Sea of words

A dreadful suspicion has been born: that we have finally started to drown in our own verbiage. This thought occurred as the Creative Scotland Bill slid metaphorically under the table, its silk skirts riding up to show the laddered tights beneath (p3). The problem seems largely to be a lack of clarity – over the definition of ‘culture’, the demarcation of roles and responsibilities and the lack of solid fact, particularly in financial terms. MSPs showed a touching and simple bewilderment when confronted with the term ‘advocacy’: what did it entail? Well, yer honours, it’s arts-speak for ‘bigging up’, innit? Or izzit? People mean different things by ‘advocacy’ – it has now become a concept wrapped in a cliché inside a dollop of fuzzy thinking. It seems to have neither specific activities nor peculiar attributes attached to it. There are many examples of mis-communication: not deliberately misleading statements, but words or phrases which have become so furred with the mosses of time of and exposure that meaning has become obscured. The collision of parliamentary language – even in its thankfully less baroque incarnation at Holyrood – with arts-speak has now resulted in a major setback for Creative Scotland. We should take warning. The term ‘culture’ itself is the worst affected: nobody, nobody ever quite knows what they are talking about when they use it. It’s worth quoting at length from the DCMS’s latest report on the Olympics: ‘Before, during and after’ (p3). “Culture means many things to many people. Our research showed that people do not necessarily understand pastimes, leisure interests and other activities that enrich their lives as ‘culture’. Culture covers not only pursuits such as visiting galleries, museums and theatres but also activities as diverse as carnival and street theatre, fashion, gaming, photography, heritage and the natural environment, and many more. With this in mind, our definition of ‘culture’ in the context of the London 2012 Games is broad and inclusive.” In other words, ‘we are not defining culture at all …’ (And did you notice that there’s no mention at all of, say, dancing, music-making or sculpting… but that betting is included?!) Clearly the problem, as with Creative Scotland, is to assess just how far one can fling the net of ‘culture’ without rupturing oneself. Let’s hope that not too much damage is done while finding out.