.)
The 1990’s was singular in its ability to mix the left hand path with the right, and creativity was pegged to material wealth in a way that it never had before: Executives introduced beanbags and mood-boards to their offices; they collected art; they adopted the collarless shirt and hemp-trainers as a de facto uniform. People started using rollerblades to get to work. The Think Tank came into it’s own. Everyone across the board loved scented candles. And in exactly the same way as executives were made to feel more artsy, the creative industries were weaponised to become just as hard and cutthroat as their equivalents in the business world. The Art Fair was born, the music festival was revived, Damien Hirst turned the business of making artwork into exactly that, a business, and just about all the money that could be squeezed out of creativity was, eventually, wrung out of it.
It was a bubble of wealth and consumption and creativity and pseudo-culture, that repeated, again and again, “express yourself, because that’s how we make money”. So is it any wonder that we grew up believing we were special?
But those days are long over. The economy was false. What we grew up thinking of as the status quo was, in fact, little more than a misleading bubble, a set of circumstances that existed for a short time and in a very strange period of our recent past.
So now that it’s all gone, we should adjust our expectations accordingly. The arts are dead. The party is over, and we’ve been left to pick up the beer cans and mop up the sick. We were tricked into believing that creativity was not just a bonus, but a bona fide human right. Then we were encouraged to spend – as I did, for many years – our time playing and experimenting and finger painting in the name of Late Capitalism. But it didn’t really work. And now 52,000 of us graduate each year, with barely a qualification to our names.
I’m not saying that you should put down the pen, or pull your chubby fingers from the clay, but I am saying that you need to stop thinking of the arts as a viable career unless you’re certain – and I mean positive – that you’ve got the talent to pull it off. This feels, I know, like you’re being robbed of something. It feels unfair. You probably want to discredit my opinion and defend your art, publicly, in the comments box below. But face facts – there isn’t enough money left in the world to sustain our creative impulses. Besides, the whole thing’s getting dull – everyone’s got a Deleuze and Guattari Reader nowadays… so go get a degree in accountancy, it won’t get you laid, but it’s much more radical.
THOMAS VINEY
There seems to have been some confusion about what, exactly, we were criticizing in our article. Which is annoying, because we think it’s pretty clear.
So, again, here’s our position: we like the humanities, we like the sciences, we like university in general, fuck, we even like the arts… but we don’t like the fact that 52,000 people go to art school every year, thinking they’ll enjoy a modest career exercising their creativity, but 51,965 of them go on to make their living selling cappuccino.
[1] I deliberately exclude subjects like Media Studies, here, because it’s just too obvious and easy a thing to shoot them down.
[2] If one Lagerfeld quote isn’t enough… feast your eyes on these: “I have no scene. I go everywhere. I adapt”; “What I like in Monte Carlo is that I feel liked, I feel wanted, but I can walk on the street with nobody grabbing”; “I only wear the latest thing. It’s my job”; “My dream? Transparent fur…”; “I envy Zaha Hadid her vision of new shapes and forms, and her ability to sketch on computers.” ; “Florals are for middle-aged women with weight problems.” ; “Believe it or not, I love rap.”; “The best Christmas gift I received this year? A platinum pogo stick.”; “On this day each year, I soak the previous year’s calendar in my mother’s favorite perfume and then set it ablaze.” *
*And if you’re hungry for more Lagerfeld gold, seek out his diet book. It’s an object lesson in not being published while mad. It’s available here.
[3] Salient note: the authors of CSFTS, Jack Canfield and Mark Victor Hansen, turned their self-help propaganda into one of the most successful publishing franchises in the world, with over 200 ‘Chicken Soup’ titles in its list. Most notable among them are Chicken Soup for the African American Woman’s Soul, Chicken Soup for the Soul: Thanks Dad and Chicken Soup for the Prisoner’s Soul. Hansen has just written a book called The One Minute Millionaire and Canfield’s son recently published a childhood memoir in which he describes his father as cold, distant and cruel, debunking the whole self-help industry in the process. So there you go – it’s not all roses.
[4] I actually attended the zenith production of the Zooropa* Tour, at Wembley, when I was about ten years old. About halfway through, Bono stopped singing, produced an early-model mobile/satellite phone from his pocket, and phoned Salman Rushdie.The conversation was broadcast to his congregated fans. At an earlier concert he’d phoned the pope. Earlier still, he’d phoned Mother Teresa.
*’Europa’ – the etymological naissance of U2’s ‘Zooropa’ – was Adolf Hitler’s moniker for the pan-European Fascist state he tried to architect. Nice.
Hate to point it out, but Manchester, Leeds and Bristol are all Russell Group unis… (http://www.russellgroup.ac.uk/our-universities.aspx).
I’d also question how exactly this new situation prices anybody out of anything… as far as I’m aware, no one’s being asked to pay anything up front (unless they can afford to do so) and loans only have to be paid back when graduates are earning enough to afford to do so. Some never will so will never pay any of it back. Where’s the problem?
Otherwise, decent article.