WHAT’S GOING ON? I’ve just read a lefty artist contemplating the end of state funding of the arts—and not squealing in righteous pain. And taking a swing at the lovey-dovey New Labour of the guitar-toting, wannabe rockstar Tony Blair at the same time. Is some sort of revolution taking place?
Well, yes and no.
It’s Mark Ravenhill delivering the opening speech of this year’s Edinburgh Fringe Festival. As you’d expect, he makes the obligatory stab at the evil Tory administration and its “ideology (and plain wrong mathematics) of austerity” (debts need to be repaid, Mark, not increased by extra spending) and the “meltdown” of capitalism. You can tell he’s been through the English education system, can’t you?
What’s really getting him riled, however, is the cosiness of artists with public funders. They’ve become too corporatised, too seduced by commerce: “Suddenly, we were talking about working in the creative industries, about the parts that the arts could play in urban renewal, about business plans and strategic thinking,” he says. This led to the arts becoming “safe and well behaved during the New Labour years”.
Being safe and well behaved is not the sort of thing a proper left wing artist should be, in Ravenhill’s eyes. No, you should be “new, a freak, challenging, disruptive, naughty, angry, irresponsibly playful”, and above all, “always telling the truth”. It’s that Romantic image of the artist as Bohemian outsider again, edgy, dangerous, consensus-busting, anti-conformist. Damn, it sounds so heroic! Everyone wants to be a rebel, man.
THE TROUBLE IS you can’t be a rebel when you go cap in hand to a public funder, any more than if you go to a private patron. If you want the dosh you‘ve got to conform and tick the right boxes. Ravenhill’s right there. But where he’s wrong is in assuming the conformity induced by New Labour’s funding procedures was down to the corporate sector and its unprogressive values.
The reality was, and still is, that the arts are overwhelmingly left wing—artists, administrators, publicists, the lot. As a result, even when we have a more conservative government in place, the major effects on the arts are cuts to funding—not to what kind of art is being funded. You can be guaranteed that whatever the colour of the government in power, the arts administrators will make sure the money goes to ensuring the ideological sermonising continues. You know the stuff: you must celebrate non-heteronormative sexuality, you must celebrate diversity and multiculturalism, you must believe the collective is greater than the individual, you must criticise America for being evil, you must attack the patriarchy, etc.
That’s easy to do, of course, since most artists are, as Ravenhill again correctly admits, “decent, liberal, if only everyone were nicer to each other and let’s heal it with a hug sort of folk”—except that “liberal” in this case means left wing. And perhaps some of them aren’t all that decent.
Flattering themselves as non-conformist truth-tellers, our generally left wing artists preach the same ideological conformism, supported by an establishment who share the same ideology.
But here’s another problem that’s not admitted. Flattering themselves as non-conformist truth-tellers, our generally left wing artists preach the same ideological conformism, supported by an establishment who share the same ideology. So much for their rebelliousness, for their angry challenging of the status quo. There’s nothing they like better than being one of the herd.
What the public wants and what it will pay to have, are something else. The market is the clearest and most brutal arbiter of success—not always perceptive, by any means, but not to be dismissed out of hand. Public funding, as someone once said, is taking money from those who don’t want the arts and giving it to those who do, a system which is difficult to justify with vague talk about cultural value or the dubious economic benefits of the “cultural industries”.
Public funding has always been a paternalistic project and thus an extra piece of kit in the politicians’ social engineering toolbox. Maybe it is time to think seriously about Plan B: its abolition. One thing’s sure, if the funding goes, it’ll be sink or swim for hundreds of individual artists of all kinds, and many institutions. There’d be a lot of splashing and shouting in the water but in the end I don’t think there’d be much drowning. After all, I don’t think anyone will die if they don’t go to another play or turn up at another poorly attended poetry reading.
While Blackburn makes a decent point – – – would-be artists can sell out to the Left as well as to the Right. Where he errs, I believe, is in his assertion that artists are liberals. That is only half correct. Financially successful artists are often, indeed, socially liberal but if and when push ever comes to shove and real income equality is a distinct possibility, they are revealed as economic conservatives. Otherwise, they would not generally be the “liberals” I detest but rather the “radicals” I support.
Michael, I think you make some interesting snipes here. Having worked for a major arts funding body for three years, I agree that there are grounds for raising the idea of ‘creative conformity’. I disagree with you, though, when you describe arts administrators as ‘overwhelmingly left wing’. Liberal, perhaps, but often a liberalism of many shifting and contradictory colours. Back in my day, if there was ideology, it was ideology expressed in corporate style bullet points as ‘vision’, or ‘values’, with the idea of ‘professionalism’ often at the core. This idea of ‘professionalism’ seemed more fuzzy centre to me than… Read more »