![]() ![]() From an Icelandic arts festival to a Costa Rican tree house, we provided six new experiences for six applicants from all over the world.Įditorially too we are seeing how we can help on a larger scale. Our Time/Place project this summer sent six students on fully-paid trips to spark new ideas outside of their comfort zones. We’ve been thinking about where we can add value to young creatives too. We are also a founding sponsor of Nelly Ben Hayoun’s University of the Underground, a free masters course whose unique curriculum challenges students to apply creative thinking to the world’s biggest problems. At WeTransfer we recently launched the Pioneers, a list of eight creative schools around the world which deserve credit for doing things differently. ![]() Where they are not, new models need to be found. The universities need to look at their creative courses and rigorously assess whether they are fit for purpose. ![]() There are many fantastic non-profit groups fighting to protect and promote young people’s access to arts education from Arts Emergency in the UK to Enrich Chicago in the US, described as, “an arts-led movement to undo racism.” It’s been fighting to include art and design in the core education priorities alongside science, technology, engineering, and maths. The Rhode Island School of Design’s STEM to STEAM campaign deserves praise. This roll-call of shame goes on and on.Īnother study from the UK identified “the flawed equation” in creative education, namely the idea that, “ to count is to be economically productive, but to create is not.” But with the average student debt in the US just under $40,000, it’s no wonder that mainly white, middle-class people - who can afford unpaid internships, or a couple of years’ grace to work on their art - dominate the creative space. Only 18% of the top roles (producers, directors etc) on the top 250 films of 2017 were filled by women. Only 13% of professional writers are non-white. In the US, only 4.4% of arts school graduates are African-American. And we haven’t even started talking about what effect this has on diversity. So when choosing what to study or what to major in, of course creative courses are going to seem less attractive, when the future pay-off seems so much riskier.Ī recent survey found that of 2million arts graduates in the US, only 200,000 were making their living as working artists. If young people are going to take on the huge levels of debt - which going to university in so many places now entails - then it is reasonable they will look for careers that pay off that debt quickly. The reality for many writers and musicians and artists and photographers is anything but. We want to believe in endlessly upward trajectories. That this feels like an “admission” or a “revelation” tells us something about how we’ve come to think about creative careers.ĭazzled by success stories, we’ve lost sight of the struggle that so many creatives face. Arguably the hottest non-fiction writer around at this moment in time, he has a day job as a copywriter for a tech company. You may have also seen that Maysh sold the movie rights to Ben Affleck and Matt Damon for $1million.īut in the podcast, Maysh admits that when asked about the financial side of his life, he hasn’t always been honest. You may have read Maysh’s recent story about the ex-cop who rigged the McDonald’s Monopoly game. It reminded me of t his excellent interview with the writer Jeff Maysh on the Longform podcast. Anyone who has ever pursued a creative path knows quite how precarious that life is. Unsurprisingly, and heart-warmingly, the creative community rallied to his defense. The Mail did what the Mail does (it also followed up with breathless chutzpah when Owens gave an interview to American TV, that he had “broken his silence after being job-shamed.”). The “story” was that Geoffrey Owens, an actor who rose to fame in The Cosby Show and also starred in aven, Lucifer and It’s Always Sunny in Philadelphia, was now working in a New Jersey grocery store. The whole piece was horrible, from the sneering details - “he wore a t-shirt with stain marks on the front as he weighed a bag of potatoes” - to the photos, snapped on a customer’s phone as Owens tried to get on with his job. “From learning lines to serving the long line! The Cosby Show star Geoffrey Owens is spotted working as a cashier at Trader Joe’s in New Jersey.” ![]()
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