Islay McLeod
launches an SR competition
Also on this page:
Rear Window
James Shaw Grant on second sight
Why was Colinsburgh never a burgh? The Midgie is puzzled.
It is true that Eaglesham, Cambuslang, Lochwinnoch, Lenzie, Kilmacolm, Hurlford, Leuchars, Houston and Beith, to say nothing of the mysterious Bonnybridge so frequently alluded to by the editor of the Scottish Review, were never burghs either, but none of these lesser fries had the word ‘burgh’ in its name.
Is there some explanation for this oddity of Scottish local government?
Who was Colin anyway?
Alison Prince
To look back across history at work that thrills us now in galleries, museums and libraries is to see that it is the best of its time – the cream risen to the top of the milk.
This appalling arrogance of outlook reflects a philosophical shift that began in the Thatcher years and has spread like a toxic bloom through our thinking. The grip of the statistical standard has become stifling. Human sensibility is dismissed now as a personal problem that has nothing to do with the way education is shaped and national institutions are run. Governments look at their unbalanced balance sheets (which got into that state because of a detached fascination with the potential of pure figures) and see no absurdity in proposing that already poor people can be made poorer in a national debt repayment scheme. If the figures look good, never mind the costs of social distress and need. The same restricted thinking is evident in the arts world. It is being seen as a narrow profit and loss enterprise, with no time or money to waste on uncertainty. And yet, uncertainty is the very substance from which art is made.
To look back across history at work that thrills us now in galleries, museums and libraries is to see that it is the best of its time – the cream risen to the top of the milk. But what of the great bulk of skim and whey from which these treasures rose? There must have been marble-hewers whose work did not reach the Parthenon, tunesmiths who delighted listeners though they never wrote a Messiah, dancers who never made the Bolshoi but left people gasping and excited. They were needed, and they are still needed.
Art needs to be all round us, like weather and the changing sky. We need the poets who did not write the Prelude and the novelists who are not Amis or Mantel and the conceptual artists who never showed us a dead sheep. We need the sheer body and bulk of art, in all its risky fallibility. The notion that a creative product can be selected in advance for what will sell well and repay its investment carries a Stalinist pre-judgement that we must reject. It is as limiting to restrict art to that which produces maximum cash return as it is to censor it on other political grounds. To favour the products of those who have managed to find their own funding and thus take their own risk is a political act, not a cultural one. As the ugly logo so clearly shows, those who sit in judgement now are not of the people but of a system based on little boxes. It is time to protest.
Alison Prince is an author and editor in Arran
