. . . I digress
Jul 28, 2010
6:47am
The dreadful has already happened … my two penn’oth on arts funding.
Before I start let’s make it clear that I’m not against public funding for the arts. If I had my way I’d double it at the very least. In my ideal world I’d expropriate the expropriators, poleaxe the bankers, turf out the queen and all the silly hangers on, pull the plug on Trident and all that missile malarkey, and exile the Tories to a clapped out council estate in Castleford. I’d put all that money into a fleet of Lancaster Bombers and cash bomb the North. When I’d done that I’d go fetch that ridiculous Damien Hirst skull and present it to The Leeds United B team as a kickabout. Perhaps I’d present them with Damien Hirst’s real skull … no no, this is a private fantasy and best not indulging in that dangerous and dotty direction. But you get the drift. My heart’s in the right place even if my thinking is a bit dislocated.
I’ve been following the discussions about Arts Council funding cuts as a pure outsider. It’s not really my area of expertise. I honestly don’t know that much about the Arts Council and can’t really say they’ve had much of an impact on my own development as a human being, but I’ve always been glad they are there, doing whatever it is they do. All those philistine arguments from the so called libertarians that we shouldn’t be subsidizing middle class passtimes from the tax takings don’t really impress me that much; it’s a bit like wanting to abolish Bridlington because you don’t like the seaside. I was really hoping for some kind of galvanising response from the Arts Council, something I could really get behind, a perfect, sharp, clear gem of a clincher for when I was down the pub and it came to that banging the table and reducing the room to awed silence moment. So I was a bit dismayed to read Why the arts matter, a kind of manifesto from The Arts Council, and possibly one of the limpest, lamest, uninspiring protest pieces that I’ve ever come across. The more I read it the more furious I got. Not because I disagree with public funding. I just think there has to be a better argument for it. Before I go through the godawful thing, bullet point by thudding bullet point, each another shot in the foot for the arts, let me quote something that I consider a bit of a touchstone, a paragraph or two of a late essay by Richard Hoggart, a Hunslet lad (though I don’t hold that against him) who knew a thing or two about public funding. He could write a bit too. Subtract the particular reference to VAT and apply the quote to all the #artsfunding stuff you see everywhere.
So, let’s go through Why the arts matter weighing up clear, honest, mature arguments against dubious claims.
15 years sustained support … visionary leaders, blah blah. Don’t know about you but anyone who makes a unilateral declaration of spectacular brilliance makes me a bit suspicious. I read this as, we’ve had 15 years of economic growth, haven’t we been lucky chaps! Entrepreneurial business models are great … but the thing about entrepreneurs is, most of them fail. Simple fact nobody ever talks about. And, trouble with relying on any life-sustaining machinery, there’s always an off switch.
Tiny budget, huge return … Oh for heaven’s sake not the bloody half a pint of milk argument! Meals on wheels, free school milk, wheelchairs for crippled kids, guide dogs for the blind, domestic violence shelters, respite holidays for carers … you pays your money and you takes your choice. Lots of things that are worth doing only cost a few pence, but why pick one above any other? Maybe I value caring for my elderly neighbour more than giving a glitzy impression to the tourists. As for “fastest growing part of the economy” … erm, maybe not for long. Who says that’s guaranteed anyhow? Economies don’t always grow. The last sentence of this paragraph quite literally made me feel nauseated. Apart from that execrable cliche, “proven track record,” does whoever wrote this really believe that crap about regeneration? “Cohesive and engaged society?” … if that phrase wasn’t so ludicrous, obnoxious, and offensive, I’d be laughing out loud. Where have these people been, exactly? Not anywhere I’m familiar with. Wish they’d let me take them on a wander through my part of town.
Kind of society we want to be … Sorry, I don’t remember being asked what kind of society I wanted this to be. Who is this “We” they are talking about so blithely? I certainly don’t identify with this bland, anodyne corporatist crap. “The story is clear” … who to? And what story exactly? You call this recitation of dubious claims and spurious statistics a story … and you’re the Arts Council? Obviously narrative isn’t a strong point.
Arts vital role in economic recovery … strictly, the sentence beginning “Arts investment … “ is just gibberish. I take it to mean art is now totally co-opted into the imperatives of capital accumulation. Art is the fuel that fires the engines that could propel UK plc to race ahead against international competition. Art is also, somehow, the route out of recession too. Art is now “the creative economy.” I wonder what Ruskin, Morris, Orwell, Hoggart would make of this? Art equals cultural tourism … Lucky, Lucky Liverpudlians!
Artistic enjoyment and creativity has never been more universal, more innovative, more easily distributed, shared and exchanged … I kind of agree with this one. Just not sure how much it has to do with the Arts Council. Seems to me that much of the genuinely interesting stuff happens in places the Arts Council just can’t reach … the biggest laugh I heard from any audience recently was when Ivor Tymchak did his little routine at BettaKultcha III, asking everyone if they’d found the Arts Council evaluation forms under their chairs … after a few seconds of anxious shuffling and searching Ivor screwed the piece of paper he was holding, tossing it into the crowd, and said, “No? That’s cos we haven’t got any … “ General mirth and merrymaking ensued. The relief was palpable.
Art = healthy society … artist as Stakhanovite? … Lord, help us. Art’s fags, absinthe, devilry and lots of drunken debauchery with people you shouldn’t … what’s the feckin’ point otherwise?
Arts cuts, disproportionate … blahdy blah … heck, I’m bored rigid by this. Hardly a call to the barricades. More numbers, mind-numbingly dull sentences, drone, moan, groan … Then this little doozy of an admission about the cultural model; “But it is a finely balanced economy: if public funding is significantly reduced, the knock-on effect will be profound and the private sector will not make up the shortfall.” So, what was that you were saying about visionary leadership then? Visionary, but only if the economy goes on as before in the boomtimes. Leadership, but only if things don’t wobble too much. Visionary Leadership seems to be a case of screwing your eyes up really tight, pressing your fingernails deep into your palm, and wishing the world would disappear and leave you alone. Too late.
The dreadful has already happened.
I’m not going to bother with the rest of this dreary document. Go, read it for yourself and see what you think. But if that represents the best they can do then heaven help the struggling artists they are meant to speak for. Perhaps it’s time to retrain as something useful, like … I don’t know … a Big Society Consultant or something.
I’ve been following the discussions about Arts Council funding cuts as a pure outsider. It’s not really my area of expertise. I honestly don’t know that much about the Arts Council and can’t really say they’ve had much of an impact on my own development as a human being, but I’ve always been glad they are there, doing whatever it is they do. All those philistine arguments from the so called libertarians that we shouldn’t be subsidizing middle class passtimes from the tax takings don’t really impress me that much; it’s a bit like wanting to abolish Bridlington because you don’t like the seaside. I was really hoping for some kind of galvanising response from the Arts Council, something I could really get behind, a perfect, sharp, clear gem of a clincher for when I was down the pub and it came to that banging the table and reducing the room to awed silence moment. So I was a bit dismayed to read Why the arts matter, a kind of manifesto from The Arts Council, and possibly one of the limpest, lamest, uninspiring protest pieces that I’ve ever come across. The more I read it the more furious I got. Not because I disagree with public funding. I just think there has to be a better argument for it. Before I go through the godawful thing, bullet point by thudding bullet point, each another shot in the foot for the arts, let me quote something that I consider a bit of a touchstone, a paragraph or two of a late essay by Richard Hoggart, a Hunslet lad (though I don’t hold that against him) who knew a thing or two about public funding. He could write a bit too. Subtract the particular reference to VAT and apply the quote to all the #artsfunding stuff you see everywhere.
The economic case for spending public money on the arts is being more and more used. It is increasingly based on sophisticated data: about the power of high level art to attract foreign tourists, who then spend much money on all sorts of other activities, and so on to the Government’s revenue from VAT on tickets … The revenue from VAT can be shown to be more than the public purse gives in support to the arts in the first place. No doubt any treasury tyro could demonstrate the wholes in this argument. If the government began to give subventions to all sorts of bodies thought worthy by somebody, on the grounds that those bodies paid a great deal of VAT, we would have a pantomimic, Widow Twankey situation - in which we all took in each other’s washing but had no external expenses. It is sounder to argue, not that public subventions should be more generous because of the amount their activities attract in VAT, but that the arts should, as are books are at present, be exempted from VAT on the general grounds that they can be educative and civilising.
It can easily seem that any stick is good to beat opponents with when one is arguing a case about which one feels strongly and virtuously, on the side of the angels. This is never a good way to argue and can rebound badly. The arts, like any other activity whose benefits are not easily assessed and never entirely proved, should have their case made on the most clear and honest and mature grounds, not by cobbling together dubious claims.
So, let’s go through Why the arts matter weighing up clear, honest, mature arguments against dubious claims.
15 years sustained support … visionary leaders, blah blah. Don’t know about you but anyone who makes a unilateral declaration of spectacular brilliance makes me a bit suspicious. I read this as, we’ve had 15 years of economic growth, haven’t we been lucky chaps! Entrepreneurial business models are great … but the thing about entrepreneurs is, most of them fail. Simple fact nobody ever talks about. And, trouble with relying on any life-sustaining machinery, there’s always an off switch.
Tiny budget, huge return … Oh for heaven’s sake not the bloody half a pint of milk argument! Meals on wheels, free school milk, wheelchairs for crippled kids, guide dogs for the blind, domestic violence shelters, respite holidays for carers … you pays your money and you takes your choice. Lots of things that are worth doing only cost a few pence, but why pick one above any other? Maybe I value caring for my elderly neighbour more than giving a glitzy impression to the tourists. As for “fastest growing part of the economy” … erm, maybe not for long. Who says that’s guaranteed anyhow? Economies don’t always grow. The last sentence of this paragraph quite literally made me feel nauseated. Apart from that execrable cliche, “proven track record,” does whoever wrote this really believe that crap about regeneration? “Cohesive and engaged society?” … if that phrase wasn’t so ludicrous, obnoxious, and offensive, I’d be laughing out loud. Where have these people been, exactly? Not anywhere I’m familiar with. Wish they’d let me take them on a wander through my part of town.
Kind of society we want to be … Sorry, I don’t remember being asked what kind of society I wanted this to be. Who is this “We” they are talking about so blithely? I certainly don’t identify with this bland, anodyne corporatist crap. “The story is clear” … who to? And what story exactly? You call this recitation of dubious claims and spurious statistics a story … and you’re the Arts Council? Obviously narrative isn’t a strong point.
Arts vital role in economic recovery … strictly, the sentence beginning “Arts investment … “ is just gibberish. I take it to mean art is now totally co-opted into the imperatives of capital accumulation. Art is the fuel that fires the engines that could propel UK plc to race ahead against international competition. Art is also, somehow, the route out of recession too. Art is now “the creative economy.” I wonder what Ruskin, Morris, Orwell, Hoggart would make of this? Art equals cultural tourism … Lucky, Lucky Liverpudlians!
Artistic enjoyment and creativity has never been more universal, more innovative, more easily distributed, shared and exchanged … I kind of agree with this one. Just not sure how much it has to do with the Arts Council. Seems to me that much of the genuinely interesting stuff happens in places the Arts Council just can’t reach … the biggest laugh I heard from any audience recently was when Ivor Tymchak did his little routine at BettaKultcha III, asking everyone if they’d found the Arts Council evaluation forms under their chairs … after a few seconds of anxious shuffling and searching Ivor screwed the piece of paper he was holding, tossing it into the crowd, and said, “No? That’s cos we haven’t got any … “ General mirth and merrymaking ensued. The relief was palpable.
Art = healthy society … artist as Stakhanovite? … Lord, help us. Art’s fags, absinthe, devilry and lots of drunken debauchery with people you shouldn’t … what’s the feckin’ point otherwise?
Arts cuts, disproportionate … blahdy blah … heck, I’m bored rigid by this. Hardly a call to the barricades. More numbers, mind-numbingly dull sentences, drone, moan, groan … Then this little doozy of an admission about the cultural model; “But it is a finely balanced economy: if public funding is significantly reduced, the knock-on effect will be profound and the private sector will not make up the shortfall.” So, what was that you were saying about visionary leadership then? Visionary, but only if the economy goes on as before in the boomtimes. Leadership, but only if things don’t wobble too much. Visionary Leadership seems to be a case of screwing your eyes up really tight, pressing your fingernails deep into your palm, and wishing the world would disappear and leave you alone. Too late.
The dreadful has already happened.
I’m not going to bother with the rest of this dreary document. Go, read it for yourself and see what you think. But if that represents the best they can do then heaven help the struggling artists they are meant to speak for. Perhaps it’s time to retrain as something useful, like … I don’t know … a Big Society Consultant or something.
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