PATRICIA QUINN,
Madam, - Colm McAnthony castigates the Arts Council for "grossly under-funding" the promotional and educational work of Comhaltas Ceoltóirí Éireann (CCE) for the past 30 years.
Can I state for the record yet again, that the Arts Council is not responsible for funding music education, or any other kind of arts education?
Mr McAnthony might be interested to know that in 1998 and 1999, in response to extensive funding applications from CCE, we explained to members of its governing body how exactly we could assist its work in developing traditional arts. We subsequently discovered that CCE was already being funded for these purposes elsewhere, and that we were at risk of providing double funding.
Besides our many other funding mechanisms for assisting the traditional arts, the Arts Council provides funding for branches of CCE and for other organisations that seek our assistance in promoting master classes, summer schools and other activities in line with our stated purposes.
I suggest to Mr McAnthony that the most casual perusal of our published Arts Plan will demonstrate that our commitment to the traditional arts is not in question, and his imputation of exclusionary policies on our part is a nonsense. - Yours, etc.,
PATRICIA QUINN, Director, The Arts Council, Merrion Square, Dublin 2.
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Madam, - In all the controversy surrounding the proposed select committee on "traditional arts" in the projected Arts Bill, it has been overlooked that the committee on "innovation" seems likely to cause just as much trouble and confusion.
The concept of "innovation", as employed in today's artspeak, mimics the inflated use of that word in the realm of enterprise capitalism, a domain viewed with unreciprocated lust by Arts Council apparatchiks. In fact artistic innovation can almost be defined as that which passes over the head of such people, whose total absence of historical perspective frequently leads them to attribute "innovation" to works that ape the gestures of 50 or 100 years ago.
The council now appears to have a working definition of "innovation" as "that which stretches the boundaries between art forms". But since nothing that conforms to a pre-established definition can possibly be innovative, this means that council policy almost precludes genuine innovation - by definition! This absurdity has already been seen in action in the field of contemporary classical music, where Arts Council policy now to all intents and purposes denies public funding to any composition not employing "mixed media".
It would be truly disastrous if such totalitarian fallacies were to be embodied in the Arts Bill. The assessment of what is or is not "innovative" should be left to posterity, and taken out of the hands of politicians or civil servants. - Yours, etc.,
RAYMOND DEANE, (Composer, member of Aosdána), Dun Laoghaire,
Co Dublin.