The Government has lost the arts down the back of the sofa again. Look, it happens. It’s probably nothing to worry about. It knows it’s there. It hasn’t abandoned the arts as if it were a failed IT project or anything. Not yet.
This is about nomenclature. “Arts” has been dropped from the name of the department in charge of it as part of a string of shake-ups, with the Department of Tourism, Culture, Arts, Gaeltacht, Sport and Media losing responsibility for tourism and the Gaeltacht and becoming the Department of Culture, Communications and Sport.
On Wednesday we were treated to an official denial that this penalty was for the crime of starting with a vowel.
Minister for Culture, Communications and Sport Patrick O’Donovan, as he’s now known, was reportedly wary of a name change to the Department of Sport, Media, Arts, Culture and Communications because he didn’t want to be Minister for Smacc.
Potential new names for the Department of Arts: Smacc, Cacs, Scam and – my favourite – DoSac
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Other acronyms were available. We could have had Cacs, which would have conjured up a lovely image every time, or Scam. My personal choice would have been to name it the Department of Sport, Arts and Communications and then dub it DoSac, in homage to the chaotic Department of Social Affairs and Citizenship from Armando Iannucci’s BBC satire The Thick of It.
Asked about the Smacc theory at this week’s meeting of the relevant Oireachtas committee – which still has arts in its title – the department’s secretary general, Feargal Ó Coigligh, said the previous name was “seen to be a mouthful” and the Minister was anxious that the new one be “accessible”. Across European ministries, “culture” was the term usually favoured.
“Culture is the normal word that’s used,” he said, seeming relieved to take a break from raking over how the Arts Council spent €6.7 million on a botched, bug-riddled IT project.
The upshot of the committee meeting, as summarised by its chairman, Alan Kelly of the Labour Party, was that the department has more questions to answer about its handling of that fandango. With O’Donovan opting not to appoint Maureen Kennelly for a further five-year term as director of the Arts Council, Kelly couldn’t help feeling that she had become “a sacrificial lamb”.
There was some eagerness, too, about O’Donovan’s scheduled appearance before the committee in early July. He may no longer be minister for the arts, but he is still, after all, the Minister in charge of the Arts Council. He’s also the Minister who has backed extending the Basic Income for the Arts scheme beyond its pilot phase, though that doesn’t, of course, guarantee the introduction of these financial lifelines for artists.
This Coalition, like the one before it, is so good at being non-committal, and so adept at being angered and disappointed by various agencies and semi-States, that it seems a stretch to think it would bother vanishing “arts” from the department name as part of any distancing exercise.
But some believe the ditching bodes ill. Labour’s arts spokesman, Rob O’Donoghue, has blasted the rebrand as shameful, saying that it sends a message – some might say an unnecessary one – to artists “that they don’t matter and aren’t a priority”. Subsuming arts into “merely culture” is symbolic of artists’ status as “the poor relation within the department”, O’Donoghue suggests. It’s a Smacc-down.
Naturally, no one cares about “media” being swallowed up by “communications”. And few will remember that before the last name change, in 2020, the reconfigured department was first announced as the Department of Media, Tourism, Arts, Culture, Sport and the Gaeltacht before someone realised that this was not the correct pecking order and booted “media” down the back.
“Arts” has, by comparison, enjoyed long spells on departmental stationery. Responsibility for it escaped the Department of the Taoiseach in 1993, when Michael D Higgins became minister for arts, culture and the Gaeltacht. Since then there have been two artsless periods – May 2010-June 2011 and August 2017-September 2020 – with culture reigning supreme both times.
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I haven’t always been a fan of the term “the arts”. I’ve recoiled from it because of the precious way that a minority invoke it as a kind of extension of their privilege, trumpeting it as a rarefied and narrowly defined practice, replete with gatekeeping and entitlement. “Culture”, by contrast, is a word that seems to reflect the entire sweep of creativity embedded in our lives. Culture is not “merely culture”. It’s inseparable from who we are.
But these semantics are only safe to explore in the abstract, divorced from concerns about political expediency – even the slightest hint that it might be convenient for the Government to jettison “arts” from the department name is enough to render the demotion ominous and, well, artless.
It’s possibly either too late or too soon for a Save the Arts campaign. Still, prepare your placards. We must start one in support of the establishment of the Department of Smacc right away.
