Art For All? Transcription of debate at Shoreditch Town Hall, 19 January 2001
Well, I want say a few things that are very, partly, come into my head since the publication, because it been so much easier to read it, so much easier to assess it, in its visually dramatic form. I believe that state support for the arts is as necessary now as it has always been since the existence of the first states. But, I mean, I could go on forever pursuing ancient analogies, but, without doing that, I would say that the present reasons, at this time, why a government, any government, must support the arts, and therefore have some sort of arts policy, are these: they, the government, must not be seen to be philistine; they must seek to preserve, or improve an international reputation in what is now a highly competitive world; they must support the arts as a tourist attraction; and they must acknowledge that the arts, in general, are an essential part of the image, and we can't think of a government without thinking of image, the image of a civilised and a prosperous society. Whole decades and indeed whole centuries have been known to history for the flourishing or otherwise of the arts. And those seem to me the fundamental reasons why a government must support the arts and must in its own interests as well as the interests of the country be seen to do so. So now that I've had time to take in the publication in its bold new format, I think I've formed more definite views than I had when I was rather tentatively turning over the pages and trying to find my way around the book when it was not yet published. And this may be for good or ill, most definite views are often a bit suspect, but I do believe that direct government support should go to certain art forms, performances or events, which we need for all the reasons that I've just outlined. And which without sponsorship could not be mounted, and I'm thinking for example of opera, ballet, some one-off exhibitions, public statues perhaps. The focus would inevitably be London, though not exclusively so. The advice on what to support would come from a London based Arts Council as far as possible, not very far nowadays, but as far as possible, free from political arm-twisting. But this apart, I believe there ought to be regional or even local councils covering quite small areas to which a block grant should be allocated, which would be distributed according to regional or local criteria, these criteria established without any kind of government intervention. And such a policy as this with a division between direct government sponsorship and hands-off regional sponsorship would attend to the fundamental reasons for a government to support the arts, without enabling or without embroiling that government in any further, largely incompatible, aims such as the need for art to be popular, the need for it to be in some sense accessible to all, and of course accessible here does not mean accessible to people in wheelchairs, it means something quite different, the accessibility for the disabled is something we can all take for granted now, not that it always happens but we understand the need for it. It would enable the government to stand back from what at present they seem to think is the need for art to be at one and the same time, subversive; And also fostering a sense of community. One may well think that those two aims are incompatible. People who want to pursue these aims of fostering a sense of community or of being subversive, people who want to pursue these aims in the art that they make should battle for sponsorship on the basis of their theories at a local or a regional level, and I quite see that in London each borough might need to have its own arts council where such applications should be made. All the government would be left to in this case, would be to decide on the global amount that it would be prepared to spend on the arts, and if it had that decision to be made, whether it was made by Gordon Brown or the treasury officials or whoever, would be a simple decision in a way, based on finance, but not entangled in some of these extraordinary policies that emerge contradictorily in government pronouncements.
(IS: There does seem to be more people coming in and there is space at the front if anyone is prepared to sit on the floor, perhaps ...) Julian Stallabrass: It occurs to me that people know who Mary is because she's the only woman on the panel but they may not know who we are, so it might just be worth saying. Charles Saumerez Smith: Julian Stallabrass has asked me to introduce for a second time because he's pointed out that people may not have known which of the three men were which. Julian is the one on the left, he is now going to speak. JS:I just wanted to draw you attention first to the title of this publication as it became known, 'Art for All? their policies and our culture', and three words in that title, 'for', 'their' and 'our'. First, who are 'they', this alien 'them', who determine things. Mostly I think for this publication its the government but I think I'd also like to draw your attention to the role that commercial culture and the corporations play, not only in high art but also in determining the whole field of culture, and in vastly influencing the space in which art can take its place. It seems to me that there's a deep congruence between much of this corporate culture and what is sometimes referred to in the book, or quite often referred to in the book, as artistic freedom. Mark Wallinger indeed talks at one point about state-sponsored subversion, and there's this feeling, you know it's curiosity isn't it, that we go to Tate Modern, for instance, and we are constantly assured that what we are seeing is unconventional, breaking the rules, rebellious, subversive and yet here's the state telling us to go along and look and be creative. And this has a strong parallel in the blandishments of commercial culture, of advertising which is also constantly telling us to do exactly the same things, break with convention, break the rules, be rebellious, be revolutionary even, so these old slogans which used to have some kind of social and political power have been thoroughly co-opted my commerce. So in a sense it's become it's become highly conventional, if you like to be unconventional. I just wanted to say that first. Then to move on to 'our culture'. So, who are we?. We of course are as affected by corporate culture as the 'they', the 'they' of the government, but in any case, who is 'us'? Of course, as soon as you start to think about it, there comes to the front mind radical fissures of race, gender, class and religion and certainly the idea that seems to be floating behind a lot of New Labour thinking about culture, the idea that culture must necessarily bind us together in some kind of unitary national synthesis, that culture can have a role in repairing the damage that was caused by the country's exposure to neo-liberal stringencies, and social fragmentation throughout the period of the Conservative Government, I'm not sure that that's necessarily so. And that seems to me one the faults and the reasons for the failure of the culture on display at the Dome. There was a very patronising and unconvincing assumption that we could look at our culture and all be proud of being British in part because of this culture.
Most statements of subversion, of real subversion, have indeed been co-opted or can be very fast. So where does this leave us? 'Us', I'll explain that, the 'us' who might want to mount real subversion. Where does that leave us? There seem to be very little alternatives; there's silence perhaps; or various forms of iconoclasm perhaps. There's a scene in the film 'Fight Club' for instance where these strange activists blow up a piece of corporate culture, which then rolls down a kind of public fountain, it's a big ball, which they blow off its foundations and it rolls down this fountain and destroys a Starbucks' at the end, you know ... There's that kind of thing. Or there's a form of cultural action, and that's I suppose what I'd like to talk about last. And it bring us to the 'for', I mean art 'for' all, that in itself is a phrase which is problematic for me, I'd rather think about 'by' rather than 'for'. But there's a nice speech by Arthur Scargill which was given in connection with Jeremy Deller's 'Unconvention' exhibition held in Cardiff. And he talks about the role of art as memory, and particularly he sees it is as, I think, bringing us into contact with a history of resistance. New Labour with its current cultural policies has, I think, already had a small effect on the visual art world. We seem to be moving away from the vulgar and irresponsible excesses of so-called young British art towards an art which is politically and socially inflected but nevertheless, it's still rather modest and mild, in a sense, and we might think of the 'Protest and Survive' exhibition at the Whitechapel, of 'Intelligence' at the Tate, and there are a number of artists' works which you could point to which fits into this tendency. But I'd like to contrast that with an art which has emerged, I guess over the last ten years or so, of subversion and protest. It's an art that's attached to protest movements, particularly 'Reclaim the Streets'; it's also very much in evidence on-line, there's a device, for instance called 'floodnet' whose inventor Brett Staubaum (?) describes it as a collective conceptual work of art. This is a piece of work, if you can call it that, it's a tool, and perhaps a cultural intervention which is used to flood websites with too many hits so that they fall over. It was used for instance to attack the Mexican Government site in support of the Zapotiste rebels. It's a work art which, if it is a work if art, involves and requires to succeed mass participation. So I think that in relation to some of these anti-corporate, even anti-capitalist movements, there's emerging an participatory and to some extent egalitarian form of cultural activism. It's often green-tinged, it's at the opposite end of the scale from monumental, elitist, top-down art of the kind that one sees very often in museums. Will it be an art for all? No, I don't think so. But it's an active art, an art that encourages knowing through doing. And I hope it will eventually draw in a very wide participation. David Batchelor: Peter Fonda played one of the characters in the film 'Easy Rider' as most of you will know, the one with the American flag on his chopper. I was reading a book recently by Peter Biskend (?) on American independent cinema in the 1970s and in that book Peter Fonda says that the studio executives at Columbia, when they first looked at the pre-release versions of 'Easy Rider' they used to walk out shaking their heads with incomprehension. When the film became a big hit and made loads of money they used to walk around nodding their heads in incomprehension. And I suppose I only mention that as it seems to me to be the most succinct description of what seems to have happened to art in this country in the last few years, where it seems to have moved quite magically and very quickly from being fundamentally unfashionable to being fundamentally fashionable. I don't have much to add to that except that it's the best description I've heard of it.
What else would you need to do to make this liberated art from Windsor Castle accessible to anyone in the population who wants to look at it? I guess one thing might be classes in Christian mythology and Greek mythology. You're not going to get that far with a Rubens or god know what else they've got up there without a fairly reasonable knowledge of that kind of stuff. My point, obviously, is that accessibility is not a property of works of art, I don't believe it has any meaning when it's addressed to works of art. Accessibility, as far as I can understand it, is broadly a question of education and social justice. Works of art can be made accessible in various ways but accessibility is not a property of a work of art. So if this government, as it claims, is really concerned with accessibility, it could do worse than start by dispatching Chris Smith up to Windsor maybe with an SAS unit (because they've not got much to do at the moment) to go and get it and bring it back. More generally on the question of accessibility and perhaps even more generally on the question of what is the state and function of art, which seems to be the question which fundamentally underlies this volume and a lot of the talk that goes with it. It's a lot easier to say what art is not than what art is. I have come to believe over the years that art is certainly not a branch of social work; I don't think it's a branch of education; I don't think it's to do with moral improvement; nor is it certainly a vehicle for a government policy of any description; I don't think that art is light entertainment and I don't think it's rocket science; and I don't think art is revolution either, to allude to Julian's point. I think this is generally a very good thing because if art has ever proved itself it has proved itself to be very bad at all the above things. To say what art is, I think in a way, you have to get a bit personal. Art practice at least for me is best described as a highly informal and very uncertain kind of research. And even calling it research gives it a certain kind of tone which I'm very uncomfortable with, nevertheless I'm struggling to find a better way of describing it, an irregular and very unpredictable kind of enquiry. There is no reason to expect the results of this research to be easy or accessible, even to the artist. I think art is difficult; it is generated with difficulty and I don't see any reason why it should not be consumed with difficulty. The best art, the most interesting art, the art you keep going back to, at least, the art I keep going back to, is difficult. So much the better. I believe in the end that art is simply an invitation to look. And any attempt to qualify that, to impose strictures or to prescribe or proscribe the ways in which it can issue its invitation, I think have to be resisted.
Now the reason I came into this, and I presume the reason why I was invited tonight, was that I was along with Geoff Mulgan responsible for the cultural policy of the GLC between 1984 and 1986. And this was in a way a development of a kind of political correctness in trying to hand out money to artists. But we weren't trying to fund art we were trying to fund ways in which new voices could emerge; voices that had hitherto either not found resources, not found the form, not found the constituency to do this. And we worked the notion then, which I'm sad to see has almost disappeared from the critical vocabulary of cultural policy, which is the independent sector. Remember that? The independent sector is that kind of sector of experimentation that exists somewhere between traditional historic public cultural forms, like the theatre, the opera and so on, and the market place. It's where new talents new writers, new playwrights, new filmmakers emerge and before the market takes them up they need a kind of sector, they need a space in which to find their voice, find their high (?) and so on. And what we did at the GLC was not to fund art not even to fund black people or women and so on, we tried to find those institutions of production and distribution that would allow rather more voices to be heard. And at the time we were very much under the influence of Channel 4, Channel 4 was the great cultural innovation of the last 25 years in British life, I believe, because it was a commercial form, it was subsidised by advertising but it was subject to a public service ethos and it was only licensed because it had to provide space for new independent film/television production. And a lot of cultural money was spent funding the setting up of the regional film and video production companies. And that model, that there's a valid reason for cultural policy to address as it were issues of race, class, gender, sexuality and so on through funding early forms of production and distribution, I think is still valid today. And whether it's achieving social ends, or educational ends I'm not really sure, I think actually often it's achieving artistic ends. And I will just mention some of the things that we funded which I'm still rather proud of. Silvermoon Bookshop in Charing Cross Road: we worked with the planning department at the GLC to make sure that the convenants on the shops in Charing Cross Road were written in such a way as that all the bookshops could not be priced out of the market and that they were substituted by denim shops and shops selling training shoes. And that's why we still have a bookshop street in Charing Cross Road. This was a kind of regulation, a protectionism by state cultural policy. We funded ICA Video. As you know ICA started this interesting series 'In Conversation' lunch-time interviews with writers. We paid for the filming of those interviews and their circulation into the public library service throughout Britain. Because one of the things that we'd realised, we'd commissioned some research: in about 1983 a survey of all independent video production in Britain showed that although the average cost of a video production maybe £20,000 t was actually only seen three times, and I think issues of distribution do come into play when the government is funding production and not worrying about distribution. And ICA Video began to handle the distribution of independent film into the public library network, it seems to me a good project.
We've funded Rough Trade Records just as The Smiths were breaking, one the few things we made a profit out of, and we funded the Black Music Association to run training courses for Black artists to get into production and management. Because it was always then considered that blacks could make good music but they were no good at earning the money. And lastly we funded the Bass Clef which is a hundred yards from here and if you want to know the name of the very first institution that broke the Hoxton mould, it was the Bass Clef set up by Peter (?) in 1983 with a loan from (?) London Enterprise Board which is now called the Blue Note, and it may even have changed its name now. It was aeons before The Lux, before the White Cube and so on. And we also funded that in conjunction with Hackney Economic Development Agency so it was also achieving this terrible kind of other social end of economic development as well. So you can kind of get sometimes triple benefits. I think finally though, I have another problem with this issue which is that artists fell constrained when they go along seeking grants from public institutions or the government and they're asked about filling in forms and audiences and so on and they find this terribly demeaning and terribly time-consuming and they'd really rather be getting on with their art and not going through all these terribly boring bureaucratic processes. By the way I have complete sympathies with those things as well, in fact I have never, apart from those two years at the GLC, ever worked for the state or for an academic institution because I loathe them, and I've always tried to keep myself as an independent writer. But a number of years ago I read an essay by the philosopher Stuart Hampshire, this is my final point, and at the end of the war Stuart Hampshire went to Nuremberg and because he spoke German was one of the translators of the defendants at the Nuremberg Trial. And in this essay called 'Innocence Experienced' he said what he came away with at the end was how quickly that society had collapsed in the face of the kind of barbarism of the National Socialist Party and nothing, neither science nor art nor even education, he said it was astonishing how frail and easily they crumbled against the force of that ruthless regime. the only thing he said he thought that could have stopped it was a respect for due process. And I happen to think that in democratic societies a respect for due process is absolutely essential. If you're giving out public money to people then there are processes involved, and they may be boring and they may be bureaucratic but at least they're out in the open. And they do require people to negotiate about what it is they're trying to do, and governments do have right if they're elected to try and set down some of the constraints. And if you think about what happened, as you get into the second half of your life and you see places like Bosnia and you fear chaos more than you fear creativity, then you realise that although democracies need artists very badly to show the way and show there are other kinds of lifestyles and to experiment and show different kinds of worlds, artists also badly need democracy, because if you look at where democracy has failed the artists have often been the first to go to the wall. CSS: I don't consider myself a speaker and I wasn't intending to say anything and at this stage in the evening I think, having had four people speaking, it's much better to allow the floor to speak. I think one of the great virtues of the book, which I hope you will all buy if you haven't already done so or seen, is the plurality and diversity of voice which are represented in it, and I think that's represented to an extent by the people who've spoken tonight. So at this stage we will throw it open to the floor. If people at the back ... there's still a bit of space at the front or behind ... if they're fed up with standing. And if when you ask a question you could maybe say who you are ... So, who would like to start? ... Now there must be lots of people, yes, at the back ... floor: I quite interested in what you were saying, Julian, but I have some reservations about what you were saying because I think perhaps you were possibly judging the art as a ?compart / ?in the context of the politics, and it seems very very crucial to be very careful about that thing, between content and form, because I think that's where the Labour Party's perhaps doing ?this a bit wrong. ? of art, social policy ? doesn't necessarily have, yet it should ...??? art doesn't always ?change society ...can't necessarily generate ?community. And I think perhaps we're in a situation where the government in power are trying to find a social solution to those in ... perhaps it should leave art to get on with what it's good at, making art rather than changing ? CSS: OK, so I hope everybody heard that, it's about art having social content or not. Julian. JS: OK, I mean, part of what I was trying to say was that I don't think that art, or culture indeed, necessarily has this salutory effect of socially binding us together or improving us. I would though take issue with David's statement, David said that art is very bad at education, revolution, ethics etc. I mean, is this always necessarily so? I think it can be, it can have those effects, it's just that we shouldn't necessarily assume that it does. Think of Soviet Constructivism, of Situationism, of various strands of conceptual art, I think some of that art has been very good at those things. It has managed to push those things forward. Can we conceive of art, can we just stand back and think of art abstractly aside from the institutions of art, aside from the way it's displayed, aside from issues of accessibility indeed, of what people are likely to understand about the art that they see? I don't we can, I think that art is all of piece with those things, and for a full understanding of it we have to have considered them. CSS: OK, next question, or comment? At the back again. floor: To the guy on the left, could you say something, yes, sorry you on the left, ... CSS: Ken Worpole! floor: Could you say something about the constraints you mentioned that government needs to put on the way that our economy is used? Because is this not ?premised on a notion of good public, on a notion of good community, where it really is so obviously ???? about the conflict that is inherent in liberal and democratic values. KW: I completely agree with you, I'm not in favour of comunity and I'm not in favour of binding wholeness. I mean, when I was talking about the GLC policy which did have policies to create particular sectors or promote certain new voices, whether they were women's, black's and so on. It wasn't to try and mould everyone together, to try and put them marching in step but it was to celebrate pluralism, I'm a pluralist. Now if you ask me what kind of constraints, then I suppose, you know, I can remember going to Sweden 25 years ago and talking about these issues, and they said, well, of course we only ever grant any organisation money on the condition that at least 40% of its work is done in schools, whatever the organisation. It seems to me not an unreasonable kind of demand to make of a symphony orchestra or a string quartet. I think it is interesting to know for example audience profiles, without being overly programmatic; the effects of distribution; where the money comes from; where it goes to; I find these quite fascinating. And it is to me deeply worrying about the Lottery, it'd be interesting to know how many people in this room have actually bought a Lottery ticket and how many people have benefitted, indirectly or directly, from Lottery funding. I've never bought a Lottery ticket, I have to say, and of course I do go to the Tate Modern, I do go to the things that have funded by the Lottery. On the whole though, my instincts are to loathe the whole business of Lottery funding and what it means. CSS: OK, a show of hands, how many people have bought Lottery tickets? ... (what? Ever?!) ... Yeah, it's a pretty mass activity. How many people have been to Tate Modern? ... Next question, in the front.
CSS: Ken is acting as spokesperson for the government ... do you want to comment? KW: No, it's not really my field. But there was a scheme some years agowhich if everybody circulated the same thousand pounds within bank accounts which would enable them to claim ... an enterprise allowance scheme, wasn't it? And I think it was actually very successful, it was a great scheme. And I think we've just got to be more imaginative about the way in which we kind of fiddle welfare benefits or ... support ... no, I'm serious. DB: I think your point is a good one which is maybe that it gets over- estimated quite how much artists actually do receive in their lifetime, how much funding they do receive. Sure you get it from time to time but as you say, these days, from the start of your career, if such is the right word for what being an artist is, what you get is loans and so forth which pin you down for years to come. The twenty-odd years of my working life I've received very few grants at all. Most of the time, I think, for most artists, the job ... you don't even get to the point of filling in application forms. You actually have to sign on or scrounge or go to work and so forth, it's a very sort of dull pragmatic exisitence. CSS: But you were funded through college, David? DB: Oh, I was, yeah. I was, but I paid it back in kind. I probably haven't actually. CSS: OK, at the back. Ken, you ... your only comments ... what happened to the independent sector ... , the independent sector and the state sector, as your subsequent comments have suggested, that the independent sector is now at the deep end of the sector. And that's the net result of your contribution, I think, not yours particularly, yours as a whole at the GLC ... that whole cultural left movement of the 1980s. And you say, 'oh yes, ... monolithic approach to a pluralist (?)...' Well, yes, up to a point. What is this dualism/pluralism?. You're a pluralist if you come forward with the right, as you said again, race, gender, identity, disability, health, environmental issues, all these ... the lifting of pluralist ideals, yeah sure you get funding. ... but if you're a Wagner or a Yeats nowadays, so really what we have here is a state society, deciding a broad agenda of pluralism. And the art is suffocated. They become beggars; not just financial beggars on the state, but they become ?ecological beggars. So it's not just a question of getting bored?, it's a question of conforming to the right pluralist society. CSS: So once again, Ken is being asked to bear responsibility for all arts and culture policy over the last twenty years. KW: I was just talking about a particular small amount of money that we were able to disperse at the Greater London Enterprise Board between 1984 and 1986. I have no responsibility for major government policy, I certainly wouldn't spend money in that form. But those kinds of questions still seem to me to be necessary to ask when public money is being dispersed; That one has to have a sense of the artist, and is engaged in a kind of negotiation about these things. Which is why I disagree again, I'm afraid, with David Batchelor, in the piece in his paper he quotes Donald Judd as saying 'why should we expect artists to make political statements and not dentists?' And we shouldn't, the fact is that if artists are is receipt of public funding then I do think they have certain kinds of responsibilities. Mine are kind of small fish in all this and if I were to give money away again I don't think it's true that the independent sector is thriving. Compendium Bookshop has gone. Which seemed to me a bit like City Lights in San Francisco, Compendium, to me, represented a kind of cultural world of pluralism that has been terribly important in the last twenty-five years: it's gone. Waterstone's are now, having once paraded as the friend of independent publishing, are demanding 50% on all publishers, not just the best-sellers. And they're squeezing the small publishers out of business. I think what happens in culture is that you get a process of over-production followed by a process of problems of distribution. And at the time at the GLC we saw that the issue of distribution, not making artistic judgements about material, but distribution was the key issue. Maybe the in next the generation it was back again to funding artistic production. But I don't think cultural policy can ever escape the fact that it does have some responsibilities for the distribution and dissemination of culture to as many people as possible. JS: Could I just say something on that as well? I'd just like to say that firstly I would support Ken's view that the government does not owe artists a living, I mean, it is OK for them to expect something in return for the grants that they disperse. And as for the GLC or indeed New Labour's litany of pieties, I think this is an appalling phrase to describe the necessary redress for sections of the nation who have been discriminated against, or who have a difficulty time either gaining access to culture, let alone making culture, I think the GLC's policies went a long way towards making London a more enriching and diverse and exciting place to live. CSS: There was a question at the back. floor: (can't hear any of it) CSS: Well, I think Andrew Brighton who is part of PEER trust and is on the staff at the Tate would support the idea that, in fact, being on the staff at the Tate doesn't necessarily co-opt him into being a representative of the state. Is that correct, Andrew? AB: ??? CSS: But I sense from the applause for the man at the back 'what would happen to Wagner or Yeats if there were seeking public funding now' there was a degree of consensus round that. Next person to speak? floor: (can't hear) CSS: The question was about ... that state funding is one thing but the particular issue is to do with corporate sponsorship, where the view was that corporations will only fund the lowest common denominator. MW: I don't think that is absolutely true. CSS: Well, I was going to slightly defend BP, who sponsor the Portrait Award, which I've always thought was rather esoteric. MW: I have to say that I don't think that corporations do sponsor only the very popular or the bottom level art. There is certainly in the music field, which is what I know about, there is a very large number of corporations that will sponsor certainly concerts that will be sold out but these are not necessarily the lowest common denominator. I have in the last week, as it happens, been to two concerts which were completely sold out where people were queuing for tickets, both of which were baroque music. And I think that two different companies sponsored these concerts; and they were proud to do so. And they were extremely well attended. So I think there is a difference between the lowest common denominator and something that is going to attract an enormous audience. CSS: We'll probably discover that Freedom ale has supported tonight's event. Beck's has indisputably supported a lot of contemporary art practice. JS: Could I just say something on that? Because I think the dilemma's a little but different actually. Which is that corporations like to sponsor aspects of elite culture and they do this for very understandable reasons to do with the image of the company. They also do it to get access to people like you, people who are sceptical and generally hard to get effective advertising at. So sponsoring exhibition and other cultural events that you like is way of getting names into your head, which are otherwise quite difficult. Now, an interesting thing about New Labour cultural policy and this whole business of accessibility is if they actually succeed in doing what they want to do, which is to make the profile of gallery-goers much like the profile of the general population, then corporate interest in sponsoring those shows will disappear I think. MW: But I think there is quite an interesting point here, which is that no matter what our motives are, and obviously no corporation is going to sponsor something which does it no good to sponsor, I don't think one ought to look sceptically at their motives but just see what the outcome is. And I think sometimes the outcome is to provide a great diversity of arts which would not be possible without the sponsorship. And I don't care that it'll improve their image so long they do it. JS: But there are limits to that diversity I think, it's important to say. There are things which corporations don't like to see and those things more and more rarely get seen. MW: Yes, well I dare say that is true. CSS: I'm sceptical of the idea that government is clean money and that corporation money is necessarily dirty money. MW: Absolutely. CSS: Next question from the back. floor: It's not a question it's a comment. CSS: A comment. floor: I'd just like to say that I support strongly the ? of what you're saying, that the idea of corporate money being dirty is I agree slightly dangerous, in that we should look at the people who actually choose the exhibitions and go back from that to government policy. In other words, if an institution at the time (?)an exhibition s worth supporting ? I'm sure you'd probably get people to support it . So the responsibility goes back two layers. And we go right back, like the notion of accountability. And the thing that worries me really is this notion of subject matter in a very ? way. That such and such an exhibition is about such and such. And really the whole notion of contemporary art or visual art, ... is not that direct reference between what something is about and how is it, and the way it functions. And so, in other words, if government policy wasn't about that notion of about, about, about, it would make for slightly ? subject matter. Which actually, even though we make out we're in a very different time, divides(?) the fact that in the last two hundred years of art ... the notion of about, it wasn't about anything it that kind of straight way. CSS: OK, other comments from the floor. floor: I'd just like to take issue with Julian's comment that the state doesn't owe artists a living. I'd like to turn that around and say that artists don't owe that state a social policy. The point of this ... ? ... I don't use the phrase government policy I use the phrase social policy, what I find strange about New Labour is that having given up on trying to work out what is or isn't good culture, they've filled the vacuum with all kinds of performance indicators about ? in society. This is to say that if you have a performance ? ... somehow better right the way through to health, ?tion ... ? actually explain our/them?selves ... ? all their policies to the rest of society ... (can't hear none) So, the questions are liked to the culture because what you're asking really is that public funding for culture is trying to sort out what ... of social policy, as is the practice of culture, in fact, ... So if you're saying that there is a cultural ... ... apathy in cultural funding (?) ... CSS: No, I think you're on the right track in terms of the book, because the book is about whether or not art should be judged as art or whether it should be judged as social policy. That tension now is at the heart of, I think, a lot of the contributions in the book. So, other questions from the front. floor: You seem to suggest that any reasonable country must have money available direct to spend on art as appropriate to that area? And I'd like to ask you to clarify that because that to me suggests that artists had to choose that area of the country that they've lived in according to what art they're making(?). MW: Well I think what I suggest perhaps rather cynically, is that no European country, but the competition is much wider than Europe, its the USA, it's Australia, it's all over the world, can actually afford not to spend money on the arts. So therefore, however mean and money-saving a Chancellor of the Exchequer may be there has actually got to be money spent on the arts. And so there is a supply of money; how much it is will depend on this and that. But I think every government would spend money on the arts. But my view is that as somebody said nobody, the government does not actually have a duty to support individual artists, the artists are not owed a living by government . And anybody who's an artist , I think, has got to be prepared to take risks, including risks of starving in an attic. But I think there's no doubt that any government has got to have this money available to spend on the arts. And the question is how they distribute it. And my thought was that they should distribute it simply to the things that couldn't possibly go on without subsidy, and which are prestigious and which are competitive, like opera houses; And that then they should have an allocated amount of money to put out to smaller organisations who could then receive applications from individual artists, individual choirs ... it would depend, it could be a street theatre, it could be the local 'Messiah' or an exhibition of local artists. But that is much better done at a regional or local level. CSS: There are now lots of hands at the back. Maybe pointing out that there are things called the regional arts boards distributing money regionally as well as nationally. MW: Well I know. CSS: At the back. We'll have the man on the right first. floor: I want to ask Julian, given that art does not and cannot redress grievances, you call them so-called communities out there that have been used ? unrecognised ... but do you think it is actually going because to my mind it's a kind of parasitic relationship where the artist depends absolutely on a ? community, absolutely depends on the existence of a so-called ? community, where government money will be channelled. Now if it is not addressing grievances, which I don't think it can, what is it doing? What do you think it's doing? JS: I think maybe you've misunderstood what I was saying, I perhaps I wasn't clear enough. All I was saying was that the GLC's policy of giving grants to parts of the London population who previously had found it hard to get them, whose voice had not been heard very much within the culture as a whole, was a laudable one, that's all. I don't think the art itself, I mean sometimes it obviously did speak to those issues of exclusion, of prejudice, and so forth and sometimes very eloquently, I guess in that way I would say that it had some role to play in terms of ethics and education perhaps. But the giving of the grants in itself to encourage those voices to come forward I think was a very good thing to do. CSS: We're due to finish at half past, and I'll end by asking if each of the speakers has something they want to say in conclusion, so we'll take two more questions from the floor and then I'll ask the speaker's to respond in turn. OK, the man in the middle. floor: ...tion that art has responsibility, art being asked to do things that it's not supposed to do, in terms of social policy and ... The implication that this art for art (?), it means that what is being made ... criterion, is not good art, is not genuine art. So in ... ... ... artworld, is it possible to be? in the artworld ... . I mean there's always the question that the increasing popularity of art has more to do with fashion that with the art itself. So, I'm sure there are always barriers of ? and great art, but it seems to me that there are more pressing ones than government policy. I mean as ... is perhaps prior problems facing art. And should art be addressing that as well as quite rightly trying to ... government, .... CSS: And we'll have the person next-door, as the final question, or comment, or statement. floor: ... I think I can recognise just quite how ? this government is at facing ... . It means that a lot more ... art than before. Now I agree with ? that art is separate from social justice, and I think in many ways it's the failure of the project of social justice which means they're not being paid for art(?) And the idea that ... more reflective of ... society, ... art museums is a way of deciding ... wider society, which is perhaps ... CSS: OK, that's a good comment to end on from the floor and now, Ken, do you want to say ... KW: Yes, obviously I'm going to get back at the person who mentioned Yeats and Wagner. It's a bit late to regard those as icons of culture at the beginning of the 21st Century, and how culture or arts produced. And, no I would not have given a grant to Yeats but I would have been in favour of giving a grant to the Abbey Theatre for its new writers' programme. And then he would have got there anyway. It's interesting, so much of this reminds me of the debate in the 70s, because in fact I started out life running writers' workshops at Centreprise just up the road at Kingsland High Street, when everybody said that writing was a subject that couldn't be taught: Writers were kind of born. Well, obviously at the Arven ? Foundation and the creative writing course at the University of East Anglia, have shown that in the modern world many artists come into being, not through innate genius or lonely solipsistic creativity, but through the existence of a sympathetic cultural atmosphere and a sympathetic range of cultural institutions that allow them to flourish and to get their work distributed. So my idea of cultural policy is not funding the arts but funding the institutions and the forms of distribution which enable people to flourish as artists. CSS: David. DB: Both the man on my right and the man on my left, Ken and Julian, said they wanted to take issue with some of the things I said but I never actually found what that was that they wanted to take issue with. Actually, I don't think I had any serious disagreement with what Ken said, as he said, I think we were talking about two different subjects. I think I was talking about art and think you were talking about social policy. Well fine. You did say at one point, if an artist receives a government grant, then that might incur certain responsibilities. Then you think hang on a minute, 'certain responsibilities'? The back end of that sentence was a rather enormous statement. If 'certain responsibilities' are having to go into a school and do the odd half day teaching then, that seems like a reasonable responsibility, to do with developing education. But if 'certain responsibilities' are tailoring your work, which I'm sure you're not saying, to fit certain preferred self images of the government then of course it's absolutely absurd. But I realise you're not saying that at all. So as yet I haven't worked out what it is we don't agree about. Which is fine. Julian said briefly that somehow, I thought, in response to what I'd said, that the government doesn't owe artists a living. Well, knock me down with a feather. JS: That wasn't in response to you, David, it was in response to someone in the audience. DB: But as if anyone sitting in the audience has been saying 'That government owes me a living and I'm going to get it.'. Well, I think there's nothing to add to that actually, I'll stop. CSS: Julian. JS: Yeah, that remark was in response to the Yeats and Wagner man. I think that the last speaker from the audience was absolutely right that cultural policy is indeed being asked to do too much. As I said before I'm very sceptical of that. And that those wider struggles over social justice, over equality, over what democracy means too, are far more important. And those are the grounds on which our culture will become more enriched or not. And culture is part of those struggles too and generally not corporate or state sponsored culture. But as I say, those struggles are cultural as well as political. There was something that David again said that struck me, what he was that he found difficult and complex art the art that he found most enriching, and would most often want to go back to and that's true of me too. I'd absolutely agree with that. I just would want to say though, and maybe this is where the grounds of our disagreement is, that aesthetics and all the other things that we talked about are bound up together, so that people like David and me and I guess some of the people here who are fortunate enough to have the time to think about these things, to spend most of our time engaged with that art, who don't have other pressing needs and demands on our time, we are precisely the people for whom that art is most likely to appeal. So there's a kind of elitism and privilege that's bound up in that very appreciation. CSS: So Mary Warnock who had the first words should have the last word and was co-editor of the book. MW: Well, I think I'm going to say again something that I probably said before which is a very very simple point that actually those of you all who are engaged with art as makers of works of art, as people who spend a lot of their life thinking about art, selecting art to hang or look at, actually the most important criteria of what you want to do is to give a deep and irreplaceable kind of pleasure to people. And by pleasure I also include understanding, seeing things with new eyes, all kinds of things which give pleasure which can't be got from any other source except art. So it seems to me that when a government is in danger of slipping into thinking that the reason they could support art is because it has a social purpose, because it does people good, because it brings them together, because it eliminates all kinds of divisiveness in society, when they put those social purposes first they have actually taken a step which is destructive of creativity and imagination. And I believe that we ought to stop that slippery slope down into thinking of art as a socially useful commodity and start thinking of it again as something that is deeply important to individual people wherever and unpredictably it occurs. CSS: So that concludes the formal debate and discussion ... |
