What are we fighting for
A rumour went around our local secondary school that, due to budget concerns, the arts were being dispensed with. ‘Can you believe it’, I was told with high eyebrows, ‘They are cancelling the arts’. Now, as a native speaker of the arts in crisis, I have heard this kind of thing before. We all have. The arts are usually among the first on the chopping block when pennies are being pinched. There’s a quote often misattributed to Churchill; a journalist asked him if he was going to cut the arts in order to fund the war effort, in reply to which he quipped, ‘then what are we fighting for?’ It’s poetic licence but it’s a nice reframing of a naturally rather unflattering comparison. The truth is, when you put the arts next to, say, the saving of lives, it’s pretty difficult to argue that the people whose lives are no longer being saved are nevertheless better off because at least they can watch a postmodern reimagining of Death of a Salesman in their final hours.
The thing about cancelling the arts, though, is that you can’t. Full stop. Good luck trying.
Public Service Announcement: art is everywhere. make art. Consume art. Be art.
But I’m not artistic, some people say. These people have been told or have decided they are not artistic and have therefore surpassed the instinct for creating things. They don’t want to try. They don’t want to risk anything. They don’t want to reposition themselves and get a different perspective. They won’t play. They did once. They played and they probably drew and they made lines in the dirt in the playground at primary school using gumnuts and the tab from the top of an abandoned can of coke and a tiny section of hose.
I find art boring, say some people. I’m even related to some of them. I know. Embarrassing. Maybe they do find art boring. I bet if they followed my mum around they wouldn’t find it boring. My Mum talks about art and the rest of us follow her around asking stupid questions until, eventually, we realise there’s a long line of strangers behind us listening intently. Of course you can’t understand something if you haven’t been taught how to. Creativity isn’t all instinct, you see. It’s about pattern recognition and cultural connection and empathy and big ideas crouching in the shadows of small artistic gestures.
Nature is an artist. No but seriously. How come the clouds often look like the sea? How come the veins of a leaf look like the branches of a tree? Why do sunsets cause the air to flee from your body in a gasp?
It’s all a bit highfalutin for me, some people say. I’m a bit simple. I don’t get it. This one kills me, because this breed of art-refusenik is often the same breed that says things like, ‘I must be hot by 7pm on Tuesdays because my favourite murder mystery is on’. As though murder mysteries are made by engineers or scientists or builders with their bare hands.
If you’ve danced to music or cried reading a book, sorry to break it to you, but you’re one of us. If you made a speech at your best mate’s wedding that even made Uncle Frownface McStinkeye laugh: welcome to the team.
There’s a friend of mine who can make a table full of food look like a painting. Bold choices, wild colour pairings, great smells, dim lighting, floral displays that seem to have grown there, and a natural place for everyone to sit. That’s an art.
Playing is art. Pretending not to find your nephew even though he’s hiding behind his own hands in the middle of the park way out in the open? You’re empathising! You’re using your imagination! You’re creating pathways in a child’s mind!
A singing teacher told me once that it’s a scientific fact that if you can whistle a tune, you can sing it. Everyone can sing. I have no idea if this is in fact a scientific fact and please nobody tell me. The arts cannot be cancelled. It is inside us all. What would be truly wonderful, though, would be if society valued that as much as it values, say, consumer goods, or front row seats at the tennis, or oil.
We can fight the good fight though. We can sponsor the arts. Lift it up. Become a patron of the art that lives all around us. Because what else are we fighting for.