Arts without an agenda

The demands that the arts should contribute to improving the nation’s health, reduce crime or social exclusion and so on, appear to be receding. But now, peculiarly, the arts seem to be offering themselves up to solve a myriad of other environmental, economic and political problems. What has happened? It seems as if years of instrumental battering has the arts losing confidence in their inherent value, seeking to justify themselves in terms of something else.
The arts industry is not alone. There’s a huge pressure on our intellectual institutions to also prove their worth according to externally imposed criteria. And nowhere is this truer than the university sector.

AN OWN GOAL
Erudition, scholarship and research have to be useful for clear-cut policy objectives if they’re to be publicly funded. There is an explicit demand that research delivers evidence for policymakers and proof of an impact on society. This seems to have sent the arts and humanities in higher education into a spin. There is sometimes a prejudice in the arts community that you are okay if you are in science, or economics or technology, because it seems obvious how these disciplines can offer solutions to government-listed priorities. But I worry when people in the arts shout “Us too! We can help solve your problems!” They’re offering themselves up as government foot soldiers. So much for academic or artistic freedom.
Paradoxically, through the expansive rhetoric and importance given to the arts for this or that policy objective, this inevitably leads to the downsizing and the diminishing of the arts’ own significance and autonomy. If cultural organisations copy the academic arts and go down this road, it will disastrously prostitute the arts as a flexible resource, open to manipulation by a range of fashionable causes, environmentalists or political opportunists. None of these people have the slightest interest in the arts – indeed they are often contemptuous. They want to use the arts to brand and to gain recognition and acceptance for a particular policy priority or message.
THE TIMES AREN’T A-CHANGING
I think we need to be wary of a one-sided focus on keeping up with change, because I think this is cultural pessimism rather than reality. The rhetoric of “unprecedented change” suggests that the present is uniquely turbulent, but is this historically accurate? What of the Renaissance, the Enlightenment, the Industrial Revolution? The exaggerated novelty of the present moment turns change into a deterministic omnipotent force, and we become the objects of history, rather than the subjects. We fatalistically accept that our previous understanding and practice of the arts are redundant and we are running to catch up. There is a danger of encouraging a short-term approach to the arts, where they are dumped if they are not relevant or useful. We forget to value the arts and instead we risk overvaluing novelty. There is a danger that we become so overwhelmed by the new, that we overlook the timeless aspects of art. Also, surely the last thing we want of art is immediate solutions or cheap messages. Surely great works of art are too transcendent, too ethereal,
too subtle, too complex, too long term for celebration by a crass criteria of ‘change everything now’ audit.
GREEN-TINTED GLASSES
At the moment, it is entirely appropriate that artists reflect on and consider environmental concerns. But since environmentalism has become a fixed orthodoxy, how far will artists be allowed to deal with this issue critically or push boundaries imaginatively? “The science shows”, or “the debate is over”, are used to close down enquiry, and if somebody like me dares to challenge that orthodoxy, they are labelled a “denier”, demonised as a heretic. But if art is confined by this kind of black and white certainty, how interesting will it be? Surely this is propaganda, not art. The environmentalist ethic is incredibly fatalistic and pessimistic. Man becomes a mere object. Extreme weather and climate are often presented as a payback for man’s hubris and vaunting ambition. I think this corrodes the human-centred enterprise that art represents. Indeed, anti-humanism is a core feature of environmentalist outlook. James Lovelock says in his book ‘Revenge of Gaia’: “The world is suffering a plague of people.” The UN population fund last year argued for increased birth control because “No human is genuinely carbon neutral… everyone is part of the problem, so everyone must be part of the solution.” I’ve got an idea for art’s contribution to the environmental challenges posed – sterilisation or mass suicide.
Finally, the environmentalists’ discourse is profoundly hostile to accelerating economic growth and mass industrial society. We hear of monstrous greedy consumers who are told to rein in growth or face planetary catastrophe. But how helpful is that to the plight of the arts today? Actually, we should be growing the economy to be able to afford better and more arts. We need to raise productivity to produce more, in less time, using less labour because that’s what allows humanity to create surplus wealth and free time so that we can have the luxury of art, so that we can have the leisure to create it, enjoy it and stop being defensive about it as a good in its own right. So, artists should support commerce and economic prosperity, but that is at odds with a green ethos. The arts are talking about the wrong thing.