Starry-eyed under-graduates starting out on a career in the cultural sector, filled with passion and enthusiasm, can find the path towards employment pretty rocky. Adrienne Frances observation (p6) that the museums sector is staffed by overqualified, underpaid workers applies just as well to the arts. And while Kyriaki Karadelis (p6) is indeed lucky to be offered broad responsibilities and development opportunities through her internship with Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra (BSO), her good fortune doesnt extend to her pay packet. While BSO should be commended for offering such a scheme, it is a sad indictment of the arts sector in general that a talented and enthusiastic graduate should be celebrating the fact that she receives a small but formal salary rather than being expected to work for nothing. And for many young arts professionals, progression up the career ladder wont necessarily make life much easier: this autumn, ArtsProfessionals own recent salary survey will reveal just how far arts salaries at every level have fallen behind other sectors. While the arts promise to offer workers so much in terms of personal fulfilment and creative opportunities, there seems no possibility of an equivalent reward in financial terms.
Many will argue that this is not news: careers in this sector have always been held together by love and sticky tape. Some senior arts managers may even take the view that this sort of trial by poverty separates the dedicated from the dilettante. This is to miss the point. Changes in the benefit system over the past twenty years mean that young artists no longer receive the effective sponsorship of the dole. Furthermore, the current generation of graduates will typically start their working lives with university debts of well over £10,000. Under these circumstances, the pool of people willing or able to work for next to nothing will continue to shrink, and as it does so, it will become more concentratedly middle class, affluent and, frankly, white. At a time when the sector is rightly making efforts to better reflect society at large, attention must be paid to the basic issue of pay. As big ideas start to emerge from the Mission, Models, Money project (p8), lets hope that these include the notion of enabling people to pay their rent.
Liz Hill and Brian Whitehead
Co-editors