Intersections
THE SKINNY
Costing Out Creatives We’re already feeling the financial difficulties offset by the cost of living crisis – this is no different for those in creative industries. We speak to creative workers about how this economic instability is impacting their work Interviews: Ross Hunter Illustration: Angela Kirkwood
May 2022 – May Day Special
T
o call it the ‘cost of living’ is to obscure its reality. We haven’t woken up in sudden need of more daily calories or a chill in our bones that’s harder to shake than it was last month. It’s just the amount of money needed to pay this cost has increased. The cost of living has stayed the same; but the market price of living has ballooned beyond belief. It’s impacting most of us – including workers in creative industries. The notoriously precarious sector is proving increasingly difficult to navigate amid this ongoing crisis. Our anxieties on this topic justifiably centre themselves around the stagnant wages which fail to keep up with inflation and the 54% increase in the energy price cap, as reported by Ofgem. But, in doing so, our conversations tend to ignore the fact that merely being able to survive doesn’t make a life worth living. Those whose lives have been so easily accompanied by wealth may try to make us believe that a Netflix subscription or Spotify account are frivolous luxuries to be foregone in favour of sensible asceticism. But this fails to consider the indisputable fact that, for many of us, culture is a necessary component of our survival. “Art was one of the things that people consumed most during lockdown.” says playwright Oliver Emanuel, from his house in rural Kinross. “Let’s remember that leaning towards art was an important element of how we survived.” For artists like Emanuel the increase in the cost of living will mean much the same as it does for everyone else: life, at its most basic, becoming more expensive for him and his young family. He talks about his electricity bill doubling from £150 to £300 a month; about using the car less; about pondering when he will have to start crunching the numbers on the food shop. Oliver mentions how a Universal Basic Income would help a lot – for everyone, not just creative workers.
Moreover, even for a playwright with over a decade of success in the industry, the spiralling costs of survival will have an impact on the work he is able to do. “The cost of wood and timber have gone up so building sets is hugely expensive,” he says. “And people do say to you, ‘Can you write a play without any set?’ They push that expense onto you by saying, ‘Can you think creatively around this?’ “And, of course, you can,” he says. “One of the things we’ve always got going for us is that because we are thinking creatively a lot of the time, we try to think of ways creatively out of a hole.” But creative thinking can’t entirely overcome the economic reality facing the creative sector in Scotland. Nor should artists be expected to constantly rely on their creative wiles just to survive in a precarious economy. As household budgets are squeezed ever tighter and higher proportions of our wages are spent on food, heat, and taxes, it leaves people with less money to spend on the art they enjoy. And in some sectors – like theatre, where audience numbers in many venues continue to languish below pre-pandemic numbers – this ultimately means less work for everyone involved.
“I try not to project too much into the future because I don’t really know what’s going to happen in terms of work.”
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Oliver Emanuel, playwright
