I had a very thoughtful email in response to this piece, making the point that artists don’t only have to think about survival through teaching, arts admin, design, academia or the credentialed professional world. There is another route, which is older and perhaps more obvious: trades.

Carpentry, fabrication, printing, framing, welding, building, repair, practical making. I know a lot of artists who have supported themselves this way, and some who have done very well from it. It makes sense. Artists often already have a form of practical intelligence, a feel for materials, problem-solving, improvisation, precision, stubbornness. These are not marginal skills.

There is something strange, though, about the way contemporary art education often encourages intellectual ambition while being slightly embarrassed by physical competence. The artist is encouraged to theorise, contextualise and professionalise, but not necessarily to build a wall, mend a chair, weld a frame or make themselves useful in a way that someone outside the art world might pay for.

In the UK this is made worse, I think, by class. We still have a deeply class-ridden attitude to manual skill. Apprenticeships and trades are not respected here in the way they seem to be in Germany, for example. There remains a faint but persistent idea that if you are bright, articulate and university-educated, physical labour is somehow a step down. That is stupid of course, but it is also damaging.

Perhaps art schools should take this more seriously. Not instead of painting, sculpture, film, performance, theory or whatever else, but alongside it. An optional unit in basic carpentry, welding, fabrication, framing or site work might be more use to some young artists than another seminar about the uncanny in Blade Runner.

Not as a romantic fantasy of honest labour, just as a practical and often creative way to build a life around art without becoming entirely dependent on institutions that were never built to support most artists anyway.