You’ll have had your culture debate?

from the Scottish Left Review

Mark Brown asks what good is a Cultural Commission, when our politicians have yet to truly understand the arts?

The recently completed Cultural Commission report, most of the key proposals of which (such as new administrative and funding bodies for the arts) have been rejected by the Scottish Executive, was (at £600,000) an expensive and needlessly bureaucratic waste of time. We need a far broader, more philosophical debate about the, quite literally, immeasurable value of the arts and a sea change in the way in which politicians consider and make arts policy.

The political climate around the arts in Britain as a whole, and also in Scotland, has long been profoundly philistine. Scottish culture minister Patricia Ferguson also has responsibility for tourism and sport. Her Westminster counterpart Tessa Jowell (who I embarrassingly, if understandably, confused with her Blairite clone Patricia Hewitt on BBC Radio Scotland recently) has a portfolio which takes in not only culture but also media and sport. Tabloid journalists may enjoy calling the pair ‘Ministers for Fun’, but the lack of governmental priority for the arts implied by such broad-ranging departments is obvious. One need only consider the appalling treatment of the Scottish Opera chorus to see that arts funding is viewed as a luxury, an awkward expense which is a drain on health and education spending. It is never seen as an unquantifiable enhancement of people’s lives which is dwarfed by the cost of the nuclear submarines on the Clyde or the war in Iraq.

Even associating the word ‘value’ with the arts takes one into difficult territory. The politicians and bureaucrats demand that the consequences of arts policy be set out and quantified as if they were comparable to policies on public transport or hospital waiting lists. In fact, whilst there may be obvious and observable benefits to Stornoway and Peebles following the opening of their An Lanntair and Eastgate arts centres, the benefits of art works themselves are, and I use this word advisedly and in the broadest possible sense, spiritual. In other words, works of art have no use value. Their purpose and benefit cannot be measured. As the great English playwright Howard Barker says - in response to the question, ‘What use is this play to me?’ - ‘No use at all. If you need help, go to a therapist.’

Those of us who locate our politics in a democratic and anti-authoritarian form of socialism have long argued that a society is only as civilised as the position of its most vulnerable members. We might add that it is only as free, and as democratically mature, as the amount of freedom and resources it is prepared to grant to its artists. A truly mature political system would make arts funding contingent upon nothing other than the pursuit of quality by artists. It would drop the requirement for tangibles, such as national cultural institutions to which government ministers can take the Swedish ambassador, and place a premium on the freedom of the artist. That freedom must include the freedom to fail, the freedom to set the cat among the political pigeons and the freedom to be perplexing and ambiguous.

Uniquely among the recipients of tax payers’ money, artists should be given cash without any prior agreement as to how it is spent. The minute a politician starts demanding to know what the artist does with the money we are entering the realms of cultural prescription, and prescriptions sound the death knell of free art. For example, the recently announced inaugural programme of the National Theatre of Scotland (NTS) includes a piece, by the exciting playwright Anthony Neilson, which currently has no title and, as far as we know, has yet even to have found a conclusive concept in the dramatist’s mind. I take my hat off to NTS artistic director Vicky Featherstone. In regard of Neilson, as well as a number of other areas of her programme, she has subverted the basis of state funding of the arts. Of course, it is true that various, especially national, arts institutions are given money, almost as of right, before they create their programmes. However, imagine if a theatre company had approached the Scottish Arts Council for project funding, saying, ‘Well, it will be written and directed by Anthony Neilson, it has no title and no concept as yet’. I suspect they might have been shown the door as quickly as David McLetchie at a public standards committee meeting.

The argument outlined above covers much of the ground I covered in a recent, short speech to the Federation of Scottish Theatre’s (FST) conference in Pitlochry. Although it was meat and drink to many of the theatre practitioners and administrators in the audience, my position landed me in something of a stramash with fellow panellist Bryan Beattie, the ‘arts consultant’ and former adviser to the Minister for Tourism, Culture and Sport. It was ‘naïve’ and ‘ridiculous’, said Beattie, to talk of arts policy in the terms I had discussed them. It was ‘self-evident’ that our politicians were not philistines. Indeed, artists and advocates for the arts had ‘won the argument’ with the Scottish Executive over the importance of the arts to society. We have, through the Cultural Commission, ‘had the debate’ about the arts, and now we need to move forward, alongside the Scottish Executive, the Arts Council, local government and others, in ironing out and implementing good policy.

It is true that Jack McConnell generated a certain amount of optimism with his ‘arts for all’ speech at Glasgow’s Royal Scottish Academy of Music and Drama in 2003. Yet one swallow doesn’t make a summer. The First Minister was otherwise engaged when the National Theatre of Scotland came to announce its programme on November 2. Tourism, Culture and Sport minister Ferguson gave a, mercifully brief, speech in his stead (before making her excuses and leaving). The historic launch of the NTS was neither important enough to demand an hour or so of McConnell’s time nor of enough significance to keep Ferguson away from the rest of her portfolio for more than half-an-hour. Why did she leave so promptly? Did she have nothing more to say? Was she afraid that if she stayed for the media conference she might be asked a difficult, unanswerable question such as, ‘Minister, what did you last see at the theatre, and what was your opinion of it?’. I suspect the reason was a combination of the two.

Ferguson, who lists ‘photography’ and ‘reading’ as her sole cultural interests in her parliamentary biography, has proved herself to be frighteningly lacking in thought where the arts are concerned. Asked about the difficulties of her three-in-one portfolio by Janice Forsyth on a recent Radio Scotland programme, the minister replied that culture and tourism were a good combination because, ‘we have a lot of cultural tourism’. In her short speech at the NTS launch, Ferguson opined that Scottish theatre ‘punches above its weight’. It was a strange phrase for the minister responsible for the arts to make. Artists and commentators use that phrase to explain that the arts in Scotland manage, often, to create work of extraordinary quality when one considers how low a priority is granted to culture by government. When the minister herself uses the phrase, one can only guess at what she means; or, indeed, if she even knows what she means herself!

There are those who believe that McConnell has systematically rooted out the most intelligent and capable Labour ministers from the Executive, and that culture is simply in the same boat as a number of other policy areas in being lumbered with such an obviously unimpressive minister as Ferguson. Yet, consider her predecessor, Minister for Pies and Having a Half-decent Record Collection, Frank McAveety, and one can see that the arts have not been well served by the Executive. When McAveety was still in post, he was asked on Newsnight Scotland about the role of a national arts company such as Scottish Opera or the new NTS. His immediate reply to Gordon Brewer was, ‘education and outreach’. That, of course, isn’t a considered opinion so much an automatic sound bite. It’s the kind of response that one could train an intelligent monkey to give. Brewer pressed the minister on the question. Hadn’t Westminster culture minister Jowell recently published a paper which argued that the arts are of inherent value in and of themselves, and that they should not have to serve other governmental agendas, such as education and ‘social inclusion’? Wasn’t his ‘education and outreach’ answer going directly against Jowell’s case? McAveety, somewhat perplexingly, insisted that he agreed with everything in Jowell’s pamphlet. When the ministers with responsibility for culture offer us such platitudes and contradictory nonsense, I stand by my accusation of philistinism.

Beattie may assert that I ‘wouldn’t be happy until Vaclav Havel was minister’, but I’d settle for someone who had some genuine passion for and understanding of the arts, and whose portfolio was dedicated to culture alone. If Québec can have a Ministry of Culture and Communications (i.e. the arts, television and radio), why can’t Scotland? Portugal, where the arguments for prioritisation of social spending over arts funding are even greater than they are in Scotland, has its own dedicated Ministry of Culture. The governmental position of the arts in Scotland is an embarrassment by comparison.

The head-to-head between Beattie and I at the FST conference was good knockabout stuff, but it was also indicative of something more significant. Beattie gave voice, in a more articulate and intelligent way than we could reasonably expect of ministers, to a complacency about arts policy which is truly worrying. When he says we’ve ‘had the debate’ through the Cultural Commission’s soundings, he reminds one of the fictional Edinburgh man, who invites you round to his house at 7pm, only to greet you with the words, ‘You’ll have had your tea?’. If the Cultural Commission constitutes a genuine national debate about the arts, we might as well pack up our artistic bag and go home.

Mark Brown is a theatre critic, freelance journalist and teacher.