first published at www.artsprofessional.co.uk

The holiday season can play strange tricks on one’s associative sensibilities. Examples abound: Pine trees + living rooms = bubbly cheer. Bad choral singing + overstuffed shopping malls = community spirit. Likewise, events that in less emotionally heightened times might appear to have little in common suddenly seem to burst with connection.

Here’s what I mean: last week, two items of news melded together in what felt like oracular fashion for me. The first item could hardly be missed: the announcement of the London 2012 Festival, the 12-week arts-a-thon meant to justify the reported £83m being poured (largely from public sources) into that elusive thing called the Cultural Olympiad. At first blush, the Festival looks something like a mash-up of Glastonbury, WOMAD and a large wicker basketful of Barbican-esque offerings. How it will all hang together, or even if it’s meant to, remains to be seen.

The second news item was a brief e-mail from an organisation called Hidden Art. I’d never heard of them, but upon closer inspection Hidden Art appears to be one of those quiet yet busy arts companies that does a lot to keep a variety of artists informed and in funds. Hidden Art actively promotes the commerce end of its artists and has a broad, international spread of income. Tick and tick again in important boxes aligned with the government’s brave new world of the arts.

Yet the e-mail sent to me, and god knows who else, was a desperate plea for cash, because Hidden Art is on the verge of shutting down. It turns out that a big chunk of Hidden Art’s support comes from a London Development Agency (LDA) matching fund that looks likely to disappear. Government match funding to support the arts…haven’t we heard that one recently? Apparently, being asked to make up half its income gap in the space of a few months is a rather tall order for Hidden Art. What a shock.

I imagine sitting here in two years’ time, lolling into the 2012 holiday season. The tree is up; the parties are in full swing. The Olympics will have come and gone: Cate Blanchett, Toni Morrison, Damon Albarn and the other London 2012 Festival headliners will have pocketed their fees and moved on. By then, of course, the austerity hatchets now raining down on the nation’s arts provision will have done their work: we now talk about the hurt, but by then we’ll surely feel it. I wonder whether Hidden Art will have survived. Here’s a holiday wish that they do.

But regardless of Hidden Art’s fate, I also wonder how many other ‘hidden’ artists – the ones that don’t win Oscars or have massive hype machines at their disposal – will have quietly faded away by the time the Cultural Olympiad is no more than an expensive memory. And with each lost artist and company, I wonder how much more diminished will be the cultural landscape that the 2012 Cultural Olympiad is meant, in theory, to celebrate.

originally posted at www.artsprofessional.co.uk

A friend of mine is trying rather hard right now to convince me that David Cameron is a political genius of Disraelian calibre, largely based on his government’s ability to get away with pronouncements that are entirely at odds with action.

Certainly, the ConDems have managed this where the arts are concerned. For instance, quoth Jeremy Hunt: “If we had learnt to value the arts in education, as Creative Partnerships is helping us to, I believe that we would have tackled literacy and numeracy failings much more quickly.”

That was in May; a few months later, government killed the programme. If there’s since been any significant political fall-out, I haven’t noticed it.

Whether that’s genius or merely competent spin is debatable. But the ConDems are nothing if not innovative in their means of obfuscation. Witness a recent addition to the ConDem stable of economic advisors, one Richard Florida, an American urban theorist who espouses the essentialness of creativity to economic viability.

Florida is the kind of slick populist intellectual that America seems to practically mass-produce: if you picture a Venn diagram whose circles constitute Sir Ken Robinson, Malcolm Gladwell and Richard Branson, you might find Florida at their intersection. Florida rose to fame with his 2002 book The Rise of the Creative Class, in which he asserted that cities with bumper crops of high-tech workers, artists, and gays and lesbians were measurably better performers economically than cities without these groups. He dubbed this creative collective “high bohemians” and got a lot of play from ranking cities worldwide on a kind of creativity index.

Britain embraced Florida early on when the Labour-friendly think-tank Demos created its Boho Britain report based on Florida’s research, with necessarily subjective results: raise your hand if you think that Manchester really is “the UK’s answer to San Francisco.” Of late, Florida has publicly supported David Cameron’s plans to create something Silicon Valley-esque in and around the Olympic Park site. Returning the favour, the ConDems have apparently latched onto Florida’s message that creativity produces economic benefit.

Or rather, the ConDems have latched onto part of Florida’s message; the part, not surprisingly, that suits their ideology. Florida is not without his critics, but he does state time and again that artists are an integral, not peripheral, part of the creative-economic cycle. And so once again, we see the familiar pattern: the ConDems thump on about being progressive—trotting out a progressive, not to say liberal guru into the bargain—while continuing to be very regressive indeed. As far as can be told by media coverage and public debate, the spin is being bought hook, line and…well, you know.

There may be a deal-breaker where the Florida-ConDem love-fest is concerned. Florida very publicly opposes spending public funds on big cultural venues, including sports stadia, which would of course include a certain massive, globally focused, publicly funded athletics complex under construction in London. But surely the government will find a way to spin its way out of that one, too.