Why Are The Arts So Undervalued?

The writer and actor strikes in Hollywood have exposed our fundamental misunderstanding of the importance of creativity in society. Here's why we need to rethink our position

BY MARIE-CLAIRE CHAPPET PUBLISHED: 27 SEPTEMBER 2023

It was the longest to ever affect Hollywood but, after 146 days, the Writers Guild of America strike action is now over. While the specifics of the deal reached between the unions and the studios have not been made public, it is believed that many of the demands – including fair pay, minim staffing numbers and protection against AI – have been met. The actors strike, however, which developed soon after the writers', is still ongoing.

What fascinates about these moments in Hollywood is how far reaching their implications are. The questions raised by the strike action, and the vast scale of them, are profoundly resonant to the arts in general and how much we value them – or don't. Because if we no longer ascribe any intrinsic worth to the people who have meticulously crafted what we read, watch and enjoy, what does that say about how highly we think of the arts in society?

When I was younger, I wanted to be an actress. My parents were supportive but I got the impression that they wanted to prepare me for the less glamorous aspects of the job. They made me watch Fame and Withnail and I, and they only bought me the actor biographies which strenuously detailed a life of rejection and hardship. My mother cut out a comic strip for me, which remained pinned to the cork-board behind my desk until my early twenties when (spoiler alert) I gave up this dream. It showed a man knocking on his neighbour’s door. "I’m an actor and I’ve just moved in next door," he says. "Can I borrow a cup of money?"

When we think of actors, we perhaps think of the Hollywood stars living a life of luxury, where Golden Globes are displayed in their downstairs bathrooms and Architectural Digest pops over for house tours. But what the recent strikes make clear, is that these 'stars' are a slim minority. The overwhelming preponderance of those working in the arts – from writers to actors – are the kind who might move in next door to you, and ask for a cup of money. The sad fact is that, more than 20 years after my mother gave me that comic strip, this joke is still an accepted truism. If you work in the arts – be that as a singer, painter, writer or actor – don’t expect to make any money.

"When I was at school there was a really clear distinction made to me between working in a creative field and making money," says Mishki Vaccaro, a writer and director who currently works between Toronto and LA. "Obviously, I wanted to have the sort of financial freedom to live a good, comfortable life and to support myself. But if my motivating factor wasn't to make all the money in the world through business, then I felt, even at that age, that my point of view wasn't valued."

What Vaccaro explains is that a binary had been laid down between a job that would bring fulfilment to her life, and one which would financially remunerate her. It was as though she couldn't have both – and was, in fact, being punished for having the audacity to pursue a career she might enjoy. "But I would also argue that what I do has its own very important value in society, and I don’t understand why so many people in my industry are still underpaid or – worse – asked to do it for free," she says. "It shows just how much people actually value what we do, even as they consume it every day."

"We no longer ascribe any intrinsic worth to the people who have crafted what we consume"

The strikes pertinently occurred in a post-Covid era, after a pandemic in which the important function of art in society had never been more appreciated. What did we do at home for months, if not consume the work that people like Vaccaro had meticulously created? While we clapped for the NHS workers who kept us alive, there was also a quiet, unspoken but collectively recognised understanding that artists were also keeping us alive – in a different way. It was songs, books, films and TV shows that nurtured our spirits during those long months of panic and insecurity. It would make sense if both industries would see this renewed appreciation as a fiscal turning point. They did not and, ironically, both are now striking.

"I think it is important to look at the value of the arts in light of this current wave of unionisation," says Sam Ladkin, senior lecturer in creative and critical writing at the University of Sussex and editor of the 2016 book, Against Value in the Arts and Education. "It is easy for people to see the arts as something light when actually, this is a clear, old-fashioned labour dispute. This is the relationship between capital and labour, to the detriment of labour."

Ladkin is erudite when she speaks about not just the value of the arts in society, but the fundamental problem with how we make that value judgement. Art is, after all, a famously subjective medium. One man’s Picasso is another man’s trash. So, if you can’t really measure the merit of individual art itself, how can you track its broader impact?

"Art is a victim of audit culture," he says. "By this I mean we are always trying to justify art by translating it into a different form of data. So, the ambiguity and the complexity of the arts and the experience of the arts gets reduced down to the kind of commodified things the consumer might buy." Art is, therefore, placed within a system that measures it by a yardstick that doesn’t quite apply. "What’s wrong with how we judge the arts is the fact that we believe something is justifiable only if it can be translated into money."

"Art is a famously subjective medium – if you can’t measure its merit, how can you track its impact?"

Ladkin compares this to the unpaid labour of caregivers (disproportionately women) whose work contributes to the smooth running of society but, because it cannot be quantitively measured, is not valued. Vaccaro sees this an equally gendered problem, as "arts and artistic pursuits are generally coded as feminine versus maths and science, which are coded as masculine". It goes some way to describe why STEM subjects are foisted upon girls as a way to readdress the gender pay gap. While this is valiant, it fails to consider the fact that it's underpinned by a fundamentally flawed value judgement. Instead of recognising that the arts are outrageously underfunded and underpaid, we just push people away from them.

"It shows that we do not value the things that are not quantitatively measurable," says Vacarro. "But we work in a qualitative field: we work in narrative, we work in storytelling, we work in research, we work in relationships. You can’t measure that in the same way, and so tragically we are seeing huge underfunding to arts education and arts programmes in the States and in the UK."

This is why Arts Council England – which aims to invest more than £467 million of public money from the government and an estimated £250 million from The National Lottery each year to help support the sector – does attempt to measure the value of the arts differently. "We strongly advocate for the value that investment in culture creates for England," their spokesperson tells me. "This includes producing research on the social and economic benefits of creativity and culture, and making the case for investment to the government and the public." Through their meticulously researched 'Let’s Create' plan, they look at something called 'creative health', which encourages us to see art in the context of health and wellbeing. "By 2030, we want England to be a country in which the creativity of each of us is valued and given the chance to flourish."

"We don't value things that are not quantitatively measurable, but we work in a qualitative field"

The holistic value of the arts is something long neglected or, perhaps worse, relegated to a state of unimportance. But pushes from the likes of Arts Council England and the visibility of the strikes in Hollywood might just force a broader cultural conversation about our fatal misunderstanding of its significance. Both Ladkin and Vaccaro are hopeful that the strikes will prove an eye-opener to the reality of life in the arts, especially thanks to the endorsement of huge celebrity names on the picket lines, and the postponement of major projects and award ceremonies.

"Storytelling is our is our first language – from the first caveman paintings, through mythology, and now to where we are in this industry – and it remains the way we make sense of the world," says Vaccaro. "These strikes are a fight to preserve the humanity in storytelling and I’m hopeful that this will be a wake-up call to everyone; a reminder that the mark of an enlightened society is its ability to make art."

Origin Story: Born and raised in Toronto, Canada to hippie Buddhist parents, I spent most of my childhood trying to hide the fact that I was a straight-up weirdo with a very active imagination and a rich inner life. Which basically means I had no choice but to become a writer. What else was I gonna do with all those feelings? I moved to L.A. in 2013 and earned my MFA in Screenwriting from the University of Southern California. Since then, I've worked in feature film development at Simon Kinberg's Genre Films, in network television development and production at Jason Winer's Small Dog Picture Company and in the writer's room on NBC's Perfect Harmony to name a few. I've written and produced an interactive short called I'm F.I.N.E. (Fucked Up, Insecure, Neurotic & Emotional) with New Form Digital and Eko Interactive and co-wrote the season finale of Perfect Harmony. I consider writing to be a form of "good magic" and gravitate towards female-centric dark comedies about the deep fears and dilemmas of the human experience.

Pipeline Accolades: Script Pipeline Screenwriting Runner-up (#FreeBritney)

Accolades:

- 2022 Humanitas Quarter Finalist - #FreeBritney (feature)
- 2018 Sundance New Voices Second Round - Wreckoning (pilot)
- 2015 Austin Teleplay Second Round - Damaged Goods (pilot)

On Being an Artist: I've been studying with the Joan Scheckel Filmmaking Labs since 2017, and my favorite quote of hers is: "Before it was a job, it was a need."

That's the whole thing, isn't it? As humans, we have a need to express ourselves. And at the most fundamental level, as artists, it's why we do what we do.

Fueled by: A continual investigation of what gives life meaning. To me, that's what I'm personally going through and what I observe friends, family, and society at large grappling with. It's a way of diving into the complicated business of being human to uncover deep emotional truths.

And when things get sticky and self-doubt creeps in, I always remind myself of something Ira Glass of This American Life once said. I'm paraphrasing, but it's basically that we all get into this business because we have great taste, yet it takes years for our skillset to catch up with our taste. So not to judge ourselves, but to instead keep making stuff, keep going, keep getting better. I take this as a reminder that it's OK to continually feel like a beginner and like I have no idea what I'm doing. As long as I keep putting one foot in front of the other, I'm doing what I came here to do.

Currently: Writing as much as I can. Working on a new feature and another TV pilot, as well as a short that I plan to produce and direct.

Someday: A writer/director/producer with my own production shingle who works in television and film, making my own projects and supporting and uplifting new voices.

For My Mom

i carry your heart with me(i carry it in my heart)

What was my mom to me? She was everything. She was everything.

And now in her death, I am both saddened and joyful. Sad because at thirty-one, I was just starting to become her friend. In my twenties, as most people do, I tried my best to strike out on my own—although, as evidenced by the TV pilot she wrote that I found (which was dated 1987, the year before I was born... it's called Mount Royal and it's a juicy drama about a corrupt Montreal family), this apple fell directly under the tree. And joyful to remember the incredible, unique life she lived and to know that she’s no longer in pain.

Dementia is a hell of a disease. I lost my mom for good on December 10, 2019, and we lost her little by little every day for the last few years. Dad and I like to say that 2016/2017 was the last “good” year—the last year before things really started to shift. It’s our suspicion things had been changing for a while. There were signs. Her emotions, already passionate, grew inexplicably unwieldy. She of many words began to lose them. And not just words, she lost things too. Our house is filled with buried treasure, items that mom picked up and put down and forgot about. When I arrived from Los Angeles last week, I found a couch cushion in my dresser drawer… from a couch I’m not sure we even own anymore. She also got in a lot of car accidents the last few years. Not big ones, but silly ones, constantly misjudging a curb. Tasks that were once second nature became a mystery. Dad told me there was a time when mom bought new sheets every few weeks until he inquired why. Apparently the washing machine was broken, but really she just stopped remembering how to use it. For a long while, most of this stuff seemed harmless, and she was good at laughing it off. But I’ll never forget when I really started to worry: home for a visit, I came upon my mom trying to write a card. Anyone who knew her knows that her cards were epic, sometimes spilling onto a second and third page. And yet here she was, struggling to hold a pen and to use that pen to make any sort of shape on the paper.

And that’s how it went from there on out. She’d be seemingly fine and then just drop off a cliff one day in terms of functionality. Each time taking a piece of my mom that I loved so much.

And it was heartbreaking (and still is) to watch such a strong woman struggle, not only to express herself but also to just be in the world. In her passing, I’m thankful that part of her journey is over. But mostly I just miss lying on the couch holding her feet as we watched TV.

Despite how painful the past few years have been, the one thing they've taught me was how to fully love someone, flaws and all. I’ll probably always regret not being closer to my mom in my twenties, but the last few years have allowed me to step into a new role with her, as we all do with our parents eventually. I made peace with whatever I needed to from my childhood, good and bad, and was able to just be there for her. I got to care take her and love her like she did for me when I was little. She really did become childlike towards the end and she was so damn cute sometimes. She’d let me help her in ways other people couldn’t. I’d wash her hair, make sure it was blow-dried nicely, help her get dressed, and we’d go for a walk. If she needed to go to the bathroom, I was right there with her. I tucked her in at night and sang her the made up songs she used to sing to me.

And then, out of the blue, she’d have a moment of lucidity so profound it’d take my breath away, while simultaneously making me want to laugh. Last summer, mom and I were sitting outside in the backyard. I brought her an ice cream sandwich, unwrapped it, and handed it to her. She took it, looked at it, and then offered it to me. I said, “No, momma. That’s for you.” This was pretty typical of my mom. Generous to a fault. My dad once joked she was so generous, it was almost a character defect. Give her a gift, she gave you two back. As her daughter, this was both amazing and frustrating. Take care of yourself, I used to tell her, as I both basked in and drowned in her love. I was thinking of all this when she tried to give me her ice cream sandwich. I said, “I wish…” and then trailed off. She caught it. “You wish what? That I loved myself more? I know. I’m working on it.” She smiled and ate her ice cream. It’s a moment I’ve kept with me. A reminder that life is a process the whole time we’re here, and to lean into it, to love yourself fully because why the hell not, and to create deep, intimate, long-lasting relationships. Those are the things that make a life full, and man was hers packed to the brim.

I’m looking forward to a new relationship with my mom, where she guides me from the great beyond. On the one hand, when saying goodbye last week, I was cognizant of sending her off with joy so she could fully cross over. And, on the other hand, I gave her full permission to haunt the shit out of me. As long as it’s not in a scary way, I’m on board.

It’s fitting then, that we gathered on December 21, 2019, the last winter solstice of the decade, to celebrate her life. A symbol of rebirth, the solstice reminds us of the coming of the light. It may be dark now, but the days are only getting brighter from here.

Thank you for reminding us, mom, about the promise of spring. And thank you for all that you’ve given me.

I’ll see you in my dreams.