New Flow: a better future for artists, citizens and the state
Written by Tim Joss
Tim is the Director of one of the UK’s leading private Foundations supporting arts and culture. His key message in this new book is that artists’ contribution to our society and economy is not being properly or fully realised. His argument runs from the daily life of the solo artist to a radical recasting of state support. Following the Web 2.0 examples of writers, Charles Leadbeater and Lawrence Lessig, New Flow is published here in its first version. Comment and debate are invited and will inform a final version for future publication.
Here are some comments from early readers:
‘Totally thought provoking’ – Sir Brian McMaster
‘as a diagnosis of the ills dragging the arts sector down, it is, in my view, unparalleled.’ – Liz Hill, Consultant Editor, Arts Professional and Director, Arts Intelligence Limited
‘It is wonderfully lucid and fresh in its analysis and description of how the world of the arts in the UK is changing, and beguilingly invitational in its suggestions about the future. An energising read.’ – Kate Tyndall, Arts Producer and author of ‘The Producers – Alchemists of the Impossible’
‘highly stimulating, beautifully written and very accessible’ – Stewart Wallis, Executive Director, New Economics Foundation
You can write down your thoughts, suggestions and critique of Tim’s ideas below and you can also email him directly on Tim@missionmodelsmoney.org.uk
Dec 11, 2009
Two things from events forming the backdrop of reading Tim Joss’s piece stick in the mind.
The first was a seminar on sustainable development, heralding next year’s climate change conference in Copenhagen, and acknowledging what to many is an inescapable fact, that we are presently going through one of those paradigm shifts in history – from the industrial age to the next (ecological?) age.
The second is the world financial crisis, and the failure of some financiers to see the problem in terms of a paradigm shift, and to think instead that this is some kind of blip – albeit a bloody big one – and that the normal service, which created the problem in the first place, can somehow be resumed.
Tim may not couch the degree of change in these terms, but he does recognise that the pathology exhibited by financiers in the face of change is reflected in the cultural sector. Those who promote the Long Now project do so in response to a ‘pathologically’ short attention-span – the known world ruled by our most powerful people. Futurology is as useful as bedtime reading, as one arts grandee put it recently. If the reading matter doesn’t change after Copenhagen, subtitled ‘The Last Chance for the World’ (including culture), then we really are stuffed.
One of Tim’s valuable contributions is to set our understanding of what constitutes cultural provision, engagement, experience and value in an historical context.
One effect of this, for me at least, is to resist Tim’s plea not to think of ‘New Flow’ as another treatise on the value of cultural engagement. It’s difficult being a practitioner in the ‘land without music’ and ‘the nation of shopkeepers’ not to take every opportunity to try and reinforce the value of cultural engagement. Take the historical perspective back far enough and we see how the languages of visual art, music and dance predate the languages of words, numbers and financial balance sheets. Think closer to home and how, in any individual life, the artistic languages provide the basis of understanding and communication before any development of literacy and numeracy. Some may like to see this as our progression from the primitive. Others will see it as demonstrating how fundamental art is to human existence, and how it explains Schoenberg’s aphorism: ‘art comes from necessity, not from ability’.
The other effect is to clarify the transitory nature of policies, strategies and structures of provision. So, there’s an irony in a solution which offers new structures – ARDA and COPEA. Any centralised delivery system is going to create bureaucratic structures, and Tim does make important points about the need for good R&D, and a holistic definition of culture. Nevertheless, such structures do have finite shelf-lives, and they are usually compromised by a whole raft of challenges, not least political challenges. Tim’s faith in politicians’ readiness to do the right thing needs to be balanced against the paradox of cultural provision being in the hands of politicians, as expressed by Harold Pinter in his Nobel Prize speech a few years ago – art is the search for truth, politics is the search for power.
New Flow’s reference to the Scottish Culture Bill unwittingly underlines how difficult it is for bureaucracies to accommodate holistic views of culture (or anything for that matter). A wide-ranging consultation and debate on culture in Scotland produced proposals which effectively covered provision for art, leaving policy and national strategic leadership of cultural heritage completely uncertain.
Despite an impressive build-up, I’m left uncertain by the final dream-on section whether New Flow really covers cultural engagement beyond traditional art-forms, established institutions and top-down delivery. The possibility of cultural engagement in other places, other forms, and generated in and by communities rather than for communities doesn’t emerge strongly. The optimism over the impact for culture of the 2012 London Olympic Games derives from the perceived knock-on value from large-scale capital projects. Not only does the jury remain out over consistently convincing evidence for this, it has to consider also those aspects of culture that are actually destroyed, literally, by the bulldozers. The simplistic fiction put about by politicians et al of a ‘wasteland’ being replaced by something productive is exposed by the story of the Manor Gardens allotments, where a century-old interaction between culture and nature was destroyed to make way for a walkway.
A case of structure replacing flow, perhaps?
Dec 11, 2009
1. I like the objective of supporting the flow. It has a positive ring to it, as opposed to the jumping through hoops process. And your energy and dynamism drive it along beautifully.
2. The separation of creativity from engagement is fascinating, though I havn’t fully absorbed it. I know the two are very different processes but I also see, as you do, that there must be an unbreakable link between artist and public. Do you think there may be a danger that the two organisations, ARDA and COPEA, may sometimes disconnect, not willfully but through inertia, which could become incremental?!
3. I’m still not sure that the Arts Council could not achieve your objectives if there was sufficient will to re-invent itself. I don’t think the Royal Charter in itself is an obstacle.
4. I regard the arm’s length principle as a dishonest invention of the English ruling classes, who tend not to say what they mean and not to mean what they say. The classic breach in my time was the Priestley Report (around 1980) which bypassed the Arts Council to give substantial increases to the the Royal Opera, ENO, the National Theatre and the RSC. At a stroke, the arm’s length principle was in tatters. In a crisis, he who paid the piper called the tune.
5. The one big omission – understandable because it would take masses of additional research – is a detailed analysis of how other countries support artists and the arts. Maybe some models from abroad wouldn’t suit us and certainly one couldn’t simply import a foreign structure with all its historical, social, political and geographical baggage. But the different support systems of the old Eastern bloc and the USA, to give just two examples, would make an interesting companion study to your book.
Dec 11, 2009
I’ve just posted some personal thoughts on this on my Arts Counselling blog http://artscounselling.blogspot.com/2008/11/is-it-time-for-new-flow.html
Mar 08, 2010
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