Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 29

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
policymaking, theorising, and languaging that oversee money, the management of institutions,
and, most of all, the discourse about the role of art in society. All such, bureaucracies
will always be tributary to various governments, councils, counsels, and so forth,
and their agendas will never be primarily concerned with proposing an Earth and a type
of people that are lacking. They will be eager to motivate their expenditures through assessments
of impact and immediately measurable utility. That explains Ana Blandiana’s
poetic, yet valid, point: “Had it been created by the poets our world would have looked
radically different” (Blandiana 2016). Diversity must be created at a practical level, from
the bottom up, by the artists themselves, and not imposed through a detached, rhetorical
discourse on diversity. Diversity is a diversity of worlds and people who are lacking, not
diversity on a piece of paper.
The artist cannot be made tributary to such bureaucracies and policies: artists are tributary
to affirming their experience of moving like a lightning bolt through chaos, towards
the liberation of a possible life. In this way, artists serve the community in all its diversity,
from below, because their quest is oriented towards the liberation of new understandings
about the prisons in which we (with our own diverse bureaucracies) consistently
lock ourselves.
There is also (deliberate?) confusion between equal access/participation to the arts/
culture infrastructure and equal access to the artistic act. Judi Dench cannot be asked
to create her roles alongside amateurs or non-artists in a community centre somewhere
in rural England: it is the non-artists (or amateurs) who need to be allowed entrance to
the National or to the Old Vic to see Dench rehearsing/playing her roles. Amateurs/
non-artists must be given access to all the necessary instruments and funding if they
want to become a professional. I return to the question of techne (vocation, knowledge,
and expertise in the arts-making process) in the fourth part of this article. I only note
here that encouraging participation in and co-creation of the artistic art (which leads
to mixing various degrees of expertise and professional with non-professional abilities,
like the Song of Romania model) can never enhance the quality of the artistic act. On the
contrary, it drags it into the ground, into the banal, overturning its real aim, which is that
of lightning bolting through chaos on ever-new axes. The mixing of competencies and
abilities under the banner of diversity and engagement denies the emergence of a “deterritorialized
plane from chaos to the cosmos” (Young et al. 2013:169), trivialising it. As
the artistic act is pushed into quantitative growth (engaging more people and co-authors
of various competencies), the process always loses its sharpness and focus.
With this kind of language regarding diversity/public engagement in and through the
arts, we are clearly in the territory of the instrumentalisation of art, expected to serve the
state’s (neoliberal) theorisation of desired/imagined social and political outcomes. Art
can of course help clarify or better frame matters that are often of a political or social nature,
but it can never be asked to solve them. That is not art’s role or its power. As Deleuze
and Guattari note, the job of art is to “deterritorialize the system of opinion that brought
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