Here's the text of my talk from the Euclid 'Creative Europe in a time of Austerity' conference on 9 May, minus one or two tiny wisecracks and wanderings.
‘We have come here today to
be plural.’ That’s a line from a poem by the American poet Bob Perelman, a poem he wrote, I think, during the era of
Reagonomics. When Geoffrey asked me to talk at this conference, it was echoing
around my head because I’d been thinking of its application to my work in
developing people and organisations and sectors, facilitating conversations, planning
and evaluating, and to this idea I’ve writing about of adaptive resilience.
To put it
simply I have become more and become convinced that the creative diversity of
approach, opinions and even values, within our shared purpose as a cultural
sector, is the key thing we need to protect and develop most vigorously, and
that even strong but essentially monocultural ‘efficiency’ based arguments
about what we should be or how we should act, could be damaging in their
illusions of comfort and return. One size cannot fit all till we’re all the
same shape.
I want to
talk about today a diverse and holistic sense of cultural values in the
specific context of austerity that this conference has as its focus. I want to
suggest some things that we might do at a sectoral level to ease this harsh
passage.
I’d like to
start with a few words about what austerity might mean. Austerity in the UK has
tended to not simply squeeze public spending, but to add to the privatization
of public and communal life – via a new wave of sell-offs, but also by shifting
the burden to individuals, either directly or indirectly. Society will carry
what we as individuals choose to afford to carry, is the implication. The rest
we will shift into the ‘Fundraising’ budget line and hope for the best. We
might point to things as seemingly different as food banks, free schools and fees
or the lack of them for artists as three manifestations of this, just to mention
things beginning with F.
There are a
number of implication of Austerity UK of particular significance for the
cultural sector:
Firstly,
a reduction in public investment coupled with an emphasis on economic cost benefit
analysis, volunteering and philanthropic or community-focused giving of time or
money, leading to some winners, most working ever harder and some losing out.
Secondly,
a reduction in disposable incomes after 35 years of growth – with ONS saying a
drop of 4% for middle income families in last 9 years. Interestingly audiences
seem to be holding up – suggesting those that can afford it, need and want culture
as much as ever.
Thirdly,
stemming from the first two, and perhaps most profoundly, widening inequalities
between the rich, the poor and the average can be seen in society.
Why do I
say, ‘perhaps most profoundly’ when many in our sector have historically proven
extremely good at ignoring issues of inequality? Because the role of the
cultural sector in making distinctions of class, power and privilege felt and
concrete , in who gets to be an artist or creative, and who takes part as
audience – and paradoxically in combatting those distinctions – is increasingly
recognized, and policy and pragmatics may shift us in ways which will have
profound long-term effects. We know the subsidized arts are enjoyed by people
of all kinds, but disproportionately by the better off and the better educated.
We know many people still feel excluded from arts and culture, despite our best
efforts. We also know a huge share of public funding goes to national art-form
history-preserving institutions, almost exclusively in London, with readier
access to big business sponsors and wealthy philanthropists. Regional and
artist-led infrastructure is inevitably filed under the proverbial ‘difficult
decisions’. Even the arguments put forward for the economic benefits of the
arts tend to underline the awkward truth of ‘them that’s got shall get / them
that’s not shall lose.’ War Horse
becomes an argument for funding the National, not for funding emerging novelists.
We need to
respond to Austerity in ways that lessen inequality. We need, I want to
suggest, to look to our cultural values, and what we might do with them.
I have been
involved with some work with Mission Models Money, nef and Exchange[1],
a group of performing arts organisations in Newcastle Gateshead which aims to
start some arguments about culture in a sustainable economy and the role of
artists within that. This included a literature review of ways of measuring
cultural value, and workshops with artists and arts workers to identify
interventions that would provide better and more sustainable livelihoods for
artists, within a cultural ecology that was not eating itself, or contributing
to a wider unsustainable and damaging growth agenda.
Attempting
to review the cases made for and against different definitions of the value of
culture as I did, is likely to leave the reader with a constant feeling of déjà
vu lodged in the memory span of a goldfish, or as if in an unlikely cultural
policy remake of HG Well’s The Time Machine, with policies and reports flying around
you as you hurtle through in time. Austerity does not yet appear to have
changed the basic terms of the discussion. (Indeed, in much of the debate you
would think austerity did not exist except in arts funding budgets, but that’s
another argument.)
See-saw Bench by Chien-Chin Wang / Tien-Chi
Chao / Yen-Ting Lin
The
cultural value debate too often operates on a binary system focused on its own
workings. It is like sitting on this bench, which is also a seesaw. Kind of
fun, kind of annoying, all right if you’re on your own (in which case you
imagine it’s not a seesaw.) But you are always liable to be jolted if someone
heavy sits on the other end, or a gang of thin people with power on their side
arrive.
These
tensions can be presented as binaries, but they are usually present in some
combination, rather than exclusively one or the other. Individual benefit or
community benefit? Innovation or the continuation of heritage and tradition?
Intrinsic and autonomous or instrumental and useful? A profession or priesthood
or activity for amateurs too? A way to differentiate yourself from others or to
join with diverse but like-minded people? These binaries fight it out
repeatedly. Too often that seesaw argument looks more like this to people not
involved – a more uncomfortable bench to try and sit upon with others.
But like a
seesaw, cultural value and artistic practice are energised by such tensions.
The most exciting work is exciting because of it combines things that are hard
to combine or to balance. That’s a great thing about culture: it can do more
than one thing at once.
Powerful
examples of this can perhaps be found in arts and education. Perhaps the most
iconic example El Sistema and its UK siblings ‘In Harmony’ and Big Noise, where
the affects of poverty and exclusion – and of Austerity – are integrated with a
disciplined and inclusive emphasis on the highest musical standards possible.
These suggest we cannot properly make ourselves resilient if we do not address
the lived experiences of those we work with and for.
It is
unhelpful to suggest that culture is one thing which acts in similar ways in
everything it does universally, or that our businesses can work in the same
way. The diversity of intentions, values and outcomes must be respected. We
don’t need a seesaw, or institutional arm-wrestling: we need a bench more like
this: –a holistic sense of what we could be, and a holistic circle of values
and conversation that expresses our shared purpose.
Circular bench, Chris Kabeb
These then
relate to the different values that people think arts and culture generates.
Our research and conversation with artists describes how there are six elements
found consistently:
Personal Development: the stories and images people take
to their hearts and minds, in delight, bafflement, joy, anger and emotion, learning,
expansion of perception, creation of awareness, empathy
can become
an integral element of their
Well-Being: cultural activity has a role for many here,
be that raising spirits, connecting to family, friends and community,
stimulation, or indeed income..
Social Capital develops symbiotically with our
individual well-being and development: building connections between people and the
shared social norms that enable us to work and live together productively.
Culture does this both physically, in venues and at festivals, for instance,
but also intellectually and across time and space. It creates new norms. Some
argue that the creation of interdependencies
- the heart of social capital - is also at the heart of cultural development, which
is why it is arguably an Anti-Austerity activity and enables the building of
Cultural Capital: The ability and propensity of people to take
part in cultural activity, and for others to build the ways that make that
possible – from libraries to theatres etc.
The
artists, organisations and audiences for culture create the …
Economic impact: and ultimately even the
Community Sustainability without which none of this can be
genuinely long-lasting.
Using this
whole spectrum, Culture stops being simple and single and becomes plural. No
longer simply a pretext for the spending and circulation of money. Neither
simply a pretext for the circulation of ideas, arguments or dilemmas. It stops being
simply wonderfully useless beauty. It stops being simply a self-referential
game of charades, dare or the dozens. It stops being simply personal catharsis,
therapy or entertaining distraction, or social occasion for meeting friends and
neighbours, family, lovers and potential lovers. It starts to seek its role in,
well, what poet John Berryman called ‘the whole business…vague, over-claiming
and crude as it seems.’ ‘The whole
business’ – actually a useful and productive pun for our context.
Raising the
stakes, it seems to me, is perhaps our most practical cultural response to
Austerity. To reject any funneling, no matter how inadvertent, towards an ever
more privileged audience – which could fatally break that circle of possible
values in two - we have to think big not binary, plural not simple or single.
But what
might this look like? I want to conclude by thinking about one aspect of this.
As part of
the Exchange project, The Art of Living
Dangerously, we identified a general lack of attention to the specific role
of emergent and established individual artists in most models of cultural value
and of resilience, except as the inhabitants of centres, studios and organisations.
Artists felt that often the building-based infrastructure neither understood
nor supported their needs as well as possible, meaning they could contribute
less artistically, socially or economically. We looked at work done by DFID in
developing a framework for sustainable livelihoods, mainly applied in
developing countries, which seemed to suggest ways forward.
The model, which has informed sector development in Canada, building on
work by Judi Piggot, defines 5 kinds of ‘capital’ that make up the assets upon
which people can develop livelihoods:
·
Human
capital: skills, knowledge, health
·
Natural
capital: land, natural resources, environmental health
·
Financial
capital: savings, income, borrowing
·
Social
capital: networks and beneficial relationships
·
Physical
capital: infrastructure, buildings, equipment, energy.
Some of
these we have defined for us, others we can build, others we share access with
others.
That we
must – if our future is to grasp the challenges of climate change and the need
for a transition to a more sensible
way of living – think of our activity as developing sustainable uses of those 5
capitals in the context of society, not just that sub-set of our activities
called the economy or that other subset (to say larger or smaller would open
another debate) called Culture, is key. There is no point growing your
financial capital if you destroy your physical capital (be it environment or
body) in the process. As philosopher Michael Sandel has argued ‘We have drifted
from having a market economy, to being a market society’. We must
avoid this happening within the cultural sector, by emphasizing the values of long-term
productivity, diversity and inclusion rather than those of productivity and
surplus.
Monocultures
can be highly productive – for a while. Land used to grow cotton or broccoli as
in the photo, gradually uses up the nutrients that made it so highly productive
in the first place. We are at risk of doing the same to our key nutrients –
artists and diverse audiences – if we let our policy responses to Austerity be
constrained to Philanthropy, Squeezing Budgets and Reducing Dependency on
Public Funds. I came across two
statistics just recently that may be early signs of this.
The most recent Arts Council RFO data suggest that for the first time the
sector spent more on ‘Raising funds’ than on ‘Marketing’. There may be
statistical quirks, or urgent cases, but that cannot be healthy in the
long-term – for use to devote more resources to chasing grants than to
attracting people to our work?
Another
figure in the new Arts Council economic impact report by CEBR hit me – that full-time earnings
have risen by 6.8% in the last five years, whilst part-time earnings –
freelancers and artists often, one might surmise had decreased by 5.3%. Are we
squeezing our key nutrients – and widening inequality in our own sector?
There are,
however, other ways – a kind of permaculture, as in this photo, if I may be
forgiven a pun as a way of introducing a more cheerful photo to end on. The Art of Living Dangerously will argue
there are 3 key areas where people across the sector can work together.
Firstly: we
need to jointly develop approaches that sustain livelihoods by maximising use
of those 5 capitals. This might be through initiatives such as Time Banks – as
done by CVAN, building on the Leeds
Creative Timebank
pilot – through networks such as What Next, or through arts-led initiatives
that include promotion of work, such as Without
Walls, or by
sharing expertise via things such as CultureHive. We need to share experience and
knowledge, especially as people enter the sector as, for instance, is done by
a-n’s Artists Talking blogs and numerous ‘in real life’
meet ups.
Secondly:
we need to pool our risks. This might be in the shape of collaborative working,
of which there are many, many examples. Juice Festival is one I have worked closely with,
identifying that joint working had practical benefits, but also helped shaped new
understanding and skills. In a period where the CPD budget line is sacrificed
to Austerity, simply working with others may help protect actual professional
development. The collaborative projects being funded under Arts Council’s
Catalyst scheme will be informative case studies. Joint use of different
funding remains an aspiration.
Finally, we
need to use our spaces to their full extent and with all our creativity,
opening them up to as many different people as possible, from the youth theatre
to the Entrepreneurs Forum. We have fantastic assets from the period before
Austerity, in a generation of buildings funded by lottery, EU, local government
and others. Truth be told, some are sometimes under-used. Every venue should
have a scheme similar to Northern Stage’s Spare Room, providing free last-minute access
to unused spaces to individual or groups. Every arts centre should have a
scheme like Arc’s Arcade for performing artists, supporting scratch
nights, workshops with visiting groups, facilities. You will know of many other
examples.
We need,
therefore, and to conclude, to let no space, asset, idea or knowledge go unused
in our becoming plural.
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