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Abstract
On the 1 July 2010 a new cultural development body for Scotland was established. However, by 2013 the organisation was embroiled in a public dispute with a number of the individuals and organisations it was established to support. This short paper considers this “crisis” as a discursive event [Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. 2009. Methods of critical discourse analysis. London: SAGE], and informed by a discourse analysis of various texts, it identifies the core narrative as being one in which a distiguishable body of “artists” and their supporters are resisting a dangerous ideological power-grab by “non-artist” bureaucrats. It proposes that this relies upon the well-worn discursive knot of the instrumental versus the intrinsic, which facilitates a continuing obscuration of the prevailing power relationships within the network of publicly subsidised culture in Scotland. In its discursive focus on the relationship between an imagined egalitarian “cultural community” and Creative Scotland (CS), the narrative of the dispute overlooks the extent to which both CS and the majority of organisations it funds are primarily tools of governance by which the Scottish Government seeks to strategically shape the production and dissemination of culture in Scotland. It concludes that many of those individual artists arguing for various degrees of change were thus unwittingly complicit in supporting a status quo that makes the change they desire unlikely while simultaneously limiting public input into what sort of culture merits subsidy.
Notes
1. Scottish Screen was established in 1997 as the national screen agency for Scotland with a remit to develop screen culture and industry.
2. Dixon's official biography was published at http://www.scottisharts.org.uk/1/latestnews/1007015.aspx
3. It is important to note that, collectively, local councils have contributed substantially (if to varying degrees) towards the funding of culture across Scotland.
4. Initially titled the Scottish Executive on its creation in 1999, it was not until 2012 that it was renamed in law as the Scottish Government.
5. This draft bill was subject to relatively extensive public consultation.
6. This boundary blurring also resulted in a perceived lack of clarity in regards the delineation of responsibility between Creative Scotland and Scottish Enterprise for supporting the creative industries; an area that this paper does not have the space to explore.
7. A Scottish term broadly meaning an uproar, commotion or row, often used in relation to some form of protest.
8. Initially, five of the effected organisations including the Federation of Scottish Theatre and Literature Forum wrote to Fiona Hyslop to make her aware of their concerns for their organisations.
9. Social media played a significant roll in both the establishment and dissemination of the discursive narrative and it is an area that would merit detailed investigation.
10. Anne Bonnar had previously fulfilled the role of Transition Director for Creative Scotland.
11. A hashtag is a word or unspaced phrase prefixed with a #. It is a metadata tag used on microblogging sites to link messages related to a specific topic or discussion.
12. McMillan suggests that if the plan continues “senior” artists will take the “obvious option and leave the country” although to which publicly funded cultural Shangri-La is never made clear and the fate of Scotland's “junior” artists does not appear to be of concern.
13. This paper makes no claims as to the degree to which this action has been consciously employed.
14. Gray (Citation2012) identifies this as one of four ways in which societies attempt to overcome the difficulty of linking a heterogeneous “mass” citizenry to the specific practice of policy production. The other three identified are direct, representative and deliberative forms of democracy.
15. This despite the fact that the SG abandoned the arm's length principle when they moved the five national performing companies into a direct funding relationship with central government.
16. In the case of the cultural sector most often in the form of cash subsidies.
17. Indeed Hyslop stated to a parliamentary committee that she saw no problem with its content (SP, Citation2012).
18. It is perhaps worth noting that at the time of writing CS were issuing their new strategic plan (the word corporate now removed from the title). Despite a tonal change, this document remains a statement of how CS's planned actions align with SG objectives.