Money, culture, and budgets

Coming as it does mere days after delivery of the 2024/2025 national budget statement on Monday, and its rigorous dissection even minutes following its introduction, today’s contribution to this space runs the risk of relative redundancy.

Yet, it should go without saying that until the point is accepted that the future of our country resides more durably in deployment of the creative imagination than in expendable subterranean resources, there is no risk of over-emphasis.

Now, don’t get me wrong. This is not designed to fuel any new or renewed frenzy around state funding of “culture” inspired by any money-inspired formulation of “cultural policy” and what I consider to be associated threats to unfettered artistic expression.

We have had examples over the years of state investment in selected activities and the negative and positive impacts that have flowed, including effective state capture of tangible and intangible organisational assets.

I am, for example, more than a little uncomfortable with the proposed pathway being designed to elevate the work of Pan Trinbago – a process no doubt paved with good and noble intentions.

This sort of thing has been interrogated in other contexts elsewhere, sufficient to inspire, at minimum, a level of wholesome scepticism and informed discussion by creatives and their supporters. We need to be much more clinical about the ways we harness this abundance of cultural wealth in T&T.

Points such as these are explored in an important 2007 study by Arjo Klamer & Lyudmila Petrova entitled Financing the Arts: The Consequences of Interaction among Artists, Financial Support, and Creativity Motivation.

Sure, this research considers a largely developed country context, but in it, the authors critically analyse “the nature and rationales of various modes of financing the arts” dividing these modes into the various sources of funding including the state and “the market” – the latter I consider to be of considerable if not supreme, unfolding importance in our case.

Much of this coincides with my view that for starters, the state - as important are its assets held in trust on our part - should not stand at the centre of framing a way forward when it comes to the discrete elements of the cultural sector. It should await its turn in the queue of influence and power, intervening only when strategically required.

In any event, numerous free individual agents carve their own way forward with minimum fuss. Coercive “local content” broadcast policy, (an anachronism in today’s virtual space) plays no role in the achievements of most of our leading musicians. In any event, what “airplay” are people talking about?

Think also of our visual artists creating and creating – generating artistic value and scanning our realities in ways in which the mathematicians and economists are typically incompetent.

This is not to say that dollars and cents are irrelevant. I started all this by referencing Monday’s budget presentation which has to do with sowing and reaping the benefits of indigenous resources. But there is little to suggest that the creative sector is, in the official discourses, moving more to the centre of assessment of our collective wealth.

For example, the point has already been made about the multi-faceted contribution of the steelpan – as a model of social organisation, expression of musical excellence, and as under-valued economic resource.

This should not mean action to get everyone to play the pan. I know young players whose appreciation for the musical value of the instrument came via everything between the guitar and piano. But that’s an aside. Another question.

There are also poets, authors, dancers, and filmmakers converting their creative imaginations to immeasurable “value” with implications for where our country stands in the global scheme of things. Consider, for example, that Shakespeare was assessed some years ago to be among the UK’s most successful cultural exports.

Okay, so we can’t expect the bean counters at the Ministry of Finance to consider these things, but I think our numerous groupings should become more vocal on questions not only of financial flows through state expenditure, but ways our cultural products, and the environment in which they are created, can add to collective wealth and value.

Their positions on such things must go beyond what Klamer & Petrova describe as “the immaterial consequences of economic processes” and consider the actual impact of the interplay involving the “financing of cultural activity, the creative process, and cultural values.”

Things to think about when next the balance sheets are prepared, and important accounting columns and calculations are again absent.