Artist Stuart Semple on why education in the arts needs an urgent reset: 'It's like battery farming'
The artist is calling for a reset in arts education and the way the internet is used with his new book
by: Brontë Schiltz
8 Feb 2025
Artist Stuart Semple
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Before he was 30, artist Stuart Semple was a millionaire, hailed as “the Basquiat of the Noughties” by the FT and collected by the likes of Lady Gaga and Debbie Harry. In 2007, a solo exhibition saw sales of $1m within five minutes of opening. But a year later, due to the financial crash, Semple lost his studio and his home. He would sneak into an empty building to sleep on a sofa with his partner and three-month-old child.
This dark place inspired HappyCloud – hundreds of smiling faces made of soap and helium, released from the Tate Modern to float across the Thames towards the financial district. The work revitalised his passion for art.
He now trains art school graduates in his current studio and realised that his experience and knowledge could have wider benefits. “I thought, hang on a minute, we shouldn’t just keep this to ourselves in the studio,” he says. “This is really useful for everybody.”
Semple recently released a book, Make Art or Die Trying, which combines personal memoir with political manifesto. And he’s still learning from it himself. “What I’ve learned is that I hate writing books,” he laughs.
Stuart Semple, who was named a Big Issue Changemaker in 2020, is speaking to us from his studio in Bournemouth. “When you make art, or at least when I make art, I get lost in the process of making things, and I really enjoy every minute of it. I kind of lose myself. Whereas when you’re writing a book, you’ve got a structure to stick to.”
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Stuart Semple at work.
The commercialisation of education has left even those who do make it to art school in a vastly different context to the culture he trained in, he says. “Education, at least in the arts, has become almost like battery farming. You get bums on as many seats as you can.”
When he was training at Bretton’s Yorkshire Sculpture Park, “it was much more about finding yourself in your work and exploring, and almost like the more weird or avant-garde you got, the more they respected you. [Students] would get up in the middle of the night and wrap the whole canteen in toilet paper or whatever, and they’d get praised for doing stuff like that!”
But Semple’s own education was cut short when, at 19, he experienced a near-fatal allergic reaction and was diagnosed with 53 allergies, resulting in phagophobia – a fear of swallowing. Afraid of having another reaction and unsure of how long he might have to live, he dropped out of art school. “But,” he says, “I made so much work. For a while in my recovery, I couldn’t speak with my mouth because it was all very swollen, and there was a lot of blood, so painting was all I had, and that became my voice.”
He was at the peak of his career when he realised the power of using that voice to speak up for others.
“I got the biggest gig of my life, this huge art project for the city of Denver. I was asked to design a train station,” Semple says. “I designed the happiest, most joyful, inclusive train station.”
But his work raised questions from local authorities about how he would account for the presence of skateboarders, drug users and people experiencing homelessness. “I said, ‘Oh, well, what we’ll do is we’ll put some lockers in and some showers, and we’ll encourage the skateboarders to climb on it.’ And they were like, ‘No, no, no, no. Not that. What are you going to do to dissuade them from using it?’”
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This was Semple’s first encounter with hostile design – the use of architecture to deter people experiencing homelessness and poverty from public spaces. “I remember being on the phone and saying to them, ‘What if I don’t want to do it?’” he recalls. “They all just went really silent, and then I thought about it, and I was like, ‘Yeah, I don’t want to do it.’ I just put the phone down. I never heard from them ever again.”
He walked away from the biggest commission of his life with a new view of the world. Returning to Bournemouth, he noticed, for the first time, bars across public benches. “It read like a billboard saying, ‘Rough sleepers aren’t welcome.’” He teamed up with people experiencing homelessness and other local residents who came together to decorate hostile benches around the city.
This had a direct impact: the council removed the bars from the benches. “But the weird thing about that was, they did it in the middle of the night,” Semple says. “But they got their marketing manager to film it all for YouTube in the hope it would go viral, like they were trying to jump on the media trend themselves, but it got 200 views or something. It didn’t work.”
Love Benches by Stuart Semple.
Semple took to the airwaves with an award-nominated 2019 BBC Radio 4 documentary, Hostile Design, still available via BBC Sounds, which explores how designers employ techniques ranging from curved surfaces to high-pitched buzzing to marginalise vulnerable people from public spaces. It was this campaigning that led to him being recognised as a Big Issue Changemaker.
He is no stranger to the use of digital spaces to publicise ideas. After leaving art school, he began selling his works on eBay, becoming one of the first artists to build a global following online. But he is sceptical about the internet’s relationship with art.
“The promise of the internet never fulfilled itself, in my opinion,” he says. “It was going to be a free, open, egalitarian space where everyone could express themselves and access information. It was going to change the world. But obviously it’s become corporatised and huge tech companies have bought it up, and we’ve seen a subversion in self-expression in that now we own the media but don’t know how to use it.
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“We’re such babies with it. We turn up on TikTok and do a little dance. And I think that does impact artists because they start playing to an algorithm, and actually, the truth is, even the people who matter don’t know what that algorithm does. It’s a closed black box. It’s like Russian roulette. It’s a game of chance. And I think it’s stopping people from expressing themselves truly.
“But who knows? It might be exactly what we need to kick off a whole load of radical avant-garde thinking, because we’re bored to death of it.”
Make Art or Die Trying by Stuart Semple is out now (Quarto, £22). You can buy it from the Big Issue shop on bookshop.org, which helps to support Big Issue and independent bookshops.
