“Time. Money. An inability to be sincere. All three plague our whole generation. We’ve collectively lost a lifetime scrolling through brain-numbing reels. We’re all in perpetual overdrafts, condemned to paying the landlord’s mortgage.” – Jude Sides, Poet
There is little to be said and much to be done about youth artistic movements.
There was a time when young people, unsure about their futures, could live cheaply in vibrant city environments and explore their art. They knew they could spend some time, perhaps years, experimenting with their craft, working part-time enough to afford their cheap digs and create what they could. They were free to experiment, free to fearlessly enjoy the pleasures of possible mediocrity.
This is no longer the case, and it is a symptom of a wider social idolatry. The idol of profit, profit before all, profit at any cost – profit or else. We are not free to experiment, or to create; your duty to your nation and to others is to leave school and begin turning profit. But art requires time, it requires failure, and often long stints of it. It is not, now, viable for us to sit and express ourselves unless it can be quickly and obscenely commodified. If art is the result of looking inside oneself and exploring what’s there – then we are to look nowhere but at our screens and our spreadsheets.
“As a photographer whose entire medium is based upon analogue methods, a lot of my practices are really time-consuming and based on experimentation so when something inevitably goes wrong, it means I lose money in some way.” – Anna Marsden, Photographer
The pressure is not only being applied to the tenability of an artistic lifestyle; the production of young artists is being cut off at the source. Arts funding has been slashed. Arts Council England’s funding, in the past fourteen years, has fallen by almost a third – in Northern Ireland, Arts Council funding has dropped by over 60% during the same period. Consider the decline of the local art school, a common sight across Britain for our parents and grandparents; they are now few and far between. What once were havens for relaxed artistic expression no longer exist, having been consumed and amalgamated into larger University-style institutions, institutions more concerned with gaining university funding than providing the grassroots benefits of studio-based art schools.
And what of our schools? The number of students taking Music at GCSE or A-level has fallen by 36% and 45% respectively since 2010, coinciding with the loss of over 1,000 secondary school music teachers. Economic pressures take their toll on those established within their craft, but these funding disparities threaten the extinction of a whole generation of young artists.
The homes and breeding grounds of art are also neglected. The collapse of grassroots music venues seen in nearly every major city seems, perhaps unsurprisingly, to have accompanied the decline of artistic training institutions. Shuttered windows of once-great venues are now a common sight, with over ¼ of our grassroots music venues requiring emergency support over this year alone. We are told how much our country’s grassroots venues are admired, and we revere the spots where artistic giants took their first steps, but these places of artistic gestation cannot run on goodwill alone – many cannot run at all.
During 2023, 125 of our grassroots venues closed for good across England, with (close to home) the North West suffering more closures than any other area. Consider venues such as these around you, in Manchester, such as the community-run Withington Public Hall, (ETC); these places are vital and need our support.
These venues are cultural hubs, the point of contact between the artistic industries and the people, the foundation of the industry itself, and these places where enjoyment of live artistic expression is first acquired, where artists can practice and spread their craft, are not immune to economic oppression. The average profit margin of a grassroots music venue is 0.48% – running a small, grassroots venue for the facilitation of smaller-scale artistic expression has been made nearly untenable – this is an intentional economic-political decision.
“Local independent venues and performance spaces must have more money put into them. They are the lifeblood of this industry, and if they can’t afford to stay open then the arts will continue to only be accessible by the elite.” – Jude Sides, Poet
“I think that it is important for the government to put funding into the art community as it is so vital to so many people, even if they don’t realise it. People cannot see films, listen to music or enjoy a show if there is no financial support put into the people that are making it happen.” – Anna Marsden
This is a systemic oppression of arts, an economic pressure indicative of a wider wave of anti-artistic, often anti-intellectual political thought.
We live in a time where humanities degrees are mocked, questioned, and underfunded by political agents who believe that the only purpose of a degree, of education, is to equip the young with the requisite skills to work – to increase their human capital. An education, to them, is worthless if it does not increase capital, you yourself are worthless without your human capital, without your ability to create profit – there is, therefore, no worth in your profitless art. There is no education for education’s sake, there is no leeway, and there is no time for unprofitable thought.
The youth of today are squeezed – squeezed for all we are worth to make money, and we are taught to believe that our worth is measured, rightly, in Great British Pounds and Pence. If you want to make art, you’d better be a genius, and you’d better make it big, before that next rent payment. There can be no young Hemingways living out of Parisian hotels on the meagre wages of a short story writer, no penniless young Dylans hitching around Greenwich Village – these generations of young artists no longer exist, they cannot be allowed to exist in a system geared so violently towards profit.
“In a capitalist society, we value what can make us money, but we’ve lost the idea of what creativity really means: to play. That’s why it’s essential to humanity. We should be able to just explore things as humans without the pressure of questioning something’s importance just because it might not make money.” – Sophie Irving, Musician
“Without art, we would all be dead. Through all of humanity’s darkest points, it has been art that has shown us hope. Through all of our highest points, it has been art that has let us rejoice. It is so fundamentally important to life itself that it has to be an option for work.” – Jude Sides, Poet
But we ourselves, as young people, are not free of blame. How can we expect to live in a generation which creates great, meaningful art, like all those before us, if we are reluctant even to engage with it? We have, as young people, an aversion to difficult experiences, and to social distress. Art is difficult, it forces us to consider ourselves, our nature, and often find ourselves wanting – it puts us through it, and we emerge improved. But we cannot go through this, the cleansing and corroding of ourselves, our eyes, and our outlooks, if we look down on art with disdainful eyes as useless – petty and indulgent.
If long books are ‘pretentious’, if old films are ‘pretentious’, if theatre, sculpture, painting, poetry and difficult music are, ‘pretentious’, then what is an artist? Who is the one who creates? If we exist, as a blooming generation, happy in the heady haze of short-form media and AI-slop, then what hope have we? We seem uninclined to put ourselves out into the world. We shop online to avoid awkwardness at the tills, we hope to find love on apps, and consult the great and mighty oracle of ChatGPT for any and all of our concerns. We remove ourselves incessantly from the glorious hardships of human experience: we cannot bear to take ourselves seriously. We shield ourselves from the necessary negatives of social interaction, cringing at displays of natural emotion and a universal ‘awkwardness’. We spoil ourselves and we pay for it.
“I don’t think our generation has much time for art. I rarely see young people sitting in the crowd at gigs… for some reason, engaging in art is embarrassing.” – Dan Thorp, Comedian
“I think a lot of our generation is inspired so much by the art of older generations… I do think that we struggle to look up at what’s around us and inside us for inspiration. I find that we are so often inspired by things we have seen rather than what we feel” – Anna Marsden, Photographer
Art requires toil, it needs this humanity. That is what gives it its incandescence – we see in art the soul of another, we see ourselves. Perhaps the greatest contribution of AI has been its answer to the question, “What is art without a soul?” – it is creepy, it is lifeless, and it is downright insidious. We cannot accept this loss of humanity – our loss of humanity, in our reluctance to engage, to explore and bare our souls.
“AI strips humanity from any field it is used in – convenience kills – boredom is where creativity thrives – the use of AI stops people from getting to know themselves – they don’t get to think enough – there is a joy in creating, and working hard to create something is an essential part of being human” – Sophie Irving, Musician
“I can’t stand AI. It is a byproduct of this capitalist hellscape in which we live. Let the machines do all the thinking, we can be happily placated with AI-generated images of ‘Super Mario if he was in a Wes Anderson film’. Sod off” – Jude Sides, Poet
Within many of us lies the first pages of a novel, the opening chords to a song, preliminary sketches, and there they will remain, unfinished, unless we are willing to experience our condition wholly, to stop scrolling and look inside ourselves. What is Picasso’s screen time? We need to feel the bad things, to put pen to paper, to go through it all and fail.
“I’d love to see young people engaging with art in person. I think it would probably inspire more young people to produce their own. Art is more than just the best of the best.” – Dan Thorp, Comedian
“Art should be personal. Whatever you like, whatever you enjoy, that’s yours, and that’s what makes it so special” – Jude Sides, Poet
The system is against art, but we ourselves cannot be. We have a duty to ourselves and to one another to resist the encroachment of profit and to create because we want to, because it feels good, and because it helps us to understand each other – not because it makes money. If we wish to understand each other, to connect with each other beyond Wi-Fi, we must put something of ourselves on the line, we must fall back on our humanity to find and express ourselves. We must create. We must seek the creations of others.
With thanks to young artists Jude Sides, Dan Thorp, Sophie Irving, and Anna Marsden, for their thoughts – check them all out here.
