Working lives
Last in the series
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Remembering Bessie
A Scottish artist rediscovered
Exciting news from the chimp enclosure at Edinburgh Zoo: two gangs who have spent months making friends were introduced to the public this week as a new ‘super group’.
The head keeper at Budongo Trail, the world’s largest chimp enclosure, explained that individual characteristics and compatability, as well as hierarchical status, are taken into consideration when introducing chimps. ‘There’s a lot of group politics going on,’ she added.
But so far, so good. The keepers first introduced the lowest-status animals, parliamentary private secretaries recruited from the Liberal Democrats, into the old group known as Tories on the make. There was a gradual progression up the status ladder until it was time to introduce the alpha males known affectionately as Dave and Nick. ‘This was the biggest challenge,’ said a Zoo spokesman, ‘and we expected them to give each other a wide berth. But within a few days they were the best of pals’. Oddly enough neither seemed to remember that they had met on television during the election campaign and said lots of things they didn’t really mean.
However, a few of the new arrivals are giving cause for concern. Vince scowls a lot in the corner and there are fears he may want to escape at some stage. Danny’s sudden status change is bewildering some of the new arrivals. And, of course, everyone’s missing Gordon.
A pay machine in a council-owned car park in Rose Street, Inverness, is happy to accept English £5 notes but is refusing some Scottish ones.
The Midgie’s motoring correspondent, Kirkpatrick Durham, drove with his usual majestic care to the Highland capital yesterday to try this remarkable machine for himself. He discovered that whether it takes a Scottish fiver rather depends on who is pictorially depicted on the note. For some reason the machine has developed a strong antipathy to Walter Scott, an inoffensive lawyer and author from the Borders.
As he was leaving the machine for a well-earned afternoon tea in the Station Hotel, our correspondent inserted a note bearing the handsome countenance of Robert Burns. Absolutely no problem.
What is the meaning of this discrimination? Is it possible to blame Sir Fred – or is that excuse wearing a little thin perchance?
For lively discussion of current politics:
scotlandquovadis.net
For intelligent comment on Scottish literature:
scottishreviewof books.org
Many of the greatest artists would have contributed nothing whatever
to the economy.
In its embyronic state, Creative Scotland received consultancy advice estimated to have cost £200,000 from the public purse. It received ‘strategic advice’, advice on ‘financial modelling’, advice on ‘supporting the financial modelling’, advice on ‘organisational structure modelling’, advice on ‘project management’, advice on ‘premises options’. Yes, that’s right. Creative Scotland could not be relied upon to find an office for itself. It needed a consultant even for that.
The work of a valuable community theatre, the Byre in St Andrews, is threatened by the partial withdrawal of funding – one of the last acts of the former Scottish Arts Council under the chairmanship of the retired bishop. Further north, George Gunn is not being replaced as artistic director of the Grey Coast Theatre Company in Caithness. We are entitled to wonder how far £200,000 might have gone to save and protect these worthwhile enterprises had the public money squandered on Creative Scotland’s consultancy binge been re-directed to actual support of the arts.
But it is by no means clear that actual support of the arts, at least in the traditional sense, is really what ‘excites’ Creative Scotland. The language of its public utterances suggests that the arts in Scotland are now to be viewed in a different way; that they are to be regarded as a business (‘a creative industry’, to borrow the horrid official jargon), subject to the laws of the marketplace. If this fairly represents Creative Scotland’s thinking, it marks a profound shift in public policy on the arts. It is disturbing that it is happening first in Scotland.
Creative Scotland’s chairman, Sir Sandy Crombie, and a leading member of the small non-executive board, Peter Cabrelli, are both products (so to speak) of the financial services sector; Cabrelli, indeed, was an influential figure in the merger of Halifax and the Bank of Scotland which created HBOS plc. Crombie refers on Creative Scotland’s website to public ‘investment’ in the arts and claims that the job of the board is ‘to produce a return on that investment for the benefit of our country‘ (my italics). This is an appalling statement with an unmistakable message: the arts are to be judged in future by the standards of the bottom line. Ask no more what the arts can do for you; ask instead what the arts can do for your country.
Culture minister Fiona Hyslop goes further. She talks of ‘the potential contribution of the arts to every part of Scotland’s society and economy’. Since when were the arts expected to ‘contribute to the economy’? I suppose the answer to this troubling question is: when the board of Creative Scotland was stuffed with people who believe in the concept of creative industries. It may not be too late – hell, it is too late, but I’ll say it anyway – to offer the Hyslops and Crombies of this world an alternative vision. Public funding of the arts is any government’s conscience money: it is given by governments which are up to all sorts of no good in other ways, including killing people, to allow the most gifted individuals in any society – artists – to be intellectually free. It is given to allow them to think the unthinkable, say the unsayable, oppose the established order, bite the hand that feeds them, shock and dismay Sir Sandy Crombie; most of all to allow them to fail and sometimes fail badly.
Many of the greatest artists would have contributed nothing whatever to the economy and very little to any social structure that Fiona Hyslop would recognise as society. The idea implicit in current official thinking that the arts are somehow about conventional notions of commercial success, in the same dismal catalogue as tourist attractions, ‘world championship golf courses’ and military tattoos, or that it is perfectly all right to describe them as ‘products’ or ‘industries’, is abhorrent. But we had better learn to live with the new philistinism because, suddenly, it’s the only show in town.
