Not discounting the fact that it’s certainly harder to get into a career in the arts without the necessary connections or the safety blanket of a decent income, but I’m curious how much of the drop is because of how blurred the line has become between working and middle class.
You could go to work in a suit and tie every day and be making significantly less than your average brickie.
Because the survey relies on self reporting then what people perceive to be working class is quite vital in getting reliable figures.
[deleted]
> **This reflected a similar decline in the number of people with working-class origins**, according to the paper in the journal Sociology by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield. People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37% of the workforce in 1981, but by 2011 that had fallen to about 21%.
So basically the headline is misrepresenting the data. The actual story is that the percentage of working class people (by whatever metric they’re using) in the UK has significantly fallen
Totally minor thing, but when GoT was big, it always struck me as strange that barring one or two, noone below a certain age in the North spoke with a Northern accent.
Its why music isn’t half as good anymore. Only people who have something to fall back on can take the chance and, usually, only those with parental financial backing and connections make it.
The best music has always come from working class people. Now its all just a different shade of beige.
I’ve (m51 blue collar working class family) spent a lifetime (35 years) working in the arts and representation has always been diverse. Plenty of people work second jobs to keep their passion alive without the bank of mum and dad coming to the rescue. The over representation of the upper echelons at the very top by the very wealthy is not a new phenomenon but I’m very conflicted by this subject and find myself utterly torn between agreeing and disagreeing.
I think that ‘the arts’ is just becoming less representative. It tends to be what a few people who work in the media and live in London care about.
The real new music, video and computer games etc are just being made by people for free and posted online. It’s still art if you live outside London and not getting paid loads of money for it.
The decline is an illusion caused by the increasing irrelevance of the historical way of measuring who is being creative.
Look up any given British actor and there’s a good 70%+ chance that they went to fancy private/public schools. And it’s only going to get worse as art grants and such have been taken away.
I went to school in a very deprived area and most kids were not interested in the arts to begin with. The fact that our music department had barely any equipment and offered no instrument lessons or clubs only made it worse. The barrier to entry is already set at a young age, it only gets worse when you grow up and realise you have no safety net to try out a career in the arts, even for a few months or so.
Someone in the thread the other day said that’s its possibly due to the fact that benefits that was given to artists (actors and musicians) out of work in the 80s have stopped and so those who would have been given that have instead had to get jobs that leave them no time to focus on their crafts.
Another article the other day, made the claim that it’s only 16% of the ‘art’ industry that’s from a working class background.
Having worked in art/media for 15 years, this seems very true.
Don’t get me started on the lack of diversity in UK music conservatoires. I had to buy my own piano with saved up christmas and birthday money. This was in 2001. It was £50 from a local primary school who were going to chuck it out. My grandmother paid for my piano lessons out of her pension, because my parents couldn’t afford it.
I started piano age 13. I went to a state school and the peripatetic instrumental tuition was provided by a private company which was co-owned and co-directed by a convicted paedophile and a tax evader. The teaching was low quality. When the school found out about the conviction, the instrumental teachers were laid off. I didn’t have a piano teacher for two years because of this. The school did nothing to help me find another one. By the time I was 19 I had only achieved grade 7, so I had no chance of being admitted to a music conservatoire.
At the of 27, I ended up getting a first class honours degree in music from a university, but I am nowhere near the level of a professional pianist. I would have loved to have gone to a conservatoire, but if you don’t have parents who have money and who understand the system, you have no chance. You will be up against kids who have been private tutored in piano, music theory, and singing from the age of 5. They go to junior conservatoires and private music schools. They are grade 8 by the time they begin secondary school.
When I was a kid, my teachers acknowledged I was musically talented, but they didn’t give me any extra help. They didn’t set me up with free instrumental tuition, they didn’t refer me to a junior conservatoire. There was no free instrumental tuition in my country because it was a Tory council. Even if I had known about a junior conservatoire, they probably wouldn’t have admitted me because I wasn’t a high enough standard for my age.
UK music conservatoires are more elitist than Oxbridge. This has to change. The same goes for drama schools and ballet schools.
I am lucky to have had the education I got. Many people don’t even have what I have. This is a tragedy. There are Beethoven’s and Mozart’s out in the world, but their talent will never be nurtured and realised.
This was why music was so good in the 90s – bands and acts were supported just long enough to make their name. You wouldn’t have heard of Oasis, The Stone Roses or Pulp if they were trying to break out now.
Now nobody can get off the ground. Back to serfdom we go.
It’s why the indie scene dropped off the face of the Earth and when you go on rock stations there’s like 5 new bands and the rest is looking back on better times.
Depressing.
The article has a somewhat narrow view of what ‘in the arts’ means, never mind the problems with definitions of class.
There are a huge number of people rigging, erecting staging and set, designing and running scenic automation systems, dealing with sound design and implementation, dealing with safety cases and licensing, building props, painting sets, designing lighting, making repairs, running front of house, selling the merch, cleaning the auditorium… All these folks are ‘in the arts’ in the professional sense of ‘does this for a living’.
And you know what, most of them have good choices outside the arts, I mean a head tech has typically got electrics, rigging, sometimes some electronics or optics chops, video skills… These are marketable if that person wants out.
Now director, choreographer, opera singer, classical musician and such, are rather dependent on a mix of who you know and being in a position to pay your dues, but I would contend that most of the people working professionally in the arts are wearing black and wearing tool belts.
When I went to school I was interested in art and music. I wasn’t a model student, but I was far from the worst there. When was a teenager I lived in a roughish area and I remember the music teacher didn’t really seem to like most students and my art teacher was hopeless at controlling the classroom.
In the last ten years I have done more as a self taught artist than I feel my teachers did. Thing is id love to throw myself in to my art and make it a full time career but it’s hard to make an impact plus I work a full time job because I need to keep income coming in.
Because of the cost of living increase plus low wages and rent having increased having time to persue passions and dreams really does feel reserved for those born into wealth.
I studied an arts subject and all I can say is that I’m glad my time at university showed me how much of an outsider I would be in the industry. It was a bit of a shock to realise other students had so many resources, extra tuition, family connections, money to fall back on etc. On top of general prejudices like northern accent.
Ultimately I chose to work in another industry after university and everyone I know who did go in to work in the arts was already from a wealthy background.
In 90s I tried to make it in bands. No wage, so had to take temp jobs to live didn’t get paid enough to cover expenses. Had record deal, made album: around £400 profit in total. Did it for 9 yrs on off. Others got jobs we couldn’t tour, end of story. My son in same boat now
I can’t trust any newspaper to accurately understand what “Working class” is anymore, I’ve literally never seen them lay out a proper definition.
​
It’s an actual economic class descriptor yet it will be paraded as a “Personal identity thing assigned by your parents.”
*If you draw a wage you are working class.*
*If you are solo self-employed or own your own small business or have a mixed portfolio you are middle class.*
*If you get your income from rent, investing, or a business that you own you are upper class. Your profession dose not matter…*
*Yes that means doctors particularly NHS ones not in private practice are probably working class. Yes that means that several lawyers are working class, And yes that means alot of bricklayers are infact middle class. No I don’t give a fuck what your accent is like it doesn’t make you middle class.*
​
This above is completely forgotten and intentionally erased from peoples understanding due to capitalist fundamentalism in our society. Until I see something like this published in an article to clarify definitions because literally nobody ever gets it the whole article as published has no meaning.
Gary Oldman:
>People say to me ‘Why haven’t you directed again?’ and it hasn’t been for want of trying,” he said at the BFI in October. “They don’t want another one of these [Nil by Mouth]. That’s the problem. They want Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Nill By Mouth had a US gross of $266,130. I can’t find any figures for the rest of the world. On a budget of $9 million.
Four Weddings had a budget of £3 million and had a worldwide cinema box office of $245.7 million. Plus VHS/DVD/TV/Streaming and a soundtrack that was number 1 in the singles chart for 15 weeks.
If you make films that make money, people want more of them.
He could have done The Full Monty, Brassed Off, Trainspotting…
Jarvis Cocker spoke about this quite recently – gone is the age when students could claim benefits in the holidays and could jam together and write if they wanted. Now unless your parents can support you, you’ll be stuck behind a bar or a Starbucks. Creativity should be open to everyone.
20 comments
Not discounting the fact that it’s certainly harder to get into a career in the arts without the necessary connections or the safety blanket of a decent income, but I’m curious how much of the drop is because of how blurred the line has become between working and middle class.
You could go to work in a suit and tie every day and be making significantly less than your average brickie.
Because the survey relies on self reporting then what people perceive to be working class is quite vital in getting reliable figures.
[deleted]
> **This reflected a similar decline in the number of people with working-class origins**, according to the paper in the journal Sociology by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield. People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37% of the workforce in 1981, but by 2011 that had fallen to about 21%.
So basically the headline is misrepresenting the data. The actual story is that the percentage of working class people (by whatever metric they’re using) in the UK has significantly fallen
Totally minor thing, but when GoT was big, it always struck me as strange that barring one or two, noone below a certain age in the North spoke with a Northern accent.
Its why music isn’t half as good anymore. Only people who have something to fall back on can take the chance and, usually, only those with parental financial backing and connections make it.
The best music has always come from working class people. Now its all just a different shade of beige.
I’ve (m51 blue collar working class family) spent a lifetime (35 years) working in the arts and representation has always been diverse. Plenty of people work second jobs to keep their passion alive without the bank of mum and dad coming to the rescue. The over representation of the upper echelons at the very top by the very wealthy is not a new phenomenon but I’m very conflicted by this subject and find myself utterly torn between agreeing and disagreeing.
I think that ‘the arts’ is just becoming less representative. It tends to be what a few people who work in the media and live in London care about.
The real new music, video and computer games etc are just being made by people for free and posted online. It’s still art if you live outside London and not getting paid loads of money for it.
The decline is an illusion caused by the increasing irrelevance of the historical way of measuring who is being creative.
Look up any given British actor and there’s a good 70%+ chance that they went to fancy private/public schools. And it’s only going to get worse as art grants and such have been taken away.
I went to school in a very deprived area and most kids were not interested in the arts to begin with. The fact that our music department had barely any equipment and offered no instrument lessons or clubs only made it worse. The barrier to entry is already set at a young age, it only gets worse when you grow up and realise you have no safety net to try out a career in the arts, even for a few months or so.
Someone in the thread the other day said that’s its possibly due to the fact that benefits that was given to artists (actors and musicians) out of work in the 80s have stopped and so those who would have been given that have instead had to get jobs that leave them no time to focus on their crafts.
Another article the other day, made the claim that it’s only 16% of the ‘art’ industry that’s from a working class background.
Having worked in art/media for 15 years, this seems very true.
Don’t get me started on the lack of diversity in UK music conservatoires. I had to buy my own piano with saved up christmas and birthday money. This was in 2001. It was £50 from a local primary school who were going to chuck it out. My grandmother paid for my piano lessons out of her pension, because my parents couldn’t afford it.
I started piano age 13. I went to a state school and the peripatetic instrumental tuition was provided by a private company which was co-owned and co-directed by a convicted paedophile and a tax evader. The teaching was low quality. When the school found out about the conviction, the instrumental teachers were laid off. I didn’t have a piano teacher for two years because of this. The school did nothing to help me find another one. By the time I was 19 I had only achieved grade 7, so I had no chance of being admitted to a music conservatoire.
At the of 27, I ended up getting a first class honours degree in music from a university, but I am nowhere near the level of a professional pianist. I would have loved to have gone to a conservatoire, but if you don’t have parents who have money and who understand the system, you have no chance. You will be up against kids who have been private tutored in piano, music theory, and singing from the age of 5. They go to junior conservatoires and private music schools. They are grade 8 by the time they begin secondary school.
When I was a kid, my teachers acknowledged I was musically talented, but they didn’t give me any extra help. They didn’t set me up with free instrumental tuition, they didn’t refer me to a junior conservatoire. There was no free instrumental tuition in my country because it was a Tory council. Even if I had known about a junior conservatoire, they probably wouldn’t have admitted me because I wasn’t a high enough standard for my age.
UK music conservatoires are more elitist than Oxbridge. This has to change. The same goes for drama schools and ballet schools.
I am lucky to have had the education I got. Many people don’t even have what I have. This is a tragedy. There are Beethoven’s and Mozart’s out in the world, but their talent will never be nurtured and realised.
This was why music was so good in the 90s – bands and acts were supported just long enough to make their name. You wouldn’t have heard of Oasis, The Stone Roses or Pulp if they were trying to break out now.
Now nobody can get off the ground. Back to serfdom we go.
It’s why the indie scene dropped off the face of the Earth and when you go on rock stations there’s like 5 new bands and the rest is looking back on better times.
Depressing.
The article has a somewhat narrow view of what ‘in the arts’ means, never mind the problems with definitions of class.
There are a huge number of people rigging, erecting staging and set, designing and running scenic automation systems, dealing with sound design and implementation, dealing with safety cases and licensing, building props, painting sets, designing lighting, making repairs, running front of house, selling the merch, cleaning the auditorium… All these folks are ‘in the arts’ in the professional sense of ‘does this for a living’.
And you know what, most of them have good choices outside the arts, I mean a head tech has typically got electrics, rigging, sometimes some electronics or optics chops, video skills… These are marketable if that person wants out.
Now director, choreographer, opera singer, classical musician and such, are rather dependent on a mix of who you know and being in a position to pay your dues, but I would contend that most of the people working professionally in the arts are wearing black and wearing tool belts.
When I went to school I was interested in art and music. I wasn’t a model student, but I was far from the worst there. When was a teenager I lived in a roughish area and I remember the music teacher didn’t really seem to like most students and my art teacher was hopeless at controlling the classroom.
In the last ten years I have done more as a self taught artist than I feel my teachers did. Thing is id love to throw myself in to my art and make it a full time career but it’s hard to make an impact plus I work a full time job because I need to keep income coming in.
Because of the cost of living increase plus low wages and rent having increased having time to persue passions and dreams really does feel reserved for those born into wealth.
I studied an arts subject and all I can say is that I’m glad my time at university showed me how much of an outsider I would be in the industry. It was a bit of a shock to realise other students had so many resources, extra tuition, family connections, money to fall back on etc. On top of general prejudices like northern accent.
Ultimately I chose to work in another industry after university and everyone I know who did go in to work in the arts was already from a wealthy background.
In 90s I tried to make it in bands. No wage, so had to take temp jobs to live didn’t get paid enough to cover expenses. Had record deal, made album: around £400 profit in total. Did it for 9 yrs on off. Others got jobs we couldn’t tour, end of story. My son in same boat now
I can’t trust any newspaper to accurately understand what “Working class” is anymore, I’ve literally never seen them lay out a proper definition.
​
It’s an actual economic class descriptor yet it will be paraded as a “Personal identity thing assigned by your parents.”
*If you draw a wage you are working class.*
*If you are solo self-employed or own your own small business or have a mixed portfolio you are middle class.*
*If you get your income from rent, investing, or a business that you own you are upper class. Your profession dose not matter…*
*Yes that means doctors particularly NHS ones not in private practice are probably working class. Yes that means that several lawyers are working class, And yes that means alot of bricklayers are infact middle class. No I don’t give a fuck what your accent is like it doesn’t make you middle class.*
​
This above is completely forgotten and intentionally erased from peoples understanding due to capitalist fundamentalism in our society. Until I see something like this published in an article to clarify definitions because literally nobody ever gets it the whole article as published has no meaning.
Gary Oldman:
>People say to me ‘Why haven’t you directed again?’ and it hasn’t been for want of trying,” he said at the BFI in October. “They don’t want another one of these [Nil by Mouth]. That’s the problem. They want Four Weddings and a Funeral.
Nill By Mouth had a US gross of $266,130. I can’t find any figures for the rest of the world. On a budget of $9 million.
Four Weddings had a budget of £3 million and had a worldwide cinema box office of $245.7 million. Plus VHS/DVD/TV/Streaming and a soundtrack that was number 1 in the singles chart for 15 weeks.
If you make films that make money, people want more of them.
He could have done The Full Monty, Brassed Off, Trainspotting…
Jarvis Cocker spoke about this quite recently – gone is the age when students could claim benefits in the holidays and could jam together and write if they wanted. Now unless your parents can support you, you’ll be stuck behind a bar or a Starbucks. Creativity should be open to everyone.