The arts are often first to lose out when governments slash budgets, but former chairman of Arts Council England Sir Christopher Frayling argues that increasing arts budgets could aid economic recovery, as he tells ARMINTA WALLACE.
AS THE recession deepens and the Government belt tightens, many arts organisations in Ireland are steeling themselves for a period of cutbacks in public funding. But there are those who argue that when times get tough, that’s when the arts should take a leading role in our socio-economic culture. One man who puts this case more fluently than most is the rector of London’s Royal College of Art and recently retired chairman of Arts Council England, Sir Christopher Frayling.
Having been in the thick of London’s artistic action for the past five years, Frayling is an unrepentant supporter of government intervention in the arts – especially at a time of economic and cultural uncertainty. It is, he says, a matter of sound economic sense. “When times are hard, that is precisely when you should invest in the arts, rather than it being the first thing to be cut,” he says. “I was at a seminar at No 11 Downing Street two weeks ago, which was all about Roosevelt’s Works Progress Administration in America in the mid-1930s.” A determined attempt to put big money into the arts, Roosevelt’s initiative was recently described by Barack Obama as “good spending in difficult times”.
Support for the arts, from this perspective, is not some well-intentioned add-on, but a fundamental part of the capitalist world view. "The arts are important to all our futures," Frayling says. "They're increasingly important to the creative industries – that sector of the economy that depends on creativity and innovation. I've just come back from mainland China, where they're currently building 1,300 art and design schools. They know that when the world economy turns around, creativity is going to be one of the things that will give them the edge. They're fed up with manufacturing everyone else's stuff – they want to create their own. So they'vegot the message."
At a time when there’s much high-level muttering about clear economic signals and unambiguous policies, Frayling believes that the very ambiguity, not to say unpredictability, of the arts sector is actually one of its greatest strengths.
“Nothing is definite in the arts – and you have to have the right to fail as well as the right to succeed,” he says. “It’s a bit like science. They say that over 90 per cent of scientific experiments are unsuccessful; but that just means that the 10 per cent which are successful are fantastically important. It’s not an evens bet. But when it works, the results are spectacular. For example, who would have predicted 15 years ago that computer games would be a huge sector of the economy?”
SUCH SUDDEN SHIFTS of conversational direction and unlikely examples make Frayling a compelling speaker, and guarantee a lively debate at the Burren Law School in Ballyvaughan, Co Clare this weekend, where he will take part in a debate on the institutional framework and support for the arts. His lucid, no-nonsense style is clearly evident in a recent speech entitled "Slaying the Sixth Giant", in which, recalling his time at Arts Council England, he marshals a vast assembly of cultural reference points, from The Archersthrough Immanuel Kant to "bollocks – a new critical category in a debate about the arts and society that goes back some 2,500 years to Plato's Republic".
“We had some lively discussions about where the boundaries of the arts should be drawn,” reads one particularly wry paragraph, “including a fierce debate about Morris dancing, in which one member of the Council referred to the practice as ‘rural fascism’; and another debate about conjuring – during which we discovered that a scary number of MPs, some of them senior MPs, had a deep interest in magic.”
What he really wanted to do in the speech was remind people that the Arts Council model evolved out of something called the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, and at a pretty inauspicious time in history. “There was lots of talk during and just after the second World War about the five giants of physical poverty: want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness,” he explains. “But the economist Maynard Keynes came up with this idea of the sixth giant, which was poverty of aspiration. He encouraged the funding of arts on a level with health and education. That’s quite rare these days – health is the top priority for government, followed by primary education, then secondary education and then, perhaps, the arts. But Keynes didn’t see it like that. And he was a hard-nosed economist; he wasn’t just doing it for fun, he also saw the economic value.”
After years of languishing in the doldrums as global capitalism appeared to have won an unmitigated philosophical victory, Keynes’s ideas are undergoing something of a resurgence in the shape of Barack Obama’s stimulus package for the US economy.
Frayling acknowledges that the current economic and cultural situation is radically different from that which prevailed half a century ago, but believes that in order to move forward the arts sector needs to take a shrewd look at where it has come from.
“People kept asking me when I was chairman of the Arts Council, ‘What is enough money? Tell us how much you want.’ And you don’t know, because it’s an ever-expanding universe. The more you put in, the more people go to things, the more artists you produce and so on. It’s an expanding universe all the time. It’s a little bit like the health service. There’s never enough. You never get there, because the more you do, the more people expect you to do – and it becomes circular.”
This, he insists, isn’t a negative progression – it’s “progress”. But as resources are stretched ever tighter, the Arts Council must become more proactive. “You look at where the arts action is, and you try and invest in it, and you make decisions. You have to do that. Last year there was a long controversy over our investment strategy, because we said, ‘Look – a lot of arts organisations have run out of puff. At the same time there are lots of new young people trying to get into the club and finding it difficult. So let’s prune the system. Let’s remove grants from about 80 organisations, let’s allow about 50 or 60 organisations in, and let’s give the really successful organisations everything they want.’ That’s what we did. But it meant there were casualties.”
And where there are casualties, is there not also wailing and moaning and gnashing of teeth among arts practitioners? “Well, there’s no point in having an Arts Council if you’re just a letter box,” he says. “If you just get money from the government and pass it on in equal parcels to everybody. Something has got to happen in that process, and part of that something is making judgments. I don’t see that as a bad thing. It’s nasty, but that’s how it is.” Tough decisions will always have to be taken. But Frayling believes it’s better if they’re taken by people who are knowledgeable and passionate about the arts, rather than directly by politicians.
“Typically you get organisations where a young person sets up, let’s say, a dance company or a publishing house. And it’s fantastic for about 10 years; and then that person moves on to something else. And the organisation wobbles at that point, because that very charismatic individual isn’t there any more. That’s often the moment where you have to decide if it’s to continue or not. The thing is, when you’re in an Arts Council, the arts community chucks things at you. The government chucks things at you. The public chucks things at you – and the newspapers chuck everything at you. You’re in a kind of no-man’s-land where people just chuck things at you.”
Right now, though, it would be helpful if the arts sector could present a united front. “The argument has to be put – and put very forcibly. The arts have got to do some scrapping. And they mustn’t just roll over and say, ‘Oh well, we’ve got to take our punishment like everybody else.’ They’ve got to put their position very strongly. Otherwise the arts look like a soft target. And that’s not good.”
