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Apropos your editorial lamentation in the latest issue (ArtsProfessional issue 15, December 3, p2), if you think things are bad for ?arts professionals?, can you imagine how much worse it is for artists - without whom, of course, there could be no arts business?
In half a lifetime as a creative artist, I find it as much a struggle as ever, although there's now more money sloshing around the system. Where does it all go? If more new work were being created, produced, presented and toured, there would naturally be more satisfying and purposeful jobs for managers, administrators, and PR and marketing specialists; expensively built or refurbished venues would be less likely to have to close; more mixed audiences (in age, race and class) could be developed; and there might be some point to the myriad training organisations that are supposed to serve the arts. But it seems to have been forgotten that art is central to all this, and there will be no art unless artists are given much greater share of available funding.

Remember also that artists are not salaried, and can't just move on to another job when they or their organisation fails.

They are freelance, and have a vocation in the narrowest sense: it their own artistic vision that sustains them, and even when marginalised or impoverished, they have no choice but to pursue that vision. On the other hand, they uniquely have the capacity to transform our national culture.

As it happens, this company is one of the more successful ones, and as an artist I am relatively privileged: how on earth do others cope?