| Culture Strategy: Raymond Williams- "the State Builds Images and Symbols of Itself" |
Culture in the Senedd |
| Voices in Senedd, Books, Broadcast Media , Culture & Culture Strategy , September 19, 2024 |
The Government of Wales has had four Culture Secretaries in 2024. On 1st December 2023 the annual report of the Government included:“Culture Strategy – We have been working collaboratively with a lead external partner to engage with sector stakeholders and communities to produce a new Culture Strategy for Wales." * * * * Organisations go back sixty millennia. The notion that organisations should have strategies is relatively recent. They had policies. These were made by a small number of people for enactment by a larger number. The government of Britain, after the Northcote-Trevelyan reforms, took on a characteristic form. A tripartite structure had a small cadre of policy-formulators, a larger number in the executive group, assisted by a still larger clerical grouping. Most organisations still have small groups of policy-makers. Berkshire Hathaway employs four hundred thousand people across its many activities. Its count at headquarters numbers twenty-six. The centre-point of policy is that it has to be executable. There is no absolute date at which strategy was hived off to be an activity in its own right. Alfred Chandler (1918-2007), a Pulitzer prize-winner on organisational history, pointed the way. The phrase “structure follows strategy” is his. The concept of strategic management is usually attributed to Igor Ansoff. A list of other forerunners or pioneers would take in Ken Adam, John Gardner, Kirby Warren and Wickham Skinner. Ansoff's extensive early study included Norbert Wiener and his work on cybernetics. During the time of no social activity, in 2020, this site also published on the subject. An article of 27th March that year, below, was headed “Sharper Feedback Loops Needed”. It called for a greater richness of data for the making of policy in Wales. It looked back to policies and vocabulary that were once those of the Arts Council of Wales. * * * * The article below 20th January 2022 looked at a collection of essays on public issues. From "The Welsh Way" Dafydd Huw Rhys looked at the data deficiency: "The virtuous cycle of feedback between the public sphere and the state, vital to deliberative democracy, cannot take place. Wales' absent public sphere constrains cultural output, impedes the development of a collective civic identity, and hampers flourishing of the Welsh language." Rhys looked back to Raymond Williams on cultural policy as "display, the state building images and symbols of itself. No space or time is made for culture for its own sake, as an unquantifiable variable, or as a medium for social critique and dissent". Williams: "an arts policy of a certain kind turns out when examined to be not a policy for the arts but a policy for embellishing, representing, making more effective a particular social order or certain preferred features in it." * * * * John Tusa made his first appearance on this site 22nd November 2014. The review of his book "A Pain in the Arts" included comment on managerial slackness of language. Tusa's corrective was a chapter headed “the War of the Words: Language Matters.” His list of “some abominable words” included accessible, sustainable, transformational. His repeated recipe for language: “speak English- cut the clichés, purge the verbosity.” His central point on organisations was clear: “without independence based on responsibility, any organisation becomes an instrument of others.” The arts are pulled by other interests to serve purposes that are not theirs. Tusa did not like the clause in the job description for Chair of Arts Council England “to pay due attention to guidance from the Secretary of State.” “No arts body will be funded”, he said in a policy list for an ideal world, “if it declares its aims and purposes to be primarily instrumental.” “The best results came when the arts were left to do their professional and creative best, within the framework of practice and values that reflected the world of the arts themselves.” * * * * Art and power have always lived alongside. As Holy Roman Emperor Charles V leaned on Titian to tweak the nose in a picture of his deceased empress. Diego Rivera painted a mural for the Rockefeller Centre in New York. He sneaked in an image of Lenin. The painting was destroyed, but in a replica the artist included a likeness of John Rockefeller junior, a teetotaller, drinking in a nightclub. Michelangelo included Vatican figures whom he disliked in the Sistine Chapel. One is featured as appearing in hell. One of his cherubs gestures obscenely gesture at a pope. “Corporeal friends are spiritual enemies,” said William Blake In the modern era the state has assumed a lead role as patron. On 5th September 2024 budgetary changes were announced mid-way in the financial year. The National Library was to receive £725,000, the Arts Council of Wales £1,500,000, Sport Wales £1,000,000, Amgueddfa Cymru £940,000, Cadw £745,000. These mid-year new allocations followed £3,200,000 in July for repair work at the National Museum and the National Library of Wales. There are two points. The most obvious is that stop-start budgeting of this kind is no way to run a government in the twenty-first century. Second are the words of the former Culture Secretary that accompanied the new allocations. “These organisations are key in delivering a number of our Programme for Government commitments. ” The great institutions of culture are not entities in their own right; the civic is subordinate to the political. The governors of Wales have broken not just with the other nations but made their break with history. Lee and Bevan would have been aghast. * * * * But nothing is ever wholly new. After a meeting in Cardiff Sculptor Jonah Jones wrote in his diary “I keep preaching that Arts Council money should be spent on art.” His diary entry was written in February 1989. Also below 20th January 2022 Graham Laker in the 1990s wrote: "It's one of the great ironies of state subsidy that any Arts Council has to argue its case on the basis of the dominant political ethos. "Individually, of course, Arts Council officers and members know that the Arts have quite a different agenda... Institutionally, on the other hand, the Arts Council of Wales feels that it needs to act as an extension of the Welsh Office, which to all intents and purposes it is.” Once upon a time the Arts Council of Wales could write of “the arts as the basis of protest and dissent, the arts as surprise, contradiction and discomfort." That language has now been expunged. It may not now be spoken. * * * * Radio 4's “Front Row” turned to Wales on 16th July. The attention followed a usual pattern of being prompted by bad news. Four Cabinet members had quit the government that morning. Emma Scholefield spoke to an audience across the United Kingdom: “We're seeing across the board the impact of the reduction of funding in our arts and culture. None of this has happened overnight, the wear and tear to the building but the general decline, available for our cultural institutions and organisations. It's been happening gradually. "We've reached breaking point now. We have buildings that need repairing. We have organisations that are losing resources, that are contemplating closing down. We've seen huge losses to English-language publications.” * * * * On May 15th the Culture, Communications, Welsh Language, Sport, and International Relations Committee met. The record includes Alun Davies: “We celebrated 25 years of devolution last week, but the reality is, for a lot of cultural organisations, the politics of devolution has been that this Government has deliberately taken a decision to deprioritise culture funding in terms of its overall budget. “And not just because of the crisis today or yesterday, but over the period of devolved self-government, and I think—. I don't expect you to go into all the reasons for that this morning, but I think if the Welsh Government is serious about what it says, then it has to put its money where its mouth is, quite frankly, and that means that the funding cuts that are undermining the cultural expression of 2,000 years of history. “It's very easy for successive Ministers we see come here with strategies, but if the people don't exist, they disappear, they've gone. You've got a speech, you've got a strategy, you've got a press release, but you haven't got any substance behind it, and I think that's the issue." * * * * The next article will look at the culture strategy document. A first reading conveys first impressions. Those impressions are of evasion, inattention, a lack of responsibility. Organisations, like individuals, reveal themselves not just in the words they use but by the words they do not use. Over a length of 14,000 words devoted to culture certain words do not feature. These include: Art, craft, creation, actor, acting, dance, dancing, song, singing, writing, writers, books, novel, poem, playwright, drama, composer, composing, poet, poetry, painter, painting, pottery, sculpture, design, designing, opera, circus, touring, theatre, meaning, aesthetics, festival, Eistedddfod, Urdd, comedy, hall, venue, concert, gig, exhibition, event. |
Reviewed by: Adam Somerset |
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