Friday, November 26, 2004

Hooray For The Big Wood Louse

[Ramblin' Rant Alert] Winding me up today has been the prestige opening of the lottery funded Wales Millennium Centre, or the WMC as its also known. All that's hackneyed and bad about the arts in Wales has been dragged out to signify the importance of this event and the cultural significance for Wales. All the old faces are there, Michael Ball, Bryn Terfel, Max Boyce et all. The building embodies the clichés of the Welsh landscape and art world and the same old slate grey shit that quite frankly grew tired a long time ago. It?s a big and ridiculous looking mausoleum for dead arts and elitist snobbery.

The WMC is an apt abbreviation, as I'm sure that we will be calling it the Wasn't Many Customers a few years down the line. Once the usual waste and inbred cronyism that comes with arts in Wales has managed to alienate the majority of the people who paid for its construction, it will no doubt stand as a big irrelevance to the vast majority of Welsh people. Don't be surprised to see it needing to be bailed out with more tax payers money - like most of the recent ill considered and ill managed prestige arts/millennium projects here in Wales. Like them it will no doubt fail to appeal to a mass audience.

Already looking at the line up for the first few months, we see nothing but old highbrow entertainment. Now, this is what really gets on my goat. Lets break it down. Lottery funding. Who mainly plays the lottery here in Wales?

Is it the cultured middle-class who will make up the vast bulk of people that use the centre? No, it isn't - it?s the masses who need the hope of a big win and buy the tickets religiously. Its people like my grandparents and my parents.

I always use them as a great bullshit filter, I always have done. If I want to see if something floats I bring to mind what would interest them and get them off the sofa and out to enjoy some culture. Its not that my family are something special, from my experience of friend's families and people I've worked with they are really quite typical of your average working class family here in Wales.

Quite frankly, there's nothing on that list that would get them there. Yet we hear that the millennium centre will be inclusive, with low ticket prices and what-not. Now, here's where this always falls down. It?s the old middle-class conceit that lesser people and poorer people are just waiting to be rescued from their impoverished cultural lives and enriched with impenetrable and high-brow forms of entertainment such as classical concerts and cheap-seated operettas.

I hear this all the time - I tend to move in both worlds and get to see both sides of the equation. This is a luxury the majority of arts planners and cultural engineers here in Wales have never been afforded. The question is always - 'How can we enrich these poor hapless folk's lives with the culture and values we hold dear?'

Let me answer this for you in plain language. You can't. You know why? Because it bores the pants off us and quite frankly we got more entertaining and cheaper things to do with our time. The question you need to ask is this. 'If we can't force these oiks to appreciate the art of minimalism and the operas of Verdi, how can we enrich the things that are important to them?'

Myself, like many of the people I grew up with lived in houses were the only books were Haynes manuals and 40 year old family encyclopaedia. Music was the top 40 and we'd never dream of spending 40p on a family trip to the theatre (unless it was a panto) let alone £40 on a 300 year old opera. Culture meant bingo, drinking, family tales, TV (and I don't mean BBC 2) and the cinema - simple pleasures.

Not only that, but any attempt we make to be a part of that world that these people would like us to be in are met with condescension, resistance and hostility, despite whatever good intentions are meant. Then if we do work on things which are important to us, no matter how bad the content may be, or how trite and pointless the lesson learned, these same people stand rubbing their hands with an over inflated sense of self worth and achievement. This I know from personal experience and from watching people who have this mission to enrich the life's of poor people with culture.

I'm not claiming to know the wider answers (or really care if I was brutally frank.) I do know that if you want my family there, where they may through subterfuge and unintentional exposure find themselves enriched by the art and poetry of the centre, its not by putting on La Traviata, its by putting on someone like Jethro or Billy Connolly. Whilst they may turn their noses up at Cavalleria Rusticana and Pagliacci, an evening with The Shadows would be an entirely different affair. I mean come on, they've been paying for this every week for the past 10 years with their lottery tickets and dreams of a future not worrying about the next bill or the next redundancy.

But no, proper highbrow is the order of the day. As a struggling artist I know how difficult it is to get support to help you fulfil your talent or ambitions here in Wales. Unless of course you are lucky enough to have enough money behind you that living a life pleasing your artistic whims is financially viable, or, you know enough of the people in power here to make sure those grants swing the right way. Funnily enough, you never seem to see many lads from the poor side of town get the help, it always seems to be the same old middle class, well healed faces peddling the same old post Dylan Thomas drabness and uninspiring art.

I'm really getting sick of Wales these days. You have to empathise for the poor people up north and in the middle and down west - as usual they get nothing of worth. Its no wonder they hate us so much. We should just change the name to the Inbred Cardiff Arts Scene Millennium Centre, which lets face it, would be closer to the truth. I can't see anyone rushing the 5 hour journey down the A470 for an evening's show here.

Still, the same old faces are no doubt happy tonight, because once again their dreams have been fullfiled on the backs of a nation of people who frankly couldn't give two hoots about them. [/rant]

Posted by Dio Bach at 23:25

0 Comments: