The artist must also be a citizen

There is a particular kind of artist I have increasingly found difficult to relate to. Not the artist who is demanding because their work is demanding, nor the artist who needs solitude, protection or particular conditions in order to create. Those things are perfectly legitimate. What I find difficult is the artist who has been taught, somewhere along the way, that being an artist places them outside the ordinary obligations of being a person among other people.

It is an old idea, deeply embedded in the mythology of artistic exceptionalism: the artist as an extraordinary human being who must be protected from the mundane because the mundane might somehow interfere with the purity of creation. The instrument becomes the centre of their identity, while everything surrounding it is treated as secondary, external or even somehow beneath them. The artist is allowed to remain entirely focused on the work while someone else takes care of everything that makes the work possible.

This is not simply a matter of individual personality. I suspect that much of it is culturally transmitted. We inherit ideas about what an artist is supposed to be, and music education can reinforce them from a very early stage. In certain traditions, the young musician is taught to understand artistic excellence as something that sets them apart. The message is rarely stated so bluntly, but it can be absorbed nonetheless: your responsibility is to become exceptional at your craft; someone else will take care of the rest.

What is particularly troubling is that this education can continue long after formal training has ended. The conservatoire may teach you how to practise, perform and compete, but it does not necessarily teach you how to inhabit a profession, let alone how to inhabit society as an adult professional. And if the people teaching you have themselves been formed within the same culture, the model reproduces itself almost automatically. A musician learns not only repertoire and technique, but also a certain idea of what it means to be a musician; what deserves attention, what can be delegated, whose work matters, and where they supposedly stand in relation to everyone else.

We do not only inherit musical traditions. We inherit ideas about what it means to be a musician.

There is, of course, nothing wrong with delegation. Nobody needs to do everything themselves, and no serious professional should be ashamed of seeking assistance or delegating work outside their area of expertise. A musician should be able to concentrate on music. A manager should be able to manage. A producer should be able to produce. Specialisation is not the problem. The problem begins when delegation becomes dependency, and dependency becomes entitlement.

I have encountered musicians who seem almost proud of being unable to deal with basic aspects of contemporary life. Digital competence is perhaps the clearest example. Someone may be an extraordinary instrumentalist and yet be completely incapable of navigating the most elementary digital systems that have become part of ordinary professional and civic life. They may not know how to access an account, recover a password, upload a document, complete a form or deal with a basic administrative procedure.

None of this would be particularly interesting if the response were simply, “I don't know how to do this. Can you help me?” People have different skills, and asking for help is entirely normal. What becomes exhausting is when a task that should take five minutes becomes a four-hour emotional event, when a forgotten password becomes a catastrophe, a form becomes an attack and a digital platform becomes an oppressive force. The administration is accused of stealing hours of someone's life; technology becomes the enemy; the entire situation acquires a tragic dimension that seems wildly disproportionate to what is actually happening.

Sometimes, underneath all that drama, there is a much simpler reality: the person does not know how to do the thing.

There is something psychologically understandable about turning that discomfort outward. When a basic lack of competence has been allowed to accumulate for years, being confronted with it can be humiliating. It is much easier to experience the system as absurd, hostile or dehumanising than to admit that you never learned how to use it. But recognising a lack of competence is not an insult. It is the beginning of being able to address it. Nobody is born knowing how to navigate digital bureaucracy, contracts, taxes or institutional procedures. These are learned skills. The problem is not having gaps in one's knowledge. The problem is constructing an identity around those gaps and then expecting other people to absorb the consequences indefinitely.

This is where the romantic mythology of the artist becomes particularly damaging. It does not merely protect artistic concentration; it can also protect immaturity. An artist can be brilliant at their instrument and profoundly underdeveloped in other areas of adult life. That is not, in itself, a moral failure. But if the surrounding culture continually interprets this as evidence of artistic purity… “they only care about music”, “they are hopeless with these things”, “that's just how artists are”…, then the person has very little incentive to develop. Someone else will always do it, and the person doing it will often be expected to disappear behind the result.

I remember a small incident from years ago, during an experience in artist management. I entered a dressing room because I had forgotten my phone. The artist told me, with a certain solemnity, that instrumentalists need time alone before performing. There was nothing unreasonable about the statement itself; of course an instrumentalist may need privacy before going on stage. What stayed with me was the position from which it was being said. This person knew perfectly well that I was a pianist. This person knew I was a musician and an instrumentalist. This person knew that I played the same instrument professionally. And yet, because I was standing there in a management capacity, I was being addressed as though my experience as an instrumentalist had somehow ceased to exist.

For a moment, I was not a musician who happened to be working in management. I was management.

It was a small interaction, but it contained something I have encountered repeatedly: the assumption that artistic expertise occupies a higher position than the expertise required to make artistic work possible. The person on stage is the artist; the people around them become the infrastructure. The artist's needs are individual and specific, while everyone else's work becomes functional. This hierarchy is rarely stated explicitly, but it can become remarkably visible in everyday interactions.

And this is where the problem becomes larger than the artist. If an artist is continually treated as an exceptional being who must be protected from ordinary reality, someone else has to absorb that reality. Managers, producers, administrators, partners, colleagues and institutions become responsible for compensating for the artist's lack of autonomy. Over time, this can produce a second form of dysfunction.

The people who are repeatedly expected to absorb the practical and emotional consequences of someone else's dependency may eventually protect themselves by reducing that person to something easier to manage: a name, a fee, a catalogue, a market position, a project. The artist becomes an asset. A profile. A product to be placed in the right programme, the right market, the right season. The very people who are supposed to support artistic work can end up losing sight of the person producing it.

This is one of the uncomfortable paradoxes of the cultural sector. We rightly criticise the tendency to turn artists into products, but we do not always examine the relationships that help produce that condition. An artist who expects to be handled rather than professionally supported can contribute to an environment in which the manager eventually starts thinking in terms of handling rather than collaboration. A manager who begins to treat the artist as a commercial object reinforces the artist's sense that the cultural industry is something being done to them rather than something they participate in.

The artist becomes more defensive. The manager becomes more controlling. The artist demands more protection. The manager creates more distance. The relationship becomes increasingly transactional. Neither side is necessarily responsible for creating the entire dynamic, but both can end up reinforcing it.

This is why I find the situation so draining. There are, of course, artists who are perfectly sensible, generous, curious and capable of recognising the people around them as professionals. There are managers who care deeply about artists and understand that their role is to create conditions in which the artist can develop, rather than to control them. There are healthy relationships between the two. The problem is not that dysfunction exists; it is that certain dysfunctional patterns can become so normalised within a professional culture that we stop seeing them as dysfunction at all.

There is even an absurd version of this problem when musicians become managers of other musicians simply because the system has decided that the solution to one artist's inability to manage their own affairs is to make another artist responsible for managing them. Sometimes this is even treated as a joke: someone is “useless”, so perhaps they should go into management; someone is organised, so naturally they can take care of everyone else.

But competence is not availability, and the ability to do something does not mean that the work belongs to you. A musician who happens to understand contracts, institutions, budgets or administration does not thereby become the natural caretaker of everyone else's career. Nor should another musician's inability to organise their professional life automatically become someone else's artistic sacrifice.

There is also a gendered dimension to this history that deserves attention, although it does not need to be reduced to a simple opposition between men and women. Much of the invisible labour that has historically allowed exceptional individuals to remain protected from ordinary responsibilities has been performed by women: partners, mothers, assistants, secretaries, administrators and carers. It is worth noticing how easily competence can become expectation, and how easily the person who is capable of holding things together becomes the person expected to hold them together. The more invisible that labour becomes, the more autonomous the artist appears.

Perhaps this is the central illusion. The artist appears autonomous precisely because so many other people are dealing with the world on their behalf.

We talk constantly about protecting artists and giving them the conditions they need to create. We talk about the pressures of administration, the brutality of institutions, the demands of the market and the difficulties of making a living from art. All of these things are real. But there is a difference between protecting someone from unnecessary bureaucracy and protecting them from adulthood; between providing professional support and creating permanent dependency; between allowing an artist to concentrate on their work and teaching them that everyone else's work exists to keep their world running smoothly.

I do not need artists to be self-sufficient, and I do not need them to know everything. I do not need every musician to become an administrator, a producer, a digital expert or a manager. I need something much more basic. I need artists to be citizens.

I need them to understand that they live among other people and that their work exists within a network of other people's work. I need them to recognise the dignity of expertise that is not their own, to be able to ask for help without turning their lack of knowledge into someone else's emergency, and to understand that talent does not place anyone outside the ordinary obligations of respect, responsibility and reciprocity.

They can be extraordinary artists. I hope they are. But artistic excellence does not exempt anyone from being a person among other people. It does not make anyone more valuable than the people who work around them, and it certainly does not make dependency a virtue.

Personally, I have very little interest in the pedestal. I am much more interested in the human being who is willing to come down from it.