Subsidy for the arts is very often seen as inessential, but it sustains some of what is most precious to individuals
Defending the arts: it can seem a peculiar and foolish thing to do. I've been working in the arts since what retrospectively seem the kind and smiling days of Thatcherite funding cuts. Now I'm watching what amounts to the UK closing-down sale. Soon, the public forests and rights of way will go, as will the post offices, the educational opportunities for the weak and the regional and the poor. And people with disabilities who live in residential care will lose their transport benefits, because why would anyone in residential care ever want to leave the building and, goodness me wouldn't "normal" people be mightily disturbed if strange and possibly non-voting social outcasts did get out and about? (Obviously the homeless non-voting outcasts will continue to be outside all kinds of buildings in increasing numbers.) And on it will go, like the original type of juggernaut. So why, when everything seems to be threatened ? health, education, heritage, sport ? even mention the arts?
If you've been reading this blog for any length of time, you'll be aware that I do feel very strongly that it's legitimate to defend the arts, even in the harshest of times. You'll also be aware of the usual arguments fielded against anyone positioned on the side of the arts ? views which have been endlessly recycled in the media over the last decades and which now mean the principal activity within many arts is apology. This is, I would point out, a landscape that many observers abroad with an awareness of European history find both alarming and bewilderingly self-destructive.
You're just defending your own job. You're an artist and therefore a Middle-Class Tosser with no idea of the lives ordinary people lead and should shut up, because everything about you is suspect in ways I can't quite describe.
You know what? Yes, I am defending my own job. It's a great job ? and I would like other people to be able to have ones like it: long, but flexible hours, adaptable practices, poorly-unionised ? it's the kind of job neocon capitalism wants me to have. Sadly, it also involves reasonable experience-related pay, good working conditions and very few industrial injuries or diseases. It's work that does not depress or demoralise the worker. It involves dignity and high degrees of job satisfaction, both of which give an artist the time, energy and ability to have and express opinions ? sometimes political opinions ? should they wish. While a high-profile piece of bad art, self-indulgent art, patronising and watered-down art, uncommunicative art, tends to produce blanket condemnations of all arts everywhere, the pieces of art that people love ? the songs on their iPod, the design of their iPod, The Angel of the North, the mural at the end of their street, the play they saw on a school trip that made them into a slightly different person, the stained glass in their church, the picture on the card from someone significant, the movies they've collected on DVD ? that art tends to be so personally and deeply enjoyable and loved that it becomes a part of individual personalities. Good art stops being art ? it becomes a way of being happy, of receiving something beautiful and human from stranger, of confirming one's identity, of being not alone. This is the average end-product of a good-quality and satisfying job in the arts sector of British industry. Why would I be a tosser for defending this?
Yeah, but you're an artist ? I repeat, you don't know about ordinary people.
Wherever an artist comes from, the default classification for an arts worker tends to be Middle Class. This means that people can come into the arts from all kinds of backgrounds and places and be granted (or be cursed with) Middle Classness. This kind of social mobility can be hugely confusing for observers who want everyone to stay where they're put. (And, while we're about it, the arts are relatively gender-blind. Women can do very well in the arts without being punished for it too heavily.) Having gained an income and a trade through the arts, artists who suggest that others should have the same opportunities are dismissed as Middle-Class wankers for suggesting that access to the arts shouldn't be restricted to the Middle (and perhaps Upper) Classes. My personal experience ? which is actually nobody's business but my own ? would be that I was brought up by working-class parents who had educated themselves into Middle-Class jobs. I got through the last years of my schooling and all of my University education with the aid of the state ? being, by then, the child of a divorced working mother with limited resources. I then spent around 10 years working with people in prisons, hospitals, daycare centres, elderly care homes and indeed in the homes of people with special needs, using the arts to improve their lives. Lives were improved. Finding a means of expression when people usually shout at you or ignore you, is something significant. Creating a piece of art that means others view you as human, rather than as a problem or a freak, is a remarkable thing. (Although it can scare the crap out of politicos who want to shut down your facility, or who are trying to pretend that just because you have cerebral palsy, or use a wheelchair, or are very old and will die soon, you won't mind losing what few pleasures you have, or jumping through increasingly arcane and humiliating hoops to gain the minimal aid that would help you contribute to your society.) The arts aren't about self-indulgence, they're about being fully and visibly alive.
No, the arts are elitist and self-obsessed. What about the baby who needs an incubator? Would you take the money away from a baby?
As I've just pointed out ? and as I have pointed out for more than two decades ? it takes a great deal of effort and what amounts to wholesale economic censorship to make the arts elitist and, even then, because they are nourished by personal enthusiasm, they can still break out in unexpected ways and among unconventional people. The arts communicate the humanity of others to us and our own humanity to them. It's not some strange indulgence that means dictators, police states and every colour and composition of oppressive regime seek to control the arts ? there are the book-burnings, the intimidation, arrests and executions of artists, the specific targeting of much-loved artworks, the reduction of those private and sustaining joys that a population can cling to, unite around, the reduction of any indication that other humans are human, that they can't be robbed of dignity, harmed and destroyed. In the UK, increasingly unresponsive and self-regarding governments have imposed ever greater financial and moral burdens upon the electorate, while coincidentally suppressing the arts ? muzzling one of the few ways we have of communicating with each other at emotional depth. The arts also represent one of the few ways we have of communicating with our leaders ? of representing ourselves in a public forum to people dangerously isolated from the consequences of their actions in a manner that won't be answered by water cannon.
A straight ? and completely mythical ? choice between the baby's incubator and a poem? The incubator wins every time. The poet would write the poem anyway. Poets will write less if they never get paid, thrive less, or give up. So we get fewer poems and, long term, the poems are part of why we try to make sure there's an incubator there for the people we don't know, will never meet, don't understand, don't like. The arts are part of what gets us through the day, especially in the harshest of times. Onwards.
Source: http://www.guardian.co.uk/books/booksblog/2011/feb/03/arts-funding
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