Excellence and access: and the Arts Council’ Richard Hoggart, Warden, University of London Goldsmiths’ College

It seems that a thorough understanding of these issues by artists is necessary before any progress can be made towards making the arts really socially relevant in the complex society of the late 1970s. Before we can even talk about ‘community arts’ or ‘artists in residence’, it must be understood that the so-called cultural heritage which made Europe great-the Bachs and Beethovens, the Shakespeares and Dantes, the Constables and Tilians-is no longer communicating anything to the vast majority of Europe’s population. That the relevance of even artistic forms which were widely popular at the time of their creation are now only easily accessible to those already convinced that such culture is their heritage. It is not that these cultural forms are ‘above people’s heads’ but that it is a bourgeois culture and therefore only immediately meaningful to that group. The great artistic deception of the twentieth century has been to insist to all people that this was their culture. The Arts Council of Great Britain was established on this premise. And it is on the basis of the concept that if you educate people by constantly placing the art you wish them to ‘appreciate’ in front of them, that ballet, symphony orchestras, theatre and paintings have been toured around towns and villages throughout the country. Yet such a premise implies others, and to me crucially important ones. First, it implies that those who do not appreciate these particular art forms fail to do so because they are ‘uneducated’ or possibly not sufficiently intellectual ; not simply that they find the particular forms of expression irrelevant; and second, that other cultural pursuits enjoyed by such people are inferior and therefore not worthy of the same degree of funding and promotion. Yet over and over again, the Arts Council’s policy has been seen to be of real value only to those people who find such expression relevant-the vast majority stay away.2

I BEGIN with this long quotation from a recent book on the community arts because it incorporates many of today’s arguments-from that field of work-about excellence and access. Ms. Braden’s

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book is different from much discussion of this kind, it should be said however, in that it is not aggressive. It is, indeed, very earnestly quiet in its tone. There is no doubt of Ms. Braden’s care and commitment. Nevertheless, as the above passage shows clearly, she makes what looks like a whole case out of a mixture of genuine facts (such as that Arts Council funded activities often reach a narrow and predictable range of people), faulty history and mistaken a priori conceptions. She practises an unnecessary but, in this field, common setting of different things against each other. On this argument, ‘the vast majority’ should not be offered the chance to enjoy Shakespeare or Beethoven on the grounds that the works of such artists are not ‘socially relevant’, are remnants of ‘a bourgeois culture’ and part of ‘a great artistic deception’. Why must we have, as one of my tutors used to say, this ‘ratpit of false cornpaxisons’, these partial truths which, asserted as whole truths and set together in an artificially coherent pattern, end in anti-imaginative and anti-intellectual restrictionist prescriptions for other people ?

From the way the words ‘excellence’ and ‘access’ are commonly used today in debates about the arts, one would think they were irreconcilable. In one corner is the remaining band of professed ‘Clitists,’ people who believe that in the arts as in education more must inevitably mean worse, that any substantial widening of access means popularisation, and that popularisation means dilution, watering down. In the other corner, and by now extremely talkative, are some of the proponents and practitioners of community arts, fringe arts and related forms. For them much wider access, participation, grass-roots activity is the over-riding aim. If that means a loss of some traditional ‘excellences’, then the price (they claim) is low. Indeed, at the extreme some community artists will argue that such excellence must and should be lost, since it is a false excellence, a model of and a defining of quality in art which is fatally limited and limiting, a bourgeois device foisted on people which prevents them from discovering their own, popular, workers’, provincial art forms.

The Arts Council of Great Britain, its posture often seeming like that of an unathletic man trying to do the splits, stands straddling these two positions. Much of its money goes to the recognised ‘high arts’; but not enough, the recipients never fail to say. Much also goes to community arts and its relations, such as fringe theatre. But not at all enough, as its proponents claim. The battles are

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incessant, insistent and bitter but repetitive and muddled. In politics, I am of the Left. But in what follows I shall inevitably criticise the far Left in the community arts more than the defenders of traditional forms and more than the Right. Not surprisingly, since there is hardly a sign of Right-wing community or fringe arts activity. This is a pity in some ways, since it prevents us from seeing how the Arts Council would react to professedly non-libertarian claims.

The initial worry about the statements of many who speak for community arts is that they both narrow and at the same time over-widen the definition of art. ‘T‘hey narrow it by overwhelmingly stressing art as a communal process. If this were chiefly a deliberate counterbalance to the solipsist stress of much in bourgeois art it would be less questionable. But it works rather by asserting the primacy of communal artistic activity as against individual activity. Conversely, the definition of art is over-widened in the manner of that overused phrase: ‘The artist is not a special kind of man. Every man is a special kind of artist’. As a result, the very word ‘artist’ has itself become devaluled. Any man or woman assumes a right to the title because that is their wish, and because they associate it with the desire to change people (both of them poor prescriptions for the making of art). In this mood, they are not likely to be talking about art. They are talking about directly affecting society politically, through a committed propaganda. Or they are talking about a sort of social work (which may well be necessary), and which they seek to make art explicitly serve. In both instances, art cannot do its own best work in its own best way. I did not agree with Roy Fuller’s grounds for leaving the Arts Council, but he had a point and it lay here: that he believed more and more Arts Council money was going, under the pressures of truculence, into activities which should be funded by DHSS (‘social ambulance work’) and seemed to him to have very little to do with craft and form and the slow struggle to get down on paper or in paint just what it is you do really see. The argument for dismissing virtually all existing art forms has become a classic instance of throwing baby out with the bathwater. The fact that these ‘high’ forms grew out of certain socia.1 groupings and were affected by them does not justify the claim that they are disregardable, because wholly determined by their social roots.

The looseness of thought is matched by a looseness of expression,

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at least among those who join the committees and issue the manifestos; I know that hundreds of others in community arts work quietly and, by their lights, effectively. One community arts officer, and the phrasing is typical of a certain group, refers to ‘the present corporate state, benign-type fascism’. It is hard to respect intellectually someone who can fudge the realities by that kind of blanket language. Nor are the hurrah words used in ways which command more confidence. It isn’t that the words are in themselves all bad; they can point to important ideas. But they are devalued by being used ritualistically, by rote, totemically. I mean the repetitious use of words such as: ‘involvement’, ‘community’, ‘participation’, ‘meaningful action’ ; and, of course, passages like ‘community arts can be preparation for community action’; ‘social action through culture’; ‘community art is an art used by working class communities to better themselves’-all of which blur difficult issues.

The intellectual habits of some of the spokesmen for community arts are often not much better. They confuse good intentions with the creation of art and artistic experiences. They assume that because their emotions are generous, that because they feel great sympathy with immigrants or coal miners, and because they really want to help people, those aspirations in themselves make them artists ; so that whatever they turn their hands to, no matter how intellectually muddled or formally inept it may be, is art. As the Hutchinson Report noted: ‘On occasions we have seen activities which appeared to amount to no more than admirable social activity, not justifying an Arts Council granV.3 The implicit syndrome runs: I have strong views. They show my heart is in the right place. Therefore anything I do in pursuit of the causes for which I care is both morally right and artistically unassailable; and anyone who says otherwise is motivated by political intentions or the desire to censure, is Right- wing and probably near Fascist.

This attitude produces two widely different results. On the one hand, it creates a backlash not only from the extreme Right but also from the worried and traditional and unpermissive, who see the arts being taken over by the Visigoths and complain in their newspapers or in the House of Lords. So the claims of the Left-wing community artists become self-validating. They are confirmed both in their view of the situation and in the lack of need to listen to any critic, since all are seen as ‘censors’. The second result is

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that people who are by no means Right-wing and do not belong to the censorship lobby become, unless they are very tough, inhibited from criticising any community or fringe art for fear of being called fascist. If you can’t retain the right to argue that, whilst you will defend X’s right to say what he wants, you nevertheless think him on the evidence before you noisily unendowed, you have indeed been put in a totalitarian situation. It was to the credit of Roy Shaw, the Secretary General of the British Arts Council, that, faced with just such an issue: about a year ago (a public outcry about certain works in an exhibition put on by an organisation funded by the Arts Council plus a call for censorship), he laid about him on both sides. He told those who were asking the Arts Council to become a public cenisor that it would not do that; it would not breathe down the necks of its clients in that way. He added that his personal view was that the works in question were silly and ungifted, though he upheld the authors’ right to exhibit them. Of course, he pleased no-one.

So one could go on. It needs to be said again and again that we don’t acquire ‘a sense of community’ by willing or wishing it; that because an activity is provincial and small-scale those qualities don’t in themselves give it one per cent more of virtue; and the fact that something is from the metropolis and belongs to the ‘high arts’ doesn’t disqualify it or make it an automatic target for abuse. I use strongish words such as ‘abuse’ because the style of many proponents of community arts is extremely aggressive. The most recent instance I know is the conference of community artists held at the Arts Council, towards the end of February this year. It’s a cops and robbers world most participants posit. Many of them are not talking about art in any recognisable sense. They are talking about politics, confrontation, the bringing about of social change. What they call art is often propaganda which implicitly belittles the people they are working among. They are pointing to a dead end. To insist, as they do, that ‘agitprop’ is definitely what they are about does not improve matters. You can’t by sheer force of assertion pick up that discredited word and make it legitimate. To do so is to cheapen craft, to distort experience, and to be both contemptuous and-oddly enough-patronising towards your presumed audiences, Populism is not democracy. Too many people at present engaged in community arts have not well enough thought through what it is they are about, have made the issues crude and

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simplistic, and themselves reveal a strong strain of anti-intellectualism. Arrogance and sentimentality often combine to make up a form

of emotional self-indulgence. That the people who are behaving in this way towards working-class people are themselves often from middle-class backgrounds is no surprise. There is a certain kind of vulgarity whose base is somewhere in the mid-middle-class and which is not often found in working class people. One had become used to the arrogance of Clitists and used to discounting it; in any case, it is now muted. It is more distressing to meet the arrogance of the far Left when one is oneself of the Left.

Perhaps the most weighty charge against many community arts positions is that they have no adequate historical base and so are often unEnglish in a disabling way. Unaware of, or inadequately in possession of, an understanding of the roots of British woiking- class culture, they talk about their audiences as though they were 17th century peasants or a twentieth century lumpen-proletariat. It is all in the head, and based on thin ideological models. They rarely give the impression of having read, say, The Road to Wigan Pier, let alone Sons and Lovers. One hasn’t much doubt about how short a shrift both Orwell and Lawrence would have given their professions and manner of utterance. Both of those were nonsense- detectors, as were Hardy and Gissing and-perhaps above all, in his membership of the working-class and in his unsentimental and clear attachment to it-Tchekov.

What is missing in this activity is a whole range of traditional English working-class attitudes ; the earnest desire for understanding, a respect for the life of the mind and of the imagination. As a result, both intellectual life and the arts themselves are belittled. The tradition of tolerance and charity and human warmth goes too. This is at bottom an ungenerous world, and in its habits often nearer to the fascism it attacks than to the British working-class tradition itself. If that sounds too much like the complaint of a social democrat, let me invoke someone whose Left-wing credentials are usually regarded as impeccable. I mean E. P. Thompson. In a recent issue of Stand (Vol. 20/2) he wrote:

I can’t assume. . . that intellectual violence and Clitism are only to be found on the Right. . . There are some on the ‘Left’ who flirt with conceits of violence and aggression in a way which suggests a disorder of the imagination, a mere bravura of opinions. . . Within the

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vocabulary of this kind of ‘Left’ there are many ‘dainty terms for fratricide’.

Elsewhere in the same essay Edward Thompson makes the direct connection with the arts and their relevance:

If the message of the Left is to be bang! bang! then I wish they would get themselves poets to imagine this, to join feeling and attach form to the bangs. . . Somewhere (if poets did their work) another cluster of values would be defining themselves. These might be a little quieter, less invigilatory and dominative, less strident and more compassionate than those recently to be noted 011 the Left.

1 have been sharply critical because I believe that is needed. But to avoid unnecessary misunderstanding let me add that I am as sympathetic as the most enthusiastic to the better aims and the better achievements of comniunity arts, such as their revealing of artistic talent in people who, without them, would never have known of their own gifts. But on all this I need refer only to the commendations in the Hutchinson R e p ~ r t . ~ There is much to be said also on the achievements of fringe theatre (though the audiences for that kind of theatre are still predominantly middle-class). The fringe has been and is the nursery of new dramatic talent on a large and exciting scale. Here, though, as so often, the worst can be the enemy of the best and shout it down.

Faced with this kind of development, growing in strength throughout this decade, what has been the response of the Arts Council-whether the Council itself (the twenty nominated individuals) or its full-time officers? Muddled, in a word. There are among both councillors and1 officers signs of bourgeois guilt, of 6litism finding itself on the defensive and flipping over into a hurried acceptance of any populist claim.

Nevertheless, we had best clarify one common confusion. Dear as this image may be to many journalists and to many community artists when their demands are not met, the Arts Council is not a monolithic, unitary-Mandarin sort of body. To say, as yet another community arts officer does: ‘The Arts Council is the corporate State’s posh, art-culture funding body’ is claptrap. The same person is also capable of saying ‘Community arts should be the cultural opposition to state arts’. The truth, the much more interesting

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truth, is that the Arts Council is not at all monolithic. It includes some people on the Left. It includes some who, though not on the Left, are strongly anti-censorship of all kinds. It includes some people of the Right; and some who worry about the limits of permissiveness. It includes people who bring to bear the experience of trade unions, of the universities, of the practice of the arts, of law, of interested laymen and so on. How could it be otherwise? How should it be otherwise in a democracy? To paint it as solidly Establishment middle-class is as wrongheaded as to describe it as solidly on the far Left. I f the process of nomination is amended so that an element of election enters into the Council’s composition, that composition should still nevertheless be varied, just as opinions in the U.K. vary; and no one, whether of the far Right or the far Left, has a right to expect this difficult variety to be removed. By the same token they should resist the temptation, whenever some vote goes against them, to insist that this proves that the Council is solidly Rightist or Leftist.

The fact is that in the last few years the Arts Council has gone out on a great many limbs so as to be as hospitable as possible to new forms, no matter how outrB they may be. As a result it is very often and bitterly attacked by the Right. The Left never acknowledges this taking of what are clear risks, regarding them as merely what the Arts Council should be about anyway (without recognising the social and cultural minefields which have to be breached when a publicly-funded body acts like that in an area such as this). But let the Arts Council just once-even if only marginally and because of advice about possible libel-decide that one or perhaps two pictures out of a great many which they have bought should not be shown, let it withdraw those two and it will rouse a hornet’s nest, stirred by the artists’ own accusations that what you have here is Right-wing, near Fascist, censorship of the most outrageous kind, and stirred again by journalists who prefer to deal in such melodramatic and rhetorical models rather than in the more complicated, less dramatic, but more interesting truth.

I suppose the Arts Council could in such a situation do as the BBC used to do and claim that, since Left and Right attack it, it must have got the balance about right. That doesn’t at all necessarily follow. The fact that both sides attack a public body may mean that it has not got a clearly worked-out policy, that it leans

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intermittently to Left and Right and, lacking respect, gets clobbered by each according to the direction of lean. Indeed, I would say that the biggest single weakness of the Arts Council today lies just here; that it is doing what I called at the start the intellectual splits. I speak as a member of the Arts Council. The Council has not thought through the claims of the community arts any more than it has those of the ‘high arts’ when social class trappings have been removed from them. It has continued to give money to, say, (the most striking example) Covmt Garden-considerable amounts of money-without thinking beyond the simple belief: opera must be kept up to international level. On the other hand, the audiences really are a small Clite. It must therefore follow, here as in similar cases, that the Council’s duty (by the terms of the Charter, it should be said) is not only to keep up the particular art but to spread further the appreciation of it.

On the other hand, the Council has given increasing amounts to community arts (far less thain they need, its practitioners say; but every form of art could say that, and community arts grants have gone up very rapidly in the last few years). Yet the Council has been consistently unwilling to make real choices between community arts, to set up criteria. So it goes on funding a bewildering variety of activities. The variet,y might be a source of strength. It is just as likely a source of strife. Thus, a lot of activity is on the fringes of the circus and variety show . . . with clowns, inflatables, face-painting and play-schemes of one sort or another. All of which, whether it is strictly art or not, may be amusing and helpful to children in densely-populated areas. But the Marxists among the community artists attack the Arts Council for giving grants to such activities which are, they say, no more than ‘populist rubbish’. And the Council shies even further away. It doesn’t want to be embroiled in such internecine strife; it smiles and swears interest in all sides. It hopes it is more nearly meeting its commitment to making the arts more available to new audiences by agreeing to fund as much community arts; activity as it can possibly squeeze from the budget. As a result-as a result, that is, of neglecting to think about the question of excellence and its relation to access- it does well by neither side. It blurs its relations to grand opera and to community arts alike. It has become confusedly overstretched, without shape or form, expressling not a rich creative disorder in its giving but a worried darting from side to side, seeking good

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repute by trying to be all things to all men and letting the questions of both access and excellence remain murky.

The Council has therefore encouraged by default a false dichotomy or conflict between access and excellence. It has encouraged those on either side who, seeing indecision, become more importunate and move in for the kill. The Clitist reacts against the sillier manifestations of community art, repeats with great satisfaction that more really does mean worse, and says with totalself-satisfaction : ‘As for me, I am an unashamed elitist’. No one who is an Clitist in a good sense (a lover for its own sake and for the illumination it can give of the best that has been thought and said) would express himself in that way. That really is snob’s talk, Clitism in the social sense.

On the other hand, the opponents of the ‘high arts’ become more strident and call for the cancellation of subsidies to ‘all that bourgeois crap’, being by now surer than ever in their belief that grants are being given, very large grants, to provide cheaper seats and better opera for a small, a very small, group. It is difficult not to recognise a substantial element of truth in this, if you look round the foyer or crush bar at Covent Garden on virtually any night.

So it is necessary to repeat one or two quite simple things. One is that though ‘high art’ should not be regarded as some sort of icing on top of the social cake, and though many people’s attitudes to it are inextricably bound up with class snobberies, and though it is certainly affected by the social soil in which it is produced, nevertheless it is not wholly class-determined or defined. It can break out from the temporal soil in which it was made so as to speak to us all and at all times, if we have the opportunity and are willing. So we are mistaken to deny those with whom we come into professional contact, as teachers or community workers of whatever sort, the right of access to the high arts. In literature classes for the WEA thirty years ago, there was sometimes a tendency to suggest that the tutors should seek out ‘workers’ literature’ or literature of political struggle. Shaw and Wells were all right but surely Forster and Woolf were irrelevant, the fag end of an effete culture ? That spirit survives today in some groups who address themselves only to workers’ literature, or perhaps only to oral literature. Such literature may be interesting, valuable and illuminating. But it is wrong to set that kind of thing against the great works of literature and to dismiss those latter as irrelevant

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bourgeois productions. Working people have as much right to grapple with King Lear as have people of any other social group. To deny them that right, to claim that King Lear is an irrelevance from the past, is an instance of the higher unimaginative lunacy. But it is often said.

To stress again, since it is relevant at this point, something I hinted at earlier. The stress on the community nature of art is now so strong among people in that field that it is easy to forget that art, in both its making and its appreciation, is very often and at bottom an intensely and necessarily solitary thing. To say this need not be an instance of the power of the bourgeois solipsist view of art. Great novels, great symphonies, great plays are not written by groups. And the appreciation of these things, though it may be helped on by work in a group, is finally personal, something we must each take to ourselves. There is something one can respect in the community arts’ effort to reach out towards, to help create, a new sense of community, the reaction against anonymity and fragmentation, the revolt from the individual, self-serving, thrusting, consciousness and conscience. But it has over-simplified an inescapable and endless dilemma, that between the individual personality and the sense of community.

As a result, this attitude devalues all artistic activity. Art does not come more easily because one makes the right protestations. Even if we are only slightly gifted, art is a bard taskmaster to us as she is to the greatly gifted. She: demands, from both the makers and the audiences, respect for the experiences we are trying to shape, respect for the artistic tools we have chosen so as to do that, and respect for those by whom we hope our work will be heard. At their best, the community arts have in some ways widened access. Sometimes they have done so without violence to other criteria. Just as often, they have widened access by a sort of selling out, a rejection of the best in our common social and cultural and artistic traditions at all levels.

Behind much in their attitudes; is an unrecognised patronising and even an implicit belittling of the very working people they hope to be affecting. Even if one does not deny their good faith, and even if one recognises their devotion and hard work, one is left with the feeling that they are offering working people a form of snobbery no better than that they attack; a reverse snobbery which says-that kind of thing (opera, Shakespeare, ballet, symphonic

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music) is not for you. Here is your kind of thing, a nice bit of bold, communitarian, simplified agitprop activity.

Nor, as we have seen, has the Arts Council addressed itself seriously so far to the question of limited access. We know from their own researches that many of the traditional arts funded by the Arts Council go to those social groups who already appreciate them; that is, predominantly, socio-economic groups A and B, with some from C. This division, and it shows no sign of weakening, mirrors that increasingly sharp split in the press between the readers of the ‘serious’ papers and those of-now-the Dairy Star and the other ‘populars’; or the split in broadcasting-in which, though we all know many good programmes are made, people tend to identify themselves by channel loyalty and to stick with their channel, so that for many millions of people the idea of, say, switching to B B C ~ , let alone BBC~, would seem to be against nature.

The moral of all this is plain. Whilst thinking further and better about the proper claims of community arts the Arts Council should, so far as the ‘high arts’ are concerned, put much greater emphasis on ways to widen access. It would not be difficult to set up several experimental schemes. More important, and more a continuing matter, the Council should address itself very very much more to making links with educational agencies at all levels, but particularly with agencies which work with people aged from 16-20; and these agencies will not all be formally within the field of education. It is surprising that only last year, more than thirty years after it was founded, the Arts Council appointed its first full-time officer concerned with education, diplomatically called the ‘Educational Liaison Officer’. It is, however, not at all surprising that that initiative should have been resented by some of the Council and some of the Council’s officers. Some feared ‘vulgarisation’ as a result of the effort to broaden access. After all, the arts are sui generis and any attempt at explaining them or making them accessible outside the charmed circle of the cognoscenti might result in taking the fine in-group sheen off them, mightn’t it? How much more comfortable for us to enjoy the more advanced forms of modem art without bothering about mediation, whilst also and at the same time giving easy aid to the more ‘exciting’ forms of community arts. Come to think of it: the two apparently opposed attitudes marry here; but the relation of each to the texture of British life and its people is minimal.

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Still, the Arts Council is also collaborating with the new national Advisory Council for Adult and Continuing Education in a project designed to make such links better. One of the disappointments in all this activity about community arts is what I earlier called its lack of a sense of history. It seems neithei to have nor to recognise any past, except perhaps an ill-sustained notion of a distant folk past on which today’s community arts are presumed to be able to draw. There is a surer and nearer example. The tradition of British adult education over the last century and a half has been in some respects a model to the world. Among its many great qualities are several which are very relevant here-such as the belief that people should be able to stand up and reach for the best and the most demanding; that, given that opportunity (not watered down) a surprising number will so reach, and that when they do their grasp will reveal that they and many others have far more potentialities than either a closed Clitism or an ill-thought- through communitarianism had realised. So they have the right to the best; no less.

Paper prepared for the Gulbenkian Conference of Commonwealth Arts Councils,

* Artists andpeople. Su Braden (RKP, 1978), pp. 153-4. * Community Arts, A Report prepared by the Community Arts Evaluation Working

University of Kent, April 6th-8th. 1979.

Group (Arts Council of Great Britain, February 1977) para 443. Op. cit.

a