A rump of numpties

Two views of Creative Scotland

Alison Prince
The Scottish Arts Council (I cannot bring myself to call it Creative Scotland) is bedevilled by a conceptual gulf between itself and the artists it purports to serve. The cause of this gulf needs to be identified and dealt with before it does any further damage, for it has formalised a natural difference into an unworkable shibboleth.
     Administrators, almost by definition, are not artists. They may be passionately interested in the arts, but they have never put their shirts on the practice of an artistic discipline. Had they done so, they would not be sitting in Manor Place, devising new forms of forms. Equally, artists are very unlikely to be administrators. The state of being an artist is an unchangeable condition usually realised in early childhood, like understanding that one has asthma or is autistic. It brings about a compulsion to express the extraordinary significance of existing, and it is not fundamentally concerned with anything else. Money or lack of it is a worry, but not a primary interest. There may be small crossovers between these two admittedly crudely delineated groups, but I hold that my definition is broadly true. I also hold that these two groups are finding it increasingly difficult to talk to each other – and the main reason for this is that administration has changed significantly.
     As a writer, I have been grateful to the SAC on several occasions for research grants and support for cross-arts work with children and adults, but in recent years, an obsession with procedural definition has grown into such a monstrous construct that it blocks the growth it once served. Artists now have to quantify any proposed project in such detail that it requires us (I cannot be distanced from this) to have mentally completed the conceived work in advance of starting it, so that it can be set down in the specific terms required. From the artist’s point of view, this is impossible. The work lying ahead is still in the future, like an unborn child. The colour of its eyes or even whether it has spina bifida cannot yet be known. External support would be a blessing at this point, so that one can live while this essential development is going on, but to be really useful, such help needs to be established through discussion and understanding that continues throughout the making of the construct. But the gulf prevents that.
     The administrator wants safety and certainty, but the artist is pulling the other way. It is very difficult for him or her to cost an exploratory process in detail and quantify it in terms of its usefulness to ethnic groups and the disabled. Demands for the statement of every minuscule cost and expense bring with them a state of despair. What will be your contribution? the form demands. The artist, living on luck and hope, can usually only shrug and say, ‘Everything I have, m’lud.’ But this is no good. Define the term, ‘everything’, see p. 27,subsection 5/16. The depression brought about by such requests is so acute that many artists, to my knowledge, have stopped even considering a grant application.

     The difficulty of the process, the time involved in trying to express one’s life in unnatural terms and the state of guilt and anxiety this produces make it seem better to slog on as an artisan, hand to mouth on the old, dangerous daily basis. At least at the end of a day of such work, something has been done, whereas the struggle to achieve approved status in the hope of wonderful money brings nothing but a headache. The cynical among us wonder if that is the underlying purpose of the forms – to weed out those unable to play the tick-box game successfully. Last time I sought help to push a big project forward, I was told to put £1,000 into hiring a fund-raiser, whose success (if it happened) might prompt the SAC to make a contribution. It seems very evident that favoured applicants now tend to be those with entrepreneurial skills and a good accountant.
     From the administrative point of view, I can see the difficulty. The SAC is charged with disbursing money to a crowd of plausible groups and anarchic individuals, many of whom have never got to grips with a balance sheet. There is a requirement for a statement of need. As administrators will no doubt point out, ‘We have to cover ourselves if you fail to do the job or are last heard of heading for Tibet with half a grand of grant money in your pocket.’ That sounds fair enough – but is it? I’ve always felt that anyone involved in the arts must accept some risk. If you want to further a miracle, you have to acknowledge that there will be some bum deals. Backing the winning horse is a matter of luck and hunch, not the application of economic strategy. That, perhaps, is the nub of the problem. The push towards an increasingly analytic and money-focussed view of requests has stripped the SAC of a decent human relationship with practising artists. Applying for a grant is no longer a discussion of possibilities but a grim battle with the forms and imaginary money.
     I suspect that this distancing process, which is by no means unique to the SAC, has had the result of driving out the best and most imaginative people from many administrative outfits. There lurks in every bureaucracy a potential downward sifting of staff members that will end in the retention only of a rump of numpties, content to oversee a tedious application of the routine process. Whatever sympathy I have for the difficulties of being accessible withers fast when I think of the millions wasted on the SAC’s ludicrously expensive buffing up of its own image. I hate its ‘rebranding’ and its use of what Kenneth Roy rightly identified as tourist brochure language, and I have a special loathing for its pretentious, self-promoting magazine called IB. Such self-obsession in a Scottish institution that is meant to help the arts is a source of bitterness to working artists, and does nothing for the reputation of Scotland.

 

Alison Prince is an author and editor in Arran

 

Catherine Czerkawska
At £35,000, the new Creative Scotland logo was indeed a bad bargain, especially at a time when the arts sector is in such dire straits. But, in debating this and the poorly designed website, I get the uneasy feeling that we are shifting deckchairs on the Titanic.
     The thing that disturbs me most about the site, quite apart from its inelegant prose, is Creative Scotland's self styling as a 'National Leader'. Words such as 'support' and 'encourage' might give us, the practitioners, more confidence but ‘leader’ has the faint, but unmistakable, suggestion that we are incompetents, who need to be shown the way, rather than specialists in our own right. I note, too, the stress on that other weasel word 'investment'. Investors dictate terms, reject controversy and, like the denizens of the 'Dragons’ Den', expect healthy returns on their cash.
     Well, as practitioners, we might choose to go along with that. But if we do, we're going to expect to be paid a proper rate for the job, the same rate, in fact, as the burgeoning numbers of arts administrators. Which leads me to the term 'Creative Industries', much loved by politicians and administrators alike, but generally loathed by practitioners, as the oxymoron it undoubtedly is. In practice, most of us will spend a large part of our lives creating for love rather than money. Arts and cultural activities certainly bring money into the country as a whole, but much of it comes indirectly. These activities resemble ‘blue skies’ scientific research, which is equally, if not more, threatened by the current ethos. You don’t quite know what you’re going to get till after it has happened and sometimes it takes you completely by surprise.
     As Walter Humes so eloquently put it (SR 289) ‘the scene is set for the ascendancy of leaders who are strong on assertion and self-confidence, but who are deficient in knowledge and understanding.’ If Creative Scotland could even begin to address the problems faced by arts practitioners in an imaginative way, I'd be in full support. Instead, I suspect that – as in most other 'industries' – the producers of the product (sic) will be on the bottom rung of the ladder as far as remuneration and influence are concerned.

 

Catherine Czerkawska is a playwright and author