This follows on from the idea that what makes a grassroots movement form itself together is story.
At D&D4, I said that I would go away and think about a language with which to express the social value of the arts, and story is the key, I think. Which is lucky, really, because that’s what the arts does best: tells stories.
And not just bits of the arts, either. Everything from theatre to TV and film, literature, painting, sculpture, dance, poetry; traditional art forms and new art forms, ‘high-brow art’ and ‘low-brow’ art; accessible and obscure, historical and contemporary, political and pornographic.
We all tell stories, or conjure up stories in the imaginations of our audiences. We all make an emotional connection with the audience member.
Our skill, our great and universal gift, is to give the audience freedom: the freedom to join in, the freedom to feel, to have catharsis, to experience.
That is the social value of the arts, and the social cost of cutting funding for the arts is that we’d be taking away the escape pod.
On my way to Bethnal Green to attend D&D, I wondered at the reason why so many people were heading out that way. Were they all going to D&D? Surely not.
(Then they all got off at Chancery Lane and I thought, shit, right, everything in life is not about where I’m going. And also, the City exists between the West End and the theatre event I was attending, but clearly isn’t important enough to exist for me as a possible final destination. Lee Simpson laughed with me about this, and it was nice to have company when laughing at myself.)
Anyway, while I was on the tube, I was watching people – who were going to work in the City on finance and stuff like that – listening to music. Tons of them, headphones on, lost in music.
Their own choice of music, yes. They did have to go through the process of choosing, but the work of artists was giving them the open space, the freedom to make an emotional connection. Right there in front of me, on the tube!
I’d never seen it that way before, even though I see someone wearing headphones all the time. It reminded me of a moment I had once in Waterloo station, where I just stopped walking and looked at all the people walking past me, people on their way to something, doing something, and for a few seconds I saw them as people feeling something. Not people with purpose or motion in a train station, but people with feelings, living.
This leads onto my initial post about confession, connection and catharsis, with is about sharing, and also about freedom.
