Dear friends and colleagues
How do you deal with poverty? How do we deal with the exponentially increasing gap between the income of the richest and the poorest?
Most of us are effectively middle-class professionals with middle class jobs (teaching, curating), middle class salaries or pensions. We’re reasonably comfortable if not affluent. If we are artists our income is inevitably more erratic, and we are very dependent on the patronage (taste? foibles?) of that richest one per cent of the population who have enough money to buy art.
How many times have I heard artists say that they couldn’t afford to buy their own work?
All of us, as part of the art world, are implicated in this growing income inequality. Like it or not, it has been one of the motors driving not just the art market per se, but the art world in recent years. The very rich can afford to buy art and have pushed the prices very high. Sure, relatively few gentlemen such as Mr. Gagosian or Mark Grotjahn (can someone please explain to me why his paintings sell for so much money?) take the lion’s share of that money, but some filters down.
What can one do? Making art protesting about poverty all too easily turns into poverty porn. Writing about poverty, as I am doing now, has little or no effect, except maybe making me feel a bit better by bearing witness.
Of course, poverty is always relative. Watching the movie I Daniel Blake the other week Geraldine was in tears: she had never imagined there could be such poverty in a rich country.
I read recently that there may be as many as two million homeless people in Manila. What can any one individual do about that? Even though in Manila you can buy a cup of coffee from a machine for five pesos (about 8 p or 10 cents) buying them all a cup of coffee would cost you two hundred thousand US dollars – and would make so little difference.
Here, not just the rich but we middle classes live in a different world to the poor. I have never bought a five-peso cup of coffee. I am more likely to have a Cappuccino from Starbucks costing 130 pesos (2 pounds or 2.5 US dollars). Many artists, like other middle-class people, live in gated communities. It’s cleaner, it’s safer. Similarly, security guards keep the beggars and street kids out of the malls.
But it is not just the homeless who are poor. This was brought home to me late last year when I had to have an operation – and had to pay for it. The sort of thing that would be seen as routine in the UK and covered by the NHS. I may have to wait a while to get it done, but I wouldn’t have to pay anything.
I have medical insurance here but as it wasn’t specifically life threatening, they only paid a proportion of the bill. Once admitted the doctors (Surprise! Surprise!) found other things to add on my bill. (Everything was itemised, every syringe, every medicine, every surgical glove, every bandage, etc) and I was given an invoice for 174,390.87pesos – a bit over two and a half thousand pounds.[1]
Well, that was far more than I expected and I was bloody irritated! Another chunk out of my savings. But afterwards what struck me, and made me think, was how few people could afford that in this country. Not just the homeless but the average worker.
For example, an artist we know is having a studio built near us. The workers his builder employs get paid 450 pesos a day.[2] That’s 2700 pesos a week – yes, it is a six-day week here! In a year they will earn maybe 150,000 pesos. They will probably have family and relations to support, food and clothing to buy, etc. There is no way they could afford the operation I had. And they are being paid better than most other workers.
We are back in a world like that in Victorian novels in which the poor fear injury or illness to the bread earner so much. Penury and deprivation are always there, hovering, always close at hand.
One feels helpless in this situation. As a writer or artist what can one do save in some way bear witness to this? As a citizen one can support or work with those who can in some way change the situation. Above all there are always moral choices to be made: treat people well and tell the truth.
I have had a lot to report the last month and so wrote each week, but as you know I am in the final stages of writing a book, so I will take a break from letter writing and not send another Tuesday in Tropics till March 5th.
Have a good month!
Tony
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It could have been worse. A few years back I had a hernia operation in Singapore – again a routine thing and when I was recovering was handed a bill for 10,000 SGD – a tad under five thousand pounds. Fortunately, that time my insurance fully covered me! ↑
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According to the Economist World in 2019, the GDP in the Philippines is $3,274 as opposed to $63,870 in Singapore or $43.210 in the UK. ↑