What use are the arts?At the end of a series that has largely focused on art's practical applications, artists get their chance to assert their freedom
"Nothing is more useful to mankind than those arts which have no utility." - Ovid
THIS SERIES WAS the culmination of three months' research and almost 100 conversations, e-mail exchanges and interviews with policy-makers, teachers, art facilitators and healthcare workers who use art outside of traditional "high" cultural boundaries to make a practical impact on the lives of particular communities.
The evidence and case studies that I came across were exhilarating. From scientific research that mapped the effect of music on the brain, to the sociological links between educational attainment and artistic interest, to the economic value of cultural industries, the case for the arts began to seem indisputable.
In fact, art plays such a critical role in so many aspects of our lives that attempting to quantify its audience, as recent surveys have attempted, seems an even more impossible task than defining art itself. Our engagement with art cannot be measured in ticket stubs or in rating figures for The View. Art permeates our culture at a far deeper level, and the underlying cultural snobbery that asks "but is it art?" of those involved in creative projects with alternative audiences needs to be tempered with the recognition that enforcing boundaries upon artistic practices (even the term "the arts" denotes an exclusivity) connotes a serious lack and limit of imagination. Furthermore, it threatens the validity, the very future, of art. The arts need not be a minority interest.
Throughout my research, I deliberately avoided speaking to artists, whose belief in the power and value of the arts is implicit in their decision to devote their professional lives to a pursuit that is rarely financially rewarding. However, the response from the arts community to the series has been overwhelmingly positive, and some of the responses to the questions it has posed are recorded below.
Overall, it appears that the arts community in Ireland is eager to build audiences, to reach out to the public, to seek responses to their work, even if this is usually only possible on an individual rather than a broader public level.
For the integrity of art for art's sake is not undermined by this engagement with public needs; it is complemented by it. Art is shaped by society, it is a response to the world that artists live in. Even when the response is a rejection of the world, or the creation of an alternative world, it is a gesture informed by a desire to find new possibilities in public life or private enclaves of protection from a society that fails on many different levels. It is for this reason that the artist - that art for art's sake - can maintain vitality, whether the work is used in an instrumentalist capacity or not.
The private individual is the fundamental unit of public life, so what shapes the individual has an inherent, if indefinable, value for society as a whole. The relationship between "the arts" and a mass audience need not be a struggle. It is indivisible and of mutual benefit.
YVONNE CULLIVANis an artist. She has just completed a year-long artist's residency at the Ark cultural centre for children in Dublin.
"I think it is so important for artists to be in dialogue with the public. You get some people who say 'I can't draw', as if that eliminates the possibility of making art. Or they'll say 'you're a real artist', as if they could never be one, because art is something that is very defined for them. But it is important to show people that there are a whole range of media that they can work in creatively, that there is a whole lot of thought and decision-making behind the creation of a piece of work.
"Working in education allows me to let people know that art is not black and white, that it is multi-faceted, not right or wrong. When I first began working in education, I would bring in something and show people how to make their own. Then I would go to my studio and do something differently. I kept my art and my work in education very separate; my work in education being what I did to sustain my own work financially. But I began to see a connection between the media we were using and my own process, and so I began to look for more long-term projects so that I could make and develop my own work alongside my work with the children, showing them how to bring ideas to the table, how to share and discuss, how the whole group might take one idea forward. It is a deeper way of working, and you get beyond the surface of things. And it pushed my own work as an artist as well as challenging them."
JOHN KELLYis a writer and broadcaster.
"Without the arts most of us wouldn't get through the day. Music, books, movies, The Sopranosand The Simpsonsare often the most important things in our lives. They show us how to live, how to be human and how to survive. With our songs, our movies and our poetry, we try to mark the times we live in. We celebrate and we mourn, and sometimes, if we're lucky, we can even transcend the whole caboose.
"But the arts have their enemies even so. Firstly, there are the ranks of gatekeepers, guardians, experts and arbiters who proceed on the basis that nobody understands anything apart from themselves. They are wrong, of course, but there are enough of them around to swamp any occasion or event. The worst enemy of jazz, for example, is often the jazz fan. Most of them should never be let into gigs. A lot of them don't seem that fond of the music anyway, and none of them can dance.
"That's not to say we don't need our experts, our teachers and our enthusiasts. We most certainly do. And they have every right to use big words. Just because you can't follow what someone is saying, it doesn't necessarily mean that they are talking nonsense. In fact, the next time I hear a big word I'm going to write it down and look it up - a more constructive approach than the current compulsion to dismiss all smart people as idiots.
"And that brings me to something infinitely worse than the miserly arts snob: the self-styled everyman who purports to speak for 'the man in the street'. The snobbishness here is even more offensive because he will insist that the arts can have no meaning for the 'ordinary person', revealing a very low opinion of 'the ordinary person'. It's poisonous stuff and if it gets into the cultural nervous system, it can be lethal. Ridicule will reign once more. The weary artist will split for France. And then where will we be?"
FERGAL MCCARTHYis an artist and primary-school teacher.
"I have no formal art training at all. It wasn't even an option for me at secondary school, so I never thought about going to art college. I was very interested as a child - that creativity was always in me - but it was never really developed. I actually trained as a primary teacher at Mary Immaculate College, Limerick, and they have a very good art department there. I specialised in art as part of my training, and it was there that I began to experiment, and I stubbornly decided to go with that.
"I still work as a teacher, although I have taken career breaks where I have worked as a full-time artist. I enjoy the work, and it makes financial sense. I do like to use art in my lessons, because it helps to make other subjects more interesting. But it is also really interesting to watch children develop.
"Traditionally, art is seen not as an academic subject but as something nice to do in the afternoon. But children are naturally very creative and talented up to the age of about eight or nine. But then they become aware of how things should be; of form, perspective and shape, and how things should look. They begin to draw into themselves then, and lose their natural talent. They become concerned with things being perfect, instead of expressing themselves.
"Watching that happen is extraordinary. It makes you think about teaching, and the importance of nurturing children's creativity instead of stamping it out with lessons. But it also makes you think about art, and how we define it as absolute."
DERMOT BOLGERis a playwright, novelist and poet. His poems, 'County Lives', are currently being displayed in south Co Dublin as part of the Per Cent for Art programme. 'Walking the Road', his play about Francis Ledwidge and the forgotten Irish of the first World War, runs at the Axis Art Centre, Ballymun, until April 5th.
"As a writer, I feel it's my job to make the stuff, and up to others to decide if it's relevant. But as I grew up in an environment where I felt my experience wasn't reflected, I've always tried to write in a way that touches upon hidden lives. I began by selling photocopied work by local poets in Finglas pubs and my first Ballymun reading was in a tower basement in 1978, so I find it exhilarating, 30 years on, that things like Axis in Ballymun let me do what I would be doing anyway: trying to address an audience who may feel unrepresented or misrepresented.
"When the final part of my Ballymun trilogy, The Consequences of Lightning, appears this autumn, I hope it will have reflected something of that community's journey over 40 years, but no one person can reflect an entire community and I'm always hoping that some audience member will be provoked into writing something better.
"With South Dublin County Council's In Context 3 scheme, I've planted poems that try to reflect everyday life in unlikely places, such as the Belgard Luas Stop or Neilstown. I'm not naive enough to imagine that such poems will influence a broad constituency, but I'm seeking the one person in 500 who turns a corner and is startled to see their own experience reflected on the wall. It's my way of leaving the sort of sign I longed for as a disaffected youth, a glimpse into another way of seeing things, an affirmation by a stranger of the validity of thinking in a different way.
PAT KINEVANEis an actor and writer. His most recent play, ' Forgotten', was nominated for an Irish TimesJudges' Special Award this year and was invited to Prague, Romania and Edinburgh. ' Forgotten' will be performed on May 16th in Dublin City Gallery The Hugh Lane as part of Bealtaine, and on June 20th in the Civic Theatre, Tallaght, to mark World Elder Abuse Day.
"I wrote Forgottenfor a mainstream audience, for everybody, including elderly people. I didn't set out to 'make a piece of art', but to do something through theatre that would represent a certain section of Irish society [the elderly] who are being ignored. The community drama tag can be patronising, but to be honest I never wondered whether I was doing a community piece. If something makes someone think differently, it is a piece of art and it's done its job. Theatre provides a way of telling a story that is accessible to everybody. It can resonate in a different way: for example, I'm a healthy 41-year-old man, and in Forgottenthat was really important for me. I didn't want to represent elderly people just by having a walking stick. That would be talking down to the audience and I did not want to be seen as patronising the audience.
"But I am quite superstitious about 'selling' the show or speaking to the press, because Forgottenis dealing with something delicate and sensitive for a particular community and I feel a big responsibility to it. I don't want to be seen to be exploiting that community. But I feel very lucky that the play was received so well by an older community. They don't have a voice in society, and there was a sense of relief for them to see their fears and vulnerabilities and their pride represented. But Forgottenis not a token gesture to the elderly; it is a discussion itself. It is not for me to take any moral high ground with the issues raised.
"But, ultimately, it will be the punter who decides how successful Forgotten, or any other piece of 'art', is, and that's the most important thing for me: to entertain an audience and leave them with something to think about."
KAREN EGANis an actor and a singer-songwriter.
"The importance of being involved in the arts is certainly not reflected in my earnings. I suppose I should say that, as an actress, I find it character-building to live on a low wage.
"But all things money aside, there are times when I do wonder whether or not being an artist or calling the arts important is just an indulgence . . . but the corollary would be too depressing. To say that the arts are of no consequence is to deem them expendable, and I know that I could not live without art in my life.
"Imagine a world without the linguistic richness of Shakespeare, the visceral poetry of playwright Tom Murphy or the drama of Rachmaninov's compositions. These are what feed us and give us energy. For it is to art that we turn to make sense of the complexities of life. Just think of the lyricism of Jacques Brel's hauntingly beautiful and biting songs, or of how Edith Piaf transformed the chanson with her unique style of singing. My life is all the richer for having seen Goya's masterpieces, and I still remember the exhilaration of encountering Gaudí's Sagrada Familia. To question art's importance would suggest that we put no value on creativity.
"When faced with the extremes of life, such as the loss of a loved one, it is art which helps us engage with our existence again. Contrary to the notion that it is a form of escape, it helps us face the hard questions. It is confrontational.
"Not for me the utilitarian, Gradgrind, fact-based approach to life, which dulls the imagination. The arts facilitate our personal development and art is how we give expression to who we are. Take away the arts and then I would be truly impoverished."
GERALD DAWEis a poet, whose new collection, 'Points West', will be published in July by Gallery Press. He is director of the Oscar Wilde Centre for Irish Writing in the School of English at Trinity College Dublin.
"If you pigeonhole art into 'the arts', yes, they are a minority interest. But so what? Everything - windsurfing, rock-climbing - is a minority interest in comparison to the overpowering surge of film and video and the inordinate volume of popular music, each of which now has its own varieties of genre and niche.
"But I have never understood what the high/low culture debate refers to, since all the great European painters, musicians, writers, choreographers, theatre and film directors of the 19th and 20th century, along with their American contemporaries, all of them drew from hugely disparate cultural resources - popular, intellectual, experimental, traditional.
"The more thoughtful and progressive and dynamic cultures in Europe have always placed great store in learning to appreciate the meaning of literature and music and visual art for its own sake. They seem to have circumvented the silly divisiveness that still constricts culture in Britain and Ireland, where we get upset about such terms as 'elitist' and 'popular', which really are meaningless concepts.
"I don't see the division between 'amateur' and 'professional' bringing much light to the discussion either. Some of the finest poets writing in English have been seen as amateurs at one time or another. The professionalisation of the arts means that the quiet instinct to go about the solitary business of making art - in words, in physical forms, in sound - is all the more troublesome because so much more is expected publicly to justify what really is a private pursuit of excellence."
DEREK O'CONNORis programme director of the Darklight Digital Festival.
"For all the moaning that goes on about the vicissitudes and funding decisions of the Arts Council - about it being Dublin-centric and favoured towards names - we have a really healthy and thriving infrastructure of support for the arts. But that infrastructure can be potentially dangerous, because it can become all about the infrastructure rather than the art.
"The most important date on the arts calendar every year, for example, is the Arts Council deadline. Everyone is struggling to get funding - we have gotten used to getting paid - but the most important thing should be that artists want to make art anyway, regardless of funding decisions.
"Art is an important part of society, it is what separates us from the monkeys. It elevates us. It gives us context and understanding of the human condition. But cultural snobbery is a lethal force in contemporary society. People will argue about whether something is 'real art' or community art or native art. But the culture has changed with technology, and the cultural landscape is a lot broader than people give it credit for. Yet people are so afraid of redefining their attitude to the arts. Just because you see a performance on YouTube, does that mean it's a lesser experience of art?
"There should be no such divisions between high art and low art any more; it should be looked at just as good art or bad art. That's why places such as youth theatres are so important: it is where people can experiment and find out what art is all about to begin with. It is the reason that Darklight Digital Festival is so important too, because it is one of the only open-submission film festivals in the world, so literally everyone who sends something in, no matter what it is - video art, animation, short films - will have their work seen by us and get a response.
FIACH MACCHONGAILis artistic director of the Abbey Theatre.
"My job is to mediate between the artists and the audience, but it is disingenuous to think that a theatre should have the same audience for every play. The homogeneity of the Irish audience is gone, and when we programme at the Abbey, we are aware that our artists should engage with the many different audiences in Irish society. If that sometimes involves bypassing the mainstream middle-class theatre audience, so be it - that can be liberating.
"When we find a younger audience for productions such as The Playboy of the Western Worldor Romeo and Juliet, my heart gladdens, but we did not 'target' them specifically when we made artistic decisions and we did not patronise them in the productions. Yes, we advertised through our Bebo site, but we got them in to the theatre by making sure that there were cheap tickets and concessions.
"But how we work in the arts is always on the back foot. Even that question, 'what use are the arts?', tells us that. We always have to explain ourselves. But we need to think about it in more sophisticated terms: about how the arts make us a more entrepreneurial society; about how our critical faculties are more attuned. And we need to make the arts more important on a statutory level, especially in education.
"If I was taoiseach for the day, I would amalgamate the departments of arts and education, not because I think that education is a way to build an audience for the future, but because art makes for greater social development and skills. There is this subtext that excellence and accessibility are mutually exclusive, but they are not, and the citizen has the right to both."
