On the 19 August 2024, Creative Scotland announced that, within 12 days, it would cease to accept new applications to the Open Fund for Individuals (OFI), the grant programme through which it distributes money directly to “freelance and self-employed artists and creative practitioners living in Scotland.” The reason cited was budget uncertainty: the monetary allocation promised to this non-departmental public body by the Scottish Government had not been dispensed and, it seemed conceivable, may fail to materialise owing to a recent austerity directive. As was to be expected, the decision taken by Creative Scotland’s executives’ in response to fiscal constraint elicited significant discontent—particularly as no such cut was made to the Open Fund for Organisations—and was but the latest in a line of controversies that had unfolded since its establishment as a successor to the Scottish Arts Council in 2010. Many commentators began to express their opposition, which variously took the form of online posts, letters to politicians, press articles and so forth. I—a freelance producer in field of contemporary art, at the time taking a hiatus from work while writing a doctoral thesis—felt similar indignation to that which was being voiced, though had apprehensions about the implications of certain narratives constructed to pressure the fund’s reinstatement and the means used to amplify them. While it ultimately came to pass that government funding would be disbursed to Creative Scotland and, in early October, it resumed accepting OFI applications, it is my contention that the misgivings I felt about strategy may still hold relevance to those that labour in the cultural sector.

Before proceeding, it is necessary to point out that the main purpose of the OFI is to ensure a supply of cultural outputs, and to summarise in brief how it is administered. Creative Scotland produces a standardised application form, which sets preconditions for administrative and artistic intentionality. Within it, a candidate must outline the ‘project’ they intend to realise, its prospective ‘strengths,’ ‘impacts’ and alignment with ‘strategic imperatives,’ and the budget required, which is, in itself, a significant undertaking. Applications are accepted on a rolling basis and, once submitted, are appraised by officers at Creative Scotland, who conduct assessments using specified criteria. Owing to the level of demand for money far exceeding the allocation, a large proportion of applicants who have met the prerequisite threshold do not receive a grant, meaning that it is inevitable within this competitive system that most lose out. Notably, grant programmes such as this hold an equivocal status as to whether they are forms of ‘state aid’ or ‘service procurement’: in the case of the former, Creative Scotland is positioned as a ‘benefactor’ and the recipient a ‘beneficiary,’ while in the latter, Creative Scotland is a ‘purchaser/commissioner’ and the recipient a ‘seller/provider.’

In the aftermath of the announcement, I read many online posts made by cultural workers, within which there were two rhetorical strategies that I perceived as counter-productive to a politics of labour. The first was to point towards research, whether academic or quasi-sociological, that pertained to the demographics of cultural workforce, the message being that the funding system was a programme of ‘state aid’ already skewed to benefit the privileged. Sometimes, such research had been paid for from budgets that were earmarked for artistic production—capturing resources which could otherwise have been used for that purpose—and, fundamentally, it serves to fulfil the appetite of the state to audit the domains under its jurisdiction more so than to actually remediate inequalities. The problem with invoking it is that it reinforces the notion that all cultural workers are privileged beneficiaries, which begs the question, why ought the state—which is ostensibly committed to the edict of ‘equality, diversity and inclusion’—make concessions to us, over those at greater disadvantage outside of our sector? It is necessary to be mindful that, as budget lines, all functions of the state are commensurable and convertible, and the conclusions that it is possible to draw from such research may justify further de-prioritisation of cultural funding. The second strategy was to provide personal testimonies that emphasised the struggle to generate income as a freelance cultural worker, which frequently highlighted that many of us do so through alternative means, often in other sectors. While these experiences were articulated to evoke empathy in the pursuit of change, in reality, they may inadvertently provide politicians and senior bureaucrats with a means to rationalise further cuts, because they convey to those that control the overarching distribution of money that we already provision cultural products and services without actually receiving financial remuneration for it. This means that the purpose of a grant programme such as the OFI, from the vantage point of the state, is then obviated, because we have conceded to being ‘providers’ without actually being ‘sellers’ of our labour-power. I make these points not to diminish the real and harmful effects of inequality and insecurity, but to suggest that many of the political messages that were accentuated may be liable to co-optation.  

The second issue I seek to highlight was the reliance upon so-called ‘sector-support bodies’—named herein as intermediaries—to speak on behalf of freelancers during the dispute. While this was presented as a collectivist strategy to overcome the individuation and fragmentation inherent in work, at an ideological level, intermediaries serve to construct an artificial unity between agents that play various roles in cultural production and mediation, masking the unequal ascription of individual prestige, and the uneven infrastructural endowment of power vested in the various roles subsumed under the sectoral ‘we.’ Other commentators have argued convincingly that, in the context of organisational funding, Creative Scotland has strategically repositioned ‘bureaucratic’ functions as cultural activities through intermediaries, which diminishes the likelihood that money will actually be distributed to pay for art’s production (see Cooper, 2018). This reallocation often manifests in a manner that compounds this fact: under the auspices of ‘professional development’ and ‘networking,’ intermediaries ensure that the capacities of cultural workers, prospective and extant, are maintained, without actually providing us with a means of subsistence. The practice of funding intermediaries is not new—it was endorsed by the Arts Council of Great Britain around fifty years ago—and was and is often leveraged for a specific purpose that is also crucial to recognise: cutting the state’s internal costs through outsourcing, which is coterminous with the destabilisation of administrative labour. Though intermediaries in the present have ‘fair work’ policies—a prerequisite for multi-year organisational funding—the salaries and job security they offer is comparatively lower than in public sector employment, where there is a greater assurance of permanence and access to union representation with high membership density. This is not necessarily the most convenient truth to highlight for those of us who lack the security of employment, though it is, in my estimation, necessary to recognise if we are committed to leftist politics, because it testifies to the systematic dismantling of worker protections within the ongoing process of neoliberalisation.

The intermediary with which I am most familiar is the Scottish Contemporary Art Network (SCAN). Since its constitution as a membership organisation in 2012, SCAN has positioned itself as an embedded spokesperson for the sector, claiming to act in the interests of both ‘individuals’ and ‘organisations.’ Whether such an alignment is possible must be called into question. Because organisations hold the power to determine an individual’s access to work, pay and conditions, their interests are not merely structurally imbalanced, but often conflictual. Likewise, because the right to define the interests of an organisation is delimited to those at the upper echelons of its hierarchy, the lowest-ranking staff—whose interests can by no means be consolidated with that of their employer—effectively remain unrepresented. As an addressee on SCAN’s mailing list—though not a dues-paying member—I received an email on 22 August about the OFI closure, which I acknowledge was helpful in disseminating the news. It stated that SCAN was,

continuing to advocate for artists and freelancers in our community at this crucial time. We are working hard behind the scenes to communicate our demands for both immediate action and long-term reassurance for artists – both the most vulnerable and the most important people in our workforce.

Through this lens, neither SCAN’s own employees nor freelancers are properly recognised as workers. The former are cast as ‘benevolent servants,’ an aristocratic ideal that belies their own tenuous position as part-time workers whose employment is contingent upon securing time-limited grants; while artists are deserving, though disempowered, objects of service. In this cause-driven endeavour, SCAN had “been in touch with Scottish government officials, briefing MSP’s directly about the crisis and speaking to Creative Scotland.” These were not atypical activities for the organisation, and I have long found it peculiar that one of the reasons for which it appears to be funded by the state is precisely to lobby agents of the state. This circularity points towards two problems. Firstly, because SCAN is sanctioned to fulfil this function, to use it as a vehicle through which to articulate demands is to acquiesce to the state’s predefined parameters of political action. Secondly, because its receipt of money is predicated upon comporting with the agendas of Creative Scotland—as is the case for all funded cultural organisations, though is particularly acute in the case of intermediaries positioned as proxies—the content of any demand cannot deviate too far from a normative framework. 

Five days later, on 29 August, SCAN hosted an ‘open meeting’ online, in which it was evident that many attendees had preexisting grievances about the administration of the OFI and were profoundly affected by the recent announcement. In this, representatives of SCAN and other organisations fielded inquiries about the withdrawal of the open fund, over which they had no control and limited knowledge—which is to say that, in spite of their dialogue with state actors, they were not actually granted privileged access to granular decision-making purposefully insulated from publicity. The concern this raises for me is that by calling upon intermediaries to explain the determinants of our working lives to us and delegating to them by default our critical negotiation with the forces that shape it, we may perceive ourselves to be more informed, yet gain little actual insight through which to fully apprehend our situation. SCAN’s workers were earnest in their dedication to supporting freelancers, though the “reassurance” that they were there to provide was ultimately of politico-affective utility to Creative Scotland, because the discourse engendered within the meeting served to contain vexations that should rightly have been directed at its senior executives. The very fact of the meeting was, in other words, a buffer, which exemplifies the intermediary’s role in relation to the state. 

As it transpired, Creative Scotland reinstated the OFI, because the mobilisation of cultural workers shifted the balance of forces within the state apparatus, and it is necessary to be clear that I recognise those that projected the types of messages I have scrutinised and the employees of intermediaries to have contributed to this outcome. This does not, however, alleviate my concern that in a dispute that pertained to the non-procurement of labour, we, as freelancer cultural workers, embraced political strategies that may be counter-productive in the longer term. Though it is not always popular on the left to frame cultural funding as a quasi-market relation, we must be mindful that it is not charity we require, but compensation, and to disassociate ourselves from our position as ‘seller/providers’ may ultimately be to embrace work without pay. It is, moreover, imperative that we engender political debate about the role of intermediary bodies, and in this pursuit, I will end with three provocations. The sectoral cohesion and consensus that intermediaries serve to construct protects the distribution of power along hierarchical and functional lines, in a manner that hinders labour struggle, freelance and otherwise. Because intermediaries enable the state to offload administrative labour at a lower cost and fulfil functions tangential to actual cultural production, they impel precarisation in the cultural sector rather than mitigating it. And, though the sympathies of workers’ within intermediaries may be with our causes, these organisations are compromised, structurally, as dependents, functionaries and agitators of Creative Scotland. These points are critical to consider if we are to strategise, as labour, to change the infrastructure of the cultural sector.