Earlier this month, during the climax of Chicago rapper Noname’s headline gig in London, she paused, cut the accompaniment, and addressed her sold-out audience. “Can I hear you say free Palestine?” It was, of course, not the first time I’d been at a concert where the artist had made some kind of political statement. At Stormzy’s packed out All Points East show last year, he implored the crowd to “f*** the Government and f*** Boris”. I’ve watched Little Simz rap about apartheid, and Beyoncé sing about race relations.
But it was Noname I thought of when a row about Arts Council England broke out last week. It all started when the magazine Arts Professional reported on a hitherto largely unnoticed update that the Arts Council had made to its policies at the end of January. Buried a few lines into its relationship policy was the warning that political statements made by individuals associated with Arts Council-funded projects — even if in a personal capacity — could cause reputational risk. That in turn, the Arts Council said, could affect funding.
As the news made the rounds online, it snowballed into a PR disaster for the Arts Council. Authors, filmmakers and poets such as Feargal Sharkey, Matt Haig, Robert MacFarlane, Asif Kapadia and Nikita Gill all voiced their fury on social media. Equity, the performing arts and entertainment trade union, said it was “deeply concerned” that the effects of the Arts Council’s new guidance would be “to censor” work and “attempt to silence artists on stage and in their personal lives”. What is art devoid of message? It is obvious to the point of redundancy to point out that art is, and always has been, inherently political. An attempt to catalogue the history of political art, from Picasso’s Guernica to the Surrealist movement, would be a futile endeavour. Some of the most incisive exhibitions currently hanging in London, from Entangled Pasts at the Royal Academy to Women in Revolt at Tate, are overtly and radically political. Divorcing the two is impossible.
The ambiguity about what is and isn’t allowed could feasibly trigger a chilling effect across the industry
So the question must be asked: what counts as political? And why now? At which point, my thoughts return to Noname. Heightened tensions surrounding Israel and Gaza have seen a number of artists across the industry penalised for speaking out on the topic — Bristol’s Arnolfini gallery rightly faced criticism after it cancelled two Palestinian film events at the end of last year because it feared “they might stray into political activity”. Many have also pointed out the fact that the Arts Council’s sudden changed in tack has coincided with its upcoming full-scale review by the Department for Culture.
With this backdrop, it is unsurprising that artists have seen the Arts Council’s timing and, rightly or wrongly, read between the lines. It was incredibly naive for it not to predict this would be the conclusion drawn, especially since in 2022 the organisation put out an overtly political statement of its own expressing solidarity with Ukraine.
Still, it is an exaggeration to say, as some have, that the Arts Council is outright banning political work. After widespread backlash, it scrabbled to issue a clarification, saying that the update was aimed at helping organisations manage risk rather than dictating what kind of work artists should be making. But the implication remains that funding prospects may be affected by what could be perceived by the Arts Council as controversial or political statements. There is still ambiguity as to what is and isn’t allowed, which could feasibly trigger a chilling effect across the industry. Would a venue funded by the Arts Council risk putting its future in jeopardy by hosting a politically outspoken artist? How, under these parameters, can any artist meaningfully exercise full freedom of expression, the lifeblood of the arts?
The Arts Council is responsible for distributing £540 million of taxpayer and £240 million of lottery funding to the arts. We would all shudder at the idea of a world in which the only people with access to this are those without political convictions, or the only art allowed public funding was some milquetoast, sanitised and government-approved pile of nothingness.
Many artists throughout the years, from Picasso to Toni Morrison, have spoken thought the years of the importance of preserving the political within art. But, reading about the Arts Council’s decision, I am above all reminded of a poem I came across a few months ago by Palestinian writer MarwÄn MakhkhÅ«l: “In order for me to write poetry that isn’t political, I must listen to the birds and in order to hear the birds, the warplanes must be silent.”
