— read write play

Ed Vaizey’s recent speech on “cultural education” seems to suggest a near-future of cuts and centralization in arts funding.

First, there’s the repeated suggestion of “confusion and duplication,” a “blizzard of initiatives” that represent wasteful effort. Vaizey doesn’t actually provide any real support for that claim, but it’s the rhetorical basis for the call to spend arts funding more “efficiently and effectively.”

The big challenge I am putting to the whole cultural education world here – all of you in this room, and many more who are not, is this: I am asking you to have honest discussions about what in each of your areas really works and is worth enhancing, prioritising or replicating; and what could either done more effectively or efficiently by another organisation… or even not at all.

Perhaps reasonable enough, but it’s hard to work out what role “honest discussions” between independent practitioners and groups might take when Vaizey is clearly advocating a policy of heavy centralisation:

There is a clear role for central government here to act as a co-ordinator, resource, and funding organisation for these plans and strategies.

and

I am open to the idea of, at a national level, merging some of the plethora of cultural education initiatives and quangos into one coherent, national, agenda-setting funding body.

There’s no suggestion why a single, centralised national body should (miraculously) be less subject to bloat and over-administration, or what particular insight it might offer at a local level. More worryingly, there’s no recognition of existing national initiatives and frameworks: it’s also a speech given by a man who doesn’t actually seem to understand the reasons why – over a number of years – determined attempts have been made to decentralise control of cultural initiatives.

All of which leads to this confusing moment:

The cultural education sector is increasingly diverse and at grass roots level consists of thousands of statutory and non-statutory organisations offering all kinds of engagement with all kinds of culture. The key challenge for central government is to balance the enthusiasm and local nature of this bottom up activity with an overarching national strategy to ensure a much more coherent local offer.

There’s a genuine contradiction here – the praise of local diversity, followed by the declaration that we’re going to somehow improve that diversity by subsuming it to a national strategy. How are we to understand the relationship between diversity and “coherence”?

If the cultural life of this country is at the grass roots level, why is there a need for an overarching national agenda beyond those already in place? Is this about anything other than rationalising cuts to funding? If so, what might be on that agenda? Vaizey doesn’t seem to be able or willing to say.

As such, it’s hard not to read Vaizey’s stated support for “art for art’s sake” through the lens of this line:

We’re going to have to increasingly put a financial price on things in the year ahead.

Those working in the culture industries are already excruciatingly aware of the price of things: a call for any greater focus can only mean one thing. Prepare for cuts.

I’m introducing students to different models of devised performance – and, in passing, described Clay Shirky’s hierarchy of participation: starting with sharing, and moving in increasing complexity through co-operation and collaboration to collective action.

Since that lecture, I’ve been thinking about the value of recognising the link beween these different kinds of participation – that co-operation, for example, is often dependent on sharing, or that collective action may demand very specific modes of co-operation. Consequently, it may be productive to think of interactive and improvisational performance as creating opportunities (or demands) for participants to shift between overlapping, complimentary registers of action that aren’t bound to a simple hierarchy of sophistication. Accordingly, we might think about the terms for participation as being highly contextual.¹

Part of the value of that kind thinking is the way in which it allows us to recognise that – for example – sharing might not be simple or straightforward; that disclosure of even seemingly mundane ideas, thoughts and gestures are shaped by cultural norms and relationships of power. Similarly, particular contexts might make co-operation easier (or, at least, more desirable) than independent action – all of which has consequences for performance which engages with ideas of designed experience.

1. In fairness, I’d note that much of Shirky’s discussion in Here Comes Everybody recognises the specific conditions in which different projects have found success. [↩]