BERNARD LOUGHLIN,
Madam, - So the director of the Arts Council, Patricia Quinn (Opinion, February 6th) wants the debate on funding cuts to arts organisations to be between Vladimir and Estragon rather than Punch and Judy, does she? Has she forgotten that Vladimir and Estragon have been stuck in a bog for more than 50 years now gnawing on stolen roots and beguiling their time with knockabout and vaudeville while waiting for someone to appear or something to happen to rescue them from their plight? Very like the Arts Council.
Except that Vladimir and Estragon entertain us as they reveal profound truths about the human condition - unlike the Arts Council, whose language grows more sterile and unfunny by the pronouncement.
Behind the persiflage, what she seems to be saying is, "Don't blame me." Well, if she has been making the argument that the arts is business, and that the Arts Council is a development agency which needs a lot more money to dynamise that business, and the Government has given it 10 per cent less than it did last year, and 20 per cent less than it seemed to have promised, then surely that argument has failed to convince those to whom it was addressed. Therefore the Arts Council has failed, has it not?
It has failed because its argument is flawed by the fundamental fact that it is not a development agency, never has been and never will be. It has never directly developed anything in the arts of the slightest use to anybody, except an execrable language that is making Punch and Judy ill. And if Punch and Judy get very sick, they might just vomit all over the nice children in the audience, and we wouldn't want that, would we?
The arts are not business. If they were, then we would have amalgamations, mergers, take-overs, rationalisations, mass sackings and blood-lettings. The Gate would take over the Abbey. The National Gallery would absorb the Municipal. Painters would buy out other painters to kill off the competition, etc.
The arts sector, as the director of the Arts Council calls it - presumably to distinguish it from the prostitution sector, the fish-and-chips sector and the baby-sitting sector, all estimable businesses in their own rights- is perfectly entitled to rear up in protest in any guise it wishes, and the more colourful the costumes and language the better. We could do with a laugh.
The trouble is that with all the money it has had the Arts Council has grown more and more authoritarian. As such it has made it its principal business to so own, subsidise, control and manage the arts that there is no means for the poor whores who now find themselves stripped of their gauds to make their protest heard. There is no independent arts journal, meaning one not grant-aided by the Arts Council; there is hardly an artist who has not received or does not live in hope of receiving a dole from it; and there is almost no one willing to put his or her arts organisation at risk by saying the Arts Council itself is the problem.
The sooner there is a proper Ministry for Culture for the whole island to take over all the conflicting, overlapping competences of the department of this, that and the other, along with the Arts Council and its very dull friend the Arts Council of Northern Ireland, the better.
Then Ms Quinn could be the civil servant she sounds like, and be protected from the brickbats of punch-drunk Judies. - Yours, etc.,
BERNARD LOUGHLIN,
Catalunya,
Spain.