unemployment, the Arts are fighting a war of survival. Countries are
cutting back everywhere and naturally the greatest beneficiaries of
state funding will be putting up the greatest fight. All that is to be
expected. The Arts, like Premiership football, is a game of two
halves; the upper half of football's aristocracy out-earns many a
national budget, while the superstars of the Arts can sell a drunken
doodle on a dinner napkin for a small fortune. So there will probably
be some schadenfreude mixed into the public sympathy at the thought of
millionaire tenors being turfed out by broke opera houses... or
painters with swank basements full of canvases whose most faithful
customers had been public galleries.
In the real world after all, one has first to rent a set of walls
before worrying about the paintings to put on them. And yet, the
Funding Question throws up the stark reality that the recession had
probably started decades ago for most Arts workers. Amateur hobbyists
have decimated the lower echelons of practising artists. (It doesn't
take much to become a 'photographer' these days. A clever smartphone
is a good start and with many a prosumer camera, too many professional
photographers are already outclassed by their clients - at least in
the equipment stakes.) Likewise, the democratisation of the Arts
dissolves the borders between struggling artists and keen hobbyists.
For every successful artist there are tens of thousands who will
never be, who mortgage their lives to their dreams: actors looking for
the role, artists toiling on their 'masterpiece' with the last light
of ruined eyes... they have mastered their art, but they will never
quite comprehend the brutal economics of the captured audience. And
through all that, the Arts must struggle with the reputation of being
the Welfare Basket Case of modern society. The ultimately useless
sibling of the Crafts.
Yet, anyone who has seen ancient art that has mesmerised audiences for
centuries, perhaps a Benin, or Ife bronze, or the thousand-year old
roped pot from Igbo-Ukwu (pictured above), will understand what
aspects of our civilisation will ultimately endure. Such a one will
recognise the irrelevance of politicians and financiers over timeless
art. They will also realise the mountains of chaff that have to be
negotiated to find truly sublime work. Work that will survive
textbooks by contemporary zealots of style. Styles that will grow out
of fashion even before we are cold in our graves. Graves that will
yield their treasures in millennia to come, when when our technology
will be housed in the Museum of the Primitives while the best of our
art will draw the same gasps of awe that they draw today.
Yet the Arts face a greater threat than recession. They face
competition from the most unlikely theatre, for instruments of war are
increasingly becoming icons of art. Anyone who has ever visited a war
museum will confess to the sinister compulsion to stare at those
spiked cudgels, those skull-cracker tools from pre-history, those
pangas from Rwanda, muskets from France... From Western defence shows
to phallic missiles trundling down Pyongyang's applauding streets,
from naval reviews showing off state-of-the-'art' nuclear submarines
to military brass bands performing with the panache of circus
artists... Because military designers know that ultimately, it is the
public who will pay for their toys. They know that it is the public
who, with their ballot-boxes, decide where they want to get their Art
from: a new season of sultry theatre, or the next round of sexy
nuclear submarines. Enter the modern Air Show. This year, the 3-4 day
party on the Bournemouth beaches was a wash-out... a wet English
weekend took care of that, but last year the likes of a Bono concert
would have been shamed by the tens of thousands that mobbed the
Bournemouth Air show, oohing and aahing at athletic aircraft that
smoked, streaked and boomed across the skies. What performance art
could top the wing-walkers... the beautiful Red Arrows streaming
coloured smoke, the Hurricanes, the Spitfires, the steely grey
Eurofighter Typhoon thundering past...
It is probably nothing more than sour grapes from a cavilling artist,
this awareness that on a different beach and a different place, the
crowds would also be screaming, but not with joy. And that the special-
effects smoke from the aircraft would be unnecessary for all the pall
and mushroom clouds supplied by actual bombs. The awareness that even
this glorious rendition of sublime artistry in the skies was nothing
but a practice run for war.
http://blogs.african-writing.com/chuma/?p=901
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