Another application to fill in raises another dilemma - how do I describe what stage of my career I am at?
early career, emerging, young?
Do I want to be pigeonholed into such a category? Who is this classification useful for? What do these terms mean? How will the description affect what people think of my work and of my practice?
Eleanor Turney writes about these topics in her article, written for the Guardian:
Young, emerging or ready? For early
career artists, it's all in the labelling
The clash between creative work and bureaucracy is always going to
present problems, but it's easy to see why those handing out money need
systems with transparent criteria. This is a perennial issue in the arts
world, and more acute now as everyone scraps for less and less money.
One recent focus for argument had been schemes that support 'young' or
'emerging' talent. But are these criteria useful, and if so, for whom?
And are labels that might be useful to funders and marketers also useful
for the artists to whom they are applied?
Age limits pose
particular problems: when Arts Council England (ACE) announced its
Creative Employment Programme, led by the
National Skills Academy,
to support up to 6,500 new apprenticeships and paid internships, instead
of universal approbation there were numerous complaints that it had an
age cut-off (24 years old).
For myriad reasons (family
pressure, the need to pay the rent, changing interests) many people
don't get their first job in the arts until they're older. They are then
competing with younger graduates and those who can afford to take up
internships, but are ineligible for some streams of support, including
ACE's Creative Employment Programme and some of the opportunities
offered by another big supporter of young people in the arts,
IdeasTap. So is this unfair?
Peter
de Haan, chairman of IdeasTap spells it out clearly enough: "If you
look at the unemployment stats, it's clearly young people, especially
aged 16-25, who are in the most need of support. My experience as a
philanthropist has taught me that if you want to make a real difference
you need to focus that support."
Stephen Fewell, chair of
JMK Trust (which bestows
the £25,000
JMK
Young Directors' Award, available to under-30s) also says: "In the
current financial climate, looking at the employment prospects for young
people leaving education, I lose no sleep over youth being an
appropriate criterion for support."
However, de Haan
explains that although IdeasTap initially focused on 16-25 year-olds,
"we saw a big increase in members aged 25-30 who needed support to kick
off their careers". John Garfield-Roberts, an actor/director, worries
that graduates of schemes for young artists find themselves "at the
bottom of a very big pile, with little or no support to guide them
through the next stage of their career".
Since those
starting out can be of any age, maybe it makes sense to replace 'young'
with 'emerging' – there are a number of schemes run by ACE alone that
cater to emerging talent, including the
Artists International Development Fund,
Music Industry Talent Development Fund (which will
announce its first recipients in early 2013), and, of course,
Grants for the Arts.
Unfortunately,
'emerging' is even more nebulous a term than 'young', which can be
confirmed by a date of birth on an application form. It means different
things in different artforms and to different funding bodies. Old Vic
New Voices artistic director Steve Winter explains that they "prefer to
use the term 'emerging' because the connection between the artists we
work with is the stage they are at in their careers within this
industry, rather than their age".
Freelance
journalist and
theatre critic Andrew Haydon says, half-jokingly, that "the
definition of 'emerging' is anyone who still has to apply for funding
themselves," which applies to individual artists and to those
organisations or companies that have not achieved regular funding.
Becoming an NPO (National Portfolio Organisation) is not, of course, the
only definition of success, but it does suggest a recognition that your
work is ready for an audience. Jake Orr, artistic director of
A Younger Theatre,
is more equivocal: "Emerging can be anyone, but is currently thought to
be young, and this is something that needs to shift. They're two very
different ideas that need to be kept separate."
Even ACE
does not have a singular definition of 'emerging'. However, the
commonalities are that "the artist will have reached a critical moment
in their career
development, and
will require a particular kind of support in order to maximise their
potential and to propel them into the next phase of their development."
ACE gives the following examples of what might define an emerging
artist: recently being taken on by an agent, label, publisher, dealer or
offered development opportunities by an NPO or sector agency; beginning
to perform or have work performed or exhibited professionally; working
in entry level roles in museums or galleries.
The labels
'young' and 'emerging' can also be problematic for artists themselves.
'Young' emphasises our fetishisation of youth and precocity. Calling
someone 'emerging' suggests something unformed – something in-process
but not yet producing work to which we should be paying attention. It
highlights inexperience.
Freelance producer Rowan Rutter makes sense when she says
that "the word I personally use is 'ready' – am I READY for this
project, for this responsibility, for this story, for these artists, for
this money?"
Other people don't like either terms,
especially from a marketing point of view. Tim Wood,
communications
manager of
The Place
explains: "Almost all the work we promote is by young and/or emerging
artists. But these are utterly unhelpful labels for audiences. Arts
marketing seems to be fighting a losing battle against vaguely applied
adjectives."
John Garfield-Roberts agrees: "Tags and labels
have always been dangerous. Perfect for box ticking and graphs but they
provide very little actual life value." One tweeter suggested that
'emerging' begs to be followed with 'turd' – they would prefer 'early
career'. Again, this can be problematic because it suggests that careers
are linear and that everyone who wants to work in the arts wants to
make it their career.
Ultimately, let's hope that the
people with the money (funders or audiences) are intelligent and
clued-up enough to make decisions about the kind of work they want to
support, regardless of the age or career stage of the artist. These
terms can be helpful in some ways, but what we should really care about
is the quality of the work. As Rutter says: "Every time I hear
'emerging' I think about an ugly caterpillar-butterfly scenario. And
let's face it, there are plenty of 'emerged' caterpillars in this
business."
Eleanor Turney is a freelance journalist,
editor and copywriter, currently working part-time for the Poetry Society
– follow her on Twitter @eleanorturney
http://www.guardian.co.uk/culture-professionals-network/culture-professionals-blog/2012/nov/26/young-emerging-artists-label-problem?CMP=
Posts
