ABSTRACT
This chapter considers people’s motives for embarking on careers in the arts, and for staying in the arts even if their efforts to make a full-time living that way are unsuccessful. Pierre Bourdieu’s ideas on life trajectories prove illuminating. As competition for jobs in traditionally prestigious professions intensifies so new types of profession are created, offering young people from prosperous family backgrounds a wider range of opportunities to try. An expanding arts sector absorbs surplus upper-class labour, essentially.
Young people from poorer backgrounds have to compete against better-resourced rivals. Without the means to survive a long, badly paid or self-financed apprenticeship phase leading ultimately to acceptance as “serious” artists, they aim instead to make rapid commercial headway. Financial necessity forcing early career “choices” of which funders disapprove could deprive them of subsidy benefits permanently.
Open access programmes allowing everyone to apply for grants at any career stage seem more generously inclusive but risk doing unintended harm to rejectees, building up false hope only to dash it later. Funders wanting to pick individual winners in a kinder way could experiment with lottery methods, removing expert assessors from the selection process and leaving outcomes to chance.
