What about the heritage?
Pat Gilmour
The announcement that the Arts budget will not be cut in 1980-81 (except possibly by the ravages of 22 per cent inflation) comes only just in time to cobble a limp stitch across the credibility gap that was daily widening between what the Minister for the Arts (rapidly earning the name of Norman Stinge'n .Deceivus) preached, and what he practised. He had been rightly brought to book by Michael HoIroyd in the Observer for fooling us in the pre-election 'The Arts — the way forward' that 'candleend economies' in the 'small beer of arts expenditure' were no part of Tory policy, then immediately saving £5 million of candle-ends the minute he got into office.
Defending the indefensible position Holroyd had mapped out by selectively partquoting the letter from Mrs Thatcher that had been instrumental in conning us, the Minister conveniently neglected to mention that it had actually been introduced with the categorical statement that Mrs Thatcher had 'made it clear that the Conservative Party had to plans to cut arts expenditure'. Quite apart from the immediate 2 per cent saving she made in mid-term from already committed central government money. Mrs Thatcher has subsequently busied herself paralysing local government arts initiatives, fully aware that such non-mandatory areas are bound to feel the blade of the axe first. Already the Inner London Education Authority has suggested savings of £380,000 on staff /student ratios in their arts Schools, Battersea Arts Centre is threatened with closure by Wandsworth Borough Council, while provincial museums, after a century of neglect and starvation, are desperatly trimming budgets already pared to the bone—by 12 per cent in Southampton, for example. This is how the cabinet ministers actually preserve the 'heritage' they wax so poetic about when it suits them.
That the Tory Party hoodwinked even the upper echelons of the art establishment was neatly demonstrated by the chairman's introduction to the recently published 34th annual Arts Council report which went to press in the interregnum between the Callaghan and Thatcher governments. It reveals that in late April, Kenneth Robinson was viewing the future 'with some degree of optimism' because of the encouraging Tory noises cited above, but more particularly because the new Minister (although only in Opposition, of course) had gone a 'good deal further than this and advocated significantly increased spending.'
After the hilarity occasioned by this misplaced trust in pre-election promises, the remainder of the report by the Lord High Executioner of the Arts Council, Sir Roy Shaw, gives one little to laugh about, from his naive refusal to recognise the political nature of the Council's activity, to a barely veiled and sinister threat to community arts which, of course, we would not be far wrong in ascribing to the current right-wing swing.
Lord Goodman, Sir Roy tells us, as if this were conclusive, had 'never heard a political discussion at any Arts Council meeting, and it seemed to him inconceivable that one should take place.' The fact that at this moment, as an extension of government and therefore of the ruling class, the Arts Council is responding, whether it likes it or not, to political decisions that have been taken to weaken collective initiatives so as to leave more money in private pockets, has apparently escaped him. Sir Roy claims the arts are bi-partisan; so is education, in the sense that both parties agree we should have it. What they don't agree about is. whether the spiritually and materially poor should be deprived so that more can be given to the rich.
The truth is that whatever party is in power, the Arts Council, with its appointees in the pocket of a Minister of a department of state and a budget administered on no fixed principles and able to be withdrawn at whim, cannot really be termed 'independent' as Raymond Williams has .patiently argued in a brilliant paper in The Political Quarterly this year. While the Council members — Lady X, Lord Y and Professor Z — are usually members of the 'relatively informal but reliable consensual ruling class', members of the specialist panels (of which I am one) are the so-called experts that assist in dispensing the Council's 'discriminating patronage'. What this actually means is that they are in an excellent position to disguise their special interests — invariably a conception of art intelligible to the highly educated middle class, but alien to the average person — as being for the general good, while applying an outmoded talisman of 'standards' and 'quality' in situations such as community arts where what is important is social context and situation, Actually, of course, when it suits the Council, the 'experts' are not consulted at all; viz the high-handed action earlier this year when Sir Roy (as yet unknighted) justified on legal grounds the Council's suppression and exclusion from one of its exhibitions of a print by Conrad Atkinson critical of the Queen's royal warrant being given to the makers of thalidomide. Since this decision is re-justified in the current report, I can point out with undisguised glee that this work, which the 'independent' Council claimed was too hot to handle, is currently being exhibited by the unafraid servants of the Crown at the government-run Victoria and Albert Museum.
Community arts, for all its faults, is one of the few forms funded at the moment by the Council that has potential for extending the understanding and practice of the arts beyond the usual highly-educated middle class audience. Suggesting, as Sir Roy now does, that this part of the Council's work Should devolve to the regional arts associa tions as presently constituted. or rely on new government money, is equivalent to shooting all community artists in the back. The Council's claim has always been that as an intermediary body it pre vents government from politically interfering with an artist's work. If this were really so, why would Sir Roy be currently intimidat ing community artists by complaining that they 'consistently bite the hand that feeds them' and that because of this the Council will soon be considering whether it can continue to subsidise artists in order to have them critical of itself or or the state. The analogy Sir Roy provides for this situation comes from a play in which a nriiddle-class muddler goes on being polite and helpful to two arsonists who have designs on his house. While I can heartily endorse Sir Roy's vision of himself at the Arts Council as a middle-class bungler (if not a very helpful one), the flaw in casting COmmunity artists as arsonists is that they at least part-own 'his' house, whilst having r,ositively no assurance on it.
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