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Art for whose sake?
Art for whose sake?
Now that cuts are very much on the agenda the Irish arts scene is finally attempting to fight its corner – with rather less success than the trade unions, it has to be said, but it’s not public uninterest that has sealed the fate of culture funding, its the arts’ shilling for government that has done the damage.
Arguments against arts funding tend to centre on the issue of tax being used to prop up elitist pursuits – but surely a bit of elitism is no bad thing. Complaints about arts funding obscure a hidden agenda, one that the ‘culture sector’ is guilty of facilitating. Why, for instance, is the art world so afraid to ask for money in plain and simple terms? Why are funding applications increasingly couched in the language of cod-therapy? Why are bizarre extraneous factors involved in the consumption of art taken more seriously that the art itself?
Could it be because the ‘culturati’ has given in to the pseudo-populist thinking that claims to take a stand on behalf of the taxpayers of Ireland? Claims that stress the idea that the working class (or at least the non-middle class) are not interested in high art, just soap operas and soccer?
One one level it’s a reasonable argument – why should the rest of us pay for the denizens of Dublin 4 to nosebag pricey aesthetic truffles at the opera? However, such a reductionist view sees art transformed into to mere entertainment. It’s not. The post-modern axiom that value judgements are impossible in art is an amazingly dubious one that disguises a lack of nerve on the part of the critics and academics: beauty may well be in the eye of the beholder, but beauty is not the only factor in how we should judge art. Moreover, to argue that only the so-called ‘educated middle class’ can enjoy art is deeply patronising. Lionising popular culture in this way conflates consumption of culture with its imagined class basis, and Aleksandr Rodchenko agrees – or at least he would if he wasn’t dead.
But there’s worse: when you take the government’s money, you become the government’s customer. The fact that public money is spent on an apparently minority interest should be the least of anyone’s concerns when it comes the problems associated with sucking on the teat of government largesse.
Let’s get the ‘subsidising-the-rich’ argument out of the way first, though: public funding of the arts pales in comparison to the public subsidies made available to business, not only in the form of grant aid, but also tax breaks, public-private partnerships and all manner of other underreported phenomena. If anyone is concerned that public money is being wasted it would be enlightening to see how much money has been poured into private sector coffers in order to transform Ireland into a branch economy of the United States, something which singularly failed to provide a sufficient cushion when the inevitable slowdown in the construction industry occurred.
Capital investment in industrial production can be an appropriate use of funds, but only if it actually works, and Ireland’s strategy didn’t. The logical conclusion of liberalised and transnational markets is that the stateless businesses can pull out and piss off at their leisure. There is simply nothing any government can do about this – once you have started to play the game, you have to abide by its rules. Additionally, investors will always eventually start looking at other places to stash their cash, as Ireland has recently discovered. Perhaps the next time a politician fancies a jolly, he or she can take a trip to Argentina and ask a few questions about capital flight.
Relying on transnationals alone is to build an economy on a foundation of sand. If things start going badly for Dell, for example, job cuts in Ireland are much less problematic than in the Lonestar State. And, lo and behold, Dell indeed moved its Irish operation to Poland, not it’s Texan one.
Then we come to the issue of outsourcing. Ireland has benefited from outsourcing but it’s not much of a long-term strategy: all of those unionised American jobs that were replaced by non-unionised Irish ones can – and probably will – be replaced by even cheaper workers in Eastern Europe, China and India.
If anyone want to get the rich off welfare, they would be well advised to start with business, not the arts.
And another thing: many people have never been admitted to a hospital in their lives. Why should they pay for all of those lollygagging sick people and pensioners to lie around on trolleys? There are plenty of alleyways where their fetid rotting corpses could be piled instead, don’t you know? Once you raise the dread spectre of the taxpayer, all kinds of logical conclusions come into play, many of them offensive to common decency.
A greater worry, however, than penny pinching and ‘pomo’ snobbery is the spectre of increased politicisation of the funding regimes.
No state body can be viewed as impartial or lacking an explicitly political agenda but in recent years other countries, notably Britain, have seen increasingly explicit politicisation of arts funding.
The traditional model for arts councils was Britain’s Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, founded in 1940. The CEMA later became the Arts Council of Great Britain and operated as such until being decentralised into separate arts councils in England, Scotland, Wales and the North of Ireland in 1994. Its purpose was to patronise the arts. Today’s Arts Councils in the UK instead patronise the public – in the pejorative sense.
Increasingly the arts are being misused in an attempt to promote regional regeneration or to openly perform social engineering. Gone is the concern for exposing people to great works of art, instead replaced by a desire to utilise art’s supposed therapeutic value or even to simply offer it up as a sop to deindustrialised communities left jobless and hopeless in the wake of two and a half decades of neo-liberal economics.
Drafted into service as an alternative to real economic activity, the supposedly decadent arts have been co-opted into New Labour’s post-socialist agenda: lectures disguised as circuses for the poor – and they can buy their own bloody bread.
Lurking behind this is scorn for the public and belittling of its intelligence: it is assumed that ordinary people do not have the wit to deal with difficult art and would, left to their own devices, spend their time immersed in the most vacuous aspects of popular culture. Therefore, difficult art is out as funding must be tied to some other ‘results-based’ metric which can then be used to justify the spending in the first instance. Note how arts organisations are now more likely to speak of ‘access’ or ‘inclusion’ than skill or genius. A true victory for the bean counters.
Should Ireland follow Britain down this road it will be a sad day for the arts – and there are plenty of reasons to fear that this is exactly what will happen.
North of the border, art is increasingly seen as a tool to paper over the cracks in atomised society bowing under the weight of sectarian division that has been institutionalised rather than alleviated by a bureaucratic containment strategy disguised as a ‘peace process’, itself centred on spurious identity politics.
The Republic of Ireland lacks the North’s specific social divisions but it’s easy to see how art could be drafted into service as part of a strategy to ‘combat’ alienation, poverty, unemployment, racism, and myriad other problems that would be better served by encouraging real economic activity, especially if value for taxpayer’s money is allowed to become the primary consideration in funding.
Note the genesis of the term ‘social exclusion’. What was once seen as a purely economic problem – with an economic answer – has now been redefined as a nebulous issue to be dealt with by all manner of initiatives and projects that just happen to cost less than actually dealing with the problem.
Because of the desire to promote ‘social inclusion’, accessibility is the new mantra and community art endeavours are already encroaching on the ‘elitist’ arts. How long before arts organisations are forced to account for their audience figures by ticking the appropriate ethnic and economic class boxes?
Whatever therapeutic properties art may have, art as palliative care for the dispossessed is not a suitable strategy either for the arts or for the underlying social malaise in Irish society. It’s either an a priori good in its own right or it’s not, but it not a substitute for jobs and to pretend otherwise is capitulate to a political agenda that will damage the arts in the long run.
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