Beware the victim mentality

“It will be a nice piece, of course?” an interviewee asked me after a chat we’d had for a feature. In truth I’d been given very little to work with. I listened back to the tape while at my desk and figured it was probably something to shelve, a suck it and see until I had a bit more information.

But her comment at the close of our chat had irritated me. A career combining both PR and Journalism has given me an unfortunate or positive insight into both, depending on your approach. On the whole both sides are made up of incredibly hard-working professionals pulled in myriad directions, often ending up pleasing nobody. The caricature of the air-headed PR more interested in drinking champers than sending pictures in time for a deadline is largely as much of a cartoon character as the journalist who plots and plans to stitch up every savvy gallerist they chat to.
Yet I felt this was something more than my perennial media chip on the shoulder. I’d done an interview with a local authority spokesperson the day before. Their only concern was that I should give balance rather than a one-sided diatribe. Perhaps it was experience but my original interviewee was no less experienced. I felt I was being handled. And that was the rub. Why the need to dictate to a journalist what they should and should not write? It rings alarm bells that perhaps there is something to hide, but also that there was an expectation I would never write anything other than lovely about their organisation.
It’s a dangerous road to go down. It risks gallerists becoming the Dickensian orphan, wearing an oversized flat cap sitting on Southwark Bridge holding out their hand and waiting for a rich banker or commercialist to chance by and toss out a few coins. The confidence in your own product should be there, along with your ability to sell it, and one critical piece shouldn’t bring down the whole deck of cards. It’s too risky a strategy and it gives an impression of neediness, of a victim status that undermines the industry and everyone who works so hard within it.
Much of the chatter in recent weeks has been about cuts and funding. Unsurprisingly some may say, it has been a catastrophic body blow for many. But keep saying the same thing and eventually people tune out. Keep demanding nice positive write ups and playing the victim, eventually people stop listening. We risk losing the communications battle.
One of the best arts commentators around right now is the wonderful Matthew Cain on Channel 4. I could wax lyrical about his diverse choice of subjects, the way he intertwines his twitter presence with what he’s working on, adding a new level of engagement, but I won’t. Instead I’ll refer back to a rather tricky interview he did at the announcement of the BP Portrait prize live from the National Gallery last week. Faced with such an uncommunicative interviewee, dazzled by the combination of the win and the requirement not to swear I’m guessing, it would have been easy to fall back on stock questions, and thus get the stock responses: “Are we going to see fewer painters because there is less funding available?” “No, artists have always worked for very little”; “Are you sad to see organisations go?” “Yes it’s terrible”. No, instead of that we got an insight into different styles of portraiture, trends and adoptions by younger artists coming through. Yes, it looked like the interview was hard work but bravo to Matthew Cain for not falling back onto the dominant narrative in the arts; how very hard done by we all are and isn’t it sad?
We shouldn’t expect people just to say nice things about us when we’re going through a hard time. It’s demeaning. Critical analysis of the arts is one of the principle things that have kept audiences engaged and felt they had a sense of ownership. We can still get things wrong with no money in the same way we could get things wrong when we lived in the land of milk and honey and trying to control the message by pinning a victimhood status could do far more damage in the long term.