November 2004 Rant: Cultural Review

THERE IS A phenomenon which Australians call the "Sydney Opera House effect". It runs like this: you hire the finest architects and engineers, you negotiate complex land issues, you fill your workforce with passion for the project; in due time the building is finished, magnificent, iconic, an immediate contender for one of the architectural wonders of the modern world.

Visitors to Sydney ask to be taken to see it. The roof is breathtaking, the terraces and foyers seem to dramatise empty space. It doesn't have a single ugly angle. Their hosts agree it's magnificent, something to be proud of, but when pressed as to why they seem so reticent they say, "All we need now is a decent opera house".

This might at first blush sound like the opening to a rant about Scottish Opera or indeed about the new Parliament building. Unfortunately – and certainly as far as the Highlands are concerned – we may yet end up in the same situation as the people of Sydney. After the Cultural Commission's deliberations are over, will we be thinking: all well and good, but what we need now is a thoroughgoing cultural review.

To shift the analogy to the un-free world, there is something notionally Stalinist about the idea of a cultural commission. Citizens, a new Five Year Plan! (at least the duration is about right); record numbers of canvases painted!; smiling novelists at work!; children of the village perform folk dances for the visiting minister!; tractor production, er, down.

The immediate problem for any centralist body, with or without a majority of metropolitan members, is that the only way cultural provision can be objectively assessed is by quantification. Pravda and Izvestia liked hard figures, the way the Herald and Scotsman are always much happier with Scottish Opera stories - run complete with a balance sheet and face-paling projections of future losses or shortfalls - than they are with stories which examine more abstract cultural imperatives.

“The commission should have had no permanent base, or one utterly stripped of metropolitan associations, and its work should be peripatetic in the most fundamental, not just cosmetic, way.”

No one so far seems easy with the possibility that any governmental provision for the arts - whether that is an actual budget or merely a set of optimistic nostrums - will have to take account of quite radical regional differences. It has become, disconcertingly, a federal problem. How do you make Wigtown, Scotland's book town, fit into the same matrix as the Eden Court Theatre, a desktop publisher in South Argyll, or indeed that splendidly named body GLLAM (the Group for Large Local Authority Museums), whose whole rationale is a careful balancing of local interests and imperatives against a broader historical and aesthetic appeal?

The siting of the Cultural Commission in Edinburgh and in a school building (Why did nobody think of that for the Parliament itself? They did?) gives the awkward impression that James Boyle's commissars may bring with them the attitudes of Her Majesty's Inspectorate of Schools, a body famously resistant to local variation and accent.

The commission should have had no permanent base, or one utterly stripped of metropolitan associations, and its work should be peripatetic in the most fundamental, not just cosmetic, way. Its only valid conclusion is that its own functioning is based on a false premise: that it might be possible to shape a philosophy - fiscal or not - of arts provision even in a country as small as Scotland.

There is an alternative course, one with a potentially misleading historical precedent and originally conceived on a scale that makes a nonsense of our impacted geography. It doesn't come from Australia (where they're still waiting for a cultural review, as well as that opera house), nor from the Soviet Union, but from the United States of America in Franklin Roosevelt's first administration.

“The people who should be conducting Scotland's cultural review are the artists themselves.”

His commissioners' response to the national slide into economic depression was to create a cultural branch of the New Deal. The Works Progress Administration remains one of the most remarkable cultural experiments ever taken by a major nation. Disguised as a work-welfare scheme for artists, it transformed perceptions of America. Painters were commissioned to make murals for public buildings, at artisan wages. Novelists and poets were moved out of state to write definitive guidebooks. There were touring productions of new drama and dance.

What non-metropolitan Scotland requires now, over and above the existing apparatus of Arts Council and Creative Scotland bursaries, is a modestly scaled down version of Roosevelt's WPA. The reason is that in practice it constituted a nationwide cultural review. It can be argued that America's sense of itself, both as continental mass and as a mosaic of localities, was radically reshaped by the WPA artists. Some reported back to government on their perceptions of the country. Most merely responded to it in line with perceived local needs.

The people who should be conducting Scotland's cultural review are the artists themselves. A scheme of exchanges, public projects, a new, technologically sophisticated version of those remarkable state guidebooks: none of these are outwith the reach of present funding; together they could amount to the most profound re-evaluation of what makes us tick culturally. For all its well-intentioned protestations, the present set-up serves a centralising, quantifying end. Don't give us the Sydney Opera House; give us an "opera house" that works.

Brian Morton is a well-known freelance writer, broadcaster and cultural commentator. He lives in Argyll.