'All Art is Quite Useless'

 

  Picture: Taylor Wright via unsplash.com

‘We can forgive a man for making a useful thing as long as he does not admire it. The only excuse for making a useless thing is that one admires it intensely. 

All art is quite useless’ – Oscar Wilde, ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’

 

 

Whilst trying to refine my inquiry topic, and consequently trying to understand the dance world’s attitude towards money and personal finance, I have come to the conclusion that perhaps the reason artists shy away from talking about money and why dance schools fail to educate dancers on it (at least in my experience), is because we feel our work is not important. 

 

Back in Module 1, I wrote a blog discussing the skills dancers possess, how they are acquired within the dance world and their transferability to other fields of employment. This was partly in response to the Chancellor Rishi Sunak’s comments implying that the arts were an unviable profession and that artists should retrain, however I also wrote it to illustrate not only how we are highly skilled professionals with a lot to offer the job market, but also that our work is necessary. During quarantine huge amounts of people turned to arts to find solace and escapism, and some rediscovered their childhood creative pursuits as a coping mechanism and as a response to the increased time on their hands. 

 

I do not need to defend the value of the arts in society to artists, we would not put ourselves through all the difficulties our profession presents us with did we not believe in its validity. However, I can’t help wondering whether we do have some level of ‘internalised unimportance’, which prevents us from pushing harder for better government support and higher wages from employers. It is not, in my opinion, an unreasonable theory. The societal attitude of arts being solely performative and a commodity to be sold without inherent value is something I have experienced throughout my training and career. I have had people, even some of those closest to me imply that dancing is not a ‘real job’, despite the fact that professional training costs often more than a traditional degree, and one could argue is often more demanding, given that it requires a high level of extremely personal commitment and more often than not a complete lifestyle change. As much as we try to remain balanced human beings, dancers are still dancers outside of the studio, through the way we look after our bodies and how we choose to live our lives. 

 

I’m curious as to whether certain dance companies and employers within the industry exploit this narrative, especially when creating opportunities for graduates and early-career dancers. Perhaps due to the idea that if you ask to be paid a living wage you can be labelled ‘greedy’ and ‘entitled’, despite the fact that graduates from other sectors are for the most part paid adequately, or at least adequately enough that they don’t need one or two other jobs to support themselves. 

 

This leads even more into the endemic classism that I think exists within the dance (and especially contemporary dance) world. The belief and view of arts as a ‘glorified hobby’ only feeds the assumption that dancers do not deserve to be paid properly, and therefore only those with external financial support can afford to explore them as a career option. I feel this naturally discourages dancers from economically disadvantaged backgrounds from even entering the arts world, let alone pursuing a professional career within it, which ultimately creates a lack of economic diversity, making the arts even more unattainable and unrelatable. 

 

 

 

 

 

  

Oscar Wilde (1891) ‘The Picture of Dorian Gray’, Reprint, London: The Folio Society Limited, 2009