7: days on sale
16: bidders on the auction 43: bids 1993: page views 99: first bid in pence 360: winning bid in pounds 49: hours at £200, the longest period without the price moving 90: seconds to get from that figure to the final selling price of £360 100: percentage of positive feedback for the winning bidding
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There isn't a deliberate link between the recent debates around artists making a living and my selling the 100th performance of The Price of Everything on eBay. We've actually been planning it for a while. There isn't a deliberate link between that debate and this online auction, but there is a link. What I'm doing is an explicit engagement with the market and an acceptance of the financial value it chooses to put upon my work. Some might see it as a satirical response to how poorly artists are paid. Others might call it bowing to the inevitable. The uncharitable might imagine I hope to make a packet. (Above costs, it's going to charity.)
In conversation with a friend last night I expressed a slight unease that, although selling a show in this way might draw attention to market forces in the arts, might even satirise them a bit, and might well draw attention to the fact that the market value of our work is unlikely to sustain even a modest living, it does nothing to suggest a move beyond that market. A fundamentally unproductive irony. He said that he thought selling the show on eBay was a work of art in itself. That was nice of him, but it doesn't assuage my unease. We are, have allowed ourselves to be, part of a marketplace. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------- The normal economic model for The Price of Everything is that venues pay £450 plus travel and accommodation. They take the risk and it's their responsibility to ensure an audience. We are extremely happy to help in any way we can, but it's their venue, their audience. In total this arrangement means venues paying around £500-600 depending on how far I have to travel and how cheap the chain hotels are there. Of that payment, I get a fee, my producers get a fee, some money goes towards marketing, some towards admin costs. Some is spent on milk. I don't know the exact numbers - that's the beauty of having a producer - but I do know that my fee is £300. That fee recognises that I can't take much other work either the day of the show, or the day after the show, and that I might well spend a bit of time in the weeks before and after it engaged in admin, re-rehearsal, tech conversations, that sort of thing. Oh, and in every show I give £20 to an audience member - whether my fee is £300 or nothing. On performing the 100th show I'll have given away two thousand quid. At the time of writing, the auction is at £82. This fee is inclusive of travel and accommodation, so unless the winning bidder happens to be somewhere very convenient, it's almost certain to run at a loss. That's alright, by the way. There's a tiny reserve in the budget which means that although I won't make anything from this show, I won't actually be out of pocket. If the winning bid does cover costs, then any profit will go to a charity agreed between me and the buyer. Secretly, I'd really like it to get to three figures. Secretly, I think it probably will. It'll need to get to about £150 to definitely cover costs, and that would be great too. £150 is either fifteen people clubbing together at about the normal price, or a tremendous bargain for a venue (who can then sell tickets and turn a profit, if they're that way inclined). I suspect it's already the latter and although there are about 20 people "watching" the auction, since £50 there have only been three different bidders. If every performance of The Price of Everything had sold for £150, I'd have done an awful lot of work for no money whatsoever. If every performance had sold at full price then by performance 99 (Brighton, next week) I'd have made £29700 - minus the two grand I've given away - over the past two and a half years. The truth is, over those two and a half years, I've made more like £18-20000. For a start, 32 of those shows were on the Edinburgh Fringe. And lots of venues negotiated us down. That's still a lot of money to earn from one show. It's also a long way short of a living over those two years. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I have other projects, though. How to Occupy an Oil Rig and Story Hunt both pay me a weekly fee, of around £500 (a little less in the former case, a little more in the latter). If I earned that every week of the year without holidays, I'd earn £26k. Four weeks' holiday would make it £24k. Less than the UK mean, more than the median. A solid living. But barely anybody is able to make money from this every day of the year, and this, I think is one of the key things that's been missing from this debate. Almost every actor works in a bar or on a temp job for the 95% of the time when they're not acting. Neither Rufus Norris nor Dominic Cooke made a living from directing until they were well into their thirties. I don't think we think less of any of these people for that. And if you think making money in theatre is hard, you should try being a poet. I believe three of those make a living. One of them just died. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------------- I don't think any of us went into this to make money. I don't think many of us went into it expecting to make money. If we get to do this and people want to see it and we make some money, that's a huge bonus. But if you make art because you think it will make you money, you cease to be an artist. None of us are entitled to make a living. None of us are entitled to make a living from this, and so plenty of us do something else to make a living at all. I have a part-time job as a lecturer in theatre at the University of Bedfordshire. Jack Bennett, who's in How to Occupy an Oil Rig with me, works in a post room. He's been on at the National and he's been on in the West End and he works in a post room. That doesn't devalue his other work, it doesn't make him more or less of an actor. That's just how this works. I don't think this is the fault of the fees venues pay. They'd have to pay us a lot more per show for us to make our living from this all year round. Or we'd have to be touring 100% of the whole time. One of the first things we have to acknowledge in working through this problem is that an artist with a day job isn't less of an artist. I once went into Tennent's Bar in Glasgow just after watching an episode of The Thick of It, and there was one of the stars, pulling pints. The last time I'd seen him was in a lead at the Traverse. For as long as we pretend that having a day job makes you less of an artist, we're going to keep accidentally only hiring people who can afford not to have a day job, to save us all embarrassment. I've actually got no problem with working unpaid if it's something I believe in for an organisation it will benefit, so long as the requirements of the unpaid work don't incidentally prevent me from earning a living alongside it. But production companies won't make "profit" share shows by rehearsing evenings and weekends, because it makes them look amateur. If they're not paying anything, what does "professional" mean anymore? According to this model, it means, "in possession of a private income and parents with a London address". Just because you're not being paid, doesn't mean the work isn't any good. Just because you are being paid, doesn't mean it is. If you're doing this to make money, you're not an artist, you're an entrepreneur. Obviously I'd prefer if we could all be paid handsomely. The reasons we aren't go beyond negotiations over fees. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- It isn't just the arts. In my HE capacity I spent yesterday on strike over pay and pensions. As an artist, I think my part-time HE salary a princely sum, but I can see why colleagues are alarmed at the trend represented by a 13% real-terms pay cut over eight years, and what that means for recruitment in years to come. When scholarly research and teaching becomes as precarious a vocation as being an artist, then we'll be in real trouble. It's not just the arts, and it's not just HE. The museums sector is in the same boat. Not to mention schoolteachers, nurses, librarians. They're all being screwed by the government, by the current financial model. Everything I value is being devalued, to express which sentiment, the only words I have are words drawn from the language of economic value. It would be nice to think that we were suffering from a sectoral problem that could be solved by better conversations with each other. Better conversations, more understanding will help, but this isn't a sectoral problem. It's capitalism. This is how it works. And when it takes things away from us, we blame each other. Divide and rule. Survival of the fittest. Well, I don't like that and I don't think we have to operate that way, ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- It would be great if we all got paid handsomely. I'd like to live in a society that values artists as highly as teachers. I'd like to live in a society that values artists as highly as surgeons. I'd like to live in a society that values artists more highly than bankers. Actually, I'd like to live in a society where there's no such thing as bankers. I'd like to live in a society where the value placed on artists derives from something more than what they are paid. I'd like to live in a society where we all got paid handsomely, and where the concept of money is a faintly-remembered and ludicrous aberration, like shellsuits, or Kajagoogoo. I live here. ---------------------------------------------------------------------------------------- Here, theatre venues are not to blame for the value placed on artists. It's the market. We've spent the last three years railing against the Government for their persistent drip-bleed of arts funding. It seems absurd that, as soon as those cuts start to bite, we rail against someone else whose funding is being cut. We need to work with them to fix the problem. We've been trying to make this case to the Government, but we've also been trying to make the case to the public. And if we can't explain to the public why theatres are important as well as hospitals and SureStart centures and libraries, it's hardly surprising that the Government can get away with cutting it. And if the funding is cut, there's less to go round.* It's a bit bigger than artists vs venues. I do feel uncomfortable with venues who have teams of producers and marketing and administration, all salaried, asking artists to work for next to nothing. Fellow artists: we shouldn't tour to those venues. Usually, I won't take a profit share gig because it's too big of a risk. But it's not as simple as hard economic facts: sometimes I trust the venue to get me an audience, or I know I've got an audience in that city, or I'd just like to go because I've never been and I'm free that weekend and so it seems worth going there on a split. ----------------------------------------------------------------------------- But for any venue taking the piss, there are a dozen working incredibly hard at audience development. This is more important than artist development, because however good the performance it'll sink if there's no-one there to see it. No artist deserves an audience, no show is entitled to be seen. Reviews on the Edinburgh Fringe and in London don't necessarily mean anything to an audience in Stockton or Barnsley or Bradford. Nor should they. Those places aren't cultural backwaters if they don't know about my show's awards. Those awards are invariably given to people a long way away from Stockton, and Barnsley and Bradford, and frankly under those circumstances it's a lot of effort to pay attention to such things. That all three of these towns and many, many more have terrific venues, brimful of terrific work is down the extraordinary efforts of their terrific programmers. And if I have an audience for my show when I get there, it's because the conversation they're already having with that audience drew me in. It didn't start with my show, and it won't end with it. It's amazing how tied some places are to conventional models for this conversation, which is then not a conversation at all. "Would you like to come? £10 please" is most of it. But £10 is a lot of money and if you put too much effort into persuading me to part with it, I just get suspicious that what you're selling isn't any good. Sometimes, when The Price of Everything is selling poorly in advance, we manage to persuade the venue to have a go at pay-what-you-can, or pay-what-you-think-it-was-worth. I did three shows in Dorset last month that had sold very poorly in advance and all three venues agreed to give this a go. On average, sales increased by over 400%. Average yield was higher than the price originally advertised. We're taking a risk with our money, the venues said. Will you take a risk with an hour of your time? It's not a great deal more meaningful as conversations go, but it's a sight better than begging. We are learning that the ways we've been trying to talk to audiences in recent years have not been working. We're learning new ways of talking to them. Theatres do not thrive in a market economy and so we need to find ways of behaving as though we are somewhere else. Of behaving as though we're individuals talking to one another within a community, rather than as market nodes seeking to maximise our human capital. I'd like to run a venue where every show is pay what you can. I'd like to run a venue where you can pay in doing the plumbing, or the dishes. I'd like to run a venue where every show is part of an ongoing conversation about the world and about art, and that conversation is happening town-wide. That doesn't happen overnight. --------------------------------------------------------------------------- But it seems to me just possible that if we keep getting better at talking to audiences, then audiences will keep growing. And then they'll talk to government for us. And when taxpayers demand the government spend their money on the arts, rather than demanding that they don't, then arts funding will increase. And then we might all earn a better living. If that's what we really want. It seems to me just possible. In the meantime, though, The Price of Everything is available to buy at auction until Sunday evening, 7pm. At a price to be determined by the market. * (It is, as an aside, a bit absurd that artists are paid to tour work and venues are also paid to receive that touring work. It's easy for both to assume that the other will pick up the slack in their funding, which is why Andy Field's argument for transparency is so important. Which which in mind: I received a grant to make The Price of Everything more than two years ago, since which time it has been funded entirely by fees and box office. How to Occupy an Oil Rig is funded to the end of the forthcoming spring tour but the model is such that, should we decide to re-tour, we can afford to do so on a fee of £950, wages of £450 + per diems for me, Jack and Kathryn, and 3.6 shows per week, with no further investment. Story Hunt was funded by ACE this year, but the subsequent versions next year will be paid for by the host venues.) |
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