Circa 114: Article

Souls-searching and soul-selling: the new accountability in the arts

Within the subsidized arts, important conversations around arts practice, the social value of art and the relationship between art and the public rarely occur except at moments of crisis and then merely as subtext. The ongoing reorganisation of Northern Ireland's public administration has provided the latest field of battle, where, inevitably in an environment where resources are scarce and competition fierce, unresolved ideological and aesthetic concerns have tended once again to become externally - which is to say politically directed - focused on the prize of official recognition in the form of funding.

Organized around the contingencies of conflict management, and bearing an historic legacy of corruption and misrule, Northern Ireland's public sector is currently governed, or, perhaps more accurately, over-governed, through a diffusion of centralized power across an often confusing array of local authorities, voluntary agencies, politically appointed and executive public bodies. Four years on from the Good Friday Agreement, the Northern Ireland Executive launched "a comprehensive and strategic review of all aspects of the public sector" (Review of Public Administration or RPA) in the interests of improving efficiency and cost effectiveness in public-service delivery and enhancing political and financial accountability. ¹ As part of a consultation process, a government review team has been inviting responses from interested parties to proposed structural changes. These proposals are chiefly informed by the idea of a simplified model of public administration, made up of a regional tier, incorporating the assembly, government departments and district authorities, and a second tier comprising local councils, health agencies and other subregional bodies. The proposals also envisage local government as the "bedrock of a reformed and stream-lined public administration," where councils would take on new powers and responsibilities transferred from central government and politically appointed agencies or 'quangos'. Within these new arrangements, the position of independent and executive public bodies remains open to question, with arguments currently ranging from rationalisation and reform to abolition with the transfer of their functions to local or regional government.

The latest round of consultation, focusing on the future role of executive public bodies, such as the Arts Council of Northern Ireland (ACNI), has generated much debate throughout the subsidized arts sector, disclosing once again the complex interplay of motives and concerns, which underpin so much contemporary discussion around arts policy. For beyond an apparent consensus expressed around the need to effect more efficient and rational administrative systems, divert resources away from bureaucracy towards arts practice, and retain arm's length approaches to state subsidy, ACNI has once again come under fire from sections of the arts community for its perceived failure to act as a voice for the arts in Northern Ireland. While there is certainly considerable room for improvement, not least in ACNI's record of resisting political interference and winning financial support for the sector, this criticism surely begs the question, does the arts community, in all its current diversity, have a single, collective voice, and if so, what is it saying?

From the earliest days of formal government intervention, official approaches to the arts have exhibited a fundamental consistency, not only in the privileged status they confer upon art's incidental benefits, but in preferences shown to art forms and practice which appear to uphold official points of view. Public investment in the arts, no less than any other form of patronage, demands successful delivery of specific outcomes and benefits, and in favouring product over process tends to underacknowledge the value and purpose of arts practice in and of itself. Meanwhile, outside the celebrity spotlight, artists generally find themselves at the margins of political interest.

Not to say that political values placed on arts and cultural activities are intrinsically hostile to claims for 'artistic excellence'. On the contrary, in the immediate post war era, national prestige aside, the role of art as an integral element and driver of intellectual or knowledge based culture was understood as justification enough for state subsidy. Indeed, given the failure of the market to deliver these prized public benefits, financial assistance was often, quite logically, channelled towards less popular, even abstruse arts practices, where veneration for the selfless pursuit of excellence chimed with a democratising mission to make the best of the arts available outside of a cultivated and well-heeled clique. The political landscape has since undergone a radical transformation, where cultural policies based on 'value for money', 'sustainability' and 'accountability' reflect wider political intentions to scale down and reorganize public provision under quasi-market disciplines, an environment in which the ambition for human centred progress that established Britain's post war welfare state now seems hopelessly utopian. Disorientated by an increasingly morbid preoccupation with human failure, all sections of political life appear to have rejected the project of social progress in favour of pennypinching control, where, in the words of a recent Arts Council chairman, any sentiment or "vague hope that one day enlightenment might descend" upon the masses, now expresses "an attitude that simply won't do.²

From the mid-1990s, in the context of wider government anxieties around growing levels of political disengagement and social exclusion, official interest has focussed on art forms and practices which claim, as their primary purpose, a desire to involve or connect with the broadest possible public. Following the 1997 UK General Election, the new Secretary of State at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) explicitly defined one of the key values of art and culture as "their ability to provide ways for the people to come together to express their belief in participation in society." In Northern Ireland, in the wake of the 1998 Good Friday Agreement, remarkably similar views have been expressed, often disclosing unanimity between otherwise implacable political enemies. In 2002, DUP councillor Nelson McCausland, former Chair of the Development (Arts) subcommittee at Belfast City Hall, listed "the promotion of cultural diversity, and further exploration of positive images of Belfast" as two key benefits of localized cultural and community activity, ³ a view echoed by his successor, Sinn Féin's Eoin O'Broin. Commenting on Belfast City Council's 2003 Culture and Arts Plan, The Spirit of the City, O'Broin welcomed the proposed shift of "culture to a more central position on the urban regeneration agenda."⁴

Nor has the Arts Council of Northern Ireland been averse to embracing explicitly political agendas, notwithstanding its formal commitment to political independence. In its response to the RPA consultation process, while acknowledging that art is "not always about consumption and audiences," ACNI placed the promotion of "joined up government" at the head of its "vision," while asserting its support for the arts as a contributor to "peace building" and a vehicle for "non threatening" cultural expression.

Fluctuating according to the political preoccupations of the day, official approaches to the subsidized arts, whether militantly instrumental or liberally egalitarian, remain pivotal to the formation of cultural policy. Conversely, in a sector where the space between arts practice and official policy has always been contested, artists have generally recognized and occasionally resisted official requirements to demonstrate the external benefits of their work, over and above freedom to make art. It therefore comes as no surprise that during the latest round of RPA consultation, opposition to political interference was expressed as a key area of shared concern, where even those who opposed each other on the question of abolishing the Arts Council agreed on the need to retain some kind of 'arm's length' agency. Yet, while resistance to external political interference appears to offer the sector the opportunity of organising around a shared position, does this apparent unanimity simply draw attention to an underlying and possibly fatal fracture? For, historically at least, the business of keeping political interests at arm's length has always relied on a defence of artistic freedom, defined through the imposition of aesthetic criteria equal to, if not over and above, questions of social or political relevance. In other words, defending artistic autonomy as the expression and manifestation of individual (or indeed collective) freedom appears by implication to demand a defence of privilege.

Throughout the postwar period, the so called 'arm's length' relationship between the state and state sponsored art evolved as a kind of balancing act, where a self-confident Arts Council appealed to an educative and civilizing mission, entirely dependent on its position as the sole arbiter of cultural excellence within a unified and exclusive sector. Although co-operating with the Treasury, the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB), supported by the prestige of a membership which included such artistic 'luminaries' as Jacob Epstein, Peggy Ashcroft and John Gielgud, remained both unashamedly patrician and doggedly committed to the preservation of "artistic freedom" and "self government for the arts." Meanwhile in Northern Ireland, under the influence of what critic Ian Hill calls a "distinctly tweedy, west-Brit establishment" within the Arts Council NI, government and the arts were enjoying a relationship which was perhaps, not so much 'arm's length', more 'out of sight out of mind', an approach which was to define official arts policy in 'the Province' for much of the following six decades.⁵

In this context, 'arm's length' was sustained not only within a progressive or, in the case of NI, disinterested political climate, but by a widely held, though far from uncontested, belief in the unique quality of great art to transcend the limitations and divisions of everyday life. In 1953, although struggling to define the relationship of art to "the controversies that agitate the market place,"⁶ Clement Greenberg unequivocally lauded the avantgarde movement for being "about itself": "interested above all in solutions to (formal) problems of surface and perspective in painting, of tonality and dissonance in music, of language and depth psychology in literature"⁷ . Yet, in the United States in the era of McCarthyism and Cold War imperialism, is it possible that this apparently conservative identification of art as a "separable sphere of human activity"⁸not only remained consistent with support for radical social and political movements, but, for many on the Left, seemed to provide one of "the last defensible enclaves of political activity and dissent" in an otherwise conformist society?⁹As late as 1978, in spite of prevailing postmodernist challenges around questions of relevance, cultural elitism and even authorship itself, radical playwright David Hare defended artistic autonomy against political interference from both Left and Right with an appeal to the grand narrative of human emancipation. For Hare the function of art was not to proselytise, but to "refresh" our lives "with images, which are not official, not approved; that break what George Orwell called 'the Geneva Conventions of the mind.'"¹⁰

Of course, beyond public attachments to the principle of artistic freedom, the actual business of keeping government interest at arm's length has always required extraordinary levels of pragmatism. At the height of Margaret Thatcher's commitment to the promotion of 'enterprise culture', the ACGB freely appealed for government subsidy in the language of economic development, or as one contemporary commentator called it, "arts as industry talk."¹¹ Today, where so much of contemporary art is community orientated, concerned with extending the terms of public engagement and the development of a 'democratic aesthetic', a skilful administrator can readily discover innate and authentic coincidences between arts practice and the ambitions of public policy, through which funding opportunities may be realised. In other words, even in the subsidized sector, always constrained by the imperative of political favour, where art for art's sake has never really been an option, recognition of external policy objectives need not imply an extension of political partnership let alone abject submission to the deadening embrace of official endorsement. Yet somehow pragmatic approaches to policy guidelines appear to have given way to an unprecedented enthusiasm for political partnerships within the subsidized arts in Britain and Northern Ireland. So much so that sections of the arts community in Northern Ireland lobby long and hard to promote their status as political movers and shakers, bringers of peace, prosperity and progress, while arts initiatives which promote 'culture' as a force to cohere and rebuild civil society often seem so closely in line with the political objectives of the Northern Ireland Act that they could easily be mistaken for operational models. So, when precisely did 'being accountable' shift its meaning from accountability for the allocation of government money to accountability to government itself?

In 2002, 'One Belfast', the city's bid to become European capital of culture, loudly proclaimed the value of public engagement in cultural activities as an essential element in the process of building a shared society. Not content with merely "replacing the peace lines with peace" the bid further promised to "develop bold policies and projects" that would "provide opportunities for dialogue and expression," build "understanding and trust," and "make Belfast a centre for investment as a global cultural destination."¹² The bid was unsuccessful, although its failure may have had more to do with weaknesses within local arts structures than any objection to an excess of political intentions. Meanwhile July 2003 saw the unveiling of "another landmark public art work" in Belfast, the latest in a thirty-piece sculpture trail "connecting people, places and art" and "celebrating the changing face" of the city¹³ 'The Calling', standing fifteen metres above the traffic at the gateway to the city's newly designated 'Cultural Quarter', claims to represent, "positive communication between people and their environment" in the form of two brightly coloured human figures standing on chairs, calling to each other through cupped hands.¹⁴ According to Laganside Corporation, the development agency, which commissioned the work, this "eye catching" structure, designed to glow at night, is "unique, innovative and inspirational" and will "generate a sense of pride and place and encourage further revitalisation of this city centre location."

Whatever its value as a contributor to economic recovery and civic pride, the "unique and innovative" quality of this kind of work is open to question, given the proliferation of 'public art' as an identikit feature of almost every urban renewal programme across the British Isles. From Tyneside to Laganside, from Southwark to Salford Quays, form and quality may vary, but typically each bridge, statue and signature building derives from a set of interchangeable meanings, informed by local political concerns, usually expressed through the new language of connection, reconnection, transformation and renewal. For many critics, the derivative quality of much contemporary public art is a product of the current mania to incorporate commissioning within strategies for social inclusion and economic regeneration, demonstrating once again the increasingly destructive tendency to impose political dogma onto contemporary arts practice.

With their assimilation of political language, and concern to deliver social and economic benefits, documents like One Belfast and art work like the Laganside sculpture trail can be read as simply the latest expression of a new kind of partnership between the subsidized arts and political institutions in Northern Ireland, in which relationships have become more closely defined, contractual and formally stated. Yet given such apparent unanimity between political and artistic interests, it is interesting that controversies over issues of funding allocation, consultation and respect for artistic freedom should continue to afflict relationships within the sector.

While the Arts Council of Northern Ireland finds itself at the eye of the current political storm, many of the arts organisations now calling for its abolition, alongside transfer of its powers to "strong local authorities supporting the arts throughout the region,"¹⁵ were only recently and very noisily taking Belfast City Council to task. In March 2002, following internal reorganisation and amidst a consultation process which lasted nearly two years, Belfast City Council's 'Culture and Arts Unit' controversially switched 20% away from core funding for arts and community arts organisations (principally citycentre based), into a new 'outreach initiative' which would channel direct funding to inner city 'community partners' in designated areas of the city (specifically underresourced wards in the north). This sudden and immediate loss of direct funding at once "plunged the entire (arts) sector into crisis and public protest."¹⁶ North Belfast councillor Eoin O'Broin defended the council's initiative in the name of "democratising the arts," countering sectoral protests with charges of "cultural elitism."

The timing, within days of Imagine Belfast submitting its bid, was disastrous, and yet City Council's position had been made perfectly clear in a draft consultative document published six months earlier. Culture and Arts, the Spirit of the City (2001) had explicitly stated City Council's view of 'culture' as "an expression of identity... and a force for personal and social development." Having redefined 'culture' in terms of its ability to "generate employment and develop the economic infrastructure," "strengthen community networks," "improve general educational levels and provide a pathway to knowledge based institutions," it was surely not unreasonable for local councillors representing deprived inner city wards to demand redistribution of these cultural/ political benefits from the centre to the periphery. ¹⁷

Overlooking the potentially contentious nature of local authority relationships to the arts or appealing for the retention of arm's length approaches to funding while simultaneously demanding greater "political involvement in a partnership-working model," suggests a sector afflicted with either a serious case of memory loss or a dangerous detachment from principle. Or perhaps the confusion is simply indicative of an environment in which artists, arts organisations and policy makers increasingly find themselves uncomfortably close, yet somehow engaged in a form of mutually incomprehensible dialogue.

The ongoing dispute between Factotum and Belfast City Council is symptomatic of both the limitations inherent within close political / cultural partnerships and their potential to generate confusion. Last year, Belfast City Council arts subcommittee passed a vote of censure against Factotum, publishers of The Vacuum, the arts-and-cultural review, after upholding a complaint from a single member of the public concerning 'God' and 'Satan'-themed issues published in June 2004. The basis of the complaint was that the issues contained material which was offensive and in bad taste. Factotum has challenged the Council's position under Human Rights legislation and the case is currently before the courts in Belfast. Less about blasphemy, pornography or artists kicking against conformity, and more about what happens when political and cultural partnerships break down, one of the most striking aspects of the dispute is the sheer inoffensiveness of the contested material, particularly in a cultural context of mainstream TV where 'ordinary couples' have sex on camera, or even compared to the average content of teenage lifestyle magazines and tabloid newspapers. The misunderstanding appears to arise from a widespread acquiescence to cultural policies that reflect an entirely instrumental view of the arts, in which there is an expectation that publicly funded arts and cultural activity, lacking their own internal dynamic or agency, will always reflect community interests and produce specified social benefits. In such a climate, where artists, arts institutions and policymakers appear to talk the same language, being even slightly 'off message' can be enough to get you into hot water. You failed to deliver a 'positive image of the city'? You published material that an individual or community found offensive? These are narrow boundaries, but unfortunately in a prevailing culture of complaint and claims making, the ground is further narrowing, as definitions of what is offensive are stretched to include hurt feelings, being upset, or just feeling uncomfortable.

Why does the arts sector appear so defensive in its relationship to the public? By linking arts practice so closely to external agendas, are artists cutting the ground away beneath their own ambition and purpose? Endlessly claiming public benefit in the face of official incredulity, yet claiming no moral or political agency of their own, do artists become ghostwriters to an increasingly skeptical public? A public who must be courted and flattered but never seriously challenged? In Northern Ireland, where artistic freedoms are increasingly being called into question by the spread of bureaucratic rulemaking, the effect has been to further encourage an orientation away from supporting art on its own terms towards the political imperatives of inclusion and participation. Consequently many arts institutions find their core work subordinated to external agendas which value footfall and the pulling in of new audiences, above aspirations to artistic excellence; the most prized of all new audiences being the category known as "traditional non attenders at arts events." In seeking to connect with this imagined constituency, audience development becomes less about promoting the work artists and arts organisations do, and more about creating new approaches to arts practice that will supposedly make the experience of art more accessible. And yet, if the arts or indeed politics serve no higher purpose than simply to 'connect' with the public, how soon before they are emptied of any intrinsic object or meaning? What's more, if 'relevance' and 'participation' were ever to become dominant features of public did not spontaneously embrace, simply be placed out of bounds? It has, for example, become an orthodoxy among cultural policy makers that "traditional non attenders at arts events," preferring activities, which offer opportunities for participation and social interaction, feel fed up and awkward in art galleries, which offer nothing more than silent space, white walls and endless gazing at inanimate objects. Many go further, accusing galleries of making their audiences feel 'uncomfortable' or even 'threatened' by showing work that lacks relevance to lived experience. Where art might once have been valued in terms of its ability to unsettle and dislocate audiences from the immediacy of here and now, galleries are currently more likely to find themselves under fire for showing 'difficult' work.

Truth is, most speculation on the desires and anxieties of this anonymous mass of people simply reflects the prejudices of very small cultural and political elites. While most in the public sector share a genuine aspiration to open up the arts to wider audiences, the myth of the hostile, disinterested public and the pressure to 'give audiences what they want' simply encourages a lazy, patronising style, which underestimates the intelligence of real individuals and their capacity to enjoy the discovery of new and surprising experiences. Denigration of the audience is perhaps the ugliest expression of contemporary cultural elitism, for any genuine commitment to cultural democracy presupposes belief in an enquiring, conscious and judgemental audience, worthy of respect.

Many of the arts sector's problems around agreeing a direction and purpose for public policy ultimately revolve around unresolved questions of how art should be practiced and its relationship to the public. While the arts community in Northern Ireland is yet to find a single voice, by arguing that the public benefits of art, whatever they may be, are no more than the fruits of arts practice, mightn't it be possible, whatever our differences of approach, to logically defend the practice of art on its own terms?

It is imperative to continue the search for shared positions based on collective interests and secured upon principle, and somehow to pull the ongoing conversation around art's social value and relationship to the public out of the maze of cultural theory, away from the narrow interests of policy makers and off the divisive battleground of competitive public funding. For until artists and arts organisations have begun to seriously address their internal tensions - in a spirit of open enquiry and through clear argument and debate - they should be wary of opening the sector up to further external intervention.

1 http://www.rpani.gov.uk/
2 Gerry Robinson, quoted in Julian Stallabrass, High art lite, Verso, 1999, p.289
3 Belfast City Council seeks to empower local communities with new culture and arts funding, press release, 22 July 2002
4 Quoted Irish Times, Saturday 3 August 2003
5 Ian Hill, 'Arts administration', in M. Carruthers and S. Douds (eds.), Stepping stones, Belfast, Blackstaff Press, 2002
6 Quoted in High Art Lite, op. cit., p.238
7 Jacob Epstein, 'What to do about the arts', in K. Washburn and J. Thornton (eds.), Dumbing down, essays on the stripmining of American culture, New York, 1995
8 F. Frascina, Art, politics and dissent. Aspects of the art left in sixties America, Manchester University Press, 1999, p.108
9 ibid., p.109
10 David Hare, Obedience, struggle and revolt, Faber and Faber, 2005, p.125
11Public Funding for the Arts; the Arts in a State, Adam Smith Institute, 1988
12 One Belfast: imagine Belfast, bid for European City of Culture 2008, published 2002
13 Laganside Corporation spokesperson quoted in the South Belfast News, 11 July 2003
14 South Belfast News, 11 July 2003
15 Arts sector response to the Review of Public Administration, September 2005
16 J. Gray, Variant, Vol.2, No.16, winter 2002
17 Adopting a 'cultural power sharing' approach to arts funding may prove problematic, given Belfast's deep sectarian divisions. Artist Daniel Jewesbury recently addressed the issue of communities appealing to culture as a means of gaining political advantage - "one of the few weapons that doesn't have to be decommissioned." Where political positions are increasingly backed up with appeals to cultural tradition, and where existing political arrangements may encourage an understanding of identity as something culturally, rather than consciously or socially determined, artists are right to raise difficult questions in defence of their independence.

Pauline Hadaway is Director of Belfast Exposed, Belfast.

Reprinted from Circa 114, Winter 2005, pp. 54 - 59