Analysis of Office for National Statistics data found that 16.4% of creative workers born between 1953 and 1962 had a working-class background, but that had fallen to just 7.9% for those born four decades later.
This reflected a similar decline in the number of people with working-class origins, according to the paper in the journal Sociology by researchers from the universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield. People whose parents had a working-class job accounted for about 37% of the workforce in 1981, but by 2011 that had fallen to about 21%.
This is reflected in the irrelevant unadventurous boring pro-authority privileged clichéd middle class cliquey shite that dominates British art at a time of historic hardship and struggle it’s a bit of a cheek
It’s so bad it encouraged Blur to come back - and they’ve been hailed as kings by their offspring
And with fewer film directors, authors or songwriters to describe the experience of growing up in a working-class household, some creatives fear their stories are being squeezed out of culture or confined to “poverty porn”.
haven’t read numbers but this feels true but if anything more advanced in the US and likely reflects weakening social safety nets in both countries. If you are an Anglophone, chances are pretty strong that your favorite 20th-century art, music, writing, even to a degree film from your own country was made by someone who spent long periods of their life not paying the bills with their passion and instead paying them with welfare, unemployment, odd jobs. This has become increasingly unrealistic as the cost of living goes up, wages stagnate, and benefits get cut with relentless enthusiasm by both major sides of the electoral shell game. Creative fields have become the private preserve of first the children of the petit-bourgeoisie and increasingly just the children of the actually rich
Worth noticing also that the initial numbers likely don’t tell the whole story - artists born between 1953 and 1962 would have been in the peak of their maturity in most fields during Thatcher, when things in the arts were just starting to get actually bad, and would have spent the rest of their working lives in a Britain where the cruel moon logic of the “free” market increasingly starved out anyone who had a bad year or a failed project and couldn’t hit up daddy for rent money
