Artists Struggle to Survive: The Dark Reality for the Creators Behind Our Pandemic Consumption
Nafsika Hadjichristou, 23, had grand plans for her future once she completed her Film and TV degree at York University — except she graduated last June. During her three years at school, Hadjichristou had always been heavily involved in the art world, pioneering her own independent film projects with a burning desire for storytelling and capturing the human condition. Prior to graduation, she agreed to work on a documentary project once school ended, which would allow her to travel across the world — Sri Lanka, Ethiopia, Colombia — to do directing and filming; as well as festival photography work.
Hadjichristou’s voice becomes more delicate and she starts choosing her words slowly as she explains that the pandemic forced her to abandon those dreams — for now, at least — and come home to Cyprus. She couldn’t afford to live alone in the UK, and she found it too dangerous for her health to do so. “I’m lucky to have parents who can support me,” she says, as she explains that artists without a social safety net get little to no assistance from the government. “There was a grant you could apply for at some point and receive up to €1,500,” she says, but explains that when she tried to apply, “they told me ‘If you haven’t worked in the field yet, you don’t get the support.’ It was ridiculous.”
Hadjichristou’s story is, unfortunately, one among millions. By June 2020 — a mere three months into the coronavirus pandemic — 62% of artists in the United States were completely unemployed, while over 94% had suffered income loss due to the virus. And while various celebrity artists put on virtual performances attracting hundreds of thousands of people, and joined movements like the #TogetherAtHome concert series from opulent mansions, those without established names or sources of funding had a substantially tougher time.
From her first-hand experience, Sherifa Abudulai, 21, an NYU Tisch Drama senior who’s worked at the NY State Department of Labour for the past year, explains that the cases of unemployed freelance artists she witnessed were devastating. For actors in particular, she states “lots of us have short term contracts that only last as long as a theater production does,” adding that this lack of consistent work documentation made it harder for many to seek unemployment assistance when theaters closed down. “My sister was thankfully able to get some funding from the Pandemic Unemployment Assistance program,” she tells of the recent initiative to support individuals in need with injections of monetary financial relief, “but otherwise, most artists I know were completely financially ruined unless they had some back-up job.”
Beyond governmental help, several mutual aid groups have set up charity programs, including the NYC Arts Coalition and the Jazz Foundation of America with their COVID-19 Musicians Emergency Fund. Arts Council England also created a scheme in the United Kingdom when the pandemic hit, giving grants of up to £2,500 per applicant, from a total pool of £20 million. Dominic Johnson, 25, a London based professional musician and guitar tutor, however, explained that this move was marginally, if at all, helpful. “I don’t think I know anyone who applied and actually got it,” he explains, although adding that almost everyone he knows had to rely on such grassroots organizations within the arts industry for any sort of financial help.
Johnson’s income was not severely limited due to the pandemic as he was still able to teach guitar online, but his ability to promote and create exposure for his two bands suffered a hit. “We obviously couldn’t gig anymore,” he says, explaining that as a fairly recent grad, this type of ‘networking’ through playing at different venues and meeting other musicians is essential. He was happy, however, to have had the chance to release a new album and record a series of amateur music videos released as one big project. “It was like our own virtual concert: we didn’t make money off it, of course, but it was sweet to see our family and friends all come together on the day it premiered on YouTube!”
In terms of financial assistance, Johnson is grateful to the various groups who collected money for struggling artists, but he’s adamant that it shouldn’t be up to them to put in the work. “Relying on charity to provide for basic living expenses is just something that highlights so many things wrong with our current economic priorities and the state’s role in providing for its people.” He adds that in the UK, the government offered some protections to artists — although not freelancers.
Johnson describes this as a publicity move on the government’s part, so that they can say they did offer some protections — when, in reality, he argues, very little substantial help was given. The UK government was also supposed to allocate £257 million to support art venues and organizations, but with the continuous imposition of new lockdowns which prevented them from operating, some art workers were pessimistic about the future and predicted even more layoffs and perhaps several organizations closing down.
Art venues and organizations have suffered losses in the United States as well, but the figures highlight the entrenched disparities between large and powerful institutions and their smaller counterparts. In New York, for example, although big names like MoMA, the Met, and Carnegie Hall predicted staggering financial losses, the situation was much worse for smaller players: as early as one month into lockdown, Flushing Town Hall only had $40,000 in liquid assets and no endowments (barely 2% of its $2.3 million budget), while the Staten Island Children’s Museum projected a 30% loss of income and the Nuyorican Poets Café a loss of $302,000 in revenue. These are only some of the many modestly sized organizations fighting to stay afloat, but this inequality hasn’t just been prevalent in the professional artistic sphere.
Laura Kennedy, 22, a third-year photography student at the University of Brighton, explains that her school barely offered any help for students in need. She feels grateful and privileged to be able to support herself and afford the materials required for a visual arts education but expresses her dismay at the fact that numerous of her peers cannot. “When some of my friends complained to the university about tuition not decreasing — since we didn’t have access to any necessary resources to complete our projects and schoolwork anymore — they were told to just use their bathrooms as darkrooms.”
Kennedy’s frustration as she describes the school’s stance as ironic is obvious in the way her eyes dart around the room, almost as if in search for common sense. She berates the school for what she describes as their betrayal of less privileged students, adding her dismay at their complaints procedure as well: “if you want to talk to someone about specialist equipment or your tuition contract, in order to avoid responsibility, they just file it as a complaint for individual staff.” In Kennedy’s and her peers’ view, the process — which she describes as a “façade” — is overly bureaucratic and convoluted in an attempt to exhaust students in their efforts of getting help or justice, ultimately preventing them from doing so. To that, she says that the pandemic helped her understand that “the university is an institution, not a place to learn.”
The vast imbalance of experiences present in the art world are evident with a quick Google search: blogs prompting artists to survive the pandemic and save their income by reorganizing their studios, documenting their old exhibitions, and conducting inventory on their galleries seem a far cry from the day-to-day of most regular, non-established individuals. As Hadjichristou puts it, the art world is “a privileged world to make it in,” and these barriers to entry are further exacerbated by the pandemic: “people are desperate to get any kind of work right now,” she says as she explains that when she asked for compensation from her superiors in a recent film project she was in — “which was deemed an ‘unpaid internship’ even though they are banned in the European Union” — she was told “to just be grateful, it’s one of the only films happening this year!”
Among what artists describe as staggering inequalities, unfairness in government assistance, and little to no opportunity for asking for help, they’ve also had to be reminded of the antiquated belief that theirs are not ‘real’ jobs. After British Chancellor of the Exchequer Rishi Sunak’s explosive suggestion that artists should just retrain during the pandemic and the advert from the UK government that went with it, Johnson says “it felt like a smack in the face.”
Thea Demetriou, 22, a recent Fine Arts graduate from the University of Southampton, adds that “it was heartbreaking and infuriating,” and “people don’t realize that artists help every single one of us.” There has indeed been exhaustive research on the positive effects of the arts on mental health — and as Hadjichristou highlights regarding the hypocrisy of the situation, “all everyone’s been doing during lockdowns is consume art! Films, music, paintings — yet we’re being treated like second-class citizens whose contributions don’t matter.”
