Baroness Kidron
Main Page: Baroness Kidron (Crossbench - Life peer)
Baroness Kidron (CB)
My Lords, I would like to raise three points that have to do specifically with non-commercial arts funding: the impact of top-down funding structures on the individual artist, the rise of instrumentalism in judging art and the tyranny of excellence. I am grateful to my noble friend Lord Clancarty for his tireless work in this area and I refer noble Lords to my interests in the register.
Most current funding structures conform to the top-down principle of trickle-down theory, with the effect that the total amount of money reaching individual artists is incommensurate to their contribution to the arts ecosystem, and the gatekeepers of art funding garner too much power. In this funding model, money, whether public or private, flows from a central distributor to arts organisations that in turn offer the opportunity for individual artists to make or show work. However, as in many similar trickle-down structures, by the time the funds have trickled down, there is very little left for those at the bottom of the pile, in this case the individual artist. Meanwhile, organisations, particularly those which distribute public funds, have a duty to maximise the benefits of the funds they administer and invariably develop criteria against which success can be measured. Funding transactions routinely have to navigate the personal taste of the gatekeeper, their interpretation of public value, and the success criteria of the organisation that they are representing. This is a system that makes funding institutions complex and risk-averse and, for many individual artists, unapproachable.
Being slaves to the metrics of success is counter to the very purpose of art and the artist. Their role is not to fulfil criteria nor to follow fashion but to disrupt and reinvent the world as they imagine it. I suggest that when considering arts funding, the artist should be at the top of the pile and we should aim to support art that is intrinsically, rather than instrumentally, valuable.
That leads me to the second point, which is the harm in believing that art and artists have to be useful. Since I came to the House, I have argued that art contributes to our GDP, benefits social mobility and education, that we ought to use art in health settings, and so on and so forth. While I do support all of these uses of creativity, it must not be at the expense of supporting artists to make art. Whatever our tastes, we value art because it is provocative, reflective, beautiful, satirical, and it helps us make sense of the world. The discoveries we make have value in all sorts of other arenas, but societies protect their artists and foster creative cultures that sustain and produce art because it is the essential space in which we imagine ourselves without the straitjacket of utility, beyond the metrics of instrumentality. It is that which makes us human. If the demand is that art should deliver a predetermined outcome, then it is not art.
Finally, on the tyranny of excellence, in his Reith lectures of 1949 Bertrand Russell said:
“In the ages in which there were great poets, there were also large numbers of little poets, and when there were great painters there were large numbers of little painters. The great German composers arose in a milieu where music was valued, and where numbers of lesser men found opportunities. In those days poetry, painting, and music were a vital part of the daily life of ordinary men, as only sport is now”.
One cannot create a great artist but we can and must support a culture in which many individuals make art and in which excellence may happily flourish. It is counterintuitive, perhaps, but imperative that we do not prevent excellence by insisting upon it.