Last week, Creative Scotland brought together representatives of all 52 of its ‘Foundation’ clients.  Such gatherings were regular occurrences under the Scottish Arts Council, but with all the upheavals of the transition to the new organisation, it’s been well over a year since the last one was held.

That’s just long enough for me to notice that many of my colleagues (some of whom I’ve known for over thirty years) are, like myself, just that little bit greyer, with a few more lines showing.  Of course, that may have less to do with advancing age than with the uncertainty of the times (as Indiana Jones said, ‘It’s not the years, it’s the mileage’).  But there’s no avoiding the fact that many of those in charge of the arts in Scotland are no longer in the first flush of youth.

Why should that be surprising? Is it not normal that those at the top in any given profession should bring to their posts the advantage of the experience and wisdom gained from years in the field? As a T-shirt sometimes worn by one of our team states, ‘Youth and enthusiasm are no match for age and cunning’.  But it was not always thus.  Back in the 70s and early 80s (yes, during that last period of immense financial and political upheaval) the arts in Scotland experienced a veritable explosion of growth, with new arts centres, galleries, theatres and arts organisations popping up all over the country, from Gracefield in Dumfries to the Pier in Orkney, and from the Crawford Centre in St Andrews  to An Lanntair in Stornoway.

So great and rapid was this expansion that it offered huge opportunities to a youthful cohort of artsworkers to advance their careers.  I became Director of the Crawford Centre in 1983 at the age of just 28, and my successor was about the same age when she took over from me in 1988. The Head of Visual Arts at the Scottish Arts Council, back in 1983, was in his early 30s. That was the norm. Running the arts was a young person’s job. And that was true even at the highest levels.  Sir Timothy Clifford was only 38 when he took over the National Galleries of Scotland in 1984.

A corollary of this phenomenon was that arts people expected to change jobs regularly, and move about a lot in order to do so.  In the first half of my career to date, between 1976 and 1993, I worked for seven different organisations, while living in Glasgow, Dundee, Exeter, St Andrews and Edinburgh (twice).  Then, at the start of the 90s, something changed.  We all, as we entered our 40s, began to stay put.  Mortgages to pay, children (though not in my case) to raise, the need for a sense of stability—all these must have been factors.  And the result is, we’re all still where we settled 10, 15, 20 years ago.  Few of us can equal the record of artist and printmaker John Mackechnie, who started working at Glasgow Print Studio in 1978 and has been Director since 1983, but he’s only an exceptional example of a common trend.

The problem was that in the 90s the expansion in the arts world began to slow down.  National Lottery funding may have created a wonderful network of new buildings, but it didn’t bring many new organisations into being.  And, in its way, the Lottery contributed to this issue of longevity.  If you’ve taken anywhere between five and ten years to see through a major capital development, with all the angst that involves, then it’s only reasonable that you should want to stay on to enjoy the result!

Another, perhaps more surprising, factor was that salaries in the independent arts sector began to overtake those in the public sector.  When I joined the Scottish Arts Council in 1989 as an arts officer, I was on the same salary as I’d had as Director of the Crawford Centre, with the added advantage of overtime! By the end of the 90s, those salary levels were very different, and even some heads of department were earning less than some Chief Executives in the independent sector

So, even if we wanted to, where were we to go?  When you’re young, a change of scene, and a chance for new experiences, are welcome, but as you enter middle age the upheaval of another move (with all the belongings you’ve managed to accumulate) seems to weigh heavily in the balance against the pleasures of a different challenge, especially if there’s no raise in salary, but only a sideways step.

The end result is that, for someone starting out, a career in the arts is now a lot less attractive than it was thirty years ago.  If those of us at the top are staying put, then there’s little scope for those below us to step up, and so on all the way down the career ladder.  Which means every job oppportunity that does appear is hotly contested, and newcomers are caught in the Catch 22 situation of being unable to get a job—or even an interview– without having prior experience.  And so the only way to get that experience, for many, is to take an unpaid internship.

Of course, I’m as guilty as everyone else.  This coming January, I’ll have been with HI~Arts for 17 years—half my working life–and I’m now the longest-serving employee. At least, with a development agency, the job is always renewing itself, and the organisation is very different from what it was even as recently as five years ago.  So it’s still stimulating, surprising, and sometimes scary.  No scope for complacency, especially at the moment.

So, do I think this dominance of the sector by a bunch of ‘grey panthers’ is a wholly bad thing? Not entirely.  There comes a point when, as the saying goes, ‘you have a brilliant career behind you’, and you stop worrying about saying what you think, or about making a nuisance of yourself.  The last thing Creative Scotland needs at this time is a bunch of wussies who’re too nervous to say boo to a goose.  It’s telling that the Cultural Alliance, which has been so effective in speaking to the Government on behalf of the arts community, was co-founded by Jan-Bert Van Den Berg, who’s been at Artlink longer even than I’ve been at HI~Arts.

And, on the other hand, there’s also the advantage, as the T-shirt says of ‘age and cunning’.  As this months’ Artoon reminds us, we’ve been here before, and those of us who lived through the last lot of bad times are perhaps better equipped to guide our organisations through the shoals ahead, than those who’ve only known the relatively prosperous years that the Lottery made possible. And some of us are even old enough to hold on to some of the ideals that Thatcher tried to sweep away with her belief that ‘there is no such thing as society’.

Ultimately, though, the profession needs new blood. We can’t rely on exploiting newcomers through unpaid internships, no matter how well-structured and valuable those may be.   At some point in the future, all us mature oaks will be felled, and we need to be nurturing the saplings now.  What we need is an equivalent of Roosevelt’s ’New Deal’ which saw thousands of artists, writers, musicians and performers across America  brought on to job creation schemes.  Even at the height of Thatcherism  at least one arts centre director, still in post, got his break through just such a scheme.  The benefits, to the people of Scotland as a whole, would far outweigh the cost.  But will whichever Government sits in Holyrood after May have the courage to take such a step in the face of the inevitable media outrage?  Maybe they will, if all us grumpy old arts bureaucrats make enough noise.

© Robert Livingston, 2010