Who determines whether a play can get staged? In the unnamed authoritarian regime that serves as the dramatic backdrop for A Mirror, the answer is unequivocally the state. In this play-within-a-play – the premise is an illicit production put on under the pretence of a wedding – the ministry of culture signs off on the creative works that citizens are permitted to see; unluckier playwrights are sent off to the camps. Other forms of censorship are available too, including the civil servant all too happy to steer writers into replicating state-sanctioned narratives.
The production isn’t subtle but it does force the audience to confront what it’s like to live in a society with so little artistic freedom of expression. “Every mode of censorship depicted in A Mirror is practised somewhere in the world today,” Kate Maltby, deputy chair of the Index on Censorship, writes in its programme; billions of people live in countries where creating dissident art can land you in jail. But free expression is a spectrum; decisions over who gets state subsidies instil huge power in bureaucrats; and any artist worth their salt is highly sensitive to any whiff of being told what they can and cannot say. A row that broke out last week illustrates just how much free expression in the arts remains a live debate in the UK.
It started when the magazine Arts Professional picked up on a hitherto barely noticed update that Arts Council England (ACE) had made to its policies a couple of weeks earlier. ACE is responsible for distributing £540m of taxpayer and £240m of lottery funding to the arts. Its updated relationship policy warned the organisations it funds to be alert to the risk of making “statements including about matters of current political debate” that engender a negative reaction towards either them or to ACE itself, and says that “overtly political or activist” statements, including those made in a personal capacity by people linked to them might expose them to “reputational risk” and potentially breach funding agreements. This provoked huge concern in the sector.
The backlash prompted ACE to quickly issue a clarification that this updated guidance was intended to help organisations manage risk rather than tell them what sort of art they should be making. That’s arguably implicit in the guidance; but in a climate of heightened twitchiness about what producing politically controversial art might mean for your funding prospects, it was profoundly naive not to see how it would trigger a chilling effect as people quite understandably read between the lines.
Some of this is to do with heightened tensions around the Israel-Gaza conflict; Bristol’s Arnolfini gallery rightly faced huge criticism from artists after it cancelled two Palestinian film events at the end of last year because it feared “they might stray into political activity”. (The territory is made more complex for arts organisations to negotiate by dint of the fact that many are charities and so their campaigning is also regulated by charity law.) In another high-profile case, the Belfast rap group Kneecap is suing the government after it withdrew a grant on the basis that its members “oppose the United Kingdom”. Despite the fact that free expression should be a fundamental, non-negotiable bedrock in the arts, ACE has surprisingly little to say about it in the reams of acronym-filled jargon that fill its documents; it doesn’t appear to have a policy on free expression and the offending guidance includes a mention of it almost as afterthought.
Not all art is inherently political, but some of the best art indisputably is. And it is vital for a thriving arts sector that controversial art is not denied public funds purely on the basis that it divides opinion, because it is often the uncontroversial and unifying that has the greatest commercial potential and so existentially least dependent on subsidy.
Instead, we have a topsy-turvy world where we pretend that it is somehow possible to fund the arts impartially, when the reality is that there is nothing more political than the decision to spend taxes and lottery proceeds on one thing over another. There are politics wherever you look in the Arts Council: in its decision to make its own statements, for example, on the war in Ukraine. In its own worldview about what a diverse and inclusive arts sector looks like; it is itself so intolerant of some mainstream worldviews that it enabled the harassment of one of its own employees after she dared question its highly sectarian position on gender and sex. In the fact that environmental sustainability is one of only four principles that drive its funding: it expects its grantees to track and report to them progress on meeting environmental goals and encourages them to promote environmental responsibility in the content of their work.
This is in the context of a social media-driven world that fosters a very unhealthy culture around freedom of speech: outrage when the free expression of someone you agree with is curtailed, but silence or even glee when it happens to those you disagree with. How many artists justifiably expressing anger after the Arnolfini’s cancellation of Palestinian film screenings would have raised similar concerns after Calderdale libraries removed gender-critical books from its shelves, or when the People’s History Museum in Manchester issued a public apology for hiring out a room to the gender-critical group Sex Matters, for example? Defence of free expression is like a muscle: you have to work it hard in uncomfortable situations in order to strengthen it. But the truth is that we live in a world where people are reluctant to stick their necks out in the most clear-cut situations; following the 2022 knife attack on Salman Rushdie, the Royal Society of Literature took the extraordinary decision to refrain from issuing a statement of support.
It’s neat and easy to pretend we can take the politics out of arts funding by handing it over to self-styled impartial bureaucrats. But of course no such thing is possible. And confronting the risks of detached groupthink head-on means that artists themselves must rediscover their voice in speaking for the rights to create of those with whom they disagree.
• Sonia Sodha is an Observer columnist
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