I blame the Left-wing luvvies for giving art a bad name

Jonathan Brocklebank

THE other day Scotland’s Culture Secretary Fiona Hyslop gave a fascinating insight into her idea of culture. Artists, she said, don’t have to be close to government. ‘They just have to have a common understanding of what a country wants.’

They do? It is news to me that artists need to have a common understanding of anything. Perhaps some context will bring clarity to the Minister’s meaning.

She was speaking at a roadshow in Paisley, Renfrewshire, to canvass views for a Scottish Government strategy for the arts.

‘Strategy’ is so much nicer a word than ‘spending’, don’t you think?

‘Spending’ would make it sound like we were talking about some artists receiving handouts to produce their art and others getting zip – which, of course, is exactly what we are talking about.

Now that we have the context, let us look again at what Miss Hyslop says a nation’s artists have to do: they must understand, as a collective, what their country wants.

Troubling, isn’t it? It is almost as if the Culture Secretary is suggesting real artists think alike and pull along with their country. The super cynical among us might even conclude she thinks these are the ones who deserve public money.

A robust response from Scotland’s arts community was called for and it arrived in the form of a brilliant tweet from broadcaster Muriel Gray. ‘Artists should never have the slight Eddie est obligation to have a “common understanding of what a country wants”,’ she wrote. ‘Art does not bend the knee.’

Stirring stuff. Words that all next-generation innovators in the arts should hear and strive to live by. Sadly, it is probably already too late for much of the current generation. Their knees have been bent in deference to politicians and their causes for so long I’m not sure they can get up.

Identikit

Indeed, if you are moved to wonder how an MSP with a university degree could possibly arrive at such a wrongheaded idea of who artists are and what they are about, have a look at the artists in our midst.

Consider, for example, the performers at the Edinburgh Festival – an arts event now completely dominated by its Fringe which, in turn, is dominated by stand-up comedians with identikit opinions they are mad keen to share.

Is it so surprising that a politician working in the same town should form fanciful opinions about their purpose as artists?

Switch on BBC’s Question Time and encounter more artists gasping for air time for their party politics – such as card-carrying Labour member Izzard, now toying with renouncing his remarkable comedic talent to concentrate on a political career for which he shows zero aptitude.

Wonderful British actors such as Benedict Cumberbatch now find it impossible to be wonderful actors dedicated to the pursuit of artistic excellence alone. They have to be dedicated to politics too. Clutching thespian fingers to fevered brows, they will tell you it is their moral duty to do so. And they will use their artistic prowess as a come-on for us to hear opinions we already hear elsewhere.

Thus the spectacle of Mr Cumberbatch, at the end of his performances of Hamlet in 2015, haranguing audiences nightly with speeches about the Government’s failure to do enough about Syrian refugees. You’ve paid to see me do Shakespeare; now sit still, damn you, and hear my politics. I think that’s the artist’s message.

In the United States, meanwhile, other wonderful actors such as Meryl Streep have contrived to turn the Oscars into an annual convention for the Democrats. You came to celebrate our industry? Well, we came to be celebrated – and to tell you what our industry thinks about Trump.

Argument

I do not suggest that artists must stay out of politics either in the art they produce or even in the opinions they express in the media – often while promoting their work. Nor would you hear much argument from me on what Mr Izzard had to say about Scottish independence or Brexit or Miss Streep’s critique of the President.

But I do wonder why a community of supposed free thinkers and visionaries so enthusiastically hitches its wagons to often unremarkable politicians with equally humdrum ideas.

Why, when art bends its knee to no one, was there a glut of compliant artists wheeled out by both sides in the Scottish independence referendum?

You’ve got Vettriano? Well, I’ll see your Vettriano and raise you Emin and Spiteri. What is the message to voters? That Nationalism or Unionism is somehow the key to understanding those artists’ work?

I have much more time for the artists who prefer the public to have a direct relationship with their work – not one filtered and diluted by association with a political master.

The great American songwriter Tom Waits once wondered out loud why, if Michael Jackson was willing to let Pepsi use his music in their adverts, he did not just have done with it and put on a suit and work in their marketing department.

Similarly, if artists are so anxious to align themselves with politicians, perhaps they should consider becoming a spin doctor or producing party political broadcasts.

Miss Hyslop is, then, very much mistaken about who artists should be – but not too far wrong about who many of them are.

I urge them to stand up straight and step away from the politician. They’re cramping your style.