Dear Gunnar and Terry,
I know I am making a mistake in taking this conversation too seriously, but as it has come around yet again in an almost identical form to its previous appearance, I can’t resist it.
Gunnar asks Terry to substantiate the figures that he bandies about, in particular the mystery one of 4% that apparently has some meaning in relation to the size of the Art & Design sector compared to other areas of ‘design’. I am aware of the importance that Terry places on mathematics. I’m no mathematician or scientist but are we really to take this seriously? Terry starts with a vague ‘memory’ of this percentage and then does a selective trawl around various sources and applies some tenuous algorithms in order to try to retrospectively arrive at an approximation of the original figure. Is this an example of ‘mathematical rigour’?
We do know that here in the UK the creative industries constituted 6.4% of the economy in 2007 (£67.5bn) and that the sector was and is growing faster than the economy as a whole. It is also characterized by a high proportion of ‘micro companies’ and self-employed. The publishing sector is the largest overall constituent.
Many surveys are conducted on recent graduates and their employment status. Those of us in Art & Design are inured to the misleading statistics that place our graduates low in the tables because of the high proportion of self-employment and the equally high proportion of those who take more than the first year out of university (when the surveys are conducted) to get established. These are the ones that Terry describes contemptuously as ‘employed only by being ‘self-employed’ ‘. As my own Masters graduates return each year from the Bologna Children’s Book Fair with hundreds of thousands of pounds worth of international publishing contracts, I am aware that they are of course ‘only ‘self-employed’’. Besides, are we to accept that the sole purpose of an Art & Design degree is to be an employed artist or designer? Do we judge those who take a degree in History on whether or not they become historians?
If this is a ‘straight bat’, Terry, I would venture to suggest that it is about as straight as the bats of the current England cricket team, whose hapless exploits within your shores you will be familiar with. Let’s have a bit of honesty about these irrational, old fashioned attacks on ‘creativity’ and the Art & Design sector, rather than hiding behind bogus, spurious statistics.
Merry Christmas all!
Professor Martin Salisbury
Course Leader, MA Children's Book Illustration
Director, The Centre for Children's Book Studies
Cambridge School of Art
0845 196 2351
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http://www.anglia.ac.uk/ruskin/en/home/microsites/ccbs.html
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