68 Months Later: As CNB returns, are we witnessing an arts apocalypse?

Adam Turkington is a freelance creative producer and consultant who as part of Daisy Chain Inc is part of the team bringing Culture Night back to Belfast this year.

In early 2009 a meeting was called by a couple of arts workers who’d been asked if they fancied running an event in Belfast that had been a success in Dublin. It was the birth of Culture Night Belfast.

I was in the Belfast Circus School for the meeting along with close to a hundred arts workers from across the city. I’d completely forgotten about it until I recently interviewed the founders of CNB for a piece of research we were doing for Belfast City Council. As I talked to Sean about that day, I think we both felt a bit of a tingle as we remembered the energy in the room at the time. There was a magic about Culture Night at the start, a playful excitement about the sector having its day, like a Christmas for the arts. But more than that, remembering that day made me remember what the sector was like back then. There was a solidarity, a sense of conviction that we were fighting for our place in the new Belfast. Even more than that there was a belief that the arts had played a key role in building the peace here, even a sense that this was recognised at political level. You could say we felt a responsibility, and with CNB, a tangible sense of excitement about the potential of this new event we were birthing.

And somehow, now, in the present, these memories sting. Because that world has disappeared. And I didn’t even notice. Now, thinking about it, in a relatively short period of time that ambition and sense of excitement has all but gone.

How did I miss it? Since that chat about that day I’ve been developing a theory. It’s a theory based on a distinction I’m going to make between two kinds of arts workers. On the one hand there’s the freelance sector in the arts – the creative entrepreneurs and artists who are producing work, usually a portfolio career, dipping in and out of different clients who appreciate their skill sets. Then there’s the salaried sector – the staff in core funded organisations.

For the last fifteen years or so I’ve most spend my time in the freelance arts sector. Professionally I’m still connected with lots of people in the salaried arts sector but I mostly work with the freelance world. In particular, when I establishing Vault, became part of a lovely vibrant ecosystem of individual artists who support each other, make work together and are predominately a happy bunch. Additionally most of my work at the minute is with street artists, and the street art scene, in case you weren’t paying attention, is in a really vibrant place at the minute. There are 40+ artists who, with little or no public funding, have bottom up, built a scene that is essentially entrepreneurial. It’s a pretty amazing scene to be involved in.

In short this freelance sector is, in my experience, buzzing. We are of course talking in generalisations here, I’m not saying every freelance artist is happy, and I’m definitely not saying everyone’s well paid. In fact we’re probably less well paid BUT emotionally, in my circle, we’re in a relatively happy place. In the last couple of months however I’ve had much more contact with the salaried sector than normal. And what I’ve seen has shocked me.

In the last six months or so a significant number of big jobs in the arts have become vacant. Some through retirement, others through people leaving NI and one I spoke with recently who’s just going freelance with no work lined up – just getting out. Ten or twenty years ago the competition for these posts would have been intense, but from what I can see at this point, the opposite is true.

Then I spoke to someone who had enquired about another of these posts. ‘What’s the percentage of time spent on funding applications and reporting?’ they asked… The answer came back 80%. Four days a week out of your five spent having to justify your existence. Even if you were successful with every application, imagine what that would do for your mental health. Why would anyone do that job? When you’re freelance, you don’t need to fundraise. You need to hustle but that’s not the same thing and if you’re good, the work tends to come find you.

So I’m beginning to think we’re facing an existential crisis in the arts. In the current environment, most of the talent is staying freelance because you’ll be much more likely to be happy. You’ll never consider going to work for an organisation where you’re going to be continually faced with a narrative that says you have no value and you’re going to need to take more cuts. Again, why would anyone do that? The talented young people I know are coming through; they’re not working for organisations, they’re finding community in the freelance sector and plying their trade there. So, essentially, these sectoral jobs are going to be harder and harder to fill, and the people already in the jobs are collectively having a mental health crisis. I don’t know what’s gonna happen but it’s at breaking point as far as I can see.

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Ten years ago there was an ongoing argument Belfast creatives would have about the arts, about the lack of funding, people on Nolan talking about their granny’s hip being more important than opera, while the arts sector tried to make a the case against cuts. This argument has essentially been lost. Ten years ago we were the lowest funded arts sector in Europe and since then we’ve have faced further cuts of about a third, (which ironically saves the tax payer, in relative terms, absolutely f*ck all). But did you even know this? Was their a campaign against the cuts? Protests? Debate even. There’s very little fight left.

In this last ten years even I’ve not talked about it much. I’ve been working away in my own wee world, bumping into colleagues twitchily talking about the funding deadlines they’re up against and the amount of reporting they have to do. And every time I think ‘THANK F*CK! Thank f*ck that’s not me’. And I think about how lucky I am to be working away doing something I love, making a wee difference and I don’t have to report to anyone, I just have to do a good job. But of course the freelance biosphere needs these sectoral leaders and we’ve made their jobs so horrible that I just can’t see how we can get enough good people to do them going forward.

Maybe this all leaves you cold, but if you care about our creative sector at all then things need to change. We need to start speaking up for creatives and for what we bring to society. And not in a way that’s apologetic. We are a vital part of any functioning society. Most places in the world recognise that, but not here. Here the public discourse places every piece of art on a scale with the NHS on the other side, which is essentially something you do to things you want to attack.

We need to ask why has our society turned on the arts this way? Aren’t the funding cuts only a symptom? The wider issue is our social discourse. I work in the arts and I’ve only just noticed there’s an existential crisis in the sector. Why are we not talking about this? I don’t blame the public, I don’t blame the politicians, I don’t even blame Nolan. I blame, and I’m sorry about this, I blame the arts sector. Not all of them of course, but we need to be realistic, the funding cuts are a review. The lack of people caring is a review.

The arts in NI has on balance failed in my opinion to effectively demonstrate it’s value to most people. MOST people think that it’s a pursuit of the upper middle classes, and I would argue the sector has been complacent about that, and in the case of the lead funder actively leant into that. You don’t get to do that indefinitely. Being arms length was meant to be creatively freeing, not creatively exclusive. The result is things have got so bad that a huge proportion of public funding for the arts is going to fund workers who are spending most of their time applying for that public funding – it’s unsustainable. No-one’s doing art, they’re just scrambling to keep their heads above water and filling in forms.

Conversely if you are a freelance artist you have to be very clear about what your appeal is. You don’t have to appeal to a mass audience but you know you’re value. If you don’t you won’t last very long. Funding on the other hand shouldn’t be an excuse to do work that has no value, by definition it needs to produce work that has a value that can’t be measured in pounds and pence. That doesn’t mean it should spend most of it’s budget subsidising expensive art forms that no-one cares about. It should be a way do extraordinary things that make people go ‘Holy shit’, about building scenes and developing markets that the non-funded sector can build on. There are some really amazing things only public funding can do and has done, but it’s happening less and less.

The good news is, thanks to a significant investment from BCC, in 2025 Culture Night is coming back, an event which I believe, when it worked, moved the dial on the power of arts to make our lives better. The bad news is it can’t be anything like what it was ten years ago because of what I’ve just laid out. That energy we had in 2009 has been stripped away. They came for us. What has happened is on a scale that is in no way proportional. It’s ideological. Why did no-one care? Why was the worst funded arts sector in Europe an easy target for further cuts? We MUST be doing something wrong. Can we at least admit that?

I have believed for some time the only way to save my sector is to strategically fund work that connects more effectively with a wider audience. Organisations that have shown an ability to engage audiences and grow their income should be rewarded and encouraged to scale up their work, not, as happens, have their funding cut because ‘they can take it’. How is it that success is penalised? This is, from an entrepreneur’s perspective INSANE! We have to show people why they should care, we need to immediately pivot and fund more events like Culture Night that have a wide appeal. Because the current funding situation, it’s associated admin burden, and the insistence on propping up failing organisations is going to end us.

We’re in a death spiral and something is going to have to radically change or Culture Night will be Cillian Murphy walking over Westminster Bridge shouting ‘HELLOOOO!!’ as newspapers with the headline ‘THE ARTS DOESN’T RISE FROM THE DEAD’ blow around it’s feet.