ivan pope - ‘bound’ at grey area

02/04/2009 by Karen Ay.

Ivan Pope is having a solo show, ‘Bound’, at the Grey Area Gallery in Brighton - opening is tomorrow evening and there will be an artist talk on Sat 3 April at 7.30pm. Worth going if you are in the area and a nice excuse to visit Brighton if you aren’t.

He also has an excellent post on his blog regarding the rather prickly issue of artists not being paid a living wage. I have strong feelings about this and have had it on my mind for quite some time now. In the UK it seems that it’s assumed, more often than not, that artists are quite happy to work for free. Not so! As an example, look on the ACE jobs board - you can count on one hand the jobs that actually offer a wage, never mind a living wage. It’s pathetic and it takes the piss, and shame on ACE for promoting this. Artists are viable cultural producers. As a profession, we contribute a lot to our communities and we should not be expected to wait tables and work at Tesco in order to survive and then ‘do the art for love alone’. Any other profession would laugh at the prospect of being expected to work for free or worse, to have to actually PAY someone in order to be able to do your job.

I was talking with an old friend about this the other day over coffee. He shows work quite a lot in Europe and was remarking on how differently the Europeans treat artists and what a pleasure it was to work over there. It’s a respected profession and one of the things he commented on was the fact that the artists themselves assumed this about themselves and their work. We should take a leaf out of that book.

Perhaps we are our own worst enemies - perhaps we need to have a bit more self-respect and develop a bit more backbone. After all, if we don’t believe in our own worth in terms of what we offer and what we produce, why would anyone else? Something to consider anyway.

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