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Ireland's political and cultural magazine
56March 2015
CULTURE COMMUNITY ARTS
I
N an era of broken systems, from
healthcare to energy to education to
the way the entire economy is struc-
tured , a group of activists and artists in
the USA came together last year to form
the ‘US Department of Arts & Culture’.
They asserted that access to “culture is a
fundamental human right, that creativ-
ity is critical to social imagination; that
new ways have to be found to catalyse art
and culture in the public interest”.
Around the same time the Depart-
ment of Arts, Heritage and the Gaeltacht
announced it would produce a National
Cultural Policy, ‘Culture ’. The Arts
Council committed to publishing a new
Strategic Plan. While “prediction is very
difficult, especially about the future”, to
paraphrase Bohr, it is worth asking how
the issue of using the arts to combat
disadvantage might be integrated into
future arts policy and programmes.
The Joint Oireachtas Committee on
Environment, Culture and the Gaeltacht
recently addressed this very question
in a report. The Committee defined
cultural inclusion as “the right for all
citizens to participate in the nation’s
artistic and cultural life – to enjoy art,
to make art, to participate in decisions
about art”. They noted that the Arts
Council has no specific requirement to
promote social inclusion through the
Arts and that “while there is an implicit
understanding that many organisa-
tions fulfil a very important function in
fostering inclusion, no existing organi-
sation incorporates this aim as one of its
specific objectives”.
Various witnesses to the Committee
gave evidence of the scale of the problem
when it comes to participation of low-in-
come families and communities in the
arts. Arts funding is regressive because
it favours those who are better off. A sub-
stantial amount of revenue for the arts is
generated by the National Lottery and
lottery tickets are bought disproportion-
ately by poorer people, who are missing
in the audiences for publicly funded arts
events.
The Committee want a national policy
by which the arts will be recognised
as a fundamental means of combat-
ing social exclusion and promoting the
well-being and inclusion of disadvan-
taged groups within local communities
and at a national level. They recommend
the establishment of a cross-departmen-
tal committee, chaired by an Assistant
Secretary in the Department of Arts,
Heritage and the Gaeltacht, with appro-
priate research funds, support and
structures to identify barriers that exist
to participation in the arts at community
level by all sectors.
They want a comprehensive study of
the impact of funding through the arts
to combat social disadvantage and pro-
mote social inclusion in advance of any
major policy changes in this area and
the provision of specific funding, or
ring-fencing of a certain percentage of
funding, specifically for projects that
are geared towards combating social
exclusion and bringing the arts to dis-
advantaged groups.
These recommendations and the
concerns that inform them should be
acknowledged by the Department and
by the Arts Council in their respective
policy and strategy. A core challenge is
how to organise participation of disad-
vantaged communities in ways that open
up the whole ecology of the arts.
A recent European study noted that
much “more work is needed from the
demand side” within communities and
this should be “regarded as a vital task
for cultural practitioners”. There are a
number of blind spots which operate
when it comes to participation. These
include that arts institutions focus
more on quality than participation;
community and amateur art is viewed
as being of low quality; economic and
audience development arguments for
culture get too much benediction; and
the instrumental valuing of art and
culture do not nurture public value.
But there is more to community arts
participation than blind spots. There are
ways to re-imagine how to integrate the
culture of the nation into the manner in
which public subsidy operates. The new
duty on the public sector, under the Irish
Human Rights and Equality Commission
Act, should open up new approaches to
protecting and fulfilling cultural rights
and should lead to innovation in using an
equality and cultural rights approach to
policy and programmes in arts and cul-
ture. Resources must be targeted on the
full realisation of cultural rights.
Top-down initiatives must be comple-
mented with publicly funded bottom-up
actions led by civil society. Many artists
and cultural activists are at the forefront
of creative work nested in initiatives
seeking equality and human rights. But
they are not seen or heard. Community
art is a field of practice that must be
given a new status in policy and fund-
ing – at least if arts and culture are to be
for all. •
Culture committee recommend national policy, cross-departmental committee and
study, on how arts can combat social disadvantage. By Ed Carroll
Reducing the arts’ regressivesness
More work
is needed on
demand for
the arts from
Communities
“
March 2015 57
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