cultural funding
Back in 1990 just as a recession was beginning to bite I completed a course in print and publishing and started applying for jobs. Publishing traditionally suffers very quickly from any contraction in the economy, and at the same time was beginning to adopt new technologies in production. With no useable experience of computers, no work history, and living in North Yorkshire meaning I would have to relocate for any job I was at a major disadvantage.
But this isn't a story about me. Well, not much. Culturally at the same time there were interesting things going on. Adult comics like Crisis, Deadline and Revolver showed that there was life for comics beyond superheroes/war stories/kid's stuff/sf. Derek Jarman, Peter Greenaway and other film makers could not only secure funding but had a high profile. Musically the cross-fertilization of dance with indie hadn't yet curdled into the misogynist boorishness of Britpop, and besides there were interesting and very clever things happening in America.
I'd like to ignore the fiasco of the 'New Generation' poets of around that time (Meet the new poet/Just like the old poet) except that sometime around 92/93 Simon Armitage described poetry as the perfect art for a recession. Meaning that you only need a pencil and paper to make it. An interesting sidebar on that is that he said it on Radio 1 - unless it was while Mark Radcliffe was still on Radio 5. This was also a time when Lee and Herring, The Mary Whitehouse Experience, Victor Lewis Smith, Chris Morris, and whole range of other interesting people could be found on Radio 1.
One more personal anecdote before I move on. Around this time I applied for a position at the Liverpool Playhouse, and was offered work within the marketing department. It was initially an unfunded unpaid position of 16 hours a week, meaning I would have to find other part-time work and live on part-time wages. I wanted the job, I was desperate to leave home and get involved culturally, but I knew I couldn't afford to relocate with no money. I spent the couple of weeks grace they gave me to decide in applying for part-time jobs, and looking for alternate means of funding before I had to say sorry, I couldn't take the job.
This isn't a nostalgic look back at an imagined golden age - I would have found art to interest me at any time. In fact I've found the last five or six years to be far richer and more interesting in a lot of ways. There are forgotten films becoming available on DVD, masses of film, music and other work that might struggle to find physical distribution becoming available online, experimental/innovative poetries increasingly visible, events cropping up all over the place and so forth.
But there are signs that a lot of people are struggling. I recently reposted the appeal made by Salt Publishing. That reminded me that the Philoctetes Center which I've banged on about before are appealing for funds. Then opening Vertigo film magazine I see that they also face imminent closure. So what?
1. I'd like you to have a look at the sites below, and if you think it's worthwhile do what you can to help.
- Salt
- Vertigo
2. Please disagree. If you think there's no value in funding organisations that can't fund themselves then leave a comment or email me and I'll feature the debate here. I don't see this as a closed argument. I think there should be help for funding and distribution of work of minority interest, but a lot of people don't.
3. A related question and point of debate relates to online distribution and low-cost repackaging. How do we ensure that artists and thinkers are able to continue their work if they earn nothing from it?
4. I'd like to throw a thought out there. On the MA course I'm taking I just completed a semester on Experience and Context, looking at how our writing fits into the wider world. Popular among my fellow students was an idea of creative writing as therapeutic. I am extremely uncomfortable with this idea for a number of reasons:
i. It is uncomfortably close to the idea of art as functional and useful. I have ranted about this before but I am fucking sick of collections of poetry as a palliative for unspecified modern malaise. Art is not useful. The function of a poem is not to pick you up if you're a bit down. Yes, it might do that, but that is emphatically not its purpose. The value of art is precisely in its uselessness. Art is a product of being able to imbue objects and ideas with abstract value. To me the moment you say 'this is useful' is the moment I switch off. Which is not the same as saying art for art's sake. Of course art relates to real life, to politics, to emotions, but it is not their servant.
ii. I'm not sure it's possible to quantify the value of art to anyone. I also think that enabling someone to enjoy art is very different from getting them to write or draw. There may be a value to getting someone to write for instance, but I'm not sure how you'd go about measuring that effect. I also don't think it helps anyone to confuse what may be a very valuable personal exercise with other forms of cultural production.
iii. There also seems to be a risk of entering the realms of vague spirituality and alternative therapies. I really don't want to see art aligning itself, and becoming equated with the kind of potions and bullshit you find in this area. A song is never going to cure cancer, a film will never relieve pain. They may help someone cope with their situation, but art is not medicine.
5. Intimately related to all the forgoing is the idea of art having to justify itself either financially or as useful to a particular group. This becomes political. Who pays for what art? If an organisation or individual is paying for art what do they want back? How do they affect the content and the form? Who decides what art is acceptable and to whom? Why should a supermarket exclude a book or record because someone says 'fuck' or there's a picture that might make someone uncomfortable? What purposes is art put to? What forms of cultural production are set in competition with one another? Should it really be a choice between a library and a sports field for instance?
Please let me know your thoughts. I don't have answers and I'd like to debate this. What I do believe is that art is both useless and extremely valuable, and these things are not contradictory.
I have yet to donate money to either Vertigo or Philoctetes, although I intend to. I did however buy a copy of Robert Sheppard's Complete Twentieth Century Blues published by Salt this weekend.
Comments
i believe art IS separate from everyday life, but that it shouldnt be. i think a reconcilliation of those two has long been needed. all that's by way of saying: no one would expect a round of golf (or whatever) to be subsidised, so why do painters, poets, philosophers expect that? i think maybe it's a distraction to try and work out the place of 'art' in the market and time might more usefully be spent building, maintaining and supporting alternative non-market networks.
re salt: i have a load of books by them upstairs. and on saturday bought something by andrea brady and ulli freer. i think they've put out a lot of great work and i hope they continue to. i'll support salt as long as it's possible for me to do so, but...in all honesty...the sphere salt exists in is not the one where my main interests currently lie.
the comic crisis: was fucking brilliant wasn't it?!!!
like all the points, point 4 was meant to suggest ideas rather than make a definitive statement. But, if I have to pin it down I'd say that while of course people are free to use art in whatever way they choose, there seems to a movement in recent years, especially noticeable in poetry, to make it conform to a conception of something Culturally Important in scare quotes that's good for you. Or if it doesn't do that then it has to be a therapeutic tool for helping people to express themselves, or for some vague benefit to 'the community'. I think this is bad for several reasons.
- It encourages an idea of culture as something given by, or at best mediated through, bodies and individuals who have power - whether that be educational, financial or political.
- It helps to remove it from the realm of peoples actual lives and leaves them with a very stunted idea of what's available and what's possible.
- In my own life I can think of nothing more off-putting when I was at school than people telling me something was good.
I absolutely do not believe that poets or any artist occupy a higher realm or have a more elevated sense of worth - that power resolutely remains with the cultural consumer, whoever they are. My suggestion is rather the opposite, closer to yours really. I think that by poetry being primarily visible as Good For You, in anthologies of 100 Poems For A Rainy Day, and as a Creative Therapy For Disadvantaged People you take the power away from readers. You are very powerfully mediating poetry into something Culturally Important with mystical Voodoo powers. That makes both the poet and the reader of poetry something Other.
As for the market, I partly agree with you, partly not. In my original draft I wrote that it was culturally and historically illiterate to suggest that great art always paid for itself. Many poets for instance were courtiers or politicians first were not dependent on publication. Or they had wealthy patrons - although of course that means that the patron had a sense of the worth of the work and was willing to pay accordingly. So irrespective of whether art occupies a higher or lower realm than anything else, it has never primarily been the market which determines what is produced.
But you also can't go round saying 'this is special, we have to protect it at all costs'. And yes, I agree that building networks of like-minded individuals and groups is very necessary.
You probably have more books from Salt than I do - you may even have some of the same reservations that I do. Although there are some very interesting writers on the list there are also some I really don't care for. I also have serious questions about how useful their expansion into such a massive list, and into duplicating things readily available elsewhere - classics - for instance, has been. It might be argued that they've created many of their own problems.
I would love more adventurous work to share shelf space with dreary crap. Although I do get kind of pissed off at Barbara Taylor Bradford, Felix Dennis, Billy Corgan and other clowns taking up room. But my point is more that by allowing poetry to be controlled by well meaning cultural gatekeepers we allow it to be seen as irrelevant. But perhaps that's a good thing. Perhaps that allows poets to go off on their own, to form associations and networks, and to create something more vital away from the deadness of the poetry houses.
I grew up in a house where my parents had shelves of poetry from ancient works in translation to contemporary European and American poetry. We listened to Poetry Please and to literary programmes on Radio 3 and 4. And yet I had not the slightest interest in poetry until I was around 21 - again this will be covered in the upcoming essay mentioned earlier. Since the age of 21 up until the beginning of last year I spent more time avoiding poetry and bitching about how bad it was than I did actually reading the stuff. And yet I wrote poetry, I read a lot of poetry despite this, but still I couldn't be enthusiastic about it. No such problem with music, no problem with film either.