The Case for Art

Since the pan­dem­ic began I’ve had plen­ty of time to soul-search about the role of the arts dur­ing a cri­sis. The val­ue of most indus­tries seems to pale in com­par­i­son with the life-sav­ing work car­ried out by front­line work­ers in the NHS, yet on an indi­vid­ual lev­el we’ve nev­er been more in need of, say, a film that chimes with our sense of humour, a book with a grav­i­tas that match­es life, or a song with a melody that stirs delight. The arts offer reju­ve­nat­ing dis­trac­tions from the heavy news cycle, and can go fur­ther, deep­er and more pre­ci­sion-guid­ed to soothe our loneli­est pangs or plant the seeds of an awak­en­ing to the true ways of the world.

“I want to love more than death can harm,” writes Ocean Vuong the poet, essay­ist, nov­el­ist and teacher in ​‘The Weight of Our Liv­ing’, a 2014 essay for Rum­pus, pub­lished short­ly after he lost his uncle to sui­cide. Vuong invokes the image of a poem as a fire escape, a place that peo­ple who feel too raw to com­mu­ni­cate through the codes of con­ven­tion­al con­ver­sa­tion can climb onto to share their real­i­ty. ​“I want to leave the par­ty through the win­dow and find my uncle stand­ing on a piece of iron shaped into vis­i­ble des­per­a­tion, which must also be (how can it not?) the begin­ning of vis­i­ble hope.”

The idea that being recog­nised in the depths of despair can save your life is some­thing I believe in. Dur­ing my worst eat­ing-dis­or­dered years, I got most of my nutri­tion through the writ­ten word. I copied out frag­ments of prose and held them like amulets, con­vinced that a day would dawn when their wis­dom would turn a key that restored my health. The lone­li­ness of ill­ness is hard to con­vey. There is a dif­fer­ence between occa­sion­al­ly feel­ing alone and the grip of an alien­ation that makes you ques­tion whether you are human in any sense beyond the imme­di­ate phys­i­cal. In this state, mean­ing­ful com­mu­ni­ca­tion is elu­sive. Every­day con­ver­sa­tion can’t hold the SOS that sweats out of you.

How mag­i­cal, then, to find a pas­sage writ­ten by some­one that gets it. The relief is sen­su­al, spin­ning into awe for the solace that art pro­vides. What an endorse­ment for stay­ing alive it is to know that the record holds art­works that diag­nose your strain of suf­fer­ing and frame it in a hope­ful context.

For me and for Vuong’s uncle, crises occurred inside our minds where no one could see them. This is the norm in cas­es of pri­vate men­tal anguish, yet now we, as a glob­al pop­u­la­tion, are expe­ri­enc­ing a shared cri­sis in the form of the coro­n­avirus pan­dem­ic, although the sever­i­ty of its impact is shaped by indi­vid­ual vul­ner­a­bil­i­ty and socioe­co­nom­ic status.

What’s more, writ­ing now in ear­ly June, the cen­turies-old fight for racial jus­tice has been reignit­ed in the wake of the police killing of George Floyd, a Black man in Min­neapo­lis, whose last words, ​“I can’t breathe,” already haunt the pub­lic mem­o­ry as the last words of Eric Gar­ner in New York in 2014 and Seni Lewis in Lon­don in 2010; both Black men killed by police offi­cers. Insti­tu­tion­al racism is a cri­sis that has nev­er gone away; it per­me­ates the arts and is on our shoul­ders to rectify.

“The most impor­tant thing that art can do is make us think,” writer Olivia Laing told the BBC Radio 4 pro­gramme Start The Week on 11 May, ​“it’s a tool for think­ing round all kinds of sit­u­a­tions.” Laing’s most recent essay col­lec­tion, ​‘Fun­ny Weath­er: Art in an Emer­gency’, was writ­ten pre-COVID-19, with cli­mate change, AIDS and Brex­it in mind. She believes that art needs to be ground­ed. ​“I have a strong and slight­ly puri­tan­i­cal view that the duty of the artist is to bear wit­ness to reality.”

She put the book togeth­er as an ​“anti­dote to anx­i­ety and despair… It’s an intro­duc­tion to artists who have lived through intense­ly hard times, and who have made work that man­i­fests emo­tions of joy and hope­ful­ness and that cre­ate utopias that remain avail­able to us.” She makes a care­ful dis­tinc­tion between achiev­able utopias and irre­spon­si­ble fan­tasies sold by career politi­cians. ​“There’s a dif­fer­ence between think­ing of utopias, and being in cloud cuck­oo land, which I think is very dan­ger­ous. You can gauge a dif­fer­ence between those two dif­fer­ent imper­a­tives. Often it’s politi­cians who are cre­at­ing fan­tasies that aren’t actu­al­ly liveable.”

There are politi­cians hid­ing behind fan­tas­ti­cal rhetoric on all lev­els of the arts, from sec­re­taries of state down to gate­keep­ers of indi­vid­ual insti­tu­tions. The pur­vey­ors of cul­ture must get their hous­es in order, con­nect with their audi­ences with integri­ty and recog­nise the mes­sage of Black Lives Mat­ter, that all must be account­able for cre­at­ing shared pow­er. Too often in the cur­rent cli­mate, work­ers who pur­sue a liv­ing expres­sion of equal­i­ty incor­po­rat­ing diverse cul­ture and val­ues into their organ­i­sa­tions dis­cov­er intense resis­tance to their prin­ci­pled chal­lenges, and so are fur­ther dis­en­fran­chised by organ­i­sa­tions that con­tin­ue to speak pub­licly about com­mit­ments to diversity.

Jem­ma Desai is a researcher, writer and a film pro­gram­mer, with 15 years expe­ri­ence of work­ing in the British cul­tur­al sec­tor, large­ly for high-pro­file, pre­dom­i­nant­ly white insti­tu­tions. She is also a South Asian woman who grew up in Lon­don to immi­grant par­ents and this year quit work­ing for the BFI and British Coun­cil after a peri­od of research and dia­logue made her more cog­nisant of the cumu­la­tive impacts of insti­tu­tion­al racism on mar­gin­alised arts work­ers’ health and wellbeing.

As many mar­gin­alised arts work­ers do every­day in a vari­ety of con­texts, in the year pri­or to hand­ing in her notice Desai made whole-heart­ed over­tures to deci­sion mak­ers at the insti­tu­tions she engaged with, offer­ing action plans to redress the sys­temic racism and rais­ing con­scious­ness via detailed tes­ti­monies of how mar­gin­al­i­sa­tion had affect­ed her own career and health as well as those of her col­leagues embod­ied in dif­fer­ence. It even­tu­al­ly became clear that, despite super­fi­cial sym­pa­thy, there was no seri­ous will to pri­ori­tise the dis­man­tling of a cul­ture of white supremacy.

Desai has since made pub­lic a tour-de-force research paper called ​‘This Work Isn’t For Us’ the result of 18 months of read­ing, think­ing and dia­logu­ing with non-white cul­tur­al work­ers (and a life­time of being one). In it, she quotes an anony­mous source who sum­maris­es the dis­con­nect between ide­ol­o­gy and real­i­ty in the cul­tur­al sec­tor: ​“No one cares about us and our bod­ies. But this is sup­posed to be a space where empa­thy is encour­aged, we’re in the game of illus­trat­ing sto­ries to make peo­ple empa­thet­ic and no one is basi­cal­ly. The peo­ple in charge aren’t. They’re just inter­est­ed in power.”

While these war sto­ries make a career in the arts a dubi­ous sell, there are peo­ple out there com­mit­ted to the mat­ter of how Black, eth­nic minor­i­ty and oth­er insti­tu­tion­al­ly dis­en­fran­chised groups can get their start, con­sid­er­ing that the sec­tor is dom­i­nat­ed by peo­ple who do not look or sound like them. ​“It’s much hard­er when you face struc­tur­al dis­ad­van­tage and dif­fer­ent kinds of soft and explic­it prej­u­dice,” says Neil Grif­fiths, a one­time activist, fundrais­er and stock mar­ket ana­lyst for the Finan­cial Times who is now ded­i­cat­ed to the char­i­ty he co-found­ed, Arts Emer­gency. ​“There are plen­ty of pro­grammes that can cat­a­pult peo­ple over the fortress walls, but they soon drop out. In the sec­tor it’s referred to as ​‘boomerang­ing’.”

Arts Emer­gency secured char­i­ty sta­tus in 2013, after being con­ceived in 2010 by Grif­fiths and the writer and come­di­an, Josie Long. Both grew up white and work­ing class in South­east Lon­don and joined forces after the coali­tion vic­to­ry, at the begin­ning of aus­ter­i­ty. ​“We were both in our mid twen­ties,” Grif­fiths recalls, ​“and she was like, ​‘We’re both real­ly lucky. We’ve come from back­grounds that weren’t tra­di­tion­al­ly in the arts.’”

Arts Emer­gency pro­vides peo­ple aged 16 – 18 from non-priv­i­leged back­grounds with a trained men­tor for a year and then access to a net­work of 7,000 arts and human­i­ties pro­fes­sion­als until they turn 25. ​“Our inten­tion,” Grif­fiths says, ​“is to be a thread through an individual’s jour­ney in the same way that we look back and see our peer com­mu­ni­ty and our lucky breaks were a thread that kept us on a path.”

Grif­fiths is dri­ven by a desire to trans­form both indi­vid­ual lives and the over­all integri­ty of our polit­i­cal land­scape. ​“We’re see­ing now a pop­ulist right-wing gov­ern­ment who have failed so bad­ly. They tried to com­bat an actu­al plague [the coro­n­avirus] with spin, and media manip­u­la­tion and dif­fer­ent nar­ra­tives and spe­cious argu­ments and straw-men argu­ments. Mar­gin­alised voic­es mat­ter more than ever now because we need to hear the real sto­ry. We need to hear the truth. We need to hear that through art plat­forms. We need to hear that through pub­lic dis­course. It’s lit­er­al­ly a mat­ter of life and death.”

An art plat­form offer­ing 20 dif­fer­ent voic­es, albeit those of estab­lished authors, can be found in Pen­guin Per­spec­tives, essays writ­ten in response to Covid-19 and now avail­able as a free ebook. (A dona­tion of £10,000 was made by Pen­guin on behalf of par­tic­i­pants to book­sellers affect­ed by the cri­sis.) Essay­ists include best­selling fan­ta­sy author Philip Pull­man, for­mer Children’s Lau­re­ate Mal­o­rie Black­man, vivid chron­i­cler of fem­i­nin­i­ty Deb­o­rah Levy, and Holo­caust sur­vivor Edith Eger who implored read­ers to ​“Find an arrow to fol­low to the good that can come.”

“My hope was that it would offer a lit­tle bit of an alter­na­tive to the news cycle,” says Sam Park­er, edi­tor-in-chief at pen​guin​.co​.uk, for­mer­ly dig­i­tal edi­tor at Esquire. We are speak­ing in May at the height of the lock­down. ​“The sto­ry has moved very fast. For obvi­ous and under­stand­able rea­sons peo­ple are pre­oc­cu­pied with the lat­est news about the virus and the pol­i­tics around it. The two ques­tions we put to the authors were: ​‘What is this moment reveal­ing about your­self and about us?’ and ​‘What do you hope it changes in the future?’ The pieces are all very dif­fer­ent, but a lot of the feed­back that we saw con­sis­tent­ly on social media was that it was nice to read some­thing that was a bit slow­er. That was the short-term hope: Can we cre­ate a small space where we’re address­ing this issue but in a slight­ly more con­tem­pla­tive way.”

Park­er usu­al­ly reads every day but dur­ing the first few weeks of lock­down he found it hard to con­cen­trate. ​“I real­ly strug­gled to focus. I felt like it was a dere­lic­tion of some kind to take my focus off the news and enjoy read­ing a book.” His focus of late has returned and he has been doing ​“nos­tal­gic read­ing” and read­ing about nature. I ask what he thinks art does for the human soul. ​“What’s impor­tant in this time is to be able to access a range of emo­tions about it [lock­down]. It prob­a­bly wouldn’t be the health­i­est thing to only be angry, or only be scared, or only be slight­ly excit­ed or hope­ful about some ele­ments of it. You need to be able to access a range of respons­es and art is a real­ly great way to do that and to give your­self space to feel a few dif­fer­ent things. So, I guess that’s what it gives the soul: access to dif­fer­ent ways of feeling.”

Despite the fact that Britons have turned to var­i­ous art­forms to help them through the lock­down, huge ques­tion marks remain over how cre­ative indus­tries will fare once pub­lic life resumes in full. While cin­e­mas in Eng­land are now allowed to reopen the same is not yet true for the­atres, gal­leries, muse­ums and live music venues, and although the government’s £1.5 bil­lion sup­port pack­age is wel­come it has come too late for venues that have already made major lay-offs.

Park­er believes it would be a real shame ​“for the arts to be side­lined in what­ev­er comes next. There’s going to be a reces­sion and there’s going to be dif­fi­cult times for every­one and for soci­ety. What’s hap­pened in dif­fer­ent points in his­to­ry is that almost the first head on the chop­ping block is the arts. That’s some­thing we should be real­ly care­ful to avoid, because men­tal health is going to play a big part in the fall out of this, how­ev­er it goes, and art, like nature, is essen­tial to help men­tal wellbeing.”

No doubt because of my per­son­al his­to­ry, I see men­tal well­be­ing as a site of sanc­ti­ty that must be tend­ed to and pre­served, even when we are unim­pressed with our­selves and think we deserve to suf­fer. Is it pos­si­ble to make a space for our souls to bloom in their entire­ty? The world is burn­ing. The news is an infi­nite scroll of death, dev­as­ta­tion and dis­ap­point­ing lead­er­ship, while our ongo­ing state of social dis­tanc­ing means there are scant oppor­tu­ni­ties ​“for the sim­ple har­bour of a hug” (words from the poet Grace Nichols).

The temp­ta­tion can be to lan­guish in hys­ter­i­cal despair and to deny the oppor­tu­ni­ty for relief because it feels like a gross indul­gence, but who does it serve when you make your­self an invis­i­ble mar­tyr to the ills of the world? As my friends point­ed out when I said I want­ed to jump out of a win­dow, Boris John­son isn’t con­sid­er­ing jump­ing out of a win­dow. Or, as my dad put it, don’t let the bas­tards grind you down.

A way back to my full size is through poet­ry. So much cul­tur­al exchange occurs on social media now, with half an eye on whether the watch­ing panop­ti­con will val­i­date or punc­ture the offer­ing. Poet­ry is a pri­vate con­nec­tion from soul-to-soul. ​“There’s a reawak­en­ing that occurs as you read. It opens up some respons­es that you have on a human-to-human basis,” says Neil Ast­ley, edi­tor of ​‘Stay­ing Alive: Real Poems for Unre­al Times’. Pub­lished in 2002, and arranged by theme, this is a pop star on the poet­ry anthol­o­gy scene. Front and back cov­ers are adorned with endorse­ments from famous names. A Jane Cam­pi­on quote says: ​“These poems dis­til the human heart as noth­ing else.”

Ast­ley found­ed his poet­ry pub­lish­ing house, Blood­axe Books, in 1978. It has been his mis­sion ever since to take poet­ry out to a wider audi­ence. ​“I want to both pub­lish poet­ry for an exist­ing poet­ry read­er­ship, as well as take poet­ry out to a read­er­ship that might not nor­mal­ly have access to it, or who think that it isn’t for them.”

The suc­cess of ​‘Stay­ing Alive’, which has sold 250,000 copies to date, was not by chance. Frus­trat­ed that his poets weren’t reach­ing the audi­ences they deserved, Ast­ley took a tac­ti­cal approach. ​“I was con­vinced that there was a book that would break through into wider read­er­ship if it had the right kind of poems, and had an avenue, so I pro­duced a proof of it a year before pub­li­ca­tion, and sent it out to about 100 well-known peo­ple who I knew loved poet­ry. That’s how we got those endorse­ments on the cov­er of ​‘Stay­ing Alive’.”

By chance, the anthol­o­gy was pub­lished short­ly after ⁹⁄₁₁, lead­ing to inter­est from an Amer­i­can pub­lish­er and emo­tion­al read­ings in New York City. ​“Meryl Streep read ​‘Begin’ by Bren­dan Ken­nel­ly and that whole audi­ence of about 700 just erupt­ed in applause because it spoke to them so per­son­al­ly,” Ast­ley remem­bers. ​“I read a poem by Imti­az Dhark­er called ​‘They’ll Say, ​“She Must Be From Anoth­er Coun­try”’ and again that got spon­ta­neous applause because peo­ple con­nect­ed with it so strongly.”

One of Astley’s favourite poets is Imti­az Dhark­er, whose work has been pub­lished for over 20 years. ​“She was born in Pak­istan and grew up in Scot­land and then moved to India when she eloped with a Hin­du. Her poems are ones that I think a lot of peo­ple have con­nect­ed with because they are all about the mod­ern world and liv­ing in dif­fer­ent cul­tures and not being con­fined to one coun­try or one culture.”

‘They’ll Say, ​“She Must Be From Anoth­er Coun­try”’ cuts two ways: as a cel­e­bra­tion of per­son­al dif­fer­ence and a cri­tique of those intol­er­ant towards dif­fer­ence. It is con­fi­dent and play­ful, with a rhythm to die for. The poem is made for peo­ple akin to Dhark­er to look inwards and affirm their iden­ti­ties and it is made for those unlike her to look out­wards and appre­ci­ate iden­ti­ties dif­fer­ent to their own, but for art work­ers with pow­er there is a respon­si­bil­i­ty to do some­thing with the enhanced aware­ness that should fol­low rit­u­al gorg­ings on oth­er peo­ples’ sto­ries. We must react to the cries about sys­tems close to home that are hurt­ing peo­ple and depri­ori­tise a white-knuck­le grip on per­son­al status.

There is a dis­tinc­tion to be made between the arts as a pub­lic work­space, and the arts as a source of pri­vate solace. When it comes to our pri­vate life, the case for art is that it nur­tures our souls in secret. One of the poems that I copied out dur­ing the bad days is on page 106 of ​‘Stay­ing Alive’. This is how ​‘The Wak­ing’ by Theodore Roethke starts:

I wake to sleep, and take my wak­ing slow
I feel my fate in what I can­not fear
I learn by going where I have to go

These lines might seem sim­ple to read­ers who have nev­er been scared to face the day. To me, who used to feel that way, they opened up space to exist at my own pace. Art can jus­ti­fy a pause to feel your­self made whole and to reach out to oth­ers from a place of wise gen­eros­i­ty, which is rich­er than fear. There are oth­er things in life that induce this feel­ing – such as friend­ship and nature – but when those are beyond reach, there is renew­al stored in unas­sum­ing objects: a famil­iar DVD, a speak­er hooked up to a favourite song, a poem beat-matched to your heart’s desire.

Ast­ley is used to receiv­ing strong per­son­al reac­tions to the work he puts out. Read­ers email him about par­tic­u­lar poems. ​“One per­son said that they’d left their hus­band as a result of read­ing Mary Oliver’s poem ​‘The Jour­ney’ [‘But lit­tle by lit­tle, as you left their voice behind, the stars began to burn’]. It had helped them see their life.”

This is evi­dence of how art val­oris­es the qui­et stir­rings we have to live by bold­er instincts, and evi­dence of the badass bril­liance of Mary Oliv­er, who has said that nature and poet­ry saved her from her child­hood. She used to go out into the woods close to her home with a note­book where she found men­tal space in phys­i­cal space. Her sem­i­nal poem ​‘Wild Geese’ reach­es out to peo­ple with half a leg off a fire escape, telling them that they belong here still:

Who­ev­er you are, no mat­ter how lone­ly,
the world offers itself to your imag­i­na­tion,
calls to you like the wild geese, harsh and excit­ing –
over and over announc­ing your place
in the fam­i­ly of things.