| 'Why is the arts sector obsessed with tackling racism at a time when it seems to be in decline?' |
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By most reasonable measures, society is far less racist today than it was 20 years ago. Yet policymakers are obsessed with the problem of racism in more and more areas of life. The arts sector is certainly no exception. At a time when the cultural products we consume - visual arts, music, literature - are more diverse and experimental than ever, there is a tendency to see unwitting racial prejudice. As Raimi Gbadamosi's contribution shows, galleries and museums are accused of excluding different artistic cultures and privileging 'white' or 'Eurocentric' art forms. Furthermore, they are accused of being insensitive to the diverse cultural needs of their audiences.
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The visual arts sector is no more or less racist than wider society but, because of cultural diversity policies, it is highly racialised. The Arts Council has stated that one of its main aims is to promote cultural difference and encourage artists from ethnic minority backgrounds. The decision to support art projects is increasingly made according to the ethnic background of the artist, rather than the aesthetic merit of the work. It is no wonder that, as Rasheed Araeen shrewdly points out, when young black artists are rejected by galleries or funders they assume their failure to be a result of their ethnic background.
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Yes, it is difficult for artists to obtain entry into the circles of the cultural elite - and this is the case not just for ethnic minorities, but for the vast majority of people. It would be spurious to suggest that ethnic minority artists cannot be successful - just consider the critical and popular recognition given to artists such as Anish Kapoor and Chris Ofili. The notion that we should have a proportionate number of ethnic minorities working in the arts sector ignores the fact that people's career choices - for all sorts of reasons - do not accurately reflect census figures. If we were to enforce such a principle, what would come next? A campaign to reduce the high proportion of doctors in the NHS from an Asian background?
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Cultural diversity in the arts is seen as a way to include ethnic minorities - but in fact it reinforces racial divisions, by judging according to a person's race rather than their work. As Rasheed Araeen eloquently argues, as long as black people are assumed to have their 'own culture' they are denied recognition in the mainstream artistic tradition.
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Why is the arts sector obsessed with tackling racism at a time when it seems to be in decline? Pauline Hadaway rightly points out that celebrating diversity coincides with a wider crisis in the arts sector about aesthetic judgement and cultural authority. Throughout the 1970s and 80s, the political left and the right attacked cultural institutions for privileging high art over more popular, 'accessible' or 'commercially driven' products. Defending the special status of high culture became deeply unfashionable, and the notion of universal cultural excellence was seen to be nothing more than a relative judgement made by an elite of dead white males. Today, instead of promoting culture, cultural institutions have become oriented around promoting cultural difference.
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There has also been a redefinition of racism. In the past, anti-racist campaigns focused on social disadvantage in areas such as education, policing, employment and housing. Since the 1980s, the focus shifted on to day-to-day interactions between people and the unconscious feelings or stereotypes we supposedly project. Racism was seen as an issue of the individual's psychology and behaviour, rather than the systematic mistreatment of minorities by the state and institutions.
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In the 1980s, the Arts Council introduced 'cultural-awareness' training for its staff in order to teach them how to be sensitive to black people. Even individuals who didn't think that they were racist were suspected of harbouring subconscious prejudices. Both artists and arts organisations were in need of re-education, or as the literature of one workshop put it, 'unlearning racist attitudes'. The Council stressed that it was not training in different cultural forms, but rather 'in the area of relating to black people' - which included training in 'cross-cultural differences in communication', 'body language' and 'neutral descriptions of cultural characteristics'. Suggested workshop titles included 'Handling aggression' and 'Handling suspicion'. Such measures suggest a feeling of insecurity and racial division, rather than a critical engagement with black artists.
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The tragic legacy of such thinking is that the arts are now celebrated for affirming particular ethnic identities, rather than transcending them. The universalism of arts - meaning that any human being might be able to appreciate the beauty of different kinds of art - has been lost. Today, arts practitioners and galleries assume that each minority has its own, homogenous artistic tradition and that this is more important than promoting a Western, Eurocentric art that they might not understand.
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For all the talk of dialogue, cultural diversity embodies a depressing worldview where we can only understand things that are related to our immediate experience. Raimi Gbadamosi insists that black audiences and artists speak a different social language to everyone else. But the point is that artists don't really speak the same language as anybody else - art allows us to transcend the grubby, banal details of everyday life, and this is what makes it so interesting and valuable.
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When artists are judged by the cultural demographics of their audience, they are discouraged from experimentation. And the arts sector can no longer express a view on whether something is 'good' or 'bad', because it is too busy worrying about whether it is 'relevant' or 'accessible' and sensitive to different ethnic minority needs.
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Where the increasingly rare instances of racial prejudice occur, we should expect that complaints are dealt with and issues discussed openly. However, under the cloak of multiculturalism, there is a danger that we speak in Babylonian tongues, where issues cannot be discussed honestly. The official etiquette of diversity threatens to stifle creative thinking.
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Munira Mirza is a researcher in cultural policy at the University of Kent at Canterbury.
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