This month we take a look at the training artists do to become and remain the fabulous people they are. Before that, though, let’s look once more at some of the key facts about what it means to work as an artist in Australia. If you take the MCG on a big game, half the crowd would be the number of working artists in the country. That means all the writers, actors, directors, musicians, dancers, choreographers, craft practitioners, designers, visual artists, circus performers and so on, every kind of person who has made art their life, that’s it, they fit into half of the MCG. The rest of Australia does something else. That might be saying something.
Only one in 50, or 2%, will make a decent living from it, the rest will usually have to supplement their earnings as artists with a second or third income, and even then they will earn less than most people. The funny thing is, despite the odds, the number of Australians choosing to make art their life continues to steadily grow, especially if you are a writer, visual artist or actor. This Australia Council for the Arts research was done before new media became such a force, so we can expect artists in those ranks to be part of that growth as well.
So this is the world you are preparing for. And you are prepared. About three-quarters of all artists have had formal training, and 45% have said that formal training by coursework was their most important training of all. Lesson number one: enrol at a tertiary or specialist institution. Most artists value and recommend it. But of course, this varies among different artists. If you are a visual artist or a dancer, nearly 70% of you will say that formal training was most important for your development, but if you are a writer only half that, 36%, considered formal training as the most important form. Perhaps that means that writing is difficult to teach, but more technical arts have a strong practical element to their training that structured coursework provides.
Formal training is only part of it. There are other forms too. Artists will take private tuition on top of their qualified training, or they will learn on the job, or they will teach themselves. Again, the proportion of artists who do this and value it varies depending on what they do. The great majority of musicians and composers take additional private lessons as part of their training, whereas writers least do. Composers and writers are most likely to call themselves self-taught, and dancers least of all. Actors and musicians feel they learn more on the job than other artists, but writers, dancers and composers are not far behind, and least of all are visual artists. Lesson number two: visual artists consistently value their formal training much more than any other kind of learning.
Let’s break down the types of learning artists most value by profession. As we know, visual artists and dancers credit the highest importance to formal courses, writers least do; by far musicians value private lessons, but few others do, writers least of all. Conversely then, writers then composers say they most benefit from being self-taught, and craft practitioners next, dancers least of all. Over a third of all actors say the most important learning they do is on the job, 50% more than the next group that feels that way, writers. Least of all in this category are craft practitioners, who probably feel that if you are in the business of fine craft, it’s best to bring the skills to the job before you start.
This is the crunch stat: how much time artists work at their professions before they qualify. It’s a bang-for-buck equation. Leave aside for a moment the question of time spent in post-professional training which we will look at next, for now let’s see just what it takes to get there on the bottom rung of the ladder to the stars.
On average artists spend about four years in training. That’s what it takes for a teacher to get a bachelor’s degree and a teaching diploma. In their first year teachers will start on a wage of $50 – 60,000, whereas the median wage of all artists at any stage of their career is just under $36,000. There’s a lesson there.
Writers spend the least time in formal training of all artists, but that stat wouldn’t take account of all the reading they have done all their lives and no doubt shaped their choice of career. It only allows for the formal training that can be quantified. Actors are not far ahead of them, then it jumps significantly in order from craft practitioners, visual artists, musicians and composers to dancers, who spend more time training than any other type of artist. Lesson number three: there is no correlation between time spent in training and eventual income. In fact, it could almost be inverse. Writers and actors can potentially earn more than any other type of artist, save for the rare visual artist and musician, but certainly more than the vast majority of dancers who do it tougher than most.
Getting there doesn’t mean it’s all over. As with any profession, artists have to keep learning to keep up or stay ahead, but more then most, artists understand that lifelong learning is a reality of their working careers. Nearly a third of all artists continue to keep studying past their initial training in a mix of formal courses, private lessons and other types of training such as workshops, short courses and summer schools. Again it varies according to the type of artist they might be. By now you could probably predict the figures.
True to form, dancers, composers and visual artists are most likely to continue formal studies, musicians then actors least so, but more than any other artist, a musician is most likely to keep taking private lessons. Dancers, actors and craft practitioners are almost equal in their pursuit of other types of training, principally workshops and short courses. Across the board, writers and composers do the least of ongoing training and, yet again, it’s the dancers who do most of more slog. Lesson number four: no artist works longer and harder in training than a dancer.
The last factor to consider with artists and training is age. Lesson number five: younger artists are more likely to have more and longer formal training than older artists. It makes sense when you think about it. As artists age their years of formal training fade into an increasingly distant past to be replaced by experience and learning on the job as more important factors in their development. Secondly, there are more options to train in the arts today than there were before, and more so now with online provisions. Younger artists simply have more ways to participate in formal training than older artists had. The survey supports this view that a higher proportion of older artists consider ‘self taught’ or ‘learning on the job’ as the type of training most important to them for no better reason than they had no alternative or no longer need one.
Art is not an exact science and neither is this analysis. It comes from a report called Don’t give up your day job: An Economic Study of Professional Artists in Australia, commissioned by the Australia Council through the Division of Economic and Financial Studies, Macquarie University in Sydney, and conducted by David Throsby and Virginia Hollister in 2003. The survey included full-time and part-time artists; employed and self-employed artists; and artists regardless of whether all, some or none of their income was from art practice. It did not include artists whose primary involvement was in design (furniture, interior, fashion, industrial, architectural or graphic); artists working primarily in the film industry; or Aboriginal and Torres Strait Islander artists working in remote Indigenous communities.
Despite these deficiencies it’s the best information we have in Australia and, I suspect, still largely true, because the nature of the arts won’t have changed in the digital age. Dancers will still be training, training, training and writers will still be at their desks, largely working solo but probably on laptops or iPads now. The one significant change would be the emergence of new media and street artists. They are more likely to be on the maverick side of training, but that has yet to be studied and, if they were to be, may prove as successful as herding cats.
So that’s what it takes to become a working artist in Australia. We do our best to discourage you but it seems no one’s listening. As we said, we have a growing army of artists in Australia and they are a force to be reckoned with. That leaves us with one last lesson: once an artist has made that commitment to work and live as an artist, all laws of sense and reason break down. The attraction is too great.
