I hope that François Matarasso, the distinguished practitioner of community arts, won’t object to my adapting the title of his book for this comment piece. He was – rather outrageously, some may feel – implicated by Shadow Arts Minister Ed Vaizey in the move to the instrumental use of the arts and consequently the development of the target culture under Labour (AP173). This week, Arts Minister Margaret Hodge (p16) is very keen to assure us that she’s not just “being instrumental in my understanding of the arts” – the mere idea has clearly gone right out of fashion. And yet most ideas being suggested by politicians these days have one of two aims: the financial or the instrumental. The first aim is to increase private giving so that the state doesn’t have to increase its spend in order to achieve increased cultural activity. The second is to exploit the arts in every way possible for educational, social, regenerational and economic ends, and for the enhancement of the UK’s status (particularly by means of the Cultural Olympiad). That is not to say that exploiting the arts for any of these ends is a bad thing. Clearly, the new manifesto from Action for Children’s Arts (p1) recognises the role of the arts in children’s personal, educational and social development, as well as the importance of ‘arts for art’s sake’ for the young. If an objector exists to the idea of improving and increasing arts in education and using the arts to increase creativity, I have yet to meet that person. The question is, do we really have to separate the ‘use’ of the arts from the ‘ornament’ (taking the word in its deeper sense of an enhancement to our existence, rather than mere decoration)? Are the two mutually exclusive? We are groping our way, with the help of the better aspects of the McMaster Report, to a situation where quality and excellence in either of these areas could be recognised, celebrated and rewarded. Obviously, this is not in fact possible in all cases: it wouldn’t help those whose work is not recognised until years after they’ve gone, and it may give a little too much help to those with an over-inflated contemporary reputation. We can live with that – compromise is fine, it’s muddled, ‘fashionable’ thinking that we need to avoid.
Catherine Rose , Editor
N