The amateur and grassroots arts sector

The most recent assessment of the scale of amateur arts participation in England came in the study Our creative talent, commissioned by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) and Arts Council England in 2008. The report judged that:

Given this scale of informal arts participation and activity at grassroots level within communities, it is surprising how little research there has been on the sector. Cultural policy, and arts and cultural scholarship, has been primarily focused on formal, subsidised arts provision, artists and facilitators, while amateur arts groups and arts participation have been little considered in voluntary and community studies literature. The amateur and grassroots arts sector is diverse, rich in passion, knowledge and skills. While there is much actual crossover between amateur and commercial or state-subsidised culture in terms of shared aesthetic pleasure and social benefit, the amateur sector tends to be defined as a distinct sphere on the economic basis of its activities: that makers and participants are not paid for their creative labour. Holden's useful report The ecology of culture (2015) is a recent illustration of this distinction. In charting the wider cultural landscape in Britain, Holden identifies three spheres of culture: the publicly funded, commercially funded and ‘homemade’ cultural activities (2015, p 2). We should be cautious of accepting this distinction too readily. While the amateur and grassroots arts sector frequently has a different economic underpinning, this is not an absolute or clear-cut distinction, as we shall see, and the idea of its economic difference by no means fully characterises or describes activity in the sector.