arts and culture for a flourishing society_May 2010_Philip Orr

Arts and Culture for a Flourishing Society – Some Initial Thoughts – Philip Orr

Arts and Culture for a Flourishing Society – Some Initial Thoughts | Philip Orr

Arts and Culture for a Flourishing Society – Some Initial Thoughts Philip Orr

There has been desire in recent years to build the ‘creative industries’ within 21st century Ireland and establish the kind of ‘creative hubs’ described by Professor Richard Florida, which possess a dynamic synergy and attract global talent. Nonetheless government policy that refers very loosely to ‘creativity’ and is constantly eyeing up its economic potential, really misses the key point that the arts of a nation constitute its most important ‘creative’ resource, enriching the lives of citizens, by widening their perception of life in the present, by interrogating and celebrating life in the past and through heralding and issuing warnings about life in the future.

Artists are often the makers, the modifiers and the critics of meaning. Art - allied of course with science and technology - often creates both our narrative and our environment. Time and again, in Ireland as elsewhere, we have seen that art – in its broadest sense – can play a part in radically changing the human story. At its best, it can exercise a role in restoring dignity to those who have lacked it, express outrage at human failings, injustices or hurts and generate the kind of pictures, structures, compositions, artefacts and performances that encourage and exhibit human growth.

It is perhaps too easy now to critique the soft-focus artifice that characterised much of the Gaelic Revival and the work of its fellow-travellers, but the cultural imaginings of that period undoubtedly laid the groundwork for the Irish independence project, which - for all its weaknesses - has allowed more of Ireland’s peoples to flourish than ever before and which set an example for other emerging nations, as empires crumbled across the world. The early output of the Abbey Theatre gave dignity and significance to Irish ‘peasant’ culture, through the writings of dramatists such as J.M. Synge.

Numerous scholars, poets, musicians, antiquarians and designers constructed ‘traditional’ Celtic forms and motifs, in order to prove that Ireland had its own aesthetic heritage. Painters such as Paul Henry could take the melancholy, post-famine spaces of the West and retrieve from them a series of rich, iconic landscapes.

Perhaps more easy to identify with, in our sceptical times, are those artists who were critical of new cultural and political projects. O’Casey promptly and courageously critiqued the incendiary rhetoric and the sporadic violence too often employed by all sides in the Easter Rising, the War of Independence and the Civil War. There is Kavanagh’s honest portrait in ‘The Great Hunger’ of the sterile reality that often lay behind the de Valera dream of a rooted, rural authenticity. There is Joyce’s pursuit in exile of a meticulous, anarchic fiction that eschews grand mythologies and celebrates the everyday extra-ordinariness of the human beings who walk the streets of Dublin.

Eventually, Beckett laid waste to the cognitive pride and affective pomp that have lain at the heart of so many Enlightenment projects, including the notion of transcendent identity, whether personal or national.

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Arts and Culture for a Flourishing Society – Some Initial Thoughts | Philip Orr Art is thus the thing that expresses our hopes and articulates our despair. It imagines the unimaginable and notices the things that have been forgotten, by nations, by communities and by individuals. It would be particularly inapposite if - in an era when that other great meaning-maker, institutional monotheism, is on the wane in Ireland - artistic creativity is merely seen as a useful contribution to the ‘knowledge economy’ or as something to be further commodified in order to enhance the tourist industry.

Art is surely worth support through government policy because if Ireland is to flourish in the flux of an ever-changing world, it needs artists to tell stories, paint pictures, design buildings, write songs and enact theatre which will rebuke us for our past follies, indict actual and potential oppressors, thrill us with expressions of communal aspiration or personal joy and enhance our environment in lasting ways.

This must then impact on how public money is spent - prioritising generous support for the artistic practitioner’s creative endeavours through bursaries, tax-breaks and opportunities for interaction and travel, and through ongoing support for the maintenance of venues where artists receive professional training, experiment with new media, and see and hear their work displayed, read and performed. Particular support needs given to those artists who wish to engage with those communities that lack a public voice and experience exclusion, finding ways to help them tell their stories or add beauty to their environment.

However, it must be remembered that the ‘outcomes’ of ‘investment’ in the arts and culture are not always quantifiable in the ways that industrial and commercial outcomes usually are. The impact of creative excellence on Irish society may be relatively intangible and it may be long-term rather than short-term. How does one measure the impact, say, of a very well-written novel, published in 2010, in which the author explores the environmental and psychological factors that have gone to make up the character of a fictional Irish paedophile cleric? The clarity and the possibility of catharsis offered to the reader by a powerfully plotted story, and its contribution to an articulate discourse of national self-understanding, can scarcely be measured using raw short-term data.

And it is important to align suspicion of calibrated ‘outcomes’ in arts and culture alongside a suspicion for this methodology in some other areas of Irish life. In education, for instance, it is important not to fall into the trap of measuring the success of a student, or an educational institution, merely by the crude tally of exam results, or the number of young people ‘prepared ‘ for the workplace.

Alongside the obvious importance of equipping students with skills whereby they can earn a good living and the obvious importance of running colleges in an efficient and up-to-date way, there are other vital tasks which educationalists share with families, faith communities and various other civic institutions. These tasks include: enabling young people to handle the perennial dilemmas of life, helping them find and nourish good relationships, live responsibly within society, respect the natural

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Arts and Culture for a Flourishing Society – Some Initial Thoughts | Philip Orr environment, attend to their health and to their legal rights, and feel confident yet duly self-critical in their Irishness.

Success in achieving these things cannot be measured readily or fully with pie diagrams or barcharts, any more than the salient features of a flourishing culture or many of the key aspects of a flourishing health service.

Finally, it is probably important for us in Ireland to note that the arts and culture are not just encountered privately in the quiet space where a person reads a novel, a memoir or a poem, or in the public - but enclosed and self-selected - arena of a concert-hall, theatre or gallery. The arts of architectural, horticultural, urban and interior design are encountered as a daily public aesthetic presence within the buildings in which we must live, work and socialise, and in the streetscapes that we have to negotiate within the increasingly urban environment of 21st century Ireland. A deeper concern for the arts and culture of the nation would therefore have radical consequences for other policy areas. For instance, the licence for property developers to build housing developments would need to be issued only after an obligation has been established to work with architects and designers on a relevant and humane aesthetic for all the domestic dwellings and communal utilities in the development and for the imaginative incorporation of public space within the project as well as the exclusive use of pleasing materials.

In truth, one of the features of a grossly ugly or carelessly designed part of the built environment is that it impinges on those who did not commission it and do not own it but must nonetheless suffer the degradation that daily familiarity with such ugliness brings to the human spirit. A neighbour who rebuilds his house close to mine with a total disregard for the scale, materials and colours indicated by the surrounding environment and by my proximity to him, may be pursuing his individual ‘rights’ in his own back yard but he is blighting my happiness, if his grim or outlandish structure badly blemishes the view from my living room window.

One of the features of a well-developed civic society is the recognition that a vast number of our individual choices do have a considerable impact on those around us as well as on ourselves. This leads to the growth of a network of obligations that at first sight seem to impinge on personal liberty but in fact protect it. In such a society, there is an in-built recognition that whilst certain aesthetic choices – such as the poems and novels I read - are inviolably private, other aesthetic choices – such as whether I like to play my bagpipes at night, on my apartment balcony or whether I wish to add three stories to my bungalow and paint it fluorescent pink - are very public indeed and become my neighbour’s experience of life as well as my own.

Mature civil societies thus develop local aesthetic codes for what is and is not permissible, whenever the consequences of individual taste are likely to be felt in the public sphere. These codes would unfortunately be seen by many Irish people as tyrannical and elitist, rather than as a means of mutual protection - ‘good walls make good neighbours’ as Robert Frost suggested - and as markers of a community’s aesthetic distinctiveness.

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Arts and Culture for a Flourishing Society – Some Initial Thoughts | Philip Orr In summary, the arts are to be encouraged and supported not so much as the heartbeat of ‘the creative industries’ but as our most important way of interpreting, critiquing and celebrating ourselves on this island. Furthermore, the maturation of Irish civil society is a deeply related issue, in which market tools commonly used in Anglo-American capitalism are not naively and inappropriately imported by Irish government agencies to measure human well-being, and where the construction of a built environment is seen as a work of art as well as a matter of function.

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