 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | ||||||
 | | | | | | |
Artwash Won’t Wash As the countdown continues to the 2012 Olympics, panic is spreading through the visual arts, and rightly. In any straight contest for state funding, art must be the loser because sport’s public benefits are so much more obvious. Sport is: Art, on the other hand, is: The difficulty of identifying the benefits of art was clearly demonstrated at the government’s spring culture rally at Tate Modern, when the best of our silver-tongued former PM could come up with was this: 'The whole process of stimulation through books, plays, films, works of art; the delight in design, in architecture, in crafts; all of this enlarges a country’s capacity to be reflective, interested and bold. Dynamism in arts and culture therefore creates dynamism in a nation.' QED. (It’s a good job TB became a lawyer, not a scientist.) But dynamism alone, he went on to imply, is not enough. It’s no good the nation running round dynamically in circles - its creative energies must be channelled towards some goal, ideally connected with wealth creation. Never mind that Adam Smith excepted the arts from this demeaning responsibility; in the current politico-economic climate, the ‘creative industries’ are expected to pull their weight. More than their weight, in fact, since – following the demise of British manufacturing – they are now growing faster than the rest of the economy, of which they currently account for 7%. This summer, on the eve of the Blair-Brown handover, the Work Foundation (formerly the Industrial Society) followed with a report suggesting that arts funding should be viewed as ‘investment’ – a word normally implying expectation of some return. Of course in an ideal world, the foundation’s chief executive Will Hutton later explained in the Guardian, it wouldn’t be needed. 'Arguably the best culture is that which passes the market test,' he declared, after mentioning Salman Rushdie, the video game industries and the Beatles, in the same breath, as leading examples of 'creative content in BritainÖ delivered without any public investmentî. Poor Rushdie! That must have hurt more than the fatwah. But what was Hutton actually trying to say? If the examples of creativity he singled out for praise are the ones that contribute to GNP without need of subsidy, where does that leave the ones that don’t? Are we supposed to view these as slow starters which, given proper investment in infrastructure and training, will eventually catch up and pay for themselves? In the fine arts, this seems optimistic – not every art school product is a Damien Hirst. But, as both Hutton and Blair were keen to stress, the creative industries employ 1.8 million people. So even when failing to create wealth, they create jobs. In the fine art sector those jobs may depend on government ‘investment’ but, even so, job creation looks like progress. The artist Tino Sehgal, who trained as a political economist, certainly thinks so. In his March exhibition This Progress at the ICA he explored the notion of the museum as 'some kind of power machine, introducing the idea of progress to citizens. I’m interested to understand what the machine propagates, no matter what I put into it…' he told The Art Newspaper, 'interested in whether there can be progress which is not technological progress. Most technology is counterproductive but we need progress to open up new types of occupations.' He sounds like a man after Hutton’s heart. Let’s ignore, for a moment, the tiresome fact that it’s the old types of occupations now delegated to non-creative migrants that keep progress moving in a forward direction. What, in New Labour terms, are museums for? Are they repositories for objects held in trust for the nation, where citizens can indulge in ‘reflectivity’, or are they power machines driving creative progress? Since the former is unproductive and the latter is a dream, New Labour has come up with a Third Way. The value of new museums is now measured in their regenerative effect on their local communities, regardless of their contents. So we have a situation in which Newcastle can be named in a 2006 Artsworld poll as the arts capital of the UK, with London in ninth place. The danger of assigning a social value to art is that one is mistaken for the other. Of course I don’t dispute the regenerative power of art. Artists are like dung beetles: they move into a shit area, break up the ground and before you know it property prices are soaring and bars are opening on every corner. Art improves the quality of life, but when it’s institutionalised, the quality suffers. The more dynamic arts centres go up, the more dynamic art goes out the window. In ‘creative industries’, as in all others, the trouble starts with bosses who have no experience on the shop floor. Mark Wallinger identified the problem seven years ago in Art for All: Their Policies and Our Culture: 'Unable to codify artistic practice according to the artist’s experience, the burgeoning ranks of plutocrats, bureaucrats and apparatchiks have evolved a vocabulary and practice of Swiftian inversion… The aims of the work have to be pitched like an application for planning permission in a parallel universe.î The result is that public money is wasted on pointless projects like Bob & Roberta Smith’s misnamed Art U Need, launched this spring with backing from the Investing in Communities programme and Arts Council East to 'galvanise communities to regenerate open spaces in the Thames Gateway'. The means employed included a mass tree hug in Basildon, the founding of a monthly Rendezvous Club on Canvey Island and the dedication of a giant fish sculpture in Purfleet. If Thames Gateway is in need of regeneration, there must be better ways of achieving it than this. As Julie Burchill fulminated earlier this year about the £270, 000 spent by Brighton & Hove Council on the Brighton Festival while cutting services: 'I will never understand how anyone who claims to be human can also claim that culture is as important as the basic human requirements of housing, healthcare and education.' Actually, it’s easy to understand; it even makes sound economic sense. Housing, healthcare and education are expensive, and art is cheap. Suffering deprivation? Art will make it better! Show us where it hurts, and we’ll apply some - or better, since you’re a big boy/girl, we’ll play at being interactive and let you do it yourself! Just as global corporations invented greenwash to cover their carbon footprints, regeneration agencies have adopted artwash to cover cracks in the provision of real jobs and services. When the cracks are wide enough the artwash will seep away and, if we’re lucky, the art will be left. Laura Gascoigne | ||||
 | ||||
 | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
Columns | ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
| ||||
Laura Gascoigne All of this site is | ||||
| | | | |