Last night, I got my third job rejection in a row and finally cried about it. I thought I could talk myself out of feeling so bad, but it was the kind of crying that happened to me. I then dreamt about a fourth rejection coming in the post and when I woke up, my hands were sore from clenching my fists all night. It wasn’t just anger. I was trying to hold onto something so it couldn’t get any further away from me.

I’m not supposed to be a writer — that’s why I cried, really — but not many of us are. On Monday, researchers at Glasgow University published a report on the earnings of artists in the UK during the 2022/23 tax year. It is a dire read. While the typical income for adults in the UK is £34,963, the report found that artists can expect £12,500. This is a 48.8% decrease since 2010, and it’s not a flat rate. The number drops to £7,500 for women, and for Black artists. It drops to £5,625 for Asian artists. Dock 20% for gay and lesbian artists, and 40% if you’re bi. That original £12,500 plummets to £3,750 for disabled artists. The middle-class earn almost double that of artists who are working-class. And while we all generally supplement art-income with other work, doing so only brought the median income of survey respondents to £17,500. For context, working a 40 hour week at the minimum wage currently earns somebody £23,795. You can’t even save yourself by going to uni by the way; artists with a Masters or a PhD sit in the £7,500 category, much lower than their Bachelor-educated counterparts who sit at £12.5K. So, I imagine I’m not the only one feeling bereft this week. I bet you one million pounds I’m not the only creative worker applying for other jobs.

As a writer, I haven’t been able to afford this life for a while. I don’t have a family who can float me, or fill in the gaps. The most they have been able to do is let me live with them for the few years after university. There’s no money to inherit if someone dies. No rich patrons have adopted me in all this time. No lottery tickets have changed my stars. I graduated from a Fine Art degree in 2016, worked a lot of different art and non-art jobs and didn’t earn enough to pay taxes until 2018. In 2019, I earned 15K through two separate projects I had started: this website, plus a gallery I launched and got funded through Arts Council England. In 2020, my income was glorious at 29K. The pandemic had hamstringed a lot of arts organisations but The White Pube was already established online. Jobs were thrown our way again and again. Plus, people finally had a second to sign up to our Patreon. So, I moved out of my Nan’s house. I bought my friends incredible Christmas presents. I bought myself fifty quid perfume. I had some savings. I lent someone two grand to pay off credit card debt. Pay me back whenever, I said. I was happy! I felt solid on this earth! I was a writer.

In January 2021, I became disabled. It was the worst year of my life. I gave my gallery to someone else because I could barely move, and I earned just below minimum wage at 22K, mostly cashing in on jobs that I’d done the work for in the year previous. Patreon then plummeted in line with the cost of living crisis. We got a book deal in 2022 which meant we could substitute the dip in Patreon earnings with the modest split-between-two-people book advance, so I maintained a salary of 22K. It was 23K in 2023, which still felt fucking rough. Covid re-infection. Minimum wage versus inflation. I didn’t want to but I found myself thinking, I hope that person pays me back soon. The book advance, which allowed me to live as a full-time albeit miserly writer for 2023, has gone now. In this current tax year, I’ve so far earned 12K through my work on The White Pube and 3.6K through a part-time job. I would be set to make 23K again if my income was even, but there is very little on the cards between now and April, so I think it’s going to be a few notches below that. Hence me applying for other jobs. Hence the nightmares and the clenched fists while I wrestle with rejections for jobs I don’t want but need.

I felt righteous when I read the Glasgow Uni report, and then I felt like screaming. When somebody doesn’t get to do the thing they want in life — the vocation or the calling that they believe they should be doing, because doing that thing makes them feel complete, makes them feel right, satisfies their true needs — then they are at risk of depression and all the various endings that come with that. But the same goes for not having money, right? The ‘is it depression or am I just cold?’ question. The lack of autonomy in renting. Dentistry. Waking up to the smart meter sounding the alarm. No annual getaway. No driving lessons, no car. No insurance. Suffering on waiting lists, needing to go private, but not being able to so just suffering instead. For years, I knew I was treading water because of my own decision to prioritise working for myself in pursuit of my art practice — writing — but since Long Covid took over, the work of writing is one of the only remaining things I can do. With so few jobs I can actually apply for, rejections feel sour. And yet, I wonder how sad I’m allowed to be.

Measuring myself against the Glasgow report, I’m doing better than most creatives in this climate. But I outline my own finances and mention the jobs I’m applying for with all this delirious transparency because if and when I suddenly stop posting new writing every Sunday on this website, you’ll know why. If the names of certain young artists or actors you are excited about stop getting mentioned, eventually fading into memory, you’ll know to expect it; and if you go to talks at galleries and bookshops, watch interviews with the actors you like, or the directors, or the curators, and find that every single one of them is middle-class and comfortable and healthy and warm, it won’t be a surprise. I have a book in real shops at the moment all over the world. I am asked to comment on art goings-on for newspapers. I am interviewed and reviewed. I am invited to fucking everything. I am absolutely rich with middle-class cultural and social capital as a result of my writing, but I still have the working-class bank account I was born with. I know plenty of others in this weird mirage of a position. Those people are also applying for work elsewhere at the moment. They’re retraining, they’re desperate, and together we’re mourning the people we could have been if circumstances were in our favour. Working-class artists cannot afford to be here, and that is worth my tears.

And it’s funny, or it’s really not, that the day before the Glasgow report came out, I had just finished reading the 2020 book ‘Culture is bad for you’ by academics Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor. The book asks ‘if producing, consuming, and even defining, culture is so closely related to inequality, perhaps we should be asking whether culture is bad for you?’ I get it. I might feel like I’m fading away but the reasons for that are more solid than ever. People flush with cultural, social and economic capital as a result of being born into families from higher managerial and professional backgrounds absolutely dominate culture. They dominate production of culture, they dominate nurtured talent, and they dominate consumption of culture too. The book has plenty of passages we can read at the living-funerals of all these working-class creatives leaving the business. But its best challenge comes in the title, in which it praises how much we all get from culture — from TV and video games and music and theatre — whilst asking us to consider how much we could glean if the frameworks generating and distributing that culture were genuinely representative of the people who exist in this country, and not just the select few who fit culture’s somatic norm. With white, cis, straight, non-disabled, middle-class men running the show, how good can their culture really be? Maybe it is, in fact, bad.

I never read books like this, but given the general downwards trend of cultural life right now, I think I knew some data and a few graphs and a cold swig of history would help me find purchase in all this mess. And it worked. Using the 2011 census, the book shows there were twice as many cultural workers from working-class origins born in the baby boom generation compared with figures for those born between 1983-92. I was born in 1994 for what it’s worth. We are experiencing a steady decline of working-class people in cultural occupations, but this is true across industries, due to ‘the expansion of professional jobs… [each generation] is more likely than the previous one to have had parents in professional and managerial work, and less likely to have had parents working in working-class jobs.’ Given the book’s tracked decline of working-class individuals in general, never mind just in culture, I can’t believe my fucking luck — no offence to my taxi driver/learning assistant parents.

‘Culture is bad for you’ has given me a much better understanding of everything I was already feeling, and confirmed so many of my class-anxious suspicions — that entry schemes don’t work as blanket fixes for social inequality, that creative workers only really know middle-class people, that pantos are attended by three times as many people as the opera, and that video games are more popular than plays, exhibitions and musicals. But between the Glasgow university report, and the book, and the job rejections I’m totting up, and turning 30, and the new year approaching, I’m left thinking about the anomaly I am. All that history I exist under. It is no wonder I am so tired. So squeezed. I am caught between two worlds, and one of them is crushing the other. I’m worried I’m going to feel a new bitterness the next time I go to a gallery. A gallery, a bookshop, streaming services, the fucking radio. I don’t want to be grateful to your highnesses for letting me see some pretty pictures or read some funny words.

I’m also more conscious of the words I give back. As a critic, I can only write about the culture that gets to exist. I only just about get to do that writing in the first place, and if that’s the case, I’m not sure I want my criticism and my energy and my imagination to be in service of almost-definitely middle-class people who don’t need me to write about them. I don’t want to culturally, socially satisfy people who are legitimate enough by giving them my attention. Fuck, I hope I can find another job that doesn’t implicate me in this hierarchy. I also hope the head of every National Portfolio Organisation in the UK reads the report that came out this week line by line, and then a second time. I hope it makes them reflect on the way they work — and then I hope they all quit. Pack their bags, leave, close down, start again. We won’t have to pay rent if we live in the ashes of these museums. Maybe then, maybe there, I will have a good night’s sleep.

💰 Please comment a money emoji on our Instagram so that I know you were here

💰 Culture is Bad for You is available from Manchester University Press here

💰 The new report from Glasgow University was written by Arthur Ehlinger, Amy Thomas, Martin Kretschmer, Michele Battisti and Helena Saenz de Juano Ribes

💰 You can read the ‘UK Visual Artists (2024) survey of earnings and contracts’ here

💰 The Glasgow uni report was commissioned by DACS, The Design and Artists Copyright Society

💰 The book we wrote is called Poor Artists and it is available in all the bookshops in the land and maybe you can ask for it for Christmas