The Arts - Part of the Problem

54 — village July - August 2012

The Arts

- Part

of the

Problem

Most spending on

the arts - apart from

community arts -

does nothing for the

disadvantaged

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MAGINATION and its armature of artists

and non-artists can be mobilised to re-in-

vest and re-set our sovereignty. Precisely

because Ireland has failed we can carefully

recalibrate the public value of art and culture to

reunite the broken circuitry between people and

political processes. In 1877 we established our

ﬁrst national cultural institutions. In 1951 we

established an independent Arts Council. Today,

we have an opportunity to use the armature of

arts and culture to recover a new experience of

sovereignty.

To achieve this the dominant economic forms

of art and culture have to acknowledge they are

part of the problem. Art and culture have never

been neutral. This can be evidenced in the share of

the art’s cake that goes to the ‘haves’ and the share

that goes to the ‘have-nots’. Access and participa-

tion in arts and culture by groups experiencing

disadvantage has decreased over the last decade.

The consensus around the public value of art and

culture has broken down and many ordinary peo-

ple feel dislocated from ‘oﬃcial arts’.

Witness-statements to the 2012 Dáil

Committee on Arts and Disadvantage provide

evidence of this. Mary Nash, of the Department

of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht, commented:

“There are people who are almost proud to say

they have nothing to do with the arts”. Liz Meaney,

of the Cork City Council Arts Oﬃce, suggested:

“Large swathes of our society do not engage

because they do not believe that they have a

right to the State’s resources”. Orlaith McBride,

Director of the Arts Council, reported: “Signiﬁcant

groups of people remain excluded from artistic

and cultural life”.

During the same public session, Senator

Fiach MacConghail from The National Theatre

questioned the Arts Council about one of its rec-

ommendations for social inclusion to encompass

the arts. He asked: Is that really its position? Is it

really something it should be doing? MacConghail

touched upon something symptomatic of the

problem with the management of the arts in

Ireland. There is a gulf between policy thinking

and state action in terms of low levels of partic-

ipation. When it comes to public spending, we

have no data to indicate the contribution made

by the Arts towards making exclusion and pov-

erty impossible.

A US project called ‘Animating Democracy’

supported 36 organisations engaging arts and

culture to enhance civic dialogue. Arts-based civic

dialogue “brought forward new voices, empower-

ing disenfranchised groups and providing access

to public dialogue and decision-making processes

to people who had never before felt a welcoming

entry point”.

Although we have amazing projects operating

on the ground there is no requirement to measure

the impact of arts spending by local authorities,

national cultural institutions and the Arts Council.

What knowledge we do have is striking. In 2010,

the Arts Council received €68 million of which

just over €65 million came from the National

Lottery. This revenue is gathered disproportion-

ately from lower socio-economic groups. The

available data indicate strongly that the substan-

tial public money spent on the arts is regressive,

meaning it is a transfer of resources from the less

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well-oﬀ to the better-oﬀ.

People with lower levels of educational attain-

ment, social class and income are many times less

likely to attend a range of arts events. People over

45 are much more likely to attend no arts events.

There is, however, a lack of centrally-held data.

This means that up-to-date information on who

needs to be targeted to take part in the arts does

not exist. Policies cannot, therefore, be properly

evaluated for their eﬀectiveness.

There is no evidence, when it comes to deci-

sion-making on public funding of the arts by

existing Arts Council members or oﬃcers of

local authorities, whether such decisions eﬀect

greater engagement with the arts by disadvan-

taged groups in urban or rural areas. It would

be very helpful to liberate our managers of the

Arts to answer some straight questions: What has

worked in the area of art and disadvantage? What

has failed? How can we be more criti-

cal and make improvements?

Of course, no artist requires per-

mission to write a poem, but there are

obligations, never adequately ﬁxed

by manifesto or handbook, formed

through conversations that spindle

between the creative bench and the

society.

Such conversations drive art-

ists like Séamus McGuinness in his

‘Lived Lives Project’ with families who

have lost loved ones to suicide and

Ailbhe Murphy in her ‘Tower Songs

Project’ about the collective memory

and experience of a number of Dublin

communities as they make the transi-

tion from tower-block living.

Much of the rhetoric of research designates

disadvantaged families and communities as dam-

aged and deﬁcient. The community-arts work of

Blue Drum and Family Resource Centres oper-

ates far beyond the horizon of damage-limitation.

Family Resource Centres from Tacú in Ballinrobe

to Fatima Mansions in Dublin report that com-

munity arts groups are tactically unsurpassed as

ways to engage and work with families experienc-

ing exclusion.

In its essence community arts is about repre-

sentations, oral traditions, performing and visual

arts practices, social practices, rituals and events.

Community arts include instruments, objects,

artefacts, and cultural spaces that communities

mark as their own. Community arts

take the courage of speciﬁc commu-

nities and artists who work against

the odds of what is validated, pop-

ular or proﬁtable. That is why such

practices appear on the radar of the

oﬃcial culture long after their cultur-

ing in communities, if at all.

There is a need for a cultural

rights framework. This would have a

capacity to foster many positive out-

comes: self-expression, self-esteem,

creativity, empathy, civic participa-

tion and a whole raft of other vital

and necessary human responses that

lead to real citizenship, participation

and change in a society.

A cultural rights framework

would advocate for systems to take account of the

human person, especially of those voices unheard

in our society. Such a framework might dare to

imagine that this state will make homelessness,

household poverty, long-term unemployment,

and child poverty impossible.

A new public valuing of art and culture will

resist a taboo-centred orientation in favour of

the resilience of practices that celebrate family

and community sovereignty in Ireland today. Such

practices ask: What is a good society? How do the

public value art and culture? How can poor fami-

lies and communities beneﬁt?

Ed Carroll is Director of Blue Drum

People with

lower levels of

educational

attainment,

social class

and income

are many

times less

likely to attend

a range of arts

events