[Paleopsych] Telegraph: What's 'national' about national arts organisations?

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What's 'national' about national arts organisations?
http://www.telegraph.co.uk/arts/main.jhtml?xml=/arts/2005/05/07/baoh07.xml&sSheet=/arts/2005/05/07/ixartleft.html
    (Filed: 07/05/2005)

    Andrew O'Hagan investigates

    What is the purpose of a national theatre, a national opera or ballet
    company, a national orchestra, or a national gallery? What is the
    meaning of the word "national" in those famous organisations? Is it
    simply a matter of pride and funding, an indication that those
    particular institutions have the backing of an entire nation, its
    hopes and dreams of excellence? Or is it more complicated than that:
    do we expect these arts organisations, above all others, to embody in
    their work something essential about the nation? Should the Welsh
    National Opera, for instance, seek to capture a vision of
    international musical quality, or a vision of what it really means to
    be Welsh - or both?

    In 1899, WB Yeats, Augusta Gregory and Edward Martyn, the founders of
    the Irish National Theatre, declared that the job of the new theatre
    was "to bring upon the stage the deeper thoughts and emotions of
    Ireland". This was almost 20 years before Ireland's war of
    independence, but the Abbey, the theatre that grew out of their
    declaration, would provide the platform and the occasion for many of
    the great debates about freedom, responsibility, religion and
    modernity, debates that shaped the new nation and are still shaping it
    today. In Ireland, a taxpayer-funded conversation is seen to exist
    between art and the state, a conversation whose difficulties are part
    of its richness.

    This was true in the Czech Republic (which ended up with a playwright
    for a president); it was true in Spain after the death of Franco,
    which invested in the arts as a way of opening up freedom of
    expression; it was true in parts of Australia, where national museums
    began to blush at the idea of excluding aboriginal art; and it is true
    in post-war Germany and post-glasnost Russia, where national cultural
    institutions have allowed not just a conversation but a means of
    national cleansing about the repressions and horrors of the past. In
    each of those places, national art institutions played a part in
    making life new.

    What about Britain? Do we have reason to believe that cultural
    institutions bearing the word "national" or "royal" or "British" or
    "English" or "Scottish" or "Welsh" are engaging us in questions about
    who we are or who we are becoming?

    To some people's minds, such an effort would be spurious in the
    extreme. To them, the purpose of the Royal Opera House is to furnish a
    version of, say, Das Rheingold which fulfils the virtues of the work
    and stands up well to international standards. These are the things
    one can rely on a national opera company to do. The task bears some
    comparison with football in its modern form. A club such as Celtic has
    many international players, it is super-funded and super-commercial,
    super-branded, it can stand up to international competition on the
    field, yet, one might ask, what has any of this got to do with
    Glasgow? Does the team have anything to do with Glasgow? What
    relationship does the corporate image bear to the traditions that made
    the team and the community that supports it?

    Like the few crown jewels or the odd Stone of Scone, national arts
    companies are often, I feel, adornments that nations want to have in
    order to seem more like nations, but which can't bear the
    self-questioning that should come with a truly alive national company.

    What is achieved, for example, by the excellent Scottish Ballet being
    called Scottish Ballet instead of the Ashley Page Dance Company, which
    is more descriptive of who they are? The company is based in Glasgow,
    as it has been since 1969 when Peter Darrell took his Western Ballet
    Theatre there from Bristol. The company is not Scottish in its bones,
    so why should it matter that the company hangs on to the national
    title?

    It seems to matter, though. People want to believe that their national
    arts organisations speak volumes about the civilised nature of the
    country they live in or come from, the country whose name the company
    bears. It is like a highest form of cultural branding: your country is
    a logo, the ultimate stamp of quality. You see how this has been taken
    to extremes in America, where the use of that word, "America",
    immediately seems to confer on what follows an almost unutterable
    level of power and prestige.

    Patriotism has, in other words, taken over the meaning of the word
    "national": we use it to denote a settled imperial excellence, not the
    situating of a higher conversation between the arts and the state.
    That conversation exists, of course, in the streets, in the
    newspapers, but is not advertised by national companies as part of
    what they do. Perhaps the concentration on building "partnerships" and
    sponsorships has represented a form of privatisation of British
    culture by stealth; none of the cultural boffins I spoke to this week
    could quite define what it was that made the British Museum "British"
    or the National Gallery "National": they spoke of British values, but
    couldn't really say how these affected the life of the institutions.
    (It's interesting that the same people have no hesitation when asked
    the same question about the BBC.) My own guess is that the National
    Gallery of Art in Washington, for all its Van Goghs and Matisses,
    tells a different story from the National Gallery in London, for all
    its Van Goghs and Matisses. They each tell a particular story, but we
    might ask for much more of the particularities. We might say, in the
    spirit of the Irish, what does this material and the manner of its
    housing have to do with us?

    These days, we may mean less than we think when we speak of "national"
    this and that. I mean, would it be problematic if English National
    Ballet, who are near bankruptcy but are otherwise a good and
    fully-functioning company with no very well-defined home, were to
    become, as has been suggested, the National Ballet of Wales? It's
    rather like the situation at the founding of Scottish Ballet, except
    that, this time, many people are hitting the roof at the idea that the
    Welsh National Ballet Company might suffer from being, well, a bit
    un-Welsh. But why shouldn't a newly-designated ENB be good at getting
    into the intellectual scrum of Wales's modern make-up? Peter Darrell,
    who founded Scottish Ballet, was born in Surrey, and that didn't stop
    him dealing with the wealth of Scotland's folk heritage in his
    ballets.

    In fact, as in most areas of national life, a bit of outsiderism can
    sharpen the instincts, so long as they don't assume, like most modern
    footballers, that one piece of ground is the same as another. Each
    piece of ground is different, and the arts should be an ongoing
    investigation of that difference, an attempt to beautify and enrich
    the native gardens without becoming too conscious of the fences that
    surround them.