How to be a green artist

The Green Manifesto for Artists was launched in July by Artists Now, the UK’s largest artists’ membership organisation (more than 36,000 members). The ‘manifesto’ isn’t a polemic so much as a practical guide, aiming to help artists take active steps toward environmentally responsible practices.

The practical basis is the well-promoted manta of Reduce / Reuse / Repair / Share / Recycle, the core philosophy is “What’s good for the planet is good for artists”, and there’s an emphasis on collective impact: “Just one action from each of our members would amount to more than 36,000 actions”.

So is there a specific case for artists? Maybe yes – the Manifesto positions artists as unique agents of change, capable of reimagining systems and inspiring broader societal shifts through creative and sustainable practices, which may be optimistic for most of us but is a worthwhile starting point. Besides, it does make sense to list specific actions that artists can take, even if some of them seem pretty obvious and others pretty unattainable.

The Manifesto’s suggestions are graded into three levels of difficulty:

Each of these has six subject areas:

So here’s the summary:

    Easy

    Medium

    Hard

Overall, the Manifesto is useful because it provides a manageable (if simplistic) ticklist approach to a massive, overwhelming problem. The traffic-light grading of actions avoids the all-or-nothing fallacy that often leads to paralysis. It suggests that artists have a special cultural platform to influence public perception, meaning the value lies not just in the carbon footprint of a single work but in the symbolic power of demonstrating a sustainable creative process. It also provides a specific vocabulary for artists to gauge the performance of institutions and galleries they deal with.

On the other hand, there are some pretty obvious omissions – studios should have separate bins for non-recyclable materials, should minimise water use, should insist on LED lighting, should use digital rather than physical tools for preference (assuming the art allows it), and so on.

There are several examples of the Manifesto’s impracticality, too. Many artists already face enough cost pressures without adding the expense of sustainable alternatives – things like organic pigments, FSC-certified materials, and avoiding anything that includes plastics usually means a more expensive option, even assuming they can be sourced easily. “Subsidies for responsible travel” is a pipe dream for most. Producing an Environmental Policy for your practice sounds a bit performative, virtue-signalling in place of action.

And whatever stance an artist takes personally, they are never going to have much control over the policies of a gallery, an institution, or a purchaser when it comes to (say) heating, lighting, or shipping methods. The most challenging goals require a level of leverage over the art market that most individual creators do not possess.

In fact most of the items listed in the ‘hard’ category might better be classed as ‘near impossible’. Switching to renewable energy only works in a deregulated market where there are options in terms of suppliers and contracts. Tracing the environmental impacts of materials you use is at best time-consuming, more often impossible. Choosing not to travel by air is not really an option for artists in the Gulf (ok, the Manifesto was written by and for UK artists, but does aspire to broad use).

As for redesigning websites with low-energy principles – well yes, you can compress images, minimise code and choose a lightweight design so that less computing power is needed to create and access your site; but that assumes you know what you’re doing, or you’re prepared to trust (and pay for) a third party to do it. We’ve been through this, as it happens, and our own checklist is at the end; seem how much of that you’d be comfortable with.

The manifesto is described as an evolutionary document which will hopefully add to and refine its approach. It can’t provide a mandatory set of rules for every artist; but it is a useful tool for those looking to align their professional practice with their personal ethics. And maybe its greatest utility is in fostering a collective culture of sustainability within the arts, shifting the industry standards from “art is its own justification” to “art within planetary boundaries.”

The Green Manifesto for Artists is available here as a website and a PDF download.

A basic checklist for (re)designing a low-energy website

The larger and more complicated a website is, the more storage it will need and the longer it will to load. Both of those use computing resources, and computing uses energy. The goal is a website where the home page loads quickly even on slow mobile connections; everything feels calm, elegant, and unfussy; and images not effects dominate the visual experience. A simple rule of thumb: every image, script, animation, embed and user interaction should earn its place. In short, a quick, clean website is good for everyone – easier to maintain, better for the consumer, and even better for the planet.

The Webcarbon people have a decent summary with some detail here but our own recent redesign used this checklist of basic principles.

Basic structure:

◽ Simplify layout
◽ Keep navigation short
◽ Design to allow users to make quick decisions
◽ Make key actions obvious
◽ Shorten pages
◽ Reduce clicks to reach common tasks
◽ Don’t auto-refresh content unless necessary

Images:

◽ Compress images
◽ Use WebP/AVIF instead of JPEG/PNG
◽ Use static illustrations instead of video where possible
◽ Avoid autoplay video
◽ Avoid giant hero images if possible
◽ Avoid carousels, parallax, and heavy transitions
◽ Lazy-load below-the-fold images
◽ Serve responsive sizes
◽ Keep thumbnails small

Fonts:

◽ Minimise the number of fonts (one or two max) and font weights (two max)
◽ Preload Google fonts

Scripts:

◽ Reduce the number and size of scripts
◽ Delete unused JavaScript
◽ Defer nonessential JS
◽ Minimise/optimise CSS
◽ Inline critical CSS
◽ Minify CSS and JavaScript

Contact forms:

◽ Plain email link if possible, or a short form (all forms should be minimal)
◽ No CAPTCHA unless necessary
◽ No embedded map unless it is really needed

Extras:

◽ Limit the number of third-party widgets
◽ Load analytics sparingly
◽ Cache pages and images aggressively
◽ Remove third-party trackers and embeds where possible

Options to include only if they serve a clear purpose:

◽ PDF downloads (eg for portfolio, CV)
◽ Newsletter signup
◽ Press kit page
◽ Archive of past work and exhibitions

Audit performance:

◽ Use performance audits to compare before/after operation and spot problem areas
◽ Measure impact
◽ Track total page size
◽ Count requests