Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 32

I’LL DO IT WHEN DAME JUDI DENCH DOES IT.
with all sorts of disadvantaged communities, making projects that will remain implacably
attached to the periphery in which they were created.
In the state’s vision for diversity, arts organisations should turn into social hubs (just like
the Communist Party wanted them to become laboratories for the study of communist
doctrine) and artists into social workers whose aim is to support communities and wider
society in rekindling their local economies. The aim is�in theory, evidently�that the
artistic act achieves a rebalancing of social inequalities and brings marginalised communities
to the centre of artistic life. That is simply an impossible task for the artist (for the
professional one, in any case) to see through. Angela Gheorghiu�when rehearsing her
Tosca�cannot be asked to salvage disadvantaged communities. Her role, her voice, and
her act point to possible new compositions of sound and affect. Her voice and her art are
liberating in themselves. The soprano will sing for any audience, but that audience needs
to be de-marginalised and enabled to reach Gheorghiu, and that must be the task of the
state, not of the artist.
ACE has recently revealed that it will now decide which projects to fund based on how
relevant those projects are to audiences. As such, it will no longer be enough to produce
high-quality work to receive funds. Simon Mellor (ACE’s chief executive) says:
Relevance is becoming the new litmus test. It will no longer be enough
to produce high-quality work. You will need to be able to demonstrate
that you are also facing all your stakeholders and communities in ways
that they value. Large parts of the communities have lost all confidence
in what they view as an out-of-touch establishment. Is the Arts Council
viewed as part of the establishment? If so, how can trust be rebuilt?
(Masso 2019)
Certainly not by distorting artists’ instinct to reach for lives and people that are currently
lacking, as Deleuze suggests. Evidently, arts and culture contain�in themselves�valuable
seeds, directions, and propositions for balancing/alleviating inequalities and marginalisation,
but to push art and the artist towards social work (in exchange for money)
and into the neoliberal discourse of diversity is a grave reductionist exercise that favours
only the petty calculations of funders, policymakers, the government, and the state.
4. The Artist�s Role
William Deresiewicz (2015)�in his article The Death of the Artist�And the Birth of
the Creative Entrepreneur�proposes an overview of how the artist has been perceived
through the ages. Deresiewicz illustrates how the condition of the artist has shifted from
genius to artisan/professional to artist-entrepreneur. Today, artists can no longer be
seen as exceptional individuals who possess vision and inspiration�mysterious gifts received
from above. In their present-day condition, artists are no longer solitary geniuses,
or creators of cosmologies, magicians who tame and order the chaos to create�for the
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