In a new series, beginning today and running on Mondays, Sara Keatingwill investigate how the arts are being used to contribute to the development of Irish society. Oscar Wilde flippantly commented that 'the arts are useless'. This series suggests the infamous wit's proclamation need not be true
"A nation without arts would be a nation that had stopped talking to itself, stopped dreaming, had lost interest in the past, and lacked curiosity about the future."
- John Tusa ( Engaged with the Arts: Writings from the Frontline)
The relationship between art and its social context has provided fertile room for debate for centuries. This series will examine the way in which artistic enterprises have begun to thrive in hospitals, prisons, classrooms, and community centres across the country, enriching both the social landscape of Irish life and in many cases the artistic practices of Irish artists. It will also look at the relationship as one of binary, complementary, indivisible co-existence, rather than one of opposition.
Aristotle famously proclaimed that "art should be an imitation of life". In fact, art can be seen as an anthropology all of its own, and historians and archaeologists for generations have been using art to decipher the secrets of lost worlds. The primitive paintings on the inner walls of hollow caves provide a glimpse of a prehistoric people's lives and deaths. The tiny shapely human forms on black-figure vases are the key to understanding rites of passage in ancient Greece. Theatre evolved as a means of purging communities of their greatest desires and fears - by laughing at the foolish mistakes of others, by feeling their pain, a society might be cleansed of impulses to do the same.
Art has always been in dialogue with daily life - whether as inspiration to the artist or as an oppositional force against which the artist hopes to reap change. Art has at its core the human need to make a mark on our environment, to record the past, to shape the future. It is our artistic impulse - our imaginations, our ability to create - that distinguishes us from animals. Noam Chomsky sees our artistic faculty as integral, not merely to the development of society, but to human nature: "It is a genetic organ," he says, "like our eyes and ears." And yet, as civilisation has progressed, as societies have put their creativity towards developing ingenious ways of making life easier - through industrial power, the machine, modern technology - so art has lost its primacy in daily discourse. In fact, art itself has become a niche industry, "The Arts"; a field of speciality that, while still engaged with the world as a creative response to it, has become divorced from the society in which it is produced. The arts have been cordoned off in common perception as a pursuit of the middle-classes - like golf or bridge. The arts are for those with the leisure time, the disposable income, and the education to appreciate and consume objects or performances that are exalted as the pinnacle of the products of human creativity.
THE BEGINNINGS OF artistic elitism dates back as far as the 1600s, perhaps further. The emerging structures of the painters' guilds in Rome and Des Beaux Arts in Paris were designed to elevate the work of "artists" over mere "craftsmen", and as these academies grew in stature so did the gulf between art and the lives of ordinary citizens. Perhaps these institutions provided the earliest examples of an emerging hierarchy between high art and popular culture; a hierarchy that has become more rigid throughout the 20th century and particularly troubles the contemporary cultural climate.
However, it has largely been the reaction of artists to these divisions between "The Arts" and real life that has inspired much of the creative work that is now criticised for its obscurity from ordinary experience. For example, when Napoleon III demanded that "the public should judge" what art deserved to be seen in the competitive Paris Salon exhibitions, the artists previously refused by the establishment reacted by disposing of the very artifice of art. The burgeoning movement of impressionism, with its visible brush strokes, soon evolved into abstracted perception, and the skewed realities of Picasso and Kandinsky.
Meanwhile, in literature Virginia Woolf grappled with the desire to represent the most intrinsic element of social being - private life - yet the formal experimentation of her gabbling interior monologues eschewed a popular audience. The atonal chord-clashes of Schoenberg's string compositions, the strange symbolism of WB Yeats's dance plays, the functionalist architectural order of Le Corbusier - all conspired to challenge public perception of what art might be, but also obscured the very public that it addressed.
However, as the 20th century shifted towards postmodernism, so did the emphasis in art: from creation to consumption. And yet the development of mass media conspired to make the arts both at once more accessible and more elitist. Artists began to incorporate elements of modern technological life into the fabric and process of creativity - from Andy Warhol portraits of iconic film stars and popular foodstuffs to Damien Hirst's factory-produced artworks; from the transformation of theatre's dramatic narrative into the TV sitcom to the increased availability of pop music on the radio, and now the internet. In the postmodern age, the possibilities for artistic creation became boundless, yet at the same time our understanding of the arts, and the division between "high art" and "mass culture", has become increasingly narrow.
Yet the cultural climate has shifted again, and an increased value is being placed on the importance of the arts to society - their capacity to transform ordinary experience into objects of beauty, their ability to enhance the ways in which we engage with the world, their vital difference from every other aspect of our working lives, their encouragement of contemplation beyond our material existence. The increased demand for access to the arts among minority communities suggests a greater public awareness of the role that the arts can play in helping disadvantaged groups to understand their own experiences. The increased emphasis on the importance of the arts in education has reflected research that has proven the magnitude of the arts in shaping the growth of the individual mind. Increased subsidy for the arts at government level indicates a belief in the arts as a political necessity, a vital part of a healthy society.
AND YET THE increased demands being placed on artists to prove their public value has raised anxieties for them, particularly in relation to issues of subsidy, where a fear exists among artistic communities that their outreach activities are being valued above their creative practices. Furthermore, the idea of measuring the social value of "The Arts" is seen to debase them, or, as theatre critic Emer O'Kelly has suggested, to transform art into "a branch of the social services", creating an "arrogance of achievement" where "the work produced in a senior citizens' painting group" (not really art) "is so lauded that nobody sees the necessity of looking at the work in the National Gallery" (Real Art). Such arguments suggest that instrumentalism - as this engagement with the practical potentials of the arts is known - runs the risk of creating an environment where "if art delivers nothing immediately measurable as an outcome, then any case for public support [ will] fall", as British cultural critic John Tusa has eloquently argued.
However, Mary Cloake, director of the Arts Council, insists that the anxiety surrounding the relationship between art and its social function is "a false dichotomy": "You can't divorce art history from social history. Art by its very nature reflects the way people live, how society is structured, how they interact with each other."
MARTIN DRURY, AUTHOR of the recent report The Public and The Artsand an arts director at the Arts Council, echoes this argument in a more practical way: "We have public swimming pools, public football fields, public parks and just so we have public cultural resources. We tend to forget it but art serves a huge public good. It is important to say that instrumentalism isn't another parallel road to the arts. It is just another lane on the motorway. It should be a case of complementarity rather than opposition." This increased interest in the arts as an integral instrument of our social infrastructure is in evidence everywhere, as this series will uncover. It informs government policy on arts funding, environmental planning, anti-discrimination initiatives, commercial marketing plans, and school curricula. Although some might argue that the self-contained excellence of "The Arts" - the creative endeavour - is being compromised by this relationship.
However, there is a parallel argument that the future of the arts is in fact being enhanced by a more practical engagement with these varied social contexts. That this is creating a greater interest in and audience for the arts, which in turn creates a greater argument for public support, and thus a stronger indication for art's continued survival.