Goneril: Hear me, my lord,
what need you five-and-twenty, ten, or five -
Regan: What need one?
Lear: Oh reason not the need, our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous...
"Artists are needed more now than ever before. You're the ones who have the freedom, if you choose to use it, to think of new possibilities, crazy ideas, bold, idealistic, irrational, counterintuitive, disruptive, naughty, angry words and deeds. Because these are the only things that can adequately respond to such a huge meltdown in capitalism and the only way that we might find a way forward in to a different future... Maybe the artist free of any relationship with any public funding body is freest of all? If I didn't have to fill in forms, tick boxes, prove how good, nice, worthy me and my project are to a well meaning gatekeeper, maybe I'd make something better - more truthful, more radical?"
Which does slightly beg the question, what if you're not into proving how nice you and your project are, if your projects are challenging and innovative and brave - how can you afford to bring them to our artist-needy world unless you're rich or have a rich patron? Arts funding, despite its sneerable form-filling requirements, brings access to creativity to people who would never otherwise have that chance.
And if you've forgotten the lyrics of that 1983 pop chart number, they're a little ambiguous:
And there was times I'd take my pen
And feel obliged to start again
I do profess
That there are things in life
That one can't quite express
You know me I'm acting dumb-dumb
Regan: What need one?
Lear: Oh reason not the need, our basest beggars are in the poorest thing superfluous...
Mark Ravenhill delivered the welcome address at the Edinburgh Fringe on Friday and took the opportunity to deliver what the Guardian is calling 'some home truths'. Reminding his audience that public funding for arts didn't begin until the 1940s and has been steadily eroded in recent years ~ a bit like the NHS, you could say ~ he argued that this, and even a subsequent total demise, could be in the interests of artists.
"Let's look on this as a good thing. Didn't the arts become safe and well behaved during the New Labour years? I think they did. I think they weren't telling the truth - the dirty, dangerous, hilarious, upsetting, disruptive, noisy, beautiful truth - as often as they should have done.""Artists are needed more now than ever before. You're the ones who have the freedom, if you choose to use it, to think of new possibilities, crazy ideas, bold, idealistic, irrational, counterintuitive, disruptive, naughty, angry words and deeds. Because these are the only things that can adequately respond to such a huge meltdown in capitalism and the only way that we might find a way forward in to a different future... Maybe the artist free of any relationship with any public funding body is freest of all? If I didn't have to fill in forms, tick boxes, prove how good, nice, worthy me and my project are to a well meaning gatekeeper, maybe I'd make something better - more truthful, more radical?"
Lyn Gardner, Guardian theatre guru, thinks he has a good point. "At a time when the gap between the haves and have-nots is widening in every city, town and village across the country, perhaps Ravenhill's speech is timely in questioning the role and function of the artist. Among the most ringing lines in the speech – quoting a famous post-punk line – is that that a rising generation shouldn't look to the past for their own futures, but rip it up and start again...
Which does slightly beg the question, what if you're not into proving how nice you and your project are, if your projects are challenging and innovative and brave - how can you afford to bring them to our artist-needy world unless you're rich or have a rich patron? Arts funding, despite its sneerable form-filling requirements, brings access to creativity to people who would never otherwise have that chance.
And if you've forgotten the lyrics of that 1983 pop chart number, they're a little ambiguous:
And there was times I'd take my pen
And feel obliged to start again
I do profess
That there are things in life
That one can't quite express
You know me I'm acting dumb-dumb
