Creative

Review, links, resources about creativity. Find it all including creative self motivation, photograph, press release and more. Thanks for visiting

Search

Resources
Looking for cheap hotel deals? Compare 30 sites simultaneously on www.hotelscombined.com!
Leave Me a Message
Share and Enjoy
Tuesday, February 19, 2008
Our economic salvation and creativity

In his book At Arm’s Length, Geraint Talfan Davies argues that to fully appreciate art the nation needs help seeing the wider picture. So the former Arts Council for Wales chairman tasks a culture minister with putting on the glasses...

IN THE past few years there has been a lively debate in the arts about the value of the arts; whether the arts are to be valued for their own sake – their intrinsic value – or whether they can be supported only because of their economic, social or educational benefits – their instrumental value.

In England government ministers have themselves leapt into this fray, more recently moving away from the ‘instrumental’ camp towards valuing the quality of the art. Last year James Purnell, in his brief tenure as England’s Culture Secretary, commissioned Sir Brian McMaster to search out ways of encouraging excellence in the arts. The initiative was regarded as a new departure.

For some reason the debate seemed to pass Wales by. No Welsh culture minister has set out a clear view on this issue, although it is safe to say that the instrumental view still holds sway in Wales. But it is not a question of ‘either…or..’ There is another option.

If Government requires that the arts take a broader social mission to heart – and there is little reluctance to do so on the part of the arts – surely the corollary is that we must draw in a wider circle of government actors not only into the policy discussion but also into the funding equation. A culture minister or a First Minister who managed to do that, would have broken wholly new ground in the cultural debate in Wales, and elsewhere.

The arts are as worthy of the cross-cutting approach as the Welsh language. This would effectively reverse the usual instrumental argument. Instead of approaching it as a one-way and heavy-handed insistence on a social return on arts investment, the task would be to win a cultural return from as many areas of public investment as possible. It would also help redefine what culture ministers are for: policy leaders of a cross-cutting cultural agenda for a government, rather than signers of ad hoc cheques in a desperate search for the short-lived adrenalin rush of a more limited patronage.

What is the value of seeking social gain from the margins of the smallest department of state compared with seeking to knit culture into the agendas of the government’s biggest spenders?

What is the value of sporadic exposure to the outreach programmes of arts organizations compared with embedding the arts into the curriculum of our schools – not just as discrete lessons in art or music, not necessarily always as additions to the curriculum but as a tool for delivery of a greater part of the curriculum, a spur to creativity in all education, and perhaps an imaginative route to engaged citizenship? Sadly, it is an area where Wales is beginning to fall woefully behind other parts of the UK.

The Institute of Welsh Affairs, in its study of policy options for the Assembly’s third term, post 2007, pointed out that Wales had no equivalent of England’s well-funded schemes for encouraging the arts in the schools – the Artsmark scheme and the Creative Partnership projects – both jointly funded by the DCMS and, significantly, the Department for Education and Skills.

This is not just a question of creating more rounded citizens, or generating larger future audiences for the arts, though both are highly desirable objectives. We are enjoined to be part of the ‘the knowledge economy’. We are told our economic salvation is to lie in innovation, ideas and creativity. Exactly.

If Wales needs an innovative, knowledge-based economy – or even innovative public organisations – how do we create it without nurturing imagination, challenge and creativity in every way? And what better way than through familiarising young people in their most formative years with the challenging imagination of artists, the invitation to the lateral leap?

How can Wales make a bigger contribution to the design industry in which Britain is a world leader, if the visual arts do not have sufficient space and time within our schools, or if we do not maximise, through better collaboration, the potential that exists in the higher education sector?

If we are to have thriving creative industries, they will, in large part be seeded in the arts. There is no film industry without the writer. There is no music industry without the young musician. It is often artists who have explored new media first.

The issue also insinuates itself into both the economic development and environment portfolios. The Wales Tourist Board, not long before it was subsumed into the Assembly’s civil service, promulgated a strategy for cultural tourism. Admittedly, its definition of culture was wide enough to include food as well as festivals, but the starting point for most tourists is our natural and built environment. Famous visitors – Gilpin, Borrow, Turner – have marvelled at our landscape in Wales, but they have usually been less impressed by our cities, towns and villages.

Yet if we want to create a distinctive image for them – images that mark out our quality against competitors – it is our ambition and our cultural values that will determine it – exhibited in architecture, and fine urban and landscape design. That requires design quality to be a central objective of our planning systems, not an optional extra.

And how do we nurture a public culture that values the quality of our physical environment if the fabric of our schools is decaying or their playgrounds are sterile or our streets are devoid of stimulating art and architecture? The arts, the economy, education, and the environment must be interwoven in our thinking and our actions. Inevitably, such thinking must draw in local government. If the cross- cutting approach is necessary at the level of the Assembly Government, then it surely has even greater validity at the local level, even if culture is still a discretionary spend rather than a statutory responsibility.

It should worry us all that so many people believe that it is the steepest hill that the arts have to climb. There are many local authorities in Wales that can be proud of what they have achieved on the cultural front. The best have shown vision and commitment and have been prepared to back words with action and money. However, the majority are a long way behind the best. And all this is in the context of local government in the UK giving a far lower priority to cultural matters than its counterparts in many of our European partner countries and, in recent years still cutting back.

Sports development officers in some authorities outnumber arts officers by more than 10 to one. Despite this the Arts Council of Wales had to offer some authorities 75% of the cost of employing an Arts Development Officer to get them to appoint their very first one. In one case it had to offer 90%. Conversations in some local authorities remind you of Sinatra’s line, “If you have to ask the question, you ain’t going to understand the answer.”

For instance, why could I walk into the new offices of Pembrokeshire County Council – Graham Sutherlands’s adopted county and one with more artists per square mile than any other in Wales – and see not a single work of art on the walls?

The internal modernisation programme in local government has also produced structures that are often opaque and where responsibility for the arts floats in a way that often makes both forward progress and accountability difficult. Most arts officers – and they are relatively new appointments in many authorities – sit at a third or fourth tier level, answerable within portfolios that can range across tourism, regeneration, libraries, lifelong learning or sport and, in one instance, even crime and disorder – but never with any sense of integration within a larger picture.

In the arts the partnership between the Assembly Government and the Arts Council, on the one hand, and local government on the other, is the most important partnership that we have. Where it works, the arts thrive and the public gains. Where it doesn’t, the arts and the public suffer. It needs to work better than it does at present. It requires understanding and commitment from elected leaders and chief executives.

It demands that responsibility for the arts and culture be clearly and unambiguously located at a senior level – and in Wales that may be a responsibility wider than a single local authority. It also requires an end to situations where those with authority have no knowledge, and those with knowledge have no authority – an insistence on appointing professional arts expertise that is properly respected, trained and rewarded, and holding identified budgets that have some realistic relationship with that which they are expected to deliver.

We must also end the situation where effective planning by arts organisations is often hampered by the reluctance of local authorities to match the Arts Council’s own three-year funding agreements. Lastly, it needs clarity and consistency in the reporting of cultural expenditures that will enable robust benchmarking of performance.

Money will always be in short supply, but it is in that very situation that the cross-cutting approach within local councils becomes the most sensible and efficient way forward. The task of encouraging local government in these directions must fall to ministers. This is one area where the democratic mandate is both necessary and shared.

We live in an age when we are being urged to get beyond simple calculations of gross domestic product to more sophisticated measures of quality and even contentment. The demands of climate change are also forcing us to reassess our values alongside our behaviours. In this situation the arts and culture should sit alongside sustainability as the defining characteristics of the quality and creativity of our society, guarantors of a civilised and caring community as well as its survival. This is what will change the ‘texture of our living’ that the Assembly Government’s forgotten first cultural strategy sought to affect.

This is an edited extract from At Arm’s Length, by Geraint Talfan Davies, published by Seren. £12.99. Read more from the book in tomorrow’s Western Mail.

Source:
http://icwales.icnetwork.co.uk/news/wales-news/2008/02/19/our-economic-salvation-and-creativity-91466-20491951/

Labels:

posted by adit bbc @ 5:23 PM   0 comments
Who am I?

Name: adit bbc
Home: Yogyakarta, Yogyakarta, Indonesia
About Me:
See my complete profile
Others Articles
Archives
Useful Links
Let's Chat
Creative Visitors
Holden Service