I know Harry McAvinchey has blogged on this already but I feel I must toss in my thruppence-worth. I was listening to Talk Back (yes I should get out more) a couple of days back and it consisted of a lot of local artists lamenting the cut in their funding from the Arts Council. Blackstaff Press, for example, which published my first two books, had all – ALL – of its funding cut. And all sorts of other arts projects, such as those associated with the playwright Martin Lynch have suffered heavily and have had to lay people off.
My instinctive reaction is to join them in their disappointment and despair. The arts are an important part of our lives and help to keep us civilized (well, semi-civilised). But then the thought crossed my mind: why do we always assume that the government should give money to the arts? Easy, you may say: that’s because the arts can’t survive without subsidy. Which prompts the next question: why not? And the answer is, because people aren’t sufficiently keen on the arts to pay out to experience them.
But I just said the arts are what help keep us civilised. Right. But most people don’t see it that way – they’ve other things they’d rather do. People of very limited means will pay to play bingo, or buy cigarettes, or buy a telly; but they won’t pay to see a play, go to an art gallery, attend a symphony concert. The truth is, much of the arts bore people. And there are two reasons for that.
One is that we’re not properly educated as to what the arts can do for us. Forms of the arts – music, art, drama, literature – are taught in schools, but not so that children may fall in love with the arts, but so that they may be successful in exams – a different thing.
The second – and this no one seems prepared to admit – much of what is offered as art is second, third, fourth rate. A good rule of thumb is, the more the artist acts artistic, the higher the chances his/her work is rubbish. Not many of us want to point to a painting or go to a play and come out and say “What a load of bollocks!” Because that might suggest we’re coarse souls, incapable of appreciating the beautiful and the true.
Whatever the reason, the arts haven’t sufficient appeal for most people, they don’t bother with them. And yet some of the greatest artists – Shakespeare, Keats, Shaw, Picasso – weren’t in receipt of government subsidies. Yet millions of people enjoy their art. Would it be asking too much that artists should produce work sufficiently attractive that it can stand on its own financial hind legs?
Fill Arís
“…Ó buaileadh Cath Chionn tSáile/…Shelley, Keats, is Shakespeare:…”
Shakespeare, Keats, Shaw, Picasso are oft cited as vehicles for the transmission of culture. Irish writers and poets such as Máirtín Ó Cadhain, Padraic Ó Conaire, Nuala Ní Dhomhnaill, Seán Ó Ríordáin et al to name but a few, seldom feature in our two door vehicle of culture.
Why not Tolstoy instead of Keats? Why not Kahlil Gibran instead of Shelley? Gibran’s work questions many assumptions about the education of children.
“You may give then your love but not your thoughts…”
Why not Xin You instead of Shakespeare?
“…he cursed the name of conscience/He cursed the dark nights/and the men and the things as dark as those nights.”
Many African writers are critical of colonisation and specifically the colonisation of minds. They discuss the manner in which physical violence in battles was followed by psychological violence in the classroom. Unfortunately in Ireland physical and psychological violence were the hallmarks for what passed as teaching practice.
There is no place for xenophobia in any society which prides itself in its relations and perceptions of other cultures. A fear of losing identity, aggression and a desire to eliminate a perceived foreign culture to secure a presumed authentic identity, resulted in death and destruction in this deeply divided country. Poets, writers, actors, musicians and artists help challenge illusions and irrational fears. There is money for G 8 summits, guns bombs and wars. Will we ever learn?
Well put, Iolar. But you’ve touched on a real hobby-horse of mine: cultural imperialism. Hollywood rules the world. When we were wee boys, we played cowboys and Indians. Looking back, it seems more than just playground stuff. And rock and roll, which I love, is quintessentially American. So what are people with Irish accents doing singing in American accents? Aping the gentry?
Keats reviled the policy of the British Government on Ireland, “…the song of Erin, pierced and Saddened…”, Shelley went further and came over to Ireland across a gale heaving Irish Sea swell to Dublin, where on renting accommodation, he and his fiancée proceeded to fling proclamations calling for Catholic Emancipation out the window of their lodgings(he kept quiet the fact that he viewed Catholicism as part of the problem in Ireland via an invertebrate church, and the fact that he was an Atheist anyway who despised religion as a stifling effect on potentially radical sensibilities) and continued to hand them out with evangelical zeal among the Dublin populace calling for a Rising.Given this was only ten years after the execution of Robert Emmet, he took on an immensely risky project. His calculation was to stir up revolt against an oppressive British Empire by all and any subject to its Iron Fisted exploitative injustice. He was followed to Wales by Government spies where his Irish aid was incarcerated, ab an attempt purportedly made in Shelly’s life also.
The two examples above Iolar should be lauded as honorary Irishmen at least, and of course great humanists in the greater still picture…
Should a sculptor seek to put an artistic likeness in place of the lickspittle O Connell in the Capital, and replace Carson in the North with Keats, the subscriptions for the project should be mandatorily obtained if that is what would be required. That such luminaries and their enriching Art does not receive the prominence merited, may need subsidies to properly promote…
Whatever the reason, the arts haven’t sufficient appeal for most people, they don’t bother with them. And yet some of the greatest artists – Shakespeare, Keats, Shaw, Picasso – weren’t in receipt of government subsidies. Yet millions of people enjoy their art. Would it be asking too much that artists should produce work sufficiently attractive that it can stand on its own financial hind legs?
Sorry Jude I think your wrong on that last point I believe Shakespeare was sponsored by Lord Southampton who was part off Queen Elizabeth’s govt.I love art and the Govt. should be more and willing to invest in it because it enriches the country. Following on from your argument if artists cant create art that impresses people they shouldn’t get a grant what about those people who refuse to work should they get money why should people subsidize them?
Ah now neill…I agree with you in part. I know Shakespeare (but not Keats) and many other great artists were subsidised by big shots (although that is different from the public paying). I just get a bit twitchy at the idea that if it’s described as art, it must be deserving of support. Some stuff that postures as art is …let me not mince my words …shit. As are some who see themselves as artists. But as PJD pointed out, if high art is subsidised, why not football? I’m a bit conflicted, as they say, on this one: I agree the arts are vital for a fully human existence; but I also think that really great art is accessible, and if it’s accessible and great, people will want to consume it, so to say. I just think that some art, which appeals to a very tiny minority, enjoys huge public handouts. I’m not sure I’m happy with that.
I agree Neill, and further would argue that that culture that has the potential to enrich us all immensely, needs assistance lest it wane and wilt, impoverishing us all. A different approach in our schools may promote this vibrant potential as the vehicle for participial enrichment, which could in the future lead to our collective enrichment as a Society.
One senses, Esteemed Blogmeister, that in matters of the arts, the end really does justify the means.
In others words, it doesn’t really matter whether the artist is stoney broke or in receipt of a fat subsidy with the stipulation that he is not a phoney, if the end product is sufficiently good enough to stand on its own hind legs.
You mention Shakespeare. He was the ventriloquist who put into the mouth of Hamlet when addressing the strolling players one of the most acute observations on the artist and his public :
-Though it make the unskillful laugh but make the judicious grieve, the censure of the which one must in your allowance o’erweigh a whole theatre of others’.
Even if it doesn’t in the end, butter any parsing or analysis, It could have been addressed with Woody Allen in mind. The finest movie maker of his generation has had to emigrate to find the moola to make it possible for him to transfer his genius to the screen.
In the USA of course, the great new art form of the 20th C, is a cut-throat commercial business and amidst the vast prairies of schlock as a result of the humungous amount of dead presidents dumped in its direction, nonetheless a in the process, a justifiable variety of sublime prairie flowers have down through the years blowwomed forth in the motion picture houses. of the globe.
Many still bearing the signature of Woody Allen. Not even the wooden-hearted mussy dens of the Dworkin Class could prevent him from doing what he had to do. And they don’t come much more cut-throat that those Mamma Mias.The sows, as they say,who eat their own farrow and like nothing better than to knock on wood..
And as The Wood moved from Barcelona to London to Rome and back to London, indifferently clocking up the air miles on Genius Air no doubt the words of his hero Groucho Marx came to mind to comfort him: ”They say Allen got something from the Marx Brothers. He got nothing. Maybe twenty years ago he might have been inspired. Today he’s an original.The best, the funniest’.
It would be difficult to imagine a better example of the principle first enunciated by Hamlet.
Speaking of Fanny Power, a persuasive argument in favour of patrornage is Turlough O’Carolan. If the blind harper from Nobber was not as adept at plucking the heartstrings of
the Big Knobs in the Country Houses as he was at plucking the harpstrings of his instrument would we today have the pleasure of lending an ear to the eponymous Planxty F.P.?
Incidentally,as T’OC could barely speak English (a characteristic, curiously enough, of many Roayl Meath folk to this very day) only one of his credited 214 songs was composed in the Queen’s E. Wow ! Toirdhealbhach O Ceabrhallain scarcely qualifies as Irish at all at all by today’s contemporary cosmopolitan standards. Bubble-wrap shoneens would possibly find it difficult to stand, erm, shoulder to shoulder with him.
Equally so, a persuasive argument against the value of artistic patronage might be made by the list of names to be found in receipt of Arts Council Grants, certainly south of the Black Pig’s Dyke.
In the membership of Aos Dana (which is leprechaun for The Backscratchers Union) one finds that Instead of planxty we get angsty,lots and lots of angsty,
With two or three inexplicable exceptions this is a self-perpetuating cabal of humourless cnuas-receivers. All of whom almost are card-carrying members of the Precious McKenzie School of Weightlfting Art. Which is defined by diminutive types with inflated reputations who are so weighed down with the barbell burden of creativity they have precious little to show for their cnuas of cnuasanna. At the end of the d., going forward,
At the apex of this Pyramid Scheme we find the select number of, erm, Saoi. Saoi? More like Eyeless in Gaza, featuring grand mummy characters like M. Luch and Minnie the Sphinx..
Maybe, Old Onkel Dorf had a point when he pronounced Decadent Art with a Dreck.
There was no such thing as government subsidies in Shakespeare’s or Keat’s time. There were however patrons which were usually rich and powerful men. But then government for the people came and the normal person was able to afford to enjoy art not just a tiny rich elite in the big house. Moreover I suspect that both Shaw and Picasso may well have been in receipt of government funding. Were most of Picasso’s works not bought by musuems and are they not held in public ownership? And I’m sure that Shaw being a socialist would have prefered to see art for all the people rather than art for the big house.
Most of the great artists were subsidised: in the good old days by a wealthy benefactor.
Shakespeare is a case in point. In fact Will got state subsidies from HRH Queen Elizabeth I (God bless her!).
As the wealthy have got wealthier & meaner, the state has had to step in. Now the wealthy may have to step in again. But I doubt they will. There is a meanness of spirit among most of the moneyed class now which sneers at the starving artist and refuses to see their worth.
“Get a proper job, you tosser!” and such like is the frequent refrain.
So I fear artists will turn to crime in the absence of any subsidies. The thought of being mugged by a artist working mostly in pyrotechnics doesn’t bear thinking about.
I haven’t seen details of all the cuts , but would you be annoyed if Arts Council funding to Feile an Phobail was reduced substantially ?
Virginia loves the “Arts” from Northern Ireland, Game of Thrones is her favourite. She pays a rather enormous sum to watch this NI product.