Our Sputnik Patrons program collects monthly donations from our Patrons community and distributes it to Christian artists around the UK. Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve helped to fund, from October 2022 onwards.
You can find out more about Angelina and Rachel with our video interviews and written Q&As right here on our website.
We believe arts for profit is bad for everyone. Putting money and markets at the heart of our society hollows out our common life. That’s why we raise money to give away to artists without strings attached – so they can create for the common good rather than being pressured to make what sells.
Our Sputnik Patrons program collects monthly donations from our Patrons community and distributes it to Christian artists around the UK. Here’s a snapshot of what we’ve helped to fund this Winter.
We believe arts for profit is bad for everyone. Putting money and markets at the heart of our society hollows out our common life. That’s why we raise money to give away to artists without strings attached – so they can create for the common good rather than being pressured to make what sells. Why not become a Patron for as little as £5 / month?
Since late 2017, arts patronage has become one of the core pillars of Sputnik’s work, and raison d’etre. There are certainly some things we’ve learned in the last 2-3 years, but if anything, we’ve only become more convinced of the need for this role, and the opportunity for the church to do more.
Right now, considering the damage facing the creative industries in lockdown and its aftermath, we’ve temporarily shifted our approach – to simply offer emergency funds to out-of-work artists. But at some point we’ll be returning to funding artistic projects, and as we consider the future, it’s time to raise the bugle again (sadly still in the office) and talk about the need for change in the arts at large.
So, why is arts patronage needed in this moment?
The arts are (part of) the lifeblood of society
I’ve written before that ‘culture’ can be thought of as the fruit of human community. When humans join together in clans, tribes, cities: culture happens. Culture isn’t exclusively art, but the arts are a pretty big part of it.
Under lockdown, I believe we felt pretty quickly our need for culture, for shared experiences and that connecting lifeblood. It wasn’t just that we missed our friends; we missed the contexts in which we usually see our friends: pubs, cafés, gigs, theatres, football grounds. Streaming services, and the usual online chat around films and shows, patched some of the gap. More interesting were the bursts of community activity: musicians playing for their neighbours, online table readings for the fun of it, tennis games from tower block windows, zines and arts initiatives springing up to capture the moment.
No doubt our threshold for boredom is embarrassingly low compared to previous generations, but even so: can you imagine lockdown without art? And yet our government continually stumbled in understanding the threat, and the needs, of the creative industries. It’s hard to shake the feeling that it was the continual reminder of the industries’ financial heft (£111.7bn in 2018), rather than the real value of culture, that moved the government’s hand. I couldn’t help but face-palm as our Culture Secretary seemed to conflate ‘the arts’ with ‘classical music in the park’.
Arts and capitalism doesn’t really make sense
I’m glad the arts make a financial difference, but no-one should have to explain that stimulating the economy isn’t where art’s value lies. What about the arts programs lifting up disempowered youth? What about the spoken word nights where sparks fly and confidence is found? What about – gasp – the amateur arts organisers who bring community to disparate daydreamers?
Anyway, how do you measure the value of a song? Not so long ago, I could pay 79p to download a song that changed my life: and 79p for a waste of three minutes. Now that I pay a subscription charge to listen to any songs I like, it only gets muddier, and the only thing that seems remotely clear is that no-one is getting paid anywhere near enough for their work.
Capitalists are not blind to the fact that artists are still going to create the precious ‘content’ pretty much whether they’re paid or not.
The funny thing is that many (not all!) artists seem to have a desire to give away their work for free. Perhaps it’s knowing that the artistic process is not finished until the art is received by an audience; perhaps it’s a sense that to be ‘gifted’ is not something you possess, but rather an imperative, something you need to get out of your hands for it to fulfil its purpose as a ‘gift’. Unfortunately this internal desire is frequently exploited: capitalists are not blind to the fact that artists are still going to create the precious ‘content’ pretty much whether they’re paid or not. But it does build the sense that art and capitalism are odd bedfellows at best.
There seems a low-level hum around the fact that most Britons don’t want post-lockdown life to return to ‘normal’ as it was. (Colour me surprised). There also seems to be a new energy – out of necessity, I suppose – for local, grassroots initiatives in pretty much every sphere of public life. Depending where you live, these might involve local councils; equally likely is that they’ll spring up as a form of collectively-run projects, a more active form of citizenship.
Out of the tragedy of the last few months, the painful loss and all the rest, there is a window for re-thinking things that have seemed bleakly unchangeable for too long. But we need imagination, and we need risky generosity. Can we create better, less capitalist ways to get art made?
We need to play our part in culture
Makoto Fujimura, in his eye-opening book Culture Care (now a podcast!), compares our culture to a local ecosystem, like a river: in a polluted culture, heavy with the demands of commodification and mass-consumption, artists are pushed to make shallow and un-nourishing work, just to survive. Everyone suffers from the loss of a rich common life.
Caring for our mutual culture, he asserts, is a societal good. We do it in the way that we clean parks, or we clothe the homeless; not as a thinly-veiled excuse to share the gospel, but as a thing that is good in itself, a way to bless others and create the environment for faith and spirituality to grow.
There is a counter-cultural current growing: a desire for a common life not merely precipitated on cruel markets. I believe it’s a current worth encouraging. Ideas like arts patronage are a part of this: a way to allow artists to make work that enriches culture, not just what sells. It is, of course, an old idea – most of the art that has endured through history was supported by patrons – and in a sense, its ethos already exists in a hundred arts organisations who make constant sacrifices for the arts. Sputnik alone can’t support the arts sector! But we want to go further.
There is a counter-cultural current growing: a desire for a common life not merely precipitated on cruel markets.
It’s a difficult time for many, not just artists, so it’s an odd time to talk about fundraising: but let’s not talk as if this is ‘charity’. This isn’t about ‘starving artists’ needing a leg-up. This is about an apocalyptic moment that could allow us to rout the profiteers, the moneylenders if you like, from the spiritual heart of our common life.
We’ll be talking more about our particular Patrons scheme in the coming months as we relaunch things, but we want to hear from you, too. What can we be thinking about? What should we try?
And, of course – you can currently sign up as a Patron yourself from as little as £5 a month!
The great American
architect Frank Lloyd Wright called architecture ‘the mother art…
without an architecture of our own, we have no soul of our own
civilization’. As humans we naturally feel a connection with things
we have built – not just personally, but collectively. We even
travel around the world to marvel at the greatest achievements of our
species, from pyramids and castles, to temples and skyscrapers –
seeing these great structures as testaments to our collective ability
and ambition, imbuing their walls and towers with our own memories,
our own hopes, our own ownership.
It is something
marvellous that buildings can hold multitudes of our individually
precious moments, or that one architectural achievement can be called
‘mine’ or ‘ours’ by so many through the decades and
centuries. Like all good artists and designers, those who make our
greatest skylines and landmarks don’t think merely functionally,
but create vessels for our wildest imaginations and our most personal
experiences.
A world in two minds
Yet the world seems
split in its attitude towards architectural art – and I think one
recent event brought this out in stark relief. Watching the spires of
Notre Dame engulfed in deep orange flame, as smoke poured into the
twilight Parisian skies, it was unsurprising to see the international
outpouring of grief. The personal connection to its presence could be
seen just scrolling through our own social media feed – people we
knew shared their heartbreak at the loss (or even partial loss) of
such an undeniably beautiful, historic, creatively artistic building:
memories of first kisses, of treasured trips, of meeting old and new
friends under the shadows of its bell towers. Its place in the
cultural canon of French literature – or maybe better yet, in Disney
films – as well as its place in the heart of an island in the heart
of a river in the heart of the city, means we understand what it
means to Parisians, and admirers from further afield, and join with
the sadness in its loss.
Then, almost as soon as the news had broken, we saw something like a backlash. Were bricks and mortar and timber worth having songs of worship and prayer sung over them? There were justifiable complaints about grieving a casualty-less accident in a Western, city-centre landmark as opposed to the entirely avoidable loss of life in an inferno in a West London suburb, or even the countless treasures and buildings raised to the ground in Mosul or Palmyra as ISIS destroyed lives and cities. As the rebuild project for Notre Dame raised unbelievable sums of money in mere days, the inevitable questions followed about where those funds might be better used.
What kind of privilege is it to invest our time and our money in objects and structures of a more intangible, dare I say spiritual, purpose?
Considering the
disparity of privilege, opportunity, and diversity between Parisian
arrondissements, and in wider
France, they’re crucial questions to ask; and they raise alarming,
broader issues about the world’s rich – Carl Kinsella’s honest
and challenging response
on this is worth reading in full. But beneath the questions of
wealth, there’s a different tension that artists will recognise: what
kind of luxury is art, anyway? What kind of privilege is it to
invest our time and our money in objects and structures that may have
some limited functional use, but are more often pursuits of a more
intangible, dare I say spiritual, purpose?
The split in the
world’s opinion says that either we should move mountains and
millions to ensure that the best of our artistic endeavours or
architectural wonders remain as pristine as possible for generations
to come, or instead they should be treated as the bonus at the end of
the list once we have sufficiently and rightfully ensured mouths are
fed and families given shelter.
As artists, as much as
we value art, we can surely see the argument from both sides. Most of
us will have felt the pang of guilt at some point when sitting next
to doctors, nurses and fire fighters, trying to describe what our
next album sounds like after their stories of lives saved and hearts
kept beating. How do we constantly and consistently decide to press
on and to know for sure the value of what we do, when what surrounds
us are situations that often make what we do or what we have feel
like at best small drops in the ocean, or at worst frivolous
pursuits?
Does what we build
matter to God?
Like so many of these
questions, the answer that we can find in the Bible may not be one
extreme reaction or another, but something more delicate in the
middle. As a starting place, we know that God himself time and time
again plans to have a building or a structure that is to be used by
His people to glory Him both in its appearance and in its function.
Through the tabernacle
and the temple
and then finally in the new
city described in Revelation, we know God
recognises the need for a place and the sense of home that provides,
but also that God loves good
interior design and excellent
architectural planning and desires the skill of
all the best
craftspeople to make it happen.
I think that God understands our very human connection to places too, that goes beyond just spaces built for or consecrated to Him; taking care to put us in specific places at specific times that He knows will be to our good. We even know that the people of God wept when they remembered the home they had and the buildings that they thought were unshakeable that now laid in rubble and ashes – and in fact, Jews still mourn the temple on a specific day now, thousands of years after its destruction.
A church like Notre Dame is inherently beautiful; maybe what is more beautiful still are the meetings and memories that were shared about the place.
Yet God also seems to
have a forward thinking nature about these things, not wanting us to
sit in mourning or become too precious about the way things were. The
physical spaces and places are certainly important to Him, but
perhaps more important is what they represent or what they give the
opportunity to do. A church like Notre Dame is inherently beautiful;
its flying buttresses and stained glass are undoubtedly works of
immeasurable skill; but maybe what is more beautiful still are the
aforementioned meetings and memories that were shared about the place
over the last week. Each time a choir lifted their voices in worship,
or each time the familiarity of home’s landmarks made someone feel
more settled, or each time it became the focal point for friends or
lovers or families or fellowships to meet and share.
Hold on to artistry,
hold loosely to artwork
In the Bible, each time God’s own house is taken down, or destroyed, or goes up in flames, or even goes up on a cross, it is rebuilt in a way more glorious that the last and more unexpected. Jesus himself seemed to have a pretty clear idea on what would be left of the temple, and God repeatedlybrings down structures that are put up out of either self-ambition or become too precious.
From tent, to temple, to Christ to new Creation, God constantly remakes anew rather than rebuilds the old, and with each remaking the people that are invited in gets wider and wider and the focus becomes more on intimacy and relationship than it does on recapturing any former glories. We get closer to Him, and in doing so get closer and more understanding and more welcoming of each other.
Battersea Arts Centre by Morley Von Sternberg
In 2015, I was
privileged enough to have a job in one of my favourite venues –
Battersea Arts Centre – when a fire took hold in the roof. Much
like Notre Dame, the rest of the structure was saved through the
skill and quick response of firefighters. Within hours the community
had mobilised; and 24 hours after the fire, BAC was continuing its
normal programme through the assistance and help of those who had
come to see it as ‘theirs’. For years the building had been at
the centre of community life, as well as having run groups for
families, young people, those in need, those without money, and those
who wanted to work in the arts but didn’t know how. The community
decided in those hours after the fire that this was too much to lose,
and sprang into action, paving the way for a rebuild project that was
completed earlier this year.
Yet to walk through the
building now you will find the scars and marks of the fire; scorched
walls still blackened and sooty, melted glass and twisted metal, all
brought together and held together by a brand new imagining of what
the space and the building could be. They didn’t seek to rebuild as
was; they sought to think what they needed now, how best to serve
their community. For future generations, seeing each mark of the fire
upon the Great Hall tells a story of the passion and importance it
had for a group who decided not to give up on it. Even other great
cathedrals have shown a precedent for creating a new space out of
adversity: Coventry’s integration of its war-torn edifices is a
living story of history, for example, or Barcelona’s decision to
hand parts of its sublime Sagrada Familia over to new artists and
architects – meaning it is an amalgamation of styles and
perspectives that remains unfinished almost a century after breaking
ground.
So can we hold on to
the artistry, but hold loosely to the artwork? Can we prioritise what
our work is there to do, and not what it means to us – and in doing
so, widen up the doorway to invite in different communities and
groups who we usually wouldn’t commune with? Can we be less
precious about the physical thing itself (how it is experienced, how
it is perceived, how it comes across, or even if it gets destroyed)
and instead find joy in if it points anyone to the true, noble,
right, pure, lovely, excellent, praiseworthy things of the world? If
so, then I think our art is a discipline worth defending and pursuing
even in the most pressing times.
