The art of the state

Sat 07 Nov, 2009

No to official culture, says Jason Walsh

The arts are in trouble. An Bord Snip Nua has the scissors out and the culture sector appears to be ripe for the plucking. (1) Populist cuts to the arts are surely an inevitability in the current climate – but would that really be such a bad thing?

Ireland’s curious combination of corportatism and capitalism (often mistaken for free-market liberalism, for some inexplicable reason) has rarely threatened artists with the chop. Art may not be viewed as having much importance, but it was always funded. The indefensible dole for worthies, Aosdána, for example and curious system by which the artistic eloi pay less tax than the rest of us morlocks should give some indication as to who the state is supporting – and why.

The arts sector is pre-emtively protesting the cuts agenda but on what grounds? It is revealing that much of the debate in centred on culture’s contribution to the economy and not the a prori value of art in its own right. (2) This is a long way from the idea that inspired the foundation of the arts councils and its direct predecessor in Britain, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which was set up in 1940 to help promote high culture to the masses under economist and snob John Maynard Keynes. Today, instead of just being good for society, the arts have to ‘pay their way’ and because they are entirely unable to do so they have to engage in acts of economic legerdemain and intellectual acrobatics that should be an embarrassment to anyone who can count.

The fact is that the ‘cultural economy’ has always been wildly inflated – when the then British culture secretary Chris Smith was busy lauding the value of art to the UK’s economy he failed to point out, for example, that hairdressing was included among cultural activities. But if the arts are unable to make a clear case for their own worth, so too is the state guilty of using culture to pave over the chasms in the economy.

The notion that the economy is no longer driven by old-fashioned productive forces and is now, in fact, a ‘post-material’ economy running purely on ‘knowledge’, ‘ideas’ and ‘creativity’ was a key belief of the boom years not only in Ireland, but across the developed world. Of course, this was nonsense. The number of manual labourers in the world has been increasing in absolute terms – from 247 million in 1960 to 381 million in 1990. Even in the advanced capitalist countries the ‘industrial working class’, though declining relatively, has increased absolutely in size from 159 million to 189 million. Only in three major countries – Britain, France and Italy – has the working class actually shrunk. It therefore comes as no surprise that in these countries we saw the strongest push forward in the ‘post-material’ agenda.

Writing in 1998, before the music industry was decimated by its own stupidity, James Heartfield noted that the ‘Cool Britannia’ narrative so beloved of the government was driven as much by penury and hard labour in place of capital investment as it was by the Britpop phenomenon: “When looking at the billion pound profits of the record industry, creative as the artists might be, [...] it is the humble labour of bauxite miners, Asian oil-workers and English packers the fills the record company’s coffers.

“In November 1996 Polygram Records outsourced the packaging of its compact disks to M&S Packaging, Blackburn. One hundred and eighty workers pack a quarter of a million CDs every day. Shifts are 12 hours long, and packers stand throughout. They must ask permission to use the toilet. Casual workers are paid £3 an hour and permanent staff earn £692pcm gross. When M&S worker Nigel Cook tried to organise a branch of the Transport and General Workers’ Union he was sacked.” (3)

Artistic creativity is all well and good, but it is not the issue at hand – and it never was. Ireland’s lack of industrial development and the failure of capitalists, both native and foreign, to invest in more efficient new technology was disguised by an increase in inefficient labour-intensive employment, from on-site construction to making beds in hotel rooms and cleaning up piss in nursing homes. This fact was handily masked by the narrative of the post-material economy, the twin tracks of which were cultural production and the finance sector. Useful fools, indeed.

Today, the best case scenario from the perspective of the arts ‘sector’ (how guilelessly artists have accepted and promoted the petty economic language of government) is to survive the impending cuts by shedding a few activities and holding on to as much of the handouts as possible. But what about the effect this money has on the arts in the first place?

As artist and writer Daniel Jewesbury recently pointed out in forth, the state is never neutral or apolitical. (4) Even when the state’s agenda appears to be relatively benign – such as with the Garden of Reflection in Kilcooley, County Down, it is in fact a highly-charged, political force. (5) The Kilcooley debacle is interesting for two reasons: firstly, it is an attempt to pave over recent Irish history and local working class identity in the name of processed peace. Secondly, the objections to the loyalist ‘intervention’ (to use the cultural lingo) in the garden imply that a significant section of the population of the North – around 40 per cent, in fact – don’t like loyalist paramilitaries but think that the British army is peachy keen. Clearly, given that they spent thirty years at war with the British army this idea is unlikely, to say the least.

If anyone thinks that the South is not home to cultural politicking, think again. The battleground may not be as obvious as in the North where the demarcation is very much physical and geographical as much as it is intellectual but the South is far from free of the misuse of culture by policy mandarins.

Even the most asinine expressions of public culture are as revealing as they are banal. The uninspiring spire in O’Connell Street simply tells us that officialdom is unable to produce a monument to anything, such is the elite’s confusion over which aspects of our history should be celebrated and which would be better off ignored. We can see the same process at work in the confused response to the state’s reinstatement of the official 1916 celebrations – we don’t really know who we are and we certainly can’t agree on anything of substance. (6)

The entire community arts sector, meanwhile, has either been entirely co-opted by the state in order to disguise massive economic divisions in society or, worse still, it was always a cat’s paw for a political agenda in the first place.

If artists want to be free to do as they please then they must also be free from government diktat – but is this possible when even shaking the hand that feeds, let alone biting it, will inevitably result in starvation? Arguing that the government doesn’t respect the arts is a strange complaint to make when artists have been happily helping the state pursue its agenda for decades, an agenda that had nothing to do with art in the first place.

Jason Walsh is the editor of forth. He has contributed to the Guardian, Irish Times, Irish Examiner, Sunday Times, the Independent (of London), Daily Ireland, the CS Monitor and other newspapers. View his personal website at jasonwalsh.ie.

(1) Cutting the edges from culture, Lenny Antonelli, forth, November 5, 2009
(2) The arts in Ireland: deep cuts and unseen contributions, Heather James, practice.ie, July 20, 2009
(3) Need and Desire in the Post-Material Economy, James Heartfield, Sheffield Hallam University Press, 1998, pp 14-15
(4) Tablets of Ulster’s new covenant, Daniel Jewesbury, forth, October 22, 2009
(5) Ibid
(6) Rising folly, Jason Walsh, the Guardian, April 13, 2006