Expect an ‘intents’ debate about future funding for arts – Kevin Buckle

If I was to canvass their opinion, what would most people make of paying for highbrow projects, wonders Kevin Buckle

Is it a tent storage facility or is it art?

I was alerted by The Broughton Spurtle to the news that there was a new vision for Inverleith House in the Botanic Gardens. They had secured funding “to deliver a three-year programme of multidisciplinary engagement between artists and ecology scientists”.

This confused me as the picture from what I could tell showed that it was intended to be used as a tent storage facility. Why I wondered were these tents not taken down and instead being stored on top of each other.

Reading on it all became clear. This was not a pile of tents, this was “art” that had received a £150K award. I’m afraid I’m incapable of précising the description so I will need to rely on the article.

“Climate House will comprise an ‘immersive installation, activated as a space for conservation and action’ created in collaboration with Keg de Souza, an Australian artist internationally renowned for inflatable and temporary architecture, food, video, text, illustration, mapping and dialogical projects to explore the politics of space.”

I’m guessing the inflatable and temporary architecture is the tents!

It reminded me of a time I was in the City Art Centre to discuss the History of Scottish Music Centre and had to step over a pile of plastic that stretched over a large part of the floor.

I looked around for some explanation and discovered that this was actually art to remind us that it is a bad thing to throw plastic in the sea. The artist, who had earlier in his life done more traditional work, had wandered around beaches picking up the plastic on show.

Now there are already many problems with arts funding based as much on how they are allocated as to how much is at the arts’ disposal. The thing now is that the cost of the pandemic means that there simply won’t be enough money to fund everything – not that there ever was – and while private funding will always be available it will be hard to persuade the majority of the public that their money should continue to be allocated to arts projects that really mean nothing to all but a few.

Don’t get me wrong this is not just about the arts. Many agree that the pandemic has brought forward the demise of the high street by three to five years and quite simply there will be many businesses that may well have survived for some time but now face extinction and can not and should not be saved.

It really is hard to imagine what things will look like even six months after shops are back open in Edinburgh. On the one hand, it is hard to see how the tartan tat shops that fill the city centre can survive in the short and even medium term but then the owners are clever businessmen who will I’m sure come up with a plan.

Locals will be key to shops making any kind of viable comeback and there are far more than just tartan tat shops that rely almost completely on tourists.

Soon there will be a scramble for funding, with even Underbelly reported to already be looking for a handout, and it is also hard to believe how any project from the new Filmhouse to the Quaich Project will succeed in raising funds in the near future.

From modern art to tartan tat, all we can say is Covid-19 has changed how we view everything.