In a recent article for the BBC, the playwright Mark Ravenhill lamented the steep decline in funding for the Arts. He warned that under the current paradigm of austerity economics, funding could disappear altogether over the present decade and that it didn’t matter who won the next general election here in the UK, that all parties were equally committed to the “ideology, and plain wrong mathematics, of austerity”. He then went on to argue that this isn’t necessarily a bad thing for “Art”.
If an artist wants to make a living by their art, they rely on someone paying them for their work – obviously – a publisher, a gallery, a wealthy patron, or an art’s council grant. The danger in this is that the artist will stop being truthful to themselves and their vision, and instead begin to produce work they know they can simply sell. They start writing for “the market” and are less likely to produce work they know is going to suffer an endless round of rejection, or worse actually offend the people holding the purse strings.
It might be said then that only the artist with nothing to lose can be trusted to tell the truth about the world as he sees it. As funding becomes more difficult to obtain, so artists will have less difficulty in being critical of “the system”. Austerity = integrity, and that’s a good thing.
As an independent, unfunded author who gives his fiction away on Feedbooks, it’s easy to see why this struck a chord with me. There’s nothing particularly revolutionary or anarchic about my own work – it’s far too other-worldly for that – but the fact I can self-publish, for nothing is actually a very powerful thing, and if it were in me to be a political or a social agitator, I wouldn’t need to worry about biting the hand that feeds me. It’s the same with blogging – so long as what we bloggers say is within the law we can say what we like. That’s why blogs are powerful – perhaps not in terms of the “celebritification” of the individual blogger, but more importantly, and collectively, as waves of comment and discourse that surge on the blogsphere and which inform general opinion.
The counter argument to this of course is that the artist giving his work away is simply the one who couldn’t find a buyer for it, which is hardly a glowing recommendation for the intellectual and artistic quality of the work. In other words it’s probably rubbish. But art doesn’t have to tell the truth or be “good”, or “clever” to be successful. The most successful art is that produced by an artist who is merely honest to themselves and sincere in what they do. It doesn’t matter then if their vision is debatable, dubious, or just plain wrong, because so long as the art is sufficiently engaging it produces a reaction in the beholder, good or bad, attractive or repulsive, it has served its purpose in inspiring the beholder, even if it’s in completely the opposite direction to the one the artist intended.
So because something is available for free online, we mustn’t assume it has no merit – it can be very open and honest and untainted by “patronage”. Conversely if the art is riding upon an ocean of dollars, like for example the latest Hollywood blockbuster movie, it should make us pause and ask the question: who provides those dollars? We also need to understand that what we’re seeing is something the dollar holder likes. We may like it too, but there may be other art we would like more, but we’ll never see it if the guardians of taste, critical acclaim, political correctness and above all funding, are the ones dictating what we see in the first place.
I don’t like austerity economics either. I think it’s laid a noxious and depressing vapour over the land these past five years. It puts me more in a mind for hunkering down and counting the pennies I’ve got than for striking out, investing those pennies and making a difference in the world. That’s not good, it’s socially destructive, and I fear it will end badly, possibly in political chaos, even in those countries that seem rich enough to avoid the devil-take-the-hindmost collapse of their poorer neighbours.
But the silver lining in this is that we all have a voice now, and nothing to lose by using it. It’s not much, I know, but it’s better than nothing.
The Rivendale Review 
Wonderful thoughts. I don’t know if in the US we’re in an austerity phase or simply have lost our minds, but tattooing is the new art and I’m already tired of looking at it.
Hi Tom,
Thanks. I know what you mean about those tattoos. I’m resisting the temptation to get one done myself. Hope your summer’s going well.
Hi Michael
Another thoughtful blog post (although after careful deliberation, prompted by the previous comment, I have decided against having it tattooed across my chest in gothic style letters – in these straitened times, it would’ve cost too much money). Anyway, on a more serious note, I agree that the emphasis on producing work for “the market” is pretty unhealthy – and self-publishing is a fantastic way of getting around that mindset (especially as it seems to be one that commercial publishers can’t shake off).
But I think arts funding can be a good thing where it allows work to find an audience which the market probably wouldn’t have been prepared to touch. For example, I suspect that very few West End theatres would’ve been prepared to take the risk of staging plays like Michael Frayn’s “Copenhagen” or the recent adaptation of Mark Haddon’s “The Curious Incident of the Dog in the Night Time”, yet both went on to transfer from the National Theatre to the West End – because people who’d been to see them told other people they knew and that created demand where there wasn’t much to start with.
Of course, the danger of spending the money on stuff that the market would be unlikely to take on is that if you’re not careful, you can end up supporting art that is too self-absorbed to really connect with people – and I’m sure there have been plenty of examples of that too. So I’d like to think that austerity would lead to some smarter spending decisions, rather than no spending at all. But now I am sounding like a politician, so I’d probably better stop right there…
Paul
Hi Paul, great to hear from you. You’re right about the arts funding and I think that was the nub of what Mark Ravenhill was saying – austerity leading to a smarter or more critical approach.