The Worthiness of the Arts in the 21st Century, Address to Trinity College Historical Society
Dublin, 19th November 2013
Auditor McGuinness,
Ladies and Gentlemen,
It is a great honour to have been asked to address the College Historical Society on the occasion of its two hundred and forty third session. May I thank you, Auditor and Hannah McCarthy, for the kind invitation to join you this evening, and all of you for that generous welcome.
I recall speaking to the Society as a student in the Irish Times debating circuit and later replying, as a guest speaker, to Declan Kiberd’s auditorial address. I also vividly remember other debates, such as a memorable one with Ralf Dahrendorf as he began his tenure at the LSE.
It is interesting to note that the years when this venerable Society held its first sessions, in the second half of the eighteenth century, coincided with a key moment in the development of Western aesthetic philosophy.
Indeed those years witnessed a new phase of European commercial expansion, and the concomitant rise of a nouveau riche class eager to purchase works of art, which gave new salience to the question “what is good art?” This was when German philosopher Alexander Gottlieb Baumgarten, who is credited with the invention of the first general theory of “aesthetics,” in the modern sense, first articulated his ideas about good and bad taste.
Also in this period, Edmund Burke – an alumnus of this distinguished College – published his Philosophical Enquiry into the Origin of Our Ideas of the Sublime and Beautiful, in 1757. However, without doubt, the most influential work of all within philosophical aesthetics and the philosophy of art is the aesthetic theory developed by Immanuel Kant in his Critique of the Power of Judgment, published in 1790.
Kant proposed an alternative to the two main diverging traditions in eighteenth century aesthetics: the “empiricist” tradition represented by Burke, Hume and Hutcheson, for whom a judgment of taste was an expression of feeling without cognitive content, and the “rationalist” tradition of aesthetics represented by Baumgarten and Meier, for whom a judgment of taste consisted in the cognition of an object as having an objective property. For Kant, judgments of beauty were best understood as both being based on feeling and as constituting a claim to universal validity.
How much of this Europe-wide intellectual debate still resonates with our contemporaries? In my view, the answer to this question is to be sought not so much in the radical deconstruction which the classical, and then Romantic, categories of the beautiful and the sublime have undergone in the twentieth century, as in the fact that what were previously public discussions about the nature of the arts and the aesthetic experience have evolved into a debate on cultural policy and, more recently, narrowed into an argument as to the economic value of the so-called “creative industries.”
The rise of the specific version of economics which has become so pervasive to our ways of thinking and acting has transformed our understanding of the entire character of art. There is an implicit assumption that art and culture are peripheral, even residual, to the economic sphere; it is as if there were no ‘outside’ to a conception of man as homo economicus.
This, is for me a source of immense significance in moral and policy terms. Do art and culture depend on surplus or, alternatively, can economics be relocated with benefit within culture? These are among the major questions with which anybody concerned with assessing the value of the arts in the twenty first century must grapple, and the problem upon which I propose to reflect briefly with you today.
We are witnessing the rise, in post-industrial Europe, of a new paradigm according to which it is suggested that national economies can remain competitive if the right conditions are put in place for creativity and innovation to flourish within a new entrepreneurial culture. The significance of the arts and, more broadly, of culture, is thus being redefined in terms of their contribution to employment, exports and economic growth. It is as if within the cultural space, a terra nova of the creative industries, previously ignored, has suddenly been discovered.
This concept of ‘creative industries’ is a vast and heterogeneous field which refers to the interplay of various activities, ranging from the traditional practice of the arts and crafts, music, of visual and performing arts, to more technology-intensive and services-oriented groups of activities, such as film, television and radio, and new media and design. It is a sector with a flexible market structure, encompassing as it does independent artists and small-businesses enterprises at one extreme and some of the world’s largest multinationals with significant, monopolistic tendencies and practices at the other.
Creative industries pertain to the same ideological realm as the so-called ‘creative economy,’ which the UNCTAD defines as the “emerging concept dealing with the interface between creativity, culture, economics and technology in a contemporary world dominated by images, sounds, texts and symbols,” and which the same institution has successfully promoted, through its successive reports on the subject, as a worthwhile policy tool among governments around the world.
The concept also finds a more localised incarnation in what Heather McClean coined as the ‘creative city script,’ a ‘third way’ policy model that celebrates the mythical ideal of an artistic and inclusive, yet competitive and business-friendly urban community. Creative industries have thus become central to the contemporary strategies aimed at revitalising the economy of urban centres.
The success of this model means that interest in culture and the arts has suddenly risen, even among the most philistine of policy makers at local, national and regional level. Suddenly the suggestion begins to proliferate that there is money in culture!
While I am in favour of jobs and growth, and know from my experience as Minster for Culture how great a multiplier effect investment in the cultural sector can have, I have stressed in the past that cultural provision as a building block of participatory citizenship is not only democratic but is the most sustainable basis for creative output and employment.
The real challenge for the future of our society lies, in my view, in our ability to articulate a positive discourse about the arts and artistic practice which leaves us with an enhanced conception of citizenship and a version of human activity that is ethically driven, based on non-utilitarian conceptions of human flourishing and the power of the imagination.
This is a topic that has been debated for some decades within the discourse of the culture of economics. In his seminal paper entitled “The Necessity of Utopia: Lessons from the Culture of Economics” (1999), the Australian academic, Michael Volkerling raised questions that are of fundamental relevance to the contemporary Irish context: for example, is culture dependent on economic surplus? How to conceive of the link between the state and the ethical world of the individual?
For Volkerling, the development of the “full human capacity” of the individual is “the best way of ensuring the emergence of the ‘representative’ citizen whose commonly shared interests it [is] the function of the state to safeguard. Such a view of course substantially contradicts the economic conception of normative citizens as disaggregated, ‘rational utility maximisers,’ devoted exclusively to their own self-interest.” What we need, Professor Volkerling claims, is “a reconnection of economic policy with its cultural roots to produce a rich, holistic discourse in which cultural knowledge is a necessary element.”
In other words, the cultural space cannot be considered as the residual of the marketplace. Rather, it is the space within which various forms of human activity, including economic activity, are crafted, imagined, envisaged, or made possible. Culture, because it is shared, constitutes the bedrock of our public world – a world that is currently under threat from the demands of a destabilising privatised world, predicated on limitless consumption and the construction of ever more elaborate protections of a life-world often based on the fear of others. The recovery of this public world thus constitutes, I contend, an essential project for the twenty-first century.
If we genuinely intend to build a strong, and participatory, cultural space, allowing for the creativity of citizens, then we must be wary of narrow, short-term, neo-functional attempts at colonising a previously relatively free space of human activity for the economic benefit of the few rather than the many. It is in the free space of cultural practice that necessary utopias can best flourish.
It is equally important to reject any elitist definition of creativity and culture. In my view, cultural policy has to be based on a definition that bridges the gap between the anthropological approach to the notion of culture – understood as an evolving set of socially shared practices, beliefs and values – and an understanding of culture as referring more specifically to the sphere of the arts.
For example, sensitivity to the workings of collective memory, respect for the freedom of imagination, for each citizen’s creative potential are clear obligations which any cultural policy ought to respect. Cultural policy should never be of the contemporary moment only, or be structured on short-term and narrow gains. It must be seen as the space of pluralism in relation to what is remembered and what is imagined.
This is the view which I sought to implement during my time as Minister for the Arts, Culture and the Gaeltacht, from 1993 to 1997. In doing so, I was seeking to favour the widest possible access to culture by supporting community arts. Indeed it is important to recognize that, by enriching the capacity for community arts, we are liberating our citizens from the determinism of a narrow economic consumerism.
As a Minister who also had responsibility for broadcasting, I thus had to both consider and indicate where I stood on the choice of constituting my fellow citizens as market segments or as citizens with rights within a communicative order. If I may quote Michael Volkerling again, the aim of policy makers should be to shape, as he put it, “a role for culture that links concepts of citizenship and community within a pluralist state operating in a globalised framework.”
May I now share with you a few thoughts on the ethical dimension inherent to any affirmation of the intrinsic value of the arts and culture. Indeed to challenge the utilitarian or instrumental approach to artistic practice, should not be construed as a mere aesthetic gesture. It is so much more than that. It is, among other things, a means to pose the fundamental question of what constitutes human freedom.
Beyond the humanist ideal which cast the arts as an essential constituent of any well-rounded human person – an ideal which, in my view, should remain with us as a powerful source of inspiration – there is also much to be gained, I contend, in going back to the ethical reflection on artistic practice and its links to the question of truth and personal freedom which was passed down to us by the twentieth century figure of the dissident artist.
The reflection developed by Vaclav Havel on theatre, for example, is one worth dwelling upon. For Havel, theatrical performance was worthwhile insofar as it was capable of bringing a group of people into a new understanding of themselves. “A single performance for a few dozen people,” he wrote in one of his Letters to Olga, “can be incomparably more important than a television serial viewed and talked about by the entire country.”
This faith of Havel’s in the revealing power of theatre may seem strange today, when impact is measured in terms of volumes of sales or page views. But Havel insisted on it for other forms of art as well. If only twenty people read a novel, he wrote in his open letter to General Secretary of the Czechoslovak Communist party Gustav Husák, “the fact of its existence would still be important.”
Thus for Havel, culture was “the main instrument of society’s self-awareness.” A given society could survive without it for a while, subsisting instead on the “slick, trivial, and pre-digested” entertainment products of a totalitarian regime, but not forever.
In the very different context offered by our twenty-first century liberal democracies, these are thoughts which can still inspire us.
Patrick Mason, Artistic Director of the National Theatre Society, expressed a similar view in 2000, in relation to the value of theatre when he said:
“In the end, the National Theatre is not about making profit; it is about making theatre – theatre that is the most ambitious and rewarding that theatre can be. That type of theatre is not about social cachet, or glib marketing notions of ‘Prestige’ or ‘Excellence’, where real qualities are missing – qualities of depth, abundance, and intensity of vision. It is not about fashion, or this or that sociological agenda. It is about the enduring richness and integrity of its practice, about loyalty to the invisible world of the imagination and the spontaneous movement of the heart; above all, it is about staying true to the conviction of its founders, that all the people ‘should have a more abundant and intense life’. Surely this latter objective – a more abundant and intense life for all the people – should be the aim, and economic policy the instrument that serves it.”
Of course the challenges facing us are of a very different nature than those faced by the Easter European dissidents in the twentieth century. Today we have more reasons to be concerned with what French sociologist Alain Touraine described as a growing “social passivity” in the face of the mass commercialisation of culture. In my view, Touraine has rightfully identified the crucial distinction between active participation in cultural activity and passive consumption of cultural products or, much worse, alienated withdrawal from the social world.
Standing behind this dilemma is again the question of freedom. Is freedom to be defined primarily in terms of consumer choice in relation to an ever-widening array of cultural products? Is it to stop short of social participation or of live performance directed at an audience? Which cultural model is to prevail? Whether it is to be one of passive consumption or one of active participation is surely a matter for public discourse and public policy.
I am personally inclined to agree with Theodor Adorno’s critique of Walter Benjamin’s famous essay on the work of art in the age of its mechanical – today one could say that digital – reproducibility. While full of potential in the manner in which they can produce for mass audiences, yet, if torn from critical context, modern modes of reproduction can result in less rather than more critical citizens.
The challenge, therefore, in this beginning of the twenty-first century, is to reaffirm forcefully that the value of the arts lies primarily in the quality of depth, the intensity of vision, and the loyalty to the infinite possibilities of human imagination, that their practice can yield.
A thriving participatory culture should be the aim, and economic policy the instrument that serves it. The economy is best seen as instrumental for the flourishing of society. This is a debate which we need to rekindle, in as many fora as possible, and I avail of this opportunity to tell you that, tomorrow, I will be meeting with representatives of Irish third level institutions to discuss the place of ethics in our society, and with them to discuss and envisage the various ways in which we might reinforce the ethical connection between our economy and our society. The role of culture and the arts will be central to these discussions.
The real value of creativity lies in the exploration of how we are to live ethically together with joy and fulfilment. I would like to conclude by calling for and placing my hopes in that Ireland of tomorrow where economic discourse will be relocated within the wider frame of our culture, a place where among the ethical issues posed will be the important one of defending the integrity and freedom of that which can be imagined but which has not yet managed to be.
Thank you for your attention.