Una Mullally: Politeness has got the arts community nowhere

On April 3rd two initiatives for the arts were announced at a press conference in Dublin. One was the Arts Council’s Covid-19 Crisis Response Award “to enable Irish-based professional artists to provide access for the public to new and original art during the period of Covid-19 isolation”, with the Department of Culture and the Arts Council pooling €500,000 from each of their budgets to give 330 artists grants of €3,000, a miserly sum with a ridiculously tight deadline of 13 days.

The other was a Culture Ireland initiative called Ireland Performs, which involves producing an artistic “event” to be streamed on Facebook. The initiative is copied from a Canadian one called Canada Performs.

It's such a pity that those charged with supporting the arts on our behalf are failing so miserably right now

Both initiatives were greeted with shock and incredulity from the artistic community. Artists were among the first to fall when lockdown began, with festivals cancelled, venues shut and concerts, plays, and exhibitions pulled. Tours are gone. People have lost entire years of work. To offer the sector pocket money and demand they create content like jesters is astonishing. In a way, given how under-resourced the arts are in Ireland, we should not be surprised, but that doesn’t make these woefully inadequate, empty marketing-like plans any less hurtful. The mantra that now more than ever people are turning to art has been repeated into submission. It’s such a pity, then, that those charged with supporting the arts on our behalf are failing so miserably right now.

One of the reasons for the heightened anger in response to these initiatives is because they are part of a pattern of apathy and patronisation. In the run-up to the pandemic crisis, artists were gathering to articulate their fears and hardships. The sense of exhaustion, desperation and humiliation is acute. This feeling of hopelessness has now been compounded by these paltry, insulting “supports”.

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Bake me a cake

The announcements were so threadbare that Culture Ireland and Minister for Culture Josepha Madigan took the opportunity to pad them out with a couple of other ideas that bore no relevance to artists’ livelihoods. The Shine Your Light campaign was announced, which is fine as a feel-good campaign for children, but the sight of Madigan suggesting people bake a cake and put candles on it even if it isn’t their birthday, was one of astonishing randomness. What does that have to do with the livelihoods and survival and integrity of artists and their huge contribution to society?

Director of Creative Ireland Tania Banotti detailed an initiative asking people to film videos of themselves singing lines from Ireland’s Call. I’m not sure where those clips were meant to be sent, as by that stage, I had blacked out.

Framing flimsy PR exercises as "creativity" can only emerge from a mindset that fails to see the difference between doing a jigsaw and writing a play

Paschal Donohoe, who as a cultured man must have been cringing as this infantilising dross was unfolding, started talking about the importance of books. What was even more astonishing was that all those involved presumably saw this as something to hold a press conference for, and to broadcast, as opposed to smuggling it into the public sphere in a bare-bones press release at five to seven on a Friday evening in the hope that it might miss the papers.

Framing flimsy PR exercises as “creativity” can only emerge from the kind of mindset that fails to see the difference in creative output between doing a jigsaw and writing a play.

Not a nixer

When a new minister of the hotchpotch Department of Culture, Heritage and the Gaeltacht is announced, the arts community often greets the appointment with enthusiasm and hope, willing a minister to be on their side, even though that minister works for them. It’s time for this subservience to end.

Politeness has got the arts community nowhere. Year after year, artists are demeaned, tossed aside, exploited and ignored. The National Campaign for the Arts at least stands up for the sector, but its demands and frustrations more often than not fall on deaf ears. What should be on the table now is protest, strike, disruption and disobedience. Whoever wants the job as minister should be aware that it’s not a nixer.

Unless the next government takes the arts as seriously as the public does, there won't be any poets left for our political leaders to quote

The German government has outlined a €50 billion package for its creative and cultural sectors. In the UK, £160 million emergency funding is being made available by the English Arts Council. Here we get a suggestion to bake a cake and perhaps do a little dance for Facebook. What a joke. Ireland has the lowest investment per capita in the arts in the EU. For a country known for its culture, this is a scandal. Artists aren’t hobbyists. Being a professional artist isn’t some kind of quirky lifestyle choice. A lifetime of work goes into the vocation, as much graft as there is craft. Unless the next government takes the arts as seriously as the public does, there won’t be any poets left for our political leaders to quote. The denigration of the arts sector denigrates us all.