Artists take pride in what is well made. Our financial system needs to return to such values, writes DECLAN KIBERD
THE CALLS issued after the Farmleigh conference last autumn to “monetise the arts” must have seemed strange to painters, writers and musicians who live on or below the poverty line. Some must have been astonished at the suggestion that an economic revival might base itself on our artistic community.
The related proposal of a “university of the arts” will have struck many people as equally unexpected, given that the Shanghai ratings system applied to our universities in the previous Tiger decade took no account of achievement by scholars in the humanities or the arts.
Nevertheless, the Farmleigh theorists were on to something real. If, in the 19th century, ownership of the means of production determined a person’s wealth, then control of the means of discourse is vital to people’s prosperity in the 21st century.
A global university of the arts could bring writers, painters, musicians, dancers and film-makers together in unprecedented forms of collaboration. It could draw valuably on those artists who already have experience as teachers, creating apprenticeship models.
Major actors could make DVDs, analysing the work of their favoured dramatist, for sale on the international market. Leading poets and novelists could offer workshops.
Such activities could draw postgraduate students, but also practising artists, from Ireland and overseas. The country might become what Paris was in the 1920s: a point of despatch for the best in modern art and a laboratory for new ideas.
Organisations such as the Abbey Theatre and the craft schools in the west could offer master classes.
There are many fine buildings across the country either empty or under-utilised and these could house much of this activity. There are also plenty of vacant apartments in which visiting artists and students could be offered residencies. These buildings will depreciate and decompose unless used.
All going well, such a university could become a world-class centre for everything from animation to soundtrack music, set design to creative writing, kids’ entertainment to drama. Those who joined it would bring welcome cash.
However, no economy can ever be “saved” by the arts; and that suggestion, if carried too far, will lead only to disappointment in the end. Artists are always individuals. If co-opted to an economic or political programme, they cease at that very moment to be artists. The monstrosities perpetrated on the Girl-Meets-Tractor posters of the Soviet 1930s are proof of that.
On the other hand, artists do offer good examples for economics. They are what old-style bankers and developers used to be: brokers in risk. Though often portrayed as anti-business, they have a lot in common with entrepreneurs – they feel an initial hunch, are willing to take a risk and back it, even if that involves years of toil and may lead only to failure.
That is the romantic idea of the adventurer which used to animate financiers and builders, before the Civil Service extended its bureaucratic safety nets to these people who turn out to have been risking nothing at all – just the taxpayer’s money.
There will be no bailout for artists. They are left as brokers in risk which the other sort just played at being. They may feel an understandable contempt for those who can perform only with the assistance of such safety nets. And nowadays, many ordinary mortgage-holders are more like artists, in that they daily feel the danger of falling into an abyss.
It is, as Gore Vidal complained, a case of socialism for the rich and capitalism for the poor. The imperial powers get stimulation packages, while the smaller nations are reduced to vassal states performing as debt-collection agencies.
As we await a new form of society, following the failure of communism and capitalism (which failed because the leaders of these systems didn’t really believe in them), we can be sure of one thing. The real function of art hasn’t changed.
It soothes our pain by describing it so well; it alerts us to the beauty of nature; and it reminds us that it’s more important to be than to have.
Artists make good things and take pride in what is well made. Our future financial system needs to return to that core value – offering cash-flow to those who make good furniture or tasty food rather than to those who process abstract monetary arrangements at computer terminals.
If the arts can help a society to make more money, well and good; but in the end the real justification of art is that it enhances the lives of those who make it and those who enjoy it. It allows us to listen to the universe and to feel less isolated.
For the first time in human history, mankind lives in an environment of its own making – yet for some reason people have never felt more alone.
Garret FitzGerald is on leave