Artists Anonymous

Artists Anonymous was a support group for Glasgow-based artists co-founded, coordinated and attended by Harrison over the course of two years. It took place every three weeks at the CCA in Glasgow and aimed to provide a ‘safe space for its members to speak candidly, honestly and confidentially to others about the anxieties and stresses of their professional lives’.

Artists Anonymous was a support group for Glasgow-based artists, which aimed to provide a ‘safe space for its members to speak candidly, honestly and confidentially to others about the anxieties and stresses of their professional lives’.

It took place at the CCA in Glasgow every three weeks from 28th February 2011 until 11th December 2012. Over the course of its life, Artists Anonymous was attended by small groups of 6-12 artists (from a total cohort of twenty), from a variety of age groups and stages of their careers. By allowing them to share the problems which, due to social convention or art world etiquette, may otherwise have been suffered in silence, Artists Anonymous attempted to break down barriers, confront taboos and achieve a level of solidarity previously nonexistent in such a competitive and individualistic industry.

The inaugural Artists Anonymous meeting was coordinated by Ellie Harrison, Kate V Robertson and Oliver Braid and took place on 28th February 2011 to mark the final day of Kate V Robertson’s residency in the Creative Lab at the CCA. From the second meeting on 28th March 2011 onwards, Artists Anonymous was overseen by Val Burns – a trained Psychoanalytic Psychotherapist experienced in working with artists at Glasgow School of Art.

The idea for Artists Anonymous developed from Ellie Harrison’s 2010 Creative Lab proposal to found a ‘support group for careerist artists‘. A project which she hoped would become a practical way of addressing some of the negative modes of operating encouraged in the art world identified in her thesis How to Reconcile the Careerist Mentality with Our Impending Doom and satirised in Trajectories – her online motivational tool.

Her involvement in the Artists Anonymous group builds on her long-term interest in the dialogical relationship between creative production and mental health explored in her 2009 book Confessions of a Recovering Data Collector, but expands on this to investigate the additional potential benefits of peer-support and collective learning.

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Ellie Harrison Louise Haigh and Labour say that they will reform the complex fares system to ensure that passengers are confident that they are getting the best fare; confidence that X is the case, and X being the case are not necessarily the same thing. Simplification of fares would have to include the abolition of many fares. The assertion that simplifying the fares structure would reduce travelling costs is based upon a false premise, that being that the complicated-ness of the fares-and-ticketing structure is the reason why fares are expensive, that is not why they are expensive. They are expensive because the base level is too high. If you massively simplify the fares, one might then always be certain of getting the best available fare because there are no obscure cheaper fare hidden away in a Byzantine monolith, but that best fare is likely the best of a bad bunch. Railway fares are complicated, but it is within this myriad complexity that the nuances which facilitate cheaper options lurk; if you take a sledgehammer to the behemoth you bring down the cheaper options which lurk within the behemoth. If there are presently 18 options for doing Thing X, with 15 of those ways being cheap, and 3 of those ways being expensive, if you abolish the 15 cheap options for doing thing X you have massively simplified the paying-to-do-Thing X process because having 3 ways is much simpler than having 18 ways, and you have made it such that one is highly unlikely to not notice the cheapest of the available fares, because one is more likely to notice something when it is one amongst 3 than if it is one amongst 18, but it is nevertheless the case that the person is selecting the cheapest of the 3 most expensive. (i) Being guaranteed to always get the best fare; and (ii). getting cheaper fares are not necessarily the same thing. Be mindful of the actual specific wording of things: both before and after coming into government, Labour has never in actually promised cheaper fares, what Labour has promised is that one will be guaranteed to get the best available fare. The general public, politicians and public-transport campaign organisations alike have been seduced by the word 'simplification'. Simplification is not a virtue in and of itself. Simplification is a neutral concept, neither a good thing nor a bad thing; what is pertinent and important is the nature of the simplification. One can simplify travelling costs upwards. Simplification can simplify out the cheaper options. I deliberately say 'travelling costs', not 'fares', because thinking only terms of fares when it comes to simplification of railway fares and ticketing, and when it comes to Single-Leg Pricing is a proverbial red herring, one should think both in terms of fares AND in terms of travelling costs. Fare decreases do not necessarily mean travelling-cost. LNER is a prime example: with the June of 2023 introduction of Single-Leg Pricing on LNER, and the February of 2024 introduced of the Simpler Fares pilot, travelling costs for using LNER have gone up. Two halved-in-price Singles are more expensive than one Day Return; a fare reduction, but a travelling-cost increase. The changes December of 2023 fares-and-ticketing changes on c2c have many of the same fare-decreases-but-travelling-cost increases as LNER, plus its pay-as-you-go tap-in-tap-out integration with Transport for London (to simplify things) has necessitated the introduction of a weekday early-evening peak period between 4.00 p.m. and 7.00 p.m., which has numerous knock-on effects which can hugely increase one's travelling costs. The answer is not reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is not simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure. The answer is to decrease the price of all existing fares. Do not abolish any existing fares. Do not introduce any new types of fare. Just make all existing fares 45% cheaper, and leave it at that.

As the idiom goes: 'Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true'. Reform will only be good if it is good reform. We don't need reform, we need good reform. Some might fear that prices would inevitably be rationalised upwards. Inevitably, the rationalisation would rationalise out the cheaper options. Some might fear that reform of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, reform travelling costs upwards, and reform out the cheaper options. Some might fear that simplification of the fares-and-ticketing structure would, inevitably, simplify travelling costs upwards, and simplify out the cheaper options. Just take a look at LNER. Be careful what you wish for, because it might come true.