Lack of access to arts goes to heart of poverty trap

LAST week, the Arts Council and Combat Poverty published a joint report on poverty, Access And Participation In The Arts. It makes grim reading for anyone interested in the arts in Ireland, for it suggests that after at least 15 years of theoretical commitment by the State to equality of access to the arts, little has changed.

The report contains an in depth survey of nearly 200 people living in disadvantaged areas of Sligo and Dublin. The figures speak for themselves. In both places, about one person in 20 could be considered a fairly frequent attender at arts events other than the cinema or a traditional music session. No one at all had been to a classical music concert, a ballet or an opera in the previous year. Three per cent in Dublin and 6 per cent in Sligo had been to a theatre. Even in Dublin, where there are major art galleries with free access, just 3 per cent of those surveyed had been in a gallery in the previous year. About one in 10 in each area had visited any of the major national cultural institutions.

It is important to remember that poverty and the arts are not wholly unrelated, even opposite, areas of human experience. Firstly, poverty in a developed society like ours has almost as much to do with culture as with food and housing. The State's working definition of poverty, indeed, is exclusion from participation in "activities which are the norm for other people in society".

Exclusion from the arts is therefore not just a side effect of poverty: it is an integral part of what it means to be poor. Combat Poverty, in its report on community arts published last September, rightly pointed out that "a lack of access to and participation in arts and culture is part of the experience of poverty".

And secondly, the cultural industries that are generated by artists are now, in a post industrial society, themselves a powerful economic driving force. Arts related industries such as tourism, design, advertising and media are now at the leading edge of economic growth. So cultural exclusion isn't just about saying it is a pity the unemployed don't use their free time to read War And Peace. It is a very significant aspect of what keeps people poor in the first place.

The standard answer to complaints about the exclusivity of the audience for many cultural activities is that great art is of its nature elitist. It is complex, challenging and almost always out of line with the assumptions of everyday life. This is, of course, true, but it is also beside the point. Even if some kinds of art will always be a minority interest, why should it be so easy to define that minority in terms of socio economic class? Is it mere coincidence that art lovers are easier to find in homes with two cars in the driveway?

In any case, State finding and policy are political, not artistic, matters. And the fact is that the significant increase in State funding for the arts over the last decade has been, by the criteria used to evaluate public spending in any other area, regressive. It has gone to create services that are availed of to a disproportionate degree by the better off sections of society.

There is no doubt that there is now within cultural institutions a great deal of goodwill towards the idea that something has to be done to create more equal access to the arts. To mention just two examples in the theatre, the last Dublin Theatre Festival tried to create links with Tallaght and Ballymun, while Kathy McArdle at the Abbey has been developing specific policies on access. Such initiatives are welcome and need to be strengthened.

But they will not of themselves transform the nature of cultural exclusion. To put it crudely, the problem is not that poor people are uncultured but that they are poor. Getting lots of unemployed people into the National Concert Hall and playing Beethoven at them is not going to transform the realities of structural injustice.

If it is true that cultural deprivation is an intrinsic aspect of contemporary poverty, then two things follow. One is that you can't really tackle it without tackling poverty itself. But the other is that neither can you really tackle poverty without placing art and culture near the centre of everything you do.

The Arts Council/Combat Poverty report is important because it tries to get beyond the well meaning fuzziness that has sometimes surrounded "community arts", and to create a real link in State policy between art on the one side and the social, economic and cultural regeneration of deprived communities on the other. It advances the idea, previously mooted by Combat Poverty, of "developmental community arts". This kind of work is not about "bringing art to the people" but about making neglected areas visible to themselves and to others, about using art as a way of understanding the present and imagining the future - the first steps in any process of social change.

These ideas need to be taken out of the arts ghetto and given a real place in a national anti poverty strategy. This means, of course, that arts funding, like all State spending, should be "poverty proofed". But doesn't it also mean that many other areas of State spending - controlled by the Departments of Social Welfare, Enterprise and Employment, and Education - should be "cultureproofed"?