Listen to the Gears: 4

We’re in a credit crunch. We all know that. I won’t bore you with the details you already know about budget cuts or the lack of jobs. What I have noticed recently coming through in the media lately is reflection on how people are working around it.

I started the week watching Alan Yentob’s Imagine: Art in Troubled Times.* He talked of art and austerity, Roosevelt’s New Deal in the 1930s and speculated how recession affects the arts for the better. In the Great Depression the US government paid artists a salary to produce things to perk up everyone else. However municipal backing brings no guarantee of quality. I wonder if that were to happen in today’s recession who would get the say on what was a good piece of art and what wasn’t. Would artists conform to what Ben Bradshaw or Peter Garrett thought they should be making? Doubt it somehow.

This programme made for an interesting debate, asking who the arts are for and what they seek to inspire. Art (in its most encompassing sense) allows us to be transported from our everyday lives for a while. So what can we do to foster this idea and make it work for people? Can we do anything? And quite frankly in this recession can we even afford to? One way which has already been happening is to use the empty shopfronts which are increasingly a part of High Streets and Downtown areas the world over. Who wants to look at this?

Curator of the latest of these ventures, Manon Slome thinks that art can thrive in this kind of environment and something positive can be created. She discussed the Manhattan No Longer Empty project on Bad at Sports. With galleries going under and artist representation lacking, it made sense for all to use what was available for the minimum price. In an attempt to revitalise these empty spaces, artists were invited to make installations in response to the economic crisis. Often they would make site specific pieces in response to, for example a fishing tackle shop ‘capturing the zeitgeist of the store.’ Slome reports a great response from the public, from artists, and increasingly from backers who appear to see the positive aspects of this kind of ‘community art’.

So there do appear to be some upbeat elements in these uncertain times. Art might help us all through. Even just going to the cinema or to a museum for an afternoon might be enough to transcend the credit crunch for a little while. Shouldn’t museums and galleries be making the most of this in their advertising?

This all seems redolent of the art of the Depression era doesn’t it? Cheering up the masses? Take heed of a final warning from Arts and Ideas. Their panel talked of the myth of positive austerity. That the willing embrace of WW2 rationing and ‘getting on with it’ really is a myth. Nobody saw it in those terms then; it was damned hard. We all know how tough it is at the moment. I wonder what folk memory will say about this recession. What nostalgia will have been created of this time when historians look back?

* Admittedly not a podcast but a BBC TV programme and hence not available worldwide.

Listen to the Gears is written by August.