Art is Like a Shark: Creating a Career in the World of Art with Dr. James Fox, Art Historian and Broadcaster

There is often an assumption that art is a luxury, that it's this kind of thing that's in behind the walls, in museums and galleries, and that you can go to see it, but basically it isn't really relevant to the rest of the world. That is completely untrue. Art has been an absolutely fundamental central part of human society, everywhere in the world, since the very beginning. On today's episode of Careers Unwrap, really thrilled to have with me Dr. James Fo. James is many things. He's a renowned art historian, principally, but also a writer and a broadcaster. And as a Cambridge Scholar, he's dedicated his career to exploring and sharing the wonders of art. He's known for engaging television documentaries, his contributions to museums, also to schools and charities. And James really brings art into the public sphere, I believe, with passion and with insight. His work not only illuminates the past, but it also connects it to contemporary discussions. Making art history accessible make it relevant to a wide audience. So today he joins us to discuss his journey and his career through the world of art. Welcome, James. Thank you very much for having me, Mark. I'm delighted to be on so with somebody who has many parts to their career at the moment. People might think, what does art historian actually do? What's in your diary? What's your to do list for the week ahead? It's a question I ask of myself very often, Mark. You know, I'm an art historian, so art is the sort of cornerstone of everything I do. But I've got one of what people call this portfolio career. So I've got lots of different aspects of my career, which sounds exciting, and it is very exciting. Every day is completely different. But it also means I have to do a lot of multitasking, which is one of my great weaknesses as a human being, as my wife regularly tells me. So every week is slightly different. Every week is all over the place. If I give you this week as an example, I started on Monday with conference calls with Canada because one of my jobs is I run an educational program at a sculpture park in Canada. So I'm preparing for this big event we're doing there. So that involves lots of calls late in the evening when I'm trying to put the children to bed. And then on Monday afternoon, I traveled up to the Scottish Borders because I am creative director of a art and crafts foundation up in the Borders. And there, every single day is completely different. I mean, this week, for instance, I was there for two nights. So this week I was meeting with gardeners. We have A beautiful walled garden there to help put up trellises. I was repainting some studios, I was meeting and mentoring artists who are residents in the community. At the same time, I'm back in the evening doing my emails for the book. So I've got a book coming out in September, so working with the copy editor and the illustrator over the book and all the time fielding emails from students with their exams and things approaching as the summer approaches. And then this afternoon, as soon as I'm done with this, I am down to the offices of Penguin Press, who are publishing my book in September, to have a campaign meeting about the marketing and advertising there. So it's a classically chaotic week for me, I'm afraid. And you mentioned students in amongst that. How many students at any one point in time look towards you as either a teacher, a lecturer, a tutor, a mentor? How many students lives are you part of? Well, I mean, I'm still part of students lives who have graduated years and years ago. I'm still getting emails all the time from students 10 years later saying, oh, Dr. Fox, can I have a reference please for this latest job? So I've taught probably thousands of students in virtually 20 years, 15 to 20 years I've been teaching. I look after a small number of students very closely. I'm the director of studies at Emanuel College, which can often be only three or four undergraduate students at a time, but I'm very much overseeing every part of their education. And then of course, if you're doing lectures, you might be lecturing 30 or 40 students. If you're doing seminars, it might be 10 to 15. So I would comfortably say that I've probably taught over a thousand students over the last 15 years. And the sort of students who study under you and knee around the history of art, I mean there are of course many, many career routes that that can take you into. But what are some of the more common sectors or career journeys that those students have started out on? Well, I think there is an assumption, and it's an incorrect assumption, that the only thing you can do with a history of art degree is to become an art historian like me, God forbid, or go to an art gallery or become a curator or join an auction house. And of course lots of students do go on to those careers. But really with art history, as with any arts and humanities degree, you can do anything. And so, I mean, if I just think of my own peers, the people who were educated in the years around me, some of them have gone into cosmetics. So one is the senior VP of Mac Cosmetics and she's living the life in New York. Another student at the same time as me was Eddie Redmayne, who went on to become a relatively famous actor. I've got friends who have become artists, friends who have done law conversion courses, friends who have actually retrained to become doctors. So you know, there are others who have gone on to manage and run successful businesses. There is really such a wide range of things you can do. And that's why I often say to students and to people applying to a university that actually your degree, unless you're doing something like law and medicine, which are quite almost semi vocational degrees, but even with those, you're not straight jacketing yourself in one career or another. You're giving yourself skills that can be widely applicable across many different sectors. What are the skills that you think are particularly developed and strengthened when looking at art and the history of art? Well, I think that there are some skills that one could say that are also developed through other humanities disciplines. So the ability to write well, the ability to communicate well, the ability to manage your own time and to deliver assignments on time, which is obviously part of every career you could go on to do, the ability to analyze information and conduct your own research, all of that is something that any humanities degree should prepare you to do. Any degree in fact, should prepare you to do. I think the thing that art history has specifically is it's such a wide ranging discipline, so it can generate an enormous, enormous breadth of approach and interest that takes into account technical approaches to painting which can move towards. Lots of my students have gone into conservation as a result of their work, but also historical and economic histories and social histories. And I think above all it encourages students to look at things carefully with a really robust analytical eye. And I think that one of the things that so many of us miss in this kind of very fast paced world is actually looking at things closely, looking at them with fresh eyes and recognizing something in the more spotting commonalities. And that's something that actually is very useful in all kinds of areas. Yeah, I can understand that. And I was rewatching one of the episodes of your fantastic 2021 series, Nature and Us A History through Art. So for any listeners, this is an overt plug. It's really good. Go watch it. But in watching that, one of the people you interviewed described how the art of the past offers lessons for the future. And I think in the context of the lives where we're living now and the pressures around us, individually, globally as well, how do you think that actually manifests itself and that understanding history through art can offer us lessons for the future. What do you think they mean by that and how could you illustrate that? Well, absolutely. I mean, I think that there is often an assumption that art is a luxury, that it's this kind of thing, that behind the walls in museums and galleries and that you can go to see it, but basically it isn't really relevant to the rest of the world. That is completely untrue. Art has been an absolutely fundamental central part of human society everywhere in the world, since the very beginning, for hundreds of thousands of years. You can go for a later series than that. I traveled all the way to the remote landscapes of Australia, where you can go and you can see these paintings carved onto cliffs. These are people that didn't have necessarily houses, they didn't have technology, they didn't have developed civilizations, and yet they had art. And they recognized that art was a fundamental part of communicating with each other and packaging up information. And so art is fundamental to society. And I think it's particularly relevant today. I think that what we think of as art today could be packaged within the so called creative industries sector. Creative industries sector is a massive success for this country. It's growing faster than most sectors of the economy, two or three times faster than the economy as a whole. And it offers really, really valuable opportunities for people to build careers in more flexible ways. And so for me, I think art and creativity more generally, the crafts as well I include in that, are really valuable parts of our economy going forward. And of course, in terms of its ability to do things for us, I think that we understand not just history, we understand ourselves. We understand the deepest human instincts and needs and emotions and desires through the art that we make. And it's not a matter of life and death in the same way that maybe vaccine development or working in a hospital is. But I think certainly art is one of those things that makes life worth living. It reminds me actually of in some of the early years of me starting main business. I took my team, not very large at that time, probably about 20 people, and we had a curated tour of the Tate Modern. And I set this up mainly because I thought I just wanted us all to. To push our creative skills. And this seemed one way of perhaps getting people thinking differently. But what I recall is that it not only did that, it got us thinking and talking about different ways of approaching creative challenges, but it actually got everyone talking about themselves and their lives and what they saw in an art museum made them think far More beyond creativity and art into humanity and life in general. And so really that resonates very strongly with me that it is more than just what's on the wall or what's on the plinth. It's what it means about the people who did that, the societies that it represents. So much more comes out of it. Yes, I think the history of art is the history of people thinking out of the box and thinking out of the box and doing things differently, seeing things differently, trying to be original, trying to be inventive, trying to find a new form of truth and a new form of expression and to do something that other people haven't done before is obviously a fundamental part of art, but it's a fundamental part of life and it should be a crucial aspect of everyone's approach to their careers, whatever they're doing. To trying to do things differently, to trying to do things as well as they possibly can and to leave a mark on the world. In some ways, and you describe there as a form of truth, and in today's society, some might describe as a post truth society in some ways, but in today's society, and in particular with the influence, accelerating influence of AI and other technologies, what is the future for art in that context? When the role of the creative, the role of the artist is starting to be challenged by technology, and that's not just in creation of visual arts, but the writing of music, the writing of literature, all of these aspects of how do we take that forward in this modern tech, AI influenced environment? Well, that's a really good question mark. And we could go on it for hours. What I will say is a few things. I think there are some very specific issues regarding AI that should concern people in the creative industries. The biggest being, I suppose, copyright infringement, which is very much in the press at the moment, and the fact that people's intellectual property is being scraped, often illegally, by large language models and they're not receiving the credit that they deserve. So that is a crucial thing that has to be resolved through changing laws and regulations. I think there is a question as it pertains not just to the arts, but to many different industries, to the automation, if you like, of various jobs. And that will happen. It's already happening. Where jobs that would have gone to human illustrators or human models, if it's in fashion, will now go to algorithmic operators. So I think there are specific concerns there, but I think on the broader sense, I would say that we can often become rather apocalyptic about new technologies and we always have done throughout history, when the printing press was invented, everyone said, well, that's the end of manuscripts, or manuscripts carried on. When photography was invented in the 1830s, 1840s, people said, that's the end of painting. It wasn't the end of painting. In the 1890s, when cinema came in, everyone said, well, that's the end of the. Well, it wasn't the end of theatre in the 1950s or whatever. It was slightly earlier when television came in. That's the end of cinema. It wasn't the end of cinema. We often feel that when the new technology comes in that that is the end of everything. And the truth is, it rarely plays out that way. What you end up with is more opportunity, more diversity, more forms of expression, more platforms. And so I think that AI will certainly change things and it will damage people, certain groups of people within the creative industries and artists in the short term, but it will also create a whole range of opportunities that we don't fully understand yet. So this being a careers programme, I'd like to actually go into how you got to where you are now and why you got to where you are. What were the first triggers that made you realise that art was going to be something important in your life? Well, I fell in love with art as a boy, actually, long before I went to university. And I remember my. He was very interested in art and he would always take me to galleries and I just hated going to these galleries. All I was interested in at the time was my World cup football stickers and superheroes and the usual stuff. And one day, I can't quite remember the age. I think I was about 8 or 9, he took me to a gallery, the Stanley Spencer Gallery in Cookham, and I really didn't want to go. And he bribed me with football stickers, I think. Yes, it was 1990, I was eight years old. It was the Italia 90 World cup sticker book that I was very interested in at the time. And he bribed me with stickers and said, if you come to this gallery, I'll get you the stickers. Anyway, I went into this gallery and there was a painting in there called the Scarecrow. It was of this broken scarecrow in a garden and it absolutely. I mean, it quite literally knocked me off my feet. The impact this painting had on me was extraordinary. And I became obsessed with that painting and I did drawing after drawing, copy after copy of it, and that was the gateway drug for me. I think it was the realization that art is not just, as we said earlier, this boring thing on a wall. But it's actually something that can communicate with you in the most direct and sort of raw and powerful way possible. And that was the beginning. I then became a very avid artist. I was never particularly talented, My dream was always to become an artist after that. But I wasn't quite as good as other people in the school. And so I decided to do the next best thing which I considered at the time, which was history of art. I went to university to study history of art and it came quite easily to me. I really enjoyed it and I did well in it. And I think at that point, as I was approaching the end of my degree, all of my friends were beginning to get jobs. This was pre financial crash. Lots of them were getting jobs in Morgan Stanley and Goldman Sachs for massive opening salaries. The city was booming at that point in 2003, 2004, whatever it was. And I ended up getting funding to do a Master's. I stayed on to do a Master's and then I went to Harvard for a year and then I returned to Cambridge and I did a PhD. And then after my PhD, I applied for a research fellowship and I got a fellowship at Gombe and Caius College and ended up spending 11 years at Gombe and Caius College. So in a way I was on this conveyor belt, a semi academic conveyor belt from one position to the next. But I always felt, Mark very powerfully and passionately from the start that I, I didn't only want to be within, if you like, the ivory tower of academia. And I wanted to try to reach a broader audience. So I pushed very hard throughout that period to reach those broader audiences. And that's how I started doing broadcast work really. And from the academic perspective, some of the terms you use, there are terms lots of people have heard of but may not know really what's involved. What's the difference when you go from undergraduate studies to a Master's? Then you said you went to Harvard for a while, then you did a PhD. Well, what are all of those different levels and stages in developing an academic career and qualifications? Yeah, so if you do want to have an academic career, and it is like any interesting career, it's very competitive, but you do have to jump through these hurdles if you like, or jump over these hurdles in order to get that academic career. So typically after you finish your undergraduate degree, you will take a master's, which can be one or two years depending on what specifically you're after. And some of those master's programs are research based masters and they're usually called MPhils and sometimes they're teaching based programs, in which case they're often called MAS. So you would typically do your MPhil or MA, which is a sort of halfway house between an undergraduate degree and the PhD. And if that goes to plan, then you would begin your PhD, which is usually in this country about, in the UK, it's about three years it will take if everything goes to plan. It's if you decide to do a PhD in the States, it can be seven or eight years sometimes because you will have to go through certain processes before you actually even begin researching your dissertation. And the PhD is a really challenging exercise. I mean, it's more, I suppose, challenging psychologically than it is academically because essentially you're on your own, you have a supervisor, but really you're on your own. And you have to be very self disciplined for year after year to get this very large piece of work done. And then at that point I would say if you're looking to become an academic, the most difficult point of an academics career is that period after your PhD. That's when the real filtering process takes place. Because there are lots of PhD programs around, there's PhD funding around, but there are very few junior academic positions around. And so what you find is you find hundreds, thousands of people coming to the end of their PhDs, competing for a very small number of academic positions or research fellowships or postdocs dotted around the country and around the world. And that is a really dispiriting and I can tell you, very demoralizing process for many people because at that point, after you've done four, five years of postgraduate study, you're perhaps in your late 20s, you've got a doctorate in front of your name and you're struggling to get a job at that point. And so a lot of people end up pivoting at that point into other careers. So it is difficult. And what was your PhD topic or question? What were you looking at for those three years? My PhD was on British art in the First World War. So I've always been interested in the interactions between art and society. And I was very interested in what happens if a country enters a total war. And it was really the first total war that had ever existed, a war that essentially affected the home front almost as much as the front line. How does that affect art? Does it essentially destroy art by closing museums and galleries and forcing artists to put on uniforms and go to the front, or does it somehow invigorate art? And I think my essential argument was that the First World War was in some ways very good for art. It forced art to engage with society and social needs in a much more direct and powerful way and forge a connection between civic society in the aftermath of the war. So that was the PhD. Well, that was a long time ago. I finished that 16 years ago, that PhD. And I think with art, and obviously I'm speaking as enthusiasts, not an expert in any way. You see art moving forward on a journey through history, and then there are moments when there are massive changes in that journey, sometimes created by worldwide events like a war, more recently a pandemic, other times created by individual or small groups of artists who have such a different change in thinking that it changes everything. Is that sort of layman's viewpoint something that gets explored when you're looking at the history of art? Absolutely. I think the only sort of thing I disagree with is what we try to avoid using the word progress, because progress suggests that art is getting better and better and better. And I'm not suggesting it's getting worse and worse and worse. It's just always changing. I remember watching very early on, as a teenager, there was an art series by Sister Wendy. Do you remember the nun who went around and she was a great arts communicator, and she went in. This is when it was possible to access the great cave paintings of southern France and Spain. She went into one of those caves where you've got those wonderful cave paintings from 30,000 years ago. And she said something I never forget. She said, remember, art doesn't get better from here. It just gets different. And it's always changing. And those changes can be brought about by internal forces. So it can be art movements, clustering. It could be an artist doing something entirely new, or indeed, it can be changed by external forces, by new technology. We talked about technology, a new technology coming in and stimulating a change, or indeed by some kind of seismic political or social event that forces art to pivot in one way or another. So it's constantly changing the history of art. Art is like a kind of shark. It needs to keep swimming, keep moving to stay alive. And if it doesn't keep moving, then it will essentially die out because it's inherently vital process. I'm jotting that one down. Art is a shark. I might have to find a way to use that in everyday conversation. Now, aside from what you do as an academic and an art historian, you've also developed a career. You've developed parallel careers. You said of portfolio as both a writer but also a broadcaster. Now, broadcasting is very much a set of skills. It's a different line of work. So what have you had to learn or develop in order to become the broadcaster that you are? Broadcasting is an extremely difficult thing to do, and I didn't realize it because often the people you see on television are so accomplished at what they do that they make it seem easy. And so when you look at them, you think, anyone can do that. And then suddenly you're there. I remember the very first shoot I did was 2009. I'm not gonna tell you the series. I was making a pro television. It was my first ever television program. And I thought, this is easy. I could talk about art, no problem. I've seen them all do it on the television. And then the camera crew is around you. There are four or five people standing around you. There's a camera lens staring down your eyes. The red light goes on, and all the pressure is on you. And suddenly it is very, very difficult to act normal. And all these ticks start to appear. And the camera doesn't lie. The camera is this very kind of scouring vision. And it can pick up if you look tense. If you do look nervous, it will spot it a mile away. And so learning to be comfortable and to be natural on camera is very difficult. And it took me a few years of work to do that. I think there are other skills that are involved in broadcasting as well. So one, as I say, is being appear natural on camera. But the other thing, and this is something that many academics aren't quite so good at, is trying to be as accessible in your language as possible. Don't use dark jargon. Don't try to impress people with your intelligence. Try to speak in the most direct and accessible and engaging possible way. Try to connect with people, whether it's through passion or through storytelling or through emotions. And I think if you're able to do that, that's a really important task to learn. But, yeah, broadcasting is really difficult. And it's also about curiosity. And especially, as you know, mark yourself, if you're interviewing people, you've got to have an innate curiosity about other people and about things. And if that is real, if that is genuine, and if your passion for people and things is real, it will show itself on the screen and you will engage your audience. And in the totality of the job of everything that has to be done to make a TV program, obviously you're doing the pieces to camera, but what of the wider work are you doing in your role? Are you doing the research Are you gathering guests in or are you setting general directions? You writing scripts? What's the total job that you're normally doing? Well, every broadcaster is different, so I would say the majority of presenters, television presenters, don't write their own script. That is usually the director's job. And often the director will present the script to the presenter on the morning of the shoot and the presenter will either just essentially do exactly what has been written or they'll do a little bit of tweaking at the end and change some wording. I am far too much of a perfectionist in a fuss pot to allow directors to do the writing. So I generally did my own research, did my own scripting. So pretty much in all of my series, everything I say is they're my own words written by me. So there's that long process of what we call pre production where you've got that process of setting up the shoots, getting the scripts ready, gathering the contributors. Then there's the production process, which is exhausting. I mean, shoots are really, really tiring. You're looking at 12 hour days minimum. There's usually lunch in a van if you're lucky. It's usually not even a sit down lunch. You're often traveling from place to place. I mean, I've traveled all over the world with shoots. And so you're constantly jet lagged, you're constantly exhausted, you're constantly packing up your suitcase for the next rubbish hotel and you're always, always, always. And I'm a night owl. And shoots always start at the crack of dawn because often if you're filming museums and things, you have to film there before they open to the public or if you want, the light is excellent in the morning. But I would say, and this is another thing I would recommend to your listeners and your viewers, is that it is an incredibly rewarding industry to go into the film and television business. Now, obviously television in particular is changing dramatically at the moment, with the traditional broadcasters really essentially dying on their feet while the streaming platforms take over. But it is also a very good time to enter the film business. Did you know that more films are shot in the UK than they are in Hollywood? More American films even are shot in the UK than Hollywood because we give lots of tax breaks and we've got great facilities and great people working with the industry here. So it's a really good industry to go into. If you go to film school and want to become a camera operator or a sound recordist or a grip or a gaffer or a focus puller. These are really, really fascinating jobs and it's a really, really big and successful industry in this country. Now one of the areas I know that you're involved with on and off is around education and schools and how young people get engaged with art. And in our education system over the last decade or so, there has been increasingly less of an emphasis on arts and humanities and perhaps a raising of emphasis on areas that might fit under a stem. Now, I'm not a great fan of the separation of all of these aspects because I think creativity and technology and engineering, they need to go together. But what's your observation about the purpose of arts in education, but also where can we go within the education system to raise the profile, the usefulness, the attraction, engagement with the arts? I think it's been a really worrying few years, Mark, and what we've actually seen is the arts withdraw or been pushed out of mainstream education in many ways. I recognized that it's an expensive part when school budgets are very tight. It is an expensive part of any schooling process. You need to acquire all the materials or fire a kiln or whatever it is. But essentially the idea of creative and practical education is disappearing from our schools. It has been disappearing school by school, year by year, class by class. And the opportunities to pursue those practices is disappearing in other places as well. We're seeing even art colleges closing down. We're seeing universities get rid of their creative courses and practical courses. This is a disaster. It's a disaster for I'd say two reasons. The first reason is it's a disaster for our countries economy. I said earlier that it's one of the few sectors in which we really punch above our weight. In the UK and have done always well, certainly for the last century or so, in terms of our cultural power, our ability to project this soft power through music and the arts and design, architecture, we have this enormous impact around the world through the power of our creative industries and professionals. And to not lean into that, to not have that as a central part of our larger industrial strategy and to not funnel people into that is a real mistake on a broader perspective. But the other reason it's disastrous is it is a fundamental part of what makes us human. And it is giving young people and people actually of all ages the ability to be creative is so valuable for their mental and physical health. We know that now with the studies absolutely clear, the impact that it can have on mental and physical health and also just give them opportunities they wouldn't otherwise have. So I'm really worried about where it's going. It's why one of the jobs I do, I'm creative director of the Hugo Burge foundation and one of our big ambitions within the foundation is to try to support and to offer as much funding as we possibly can to get creative education back onto the agenda in all forms. Because it's not just about art rooms, art classes in schools, it's also about apprenticeship support, which is woefully lacking in this country for people if they want to become a craft apprenticeship. It's one of the worst places in Europe to be if you want to try to set out to be a craftsperson because the support just isn't there. So I think that if we want to sort of lean into the sectors that we're really good at, this is really low hanging fruit and the government should be doing something about it. I think it's sort of a set of opposites really here that this is an area that this country excels in. And as you said, punches Bevis weighed in, but an air we risk pulling the rug out from under our own feet by not injecting sufficient energy and learning enthusiasm at younger ages into the people who are going to take these huge varied industries together, take them forward from here. We've covered so much, James, in quite a short space of time here. I think that at the beginning, what you were talking about, of the skills that come out of the studying of art, about communication, analysis of so much about sort of understanding the past as well as the future is really important. About how if you want to go into this area, being curious is really important. We also touched on really usefully the different stages in an academic career. And I think that was really simply described. Thank you. But what was clear is the pressures post PhD if you want to continue after that stage as well. But also we discussed broadcasting skills and the need to be accessible, the need to be engaging and how in your case to actually write your own words as well, which most broadcasters don't. And also the sheer variety of roles just extending from just the arts into all things wider and creative. There are so many opportunities. So if any body listening or watching this thinks, I do feel I want a creative role, I want to be in the creative industry, keep pushing because there are many, many avenues and different types of roles you can go into there. But I think the one thing I've got as a takeaway from this is how art is really just fundamental and central to humanity. So whether you're going to work in the area or not, put art into your life a bit because it's going to be great for your life, but also the thought process that goes behind it is going to help you in almost any career you can think of. So, James, thank you so much for joining us on Careers Unwrapped for a quick run through of a really interesting to date career in the arts. And we look forward to seeing what comes next, including the book that you mentioned, which is called what? And coming out when it's called Craftland A Journey Through Britain's Lost Arts and Vanishing Trades, and it's being published by Bodilyhead, which is part of Vintage in Penguin in September. Brilliant. James, thank you very much for joining us on Careers Unrep. My pleasure. This podcast is sponsored by We Are Futures. 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