Either/Or

Art + Capitalism #4

I wonder how many people in your life know how much you earn? If I were a betting woman, I’d wager not very many. In the UK, most people find it excruciating to talk about their pay packets to anyone that’s not their nearest and dearest (and sometimes not even them), as this article lays out. We feel awkward when we think we earn too little, we feel awkward if we think we earn too much, we feel awkward if we’re not exactly sure how much is coming in each month. This begs the question - why does it feel so cringe-worthy when we’re asked this kind of question? And I think the answer is that money feels a bit…well, a bit grubby. 

We all hold different feelings about how much money matters in our lives, influenced by our background and prior history with it, as well as the opinions and views of the people around us. There are people for whom earning a big paycheque is a sign of success, and might be a part of a competitive culture where a bigger salary and/or a bigger bonus are a major motivator for working hard. In some circles, this might make them feel superior - but when confronted with an aid worker or a junior doctor, they may feel conflicted about the fact that their remuneration is so much larger than people who are literally saving lives. This is, of course, because of capitalism - what we’re paid is influenced by the market that our work falls into, not because of its intrinsic value to society. 

I once had a therapist who told me that no one has a straightforward relationship with sex, food or money. I’ll leave you to find some alternative Substacks that address the first two issues, and will restrict my focus to the third part of this triumvirate in this post. So many factors affect how we think about and behave around money and I think part of our discomfort in talking about our earnings is because we know that different people hold different judgments about this topic. What could seem like a simple question (how much money do you bring home each month?) in fact contains multitudes, and we fear (often rightly) that our answer will be taken as an immediate reflection of our character without the opportunity to show any of the nuance. The person with the big salary and the yearly bonus might fear being seen as simply greedy - but they may also have grown up poor, with no familial safety net to fall back on, and working a job that pays well has paved the way to a better life. As I discussed in my last post, there are many people within the arts sector who could be earning more money elsewhere and have made a choice to do the job they do because they care about it and it brings them great meaning and satisfaction - for some (but by no means all) of these people, that choice might have been facilitated by a high earning spouse, or the knowledge that, if finances get sticky, there are people who could step in and help. Financial circumstances are specific to you, often incredibly nuanced, and yet are the subject of significant moral judgement in all kinds of directions. 

Photo by Mathieu Stern on Unsplash

A previous colleague and current friend, Susie Italiano, appeared on the Pennies to Pounds podcast recently - for all the freelancers out there who need any help with their personal finances, Susie (who describes herself, accurately in my view, as a financial fairy godmother) is well worth looking up. In the podcast, she discusses the fact that some people that she works with have a mental block around finances and one of the factors that plays into this is an attitude that creeps into many parts of our sector: “art is pure, and money is evil”. I feel like I see this narrative rear its head all the time, and, in our organisations, too often we strike a line down the middle of the page and put creatives on one side and anyone that deals with administration or finance on the other. Nothing positive comes of this - it can lead us to view people who do artistic and creative roles as financial incompetent, when most are anything but, and can lead us to distrust the roles of those who, frankly, making working in the arts sector possible - fundraisers, marketing teams and Chief Executives or Executive Directors who spend their days trying to generate the money that’s needed to facilitate their organisation’s creative ambitions. 

Susie goes on to give the following wise advice: “money is not good and it’s not bad, it’s a resource like our time and our…talents.” It’s worth thinking more about the first part of that sentence - that money is not, in and of itself, a good thing. In parallel to a suspicion of money coming from some quarters, in others there can be an unhealthy veneration of it. If you’re a subsidised arts organisation, and/or a charity, then success is not defined by a big surplus or a healthy balance sheet - success is fulfilling your charitable mission. Often, this is helped by a strong financial position - but only because it helps you make more work, run more programmes or take risks that otherwise feel too precarious. It would also be a very narrow view of commercial companies within the arts sector to say that they are purely there to make profit - whilst their financial set-up is different, and they enter projects with the goal of income generation, they still take huge risks to make this happen and are usually doing it because they love the work and want to bring it to as big an audience as possible. Money is the means, not the end. 

The question we should ask ourselves, in both our personal and work lives, is: what does it mean to have a good year, a good decade, a good life? Maybe money or income generation is part of that - but it’s not the only, or often most important, thing. We make our own choices in both spheres, influenced by our backgrounds, situations and future plans, and then, ideally, we don’t judge others when their choices are different. Money isn’t black or white, it is many shades of grey - our task is to find the hue that matches our goals and our values and use it wisely to help us get to where we dream of going.