Towards a Cultural DemocracyAuthor(s): Ciarn BensonSource: Studies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 81, No. 321 (Spring, 1992), pp. 23-33Published by: Irish Province of the Society of JesusStable URL: http://www.jstor.org/stable/30091647Accessed: 15/10/2009 09:15

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Ciarln Benson TOWARDS A CULTURAL DEMOCRACY

Ciaron Benson, a philosopher and psychologist of art, is a lecturer in the Educa tion Department, University College, Dublin

Ideologies and Irish Arts Policies, 1921-1991 23 In this essay, I want to survey Irish arts policy at some distance from its details in order to discern the form of its armatures. What I have in mind are its ideological foundations,and the ways in which these have changed over the last seventy years. Although I present them sequentially, they should not be understood simply in terms of one ideology replacing a predecessor. The processes of social and cultural change are more kaleidoscopic than that.

I use the term ideology in both the general sense of an underlying world view and, more particularly, in the sense of the formal and consciously held beliefs of a social group.' Such beliefs have histories and powers. They invade each other's territories and fight for recognition, ac300tance and, very often, for the suppression of their rivals. It is in this sense that ideologies can be understood as contrasting and often as contending powers. Cultural policies have their own ideological bases with quite dif ferent con300tions of the uses to which cultural and artistic practices can be put. To open up a perspective on the underlying ideologies of Irish arts policy over its last seventy years, it may be helpful to begin by contrasting Ireland with another young state of similar population size, Israel.

A striking feature of some major Israeli museums, such as the Museum of the Diaspora, is the way in which they are explicitly aimed at the lives of contemporary Israeli citizens. The history of Jewish life and lives is presented so that Israeli Jews can stitch that history into their own per sonal lives as active citizens of Israel. The museum's function is clear in the minds of its policymakers and consequently its power is effectively mobilized for the purposes of contemporary Israeli history. The autobiographical activities of Jews are harnessed to the technologies of modern museums to serve the purpose of forging a new political identity for Jews from all corners of the world. A strong sense of com600 genealogy and solidarity is the likely outcome for Jews peering into this particular mirror, with all the consequences for 'us them' relationships which such strong and exclusive identifications bring in their wake.

I choose this example because it strikingly illustrates how a new state in the process of establishing itself can use and transform the idea of, in

this case, the museum as cultural mausoleum into the idea of museum as mirror presenting to its Jewish visitors, Lacan-like, an imaginary apprehension and mastery of themselves as a unified national body. The point of the example is the clear way in which an aspect of cultural policy can be subservient to the wider policy of national identity formation. How the nation chooses to converse with itself reveals, as with any con versation, more than what is actually said. Its ideological basis, in other words, is clear.

Ireland as an independent state is twenty-six years older than Israel, and of course began in radically different circumstances and with quite

24 different problems. The world was a qualitatively different place post-1945 than it was post-1922. But a contrast is nonetheless instructive for highlighting some elements in the foundation of Irish arts policymak ing. The nations are comparable in population size; both harken back to a distant historical time as the spiritual source of their being as a national entity; and, with sharply differing degrees of success, both looked to a com600 national language as the bonding agent of the new nation. But whereas Israel began by a radical openness to the world outside from every part of which it drew its citizens, Ireland in its initial decades came to close itself off, both economically and culturally, from the world out side while simultaneously exporting its citizens to every part of the world; and whereas Israel faced the problem of a radical cultural heterogeneity seeking to be nationally homogeneous, Ireland's problem came to be that of an internally stagnant homogeneity slowly and tentatively opening itself to cultural difference and to the possibilities of pluralism and modernism. Inevitably this made for huge differences in the ideational bases from which, in the first place, the idea of needing to have a national cultural policy evolved, and then to differences in the purposes and nature of the elements of that policy. The general point, however, is that wider national policies tend to govern arts policies.

Roughly speaking, one can distinguish three broad ideologies in the history of Irish arts policymaking. These would be Catholic Irish nationalism (there was also a Protestant one), liberal modernist elitism, and cultural democracy. Their interrelationships are complex, but the general point of what follows is that their impact on Irish cultural life and policy-making was successive, if overlapping.

Catholic Irish Nationalism Catholic Irish nationalism was financially and politically conservative, and intellectually reliant upon its erstwhile ruler for certain of its notions of Government. As Joe Lee makes clear in his Ireland 1912-1985 the management of the new Irish state was modelled on and heavily assisted by the British civil service. Irish politicians and civil servants were, in the area of fiscal policy, followers of the Treasury in London. If we were to

have museums, galleries, and libraries then we would have them as the British had them, which was largely as a result of private philanthropy rather than as a service of the State to its citizens. The idea that the State should have an arts or cultural policy funded by taxes had still to evolve to the level of political practice. This is not to say that Ireland had no official view on the arts and culture in its early decades. It did, but that view was generally negative in that the national self-con300t as a pure self-sufficient gaelic Catholic island race in a swelling sea of secular unbelief and cosmopolitanism demanded mechanisms which would pro tect this national mind rather than develop it. The emblematic mechanisms for self-protection were the 1923 Censorship of Films Act 25 and the 1929 Censorship of Publications Act. 'The censorship legisla tion', as Joe Lee puts it, 'served the materialistic values of the propertied classes by fostering the illusion that Ireland was a haven of virtue sur rounded by a sea of vice. . . It helped to rivet the remunerative impres sion that immorality stopped with sex. '2 Censorship was the symptom rather than the cause of the intellectual poverty to which it contributed. The mind of the nation was in the complacent hands of what Joe Lee refers to as 'the risen bourgeoisie, touting for respectability'.

If the state had a responsibility for the arts and culture, then apart from pursuing its language policy through education and civil service employment practices, some theatre grants, Radio Eireann, and the establishment of military cere600ial bands, its self-understanding required that it defend itself against what it understood to be the dangers of the arts rather than incorporate them as ways in which national self understanding might develop. The Truth was already known, as Thomas Bodkin was reminded by Dr John Charles McQuaid when he had failed to deflect Sean O'Faolain's appointment as Director of the Arts Council in 1956; 'We shall stumble on, in the semi-gloom of minds that have never been disciplined from youth and that have not matured in the tranquillity of assured knowledge'.3 The modernist idea of 'Truth' as a living evolving social process was an idea waiting for its time in Ireland. The aesthetic was emphatically subordinate to the prevailing ethic, and that ethic was unashamedly authoritarian.

For nineteen weeks, Ireland did have a Minister of Fine Arts (26 August 1921 to 9 January 1922), but this non-cabinet post did not sur vive. It was merged with the Department of Education from which, as Brian Kennedy observes in his history of the Arts Council, 'It did not re emerge for another sixty years'. The arts were, in the tight book-keeping of the young state, 'an avoidable deficit'. Sean Keating was of course employed to paint the progress of the Shannon Hydro-Electric Scheme and his heroic narratives of the Irish and especially of the Western coun tryman and woman functioned to create a particular Irish national iden tity in a similar way to the functioning of the Israeli museums with which

we began. Keating also held to the Romantic notion of the artist as seer. In his Night's Candles are Burnt Out of 1928-9, only the artist and his wife are depicted as looking towards the future, in the form of the hydro electric dam, and pointing it out to their young children, the oncoming generation. None of the other six depicted adult figures looks to the future; the priest reads his breviary by candle-light, the gunman bends to speak to a pompous self-preoccupied manager, one worker dozes, another drinks and the last observes the hanging skeleton of a soldier.5

Yet, at the same time that Keating was painting these images into the national self-consciousness, the agricultural class to which his subjects

26 generally belonged was being economically annihilated.6 The story being told by such artists was, at its kindest, history, and at its worst self delusion despite the visionary self-con300tion of the artist. The relation ship of art and society was to the ultimate benefit of neither. This osten sibly 'realistic' art owed more to wish-fulfilment than to experiences of the sort which their subjects would have been likely to have. Yet con trasts like these between aspirational representations and actual presences, between island self-sufficiency and native traditions as against international interdependence and modernism, between con300tions of local and national democracy, between Church and State, between authority and freedom, and between the aesthetic and the ethical, reverberate through the history of cultural policymaking in Ireland.

The ideology of Catholic Irish nationalism tended to sacramentalize art. For example,our first and only Minister of Fine Arts, Count Plunkett, founded The Academy of Christian Art (to which only Catholics could belong in 1929 on the understanding that art was 'an aid to spiritual knowledge and spiritual thought' and that 'Christian Art is a faint reflection of God's Beauty'.7 This ideology favoured the notions of representation held and defended by the Royal Hibernian Academy as against the subversive inroads of modernism which artists like Keating viewed in terms of 'sacrilege'. At the same time, and in contradiction, it favoured the Irish language and 'true' native art as exemplified by the 600astic Golden Age, while simultaneously nurturing a suspicion of and resentment towards Anglo-Irish artistic achievements. In this it had a clear idea of the political function of art in that it wanted artists to pro duce a distinctive Catholic Irish art, and the social role of that art was understood to be emphatically subservient to the political structures of Catholic nationalism. The contradictions inherent in this ideology, how ever, soon began to be exposed and started to give way to change in the 1940s and 1950s.

The State, Art and The Arts Council Historians will point to a number of key events in the story of Irish arts policy. One is certainly the foundation of the first Arts Council in 1951.

Apart from the significance of this for Irish art and artists, and despite its often sickly growth, it is the establishment of the Arts Council as an agency of potentially systematic State patronage of the arts that is especially interesting. John Maynard Keynes noted this in 1945 when the Arts Council of Great Britain was established: 'I do not believe it is yet realized what an important thing has happened. State patronage of the arts has crept j'8 Ireland's following suit in 1951 was similarly signifi cant because once it is acknowledged that the State should support an aspect of cultural life, such as mass education or the arts and heritage, it quickly becomes ac300ted that it is doing what ought to be done by a State of such a kind. If that support is financial then it is tax-payer's 27 600ey that is being deployed and questions of the rights of all taxpayers to the goods involved will not be long in coming forward. And once that happens, issues of differential social class access and equality of oppor tunity become very important in the ensuing discourse,as do such ques tions as the standing of popular culture vis-z-vis 'high culture' and the related question of an Arts Council's responsibility for 'standards'. This, of course, is part of what happened in the 1960s and since, and it results in the development of trends like those which later came to be grouped under the heading of cultural democracy'.

A cursory list of significant events for the cultural life of 1960s Ireland marks it as a watershed decade.9 A rising economic tide, the arrival of national television in 1961, television viewing access to British channels for large sections of Ireland, Vatican II, the Investment in Education report, and the introduction of free education in 1966/67 were highly significant developments. The curtailment of emigration and the rise in the birthrate also had major consequences in that it made the Ireland of the 1970s and 1980s a predominantly young Ireland participating in a rapidly developing international youth culture. World events impinged dramatically on Ireland. The Vietnam war raised what previously had been largely unasked questions about Ireland's relationship with the United States, and about the whole vexed question of communism versus capitalism, of the expe diencies of great powers and the rights of little ones. Especially significant for Ireland as a whole was the Civil Rights Movement in Northern Ireland, and later on in the south the move for civil rights in matters of personal morality and the employment of women. There was in the late 1960s a600gst the young a hunger for difference and for change.

This of course reflected itself in the arts world. With government assistance the new Abbey Theatre opened in 1966; the censorship laws were relaxed in 1967; the first 'arts centre', the Project Arts Centre, began in Dublin in 1966; the first major exhibition of contemporary inter national art, ROSC '67, was mounted in Dublin; and the Minister for Finance, Mr Haughey, introduced tax exemption for artistic earnings in the 1969 budget. Art and artists were on the agenda for conversation and

action in a way that had never before happened in Ireland. This was because Ireland had opened the doors to the outside world and begun to prepare itself to use what it found there.

Of its nature, the clash of cultural values and ideologies involves struggle and tension. In a curious way, the Arts Council of the 1960s and early 1970s exemplified some of the more general clashes in cultural thinking and policymaking. One could argue that the intentions of P.J. Little, for instance, in establishing the Arts Council were shaped by a mixture of ideologies. Strands of cultural democracy were certainly evident in that the primary function of the Arts Council was to 'stimulate

28 public interest in the arts'. 10 But this function was not primary in the first decades of the Arts Council. A600gst other reasons for this, one could cite the prevalence a600gst early Arts Councils of what might be called a liberal elitist ideology.

The belief that the Irish art world was largely comprised of a small group from the 'comfortable' classes, and that the Arts Council under the direction of Fr Donal O'Sullivan, S.J. (1960-73 reflected this, was widespread at that time." There was nothing uniquely Irish about this association of art, social class and the judgement of 'elitism'. But the interesting point is that it is at the crossroads formed by these associa tions and judgements that one of the crucial underlying battles in Irish arts policymaking has been quietly fought for nearly twenty years now. This is a struggle between what may be broadly characterized as the 'cultural democratic viewpoint' and those loosely allied to fight what they see as an inevitable lowering of artistic standards and a debasement of 'Art'. The brte noire of the latter group is what is called 'community arts', and less overtly, 'arts in education'. In times of financial exigency such as the present, these are the 'avoidable deficits' for this alliance of interests. At the time of writing this in late 1991, for the first time in over ten years the Arts Council has no full-time Education Officer. It never had a community arts officer, and in controversial circumstances tangen tially related to these concerns it has just lost its Regions Officer. The shifting sense of its own priorities can be seen in the three revisions of its principal standing order, as noted by Brian Kennedy. 12 In 1957 with Sean O'Faolain as Director it read: 'Future policy, while not failing to encourage local enterprise, would insist on high standards'. This was revised in 1960 by Fr O'Sullivan's Council to read: 'The Council's main function is to maintain and encourage high standards in the arts'. In 1987 it was changed back by Adrian Munnelly's Council to this: 'While recognizing local enterprise and community activity, the Council's main function is to maintain and encourage high standards in the arts'. In the innocuous language of this changing standing order, an ongoing struggle between 'elitist' and 'cultural democratic' ideologies can be discerned, and with it conflicting ideas about the Art Council's role.

Conflicting ideas about the Art Council's role: the liberal elitist position, 19604973 Fr O'Sullivan's Art Council championed modernism, mostly in the visual arts. In this it differed fundamentally from the previously dominant ideology. It bought extensively a600g younger modernist Irish artists and generally contributed to the development of a 'taste' for modern art. This was its achievement. But its style of operation and con300tion of its relationship to the political order reveal definite contradictions. While wanting to open up the sensibility of the Irish public to modern art, as through its support for ROSC 67, it studiously and embarrassingly avoided all conflict with the Government and other government agencies. 29 Its con300tion of arts policy was far from that of social policy, just as its con300tion of art seemed to play down its contentious political aspects. Its patrician image, together with its non-democratic style of decision making, indicated a view of art as somehow above the fray of ordinary life. The distinction between high and popular culture seemed to be taken as given.

Questions of significance for Sean O'Faolain, such as the need for independence for the Arts Council, were not of significance for his suc cessor as Director of the Arts Council. Nor was it part of the Arts Coun cil's self-con300t that it should fight for the development of the arts even if this meant criticizing the failure of other governmental agencies or of the government itself. In this regard, the underlying spirit of Fr O'Sullivan's Arts Council as a tasteful gentleman's club (Over the three appointed Councils from 1961 through 1966 to 1971, not one single woman was appointed to or co-opted by any of the three successive Councils, nor was there anybody from the lower middle or working classes inevitably exuded a message of art for the select few and simultaneously precluded the taking of any policy decision in favour of art for the many. This, despite the fact that the primary function of the Arts Council under the 1951 Arts Act was to 'stimulate public interest in the arts'. An underlying con300tion of 'Art' as basically detached from political process and as ultimately issuing from innate 'genius' would naturally lead its holders to underestimate the extensive and troublesome task confronting an Arts Council which seriously asked how it might go about this stimulation of public interest, knowledge, appreciation and practice of the arts. It is in this sense that these early Arts Councils lived out an idea of art's relationship to society which was out of har600y both with certain of the social aspects of modernism as well as with the democratizing ethos of the times.

The voice of this ethos was to be heard in the Seanad debate in 1971 on the National College of Art and Design Bill whose aim was to free the National College of Art from the dead hand of the Department of Educa tion. Contributions by Senators John Horgan, Mary Robinson and

James Dooge raised fundamental questions about the failure of Irish arts education, '3 about the need for community approaches to art,and about the damage done by separating art and artists from the rest of national life. James Dooge, echoing Clive Bell sixty years earlier, 14 put it like this: 'We, more than any other people perhaps, look on every artist as a special kind of man or woman, whereas we would be a much healthier com munity if we looked on every man and woman as potentially a special kind of artist". 15 Things changed after the 1973 Arts Act with the appoint ment of a new Arts Council (now with three women out of sixteen mem bers which committed itself to involvement in education, to the

30 independence of the Arts Council, and to direct grant assistance to artists. Highly significant was the appointment of a new full-time Direc tor in 1975, Colm O'Briain, and an expanding specialist staff recruited on contract from outside the civil service. Animating these officers was the new spirit of cultural democracy.

Cultural Democracy and its place in Irish Arts Policy, 1975-1991 There is a rich historical tradition contributing to the idea that cultural democracy is a desirable project for rationally based State policy in the arts. It largely originates with the Enlightenment of the eighteenth century, and from there moves intricately through the political and cultural history of the modern world. 16 In the late 1970s and 1980s especially, a variety of books examining and advocating cultural democracy appeared. 17 But the roots of the idea are much older than this and are essentially related to the rise of social democracy as a moral and political movement. A variety of historically recent moral re-evaluations are relevant to it, and these have become parts of what can be called the modern sensibility.

First, there is the shift away from the idea of society as a social hierarchy and towards the ideas of equality and of democracy. Related to this are two moral values whose development Charles Taylor traces through the modern period. The first of these is the significance of ordinary life and the second is the ideal of universal benevolence. 18 A further constituent is the emergence in the modern period of the ideal con300tion of the self as a free, self-determining subject. And related to this notion of freedom is the idea of universal justice as a moral imperative. These ideals of equality, personal rights, freedom, personal autonomy, democratic self-government, respect for others and for the significance of ordinary life and lives, are the ideas of modernity and, within the area of State arts policy, they converge in the idea of cultural democracy as an aspect of social democracy.

As an essentially modern idea, cultural democracy affiliates in all sorts of ways with other movements of modernity. Its association with the democratic traditions of socialism are strong, whereas, despite the rhetorical indications to the contrary, it is and was entirely incompatible with the traditions of totalitarian communism in which the idea of

individual freedom and genuine self-determination by communities is anathema. There are elements of Romanticism there in that, like Shelley, the power of the arts to strip away familiarity from the world is recognized. but whereas the consequence of this for Shelley was the revelation of beauty, cultural democracy conceives of the arts as a form of power, as 'literacies' which empower their users to notice the suddenly defamiliarized and until then 'obvious' world, to understand it and, if necessary, to reconstitute it. In this sense cultural democracy conceives of the arts as a form of political as well as of aesthetic power. 19 It also owes a debt to thinkers of the nineteenth century such as Matthew Arnold who married the idea of art with those of social progress and 31 improvement, even if they believed that only the few could achieve cultural excellence. In more recent times, it owes a particular debt to Ray 600d Williams who, a600gst many other things, argued for the Arts Council's role in an expanding and changing popular culture,and in tak ing 'the arts to the people'.20 At the contemporary end of the historical spectrum, it could be argued that cultural democracy is a form of postmodernism in that, for example, it actively seeks to erase the boun daries of popular art and of what is known as high art.21

The idea that arts policies can be clearly thought out and purposeful, an idea with which I began this paper, does not have a strong pedigree in Irish arts policy. By and large, this policy has over most of the history of the State simply thought of itself as 'getting along with the job' without the unnecessary baggage of theory or intellectual justification or the rationality of a comprehensive national policy. At the level of policy making, this attitude inevitably leads to reactive, once off 'grand gestures' which in turn lead to a neglect of serious infra-structural changes and planning, and to duplication and the waste of scarce resources.22 At best, development is then subject to caprice and, as in recent years, to political caprice.

The administrative categories under which cultural democracy has made itself felt on the agenda of the Arts Council have largely been those of education (both in and out of schools), what has come to be called 'community arts', and the issue of regional policy. Notions of 'access', 'equitability' and 'empowerment' are central con300ts here. From the time of Coim O'Briain's and the sixth Arts Council, cultural democratic ideas have formed an important part of the general body of ideas shaping and informing arts policy. The stimulating and enabling role of the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation in developing these ideas as they might apply to Ireland was essential here. Since 1978 the Arts Council has had an educational policy of its own as well as views of its own on educational policy which it expresses independently.23 As regards the controversial area of 'community arts', the strongest statement yet on this came from the joint Arts Council-Gulbenkian Foundation ACE project which ran

from 198589.24 But the internal controversy which this generated a600gst the members of the ninth Arts Council was symptomatic of the tensions which continue in the Arts Council's con300tions of its functions. In the present climate, reflecting the ethos of 1980s Thatcherism, the twin notions of the arts as businesses or 'cultural industries' and of 'return investment' have come to dominate as ideas informing arts policy, or so it seems.

The crisis in the State's finances has meant a re-valuation of the State's commitment to certain services. Significantly, it has meant a reconsidera tion of the nature of services which a modern democratic state thinks that it ought to provide. These re-valuations and reconsiderations tend not to

32 be part of any published policy. They emerge in decisions. And if the same is true of the previous unformulated policies which they are chang ing, then the significance of those decisions bears a final comment. The supplanting of exchequer support for the arts, for example, by lottery supplements, and the mechanisms of its disbursement, may turn out to be of far-reaching significance for future State arts policy, as would a prolonged vacancy of the Education Officer's job or of the Regions Officer's in the Arts Council itself. The process whereby ideologies struggle with each other continues as does the need for explicit policy.

It is no accident that those favouring cultural democracy (in the shape of better education services, better ways of thinking about and develop ing community oriented arts activities, and better regional policies have felt the need to argue and give reasons why their case should be heard. This is because cultural democracy is not like other elements of arts policy whose requirements for support and priority may appear to be self-evident. The reason, as I have suggested, is that the case for cultural democracy is moral and political, and grounded in the dominant ideas of modernity. It resists the con300tion of art and of artists as detached from ordinary life, and argues instead for transcending the divide which has grown up between art and society. In one form or another, the ideas sup porting this divide are still very much alive in Ireland, as elsewhere. Policies which affect the relationships of art in society require the makers of those policies to think critically about those relationships. A com prehensive arts policy in which cultural democratic ideas are reconciled with contemporary artistic and aesthetic ones is still an aspiration, but it is one which, despite the significant vacancies in the Arts Council, is closer to realization since 1975.

Notes My thanks are due to Noel Barber, Anne Kelly and Coim O'Briain for their com ments on an earlier draft of this paper. 1. For a discussion of this see Ray600d Williams, Culture, London: Fontana,

1981, pp.26-30. 2. J.J. Lee, Ireland 1912-1985: Politics and Society, Cambridge: Cambridge

University Press, 1989, p.158. See also Terence Brown's Ireland A Social and Cultural History 1922-85, London: Fontana, 1985.

3. Quoted by Brian P. Kennedy, in his informative Dreams and Responsibilities: The State and the Arts in Independent Ireland, Dublin: The Arts Council, 1990, p.118.

4. ibid.. p.7. 5. For a further discussion of this see Ciarpn Benson, 'Modernism and Ireland's

Selves' Circa, Jan-Feb 1992. 6. J.J. Lee, op. cit., p.159. 7. See S.B. Kennedy, Irish Art & Modernism, Dublin: The Hugh Lane

Municipal Gallery of Modern Art, 1991 , pp. 160-61. 8. John Maynard Keynes, The Listener, 12 July 1945, p.31. For a discussion of

Keynes in the context of a critical reflection on the Arts Council of Great 33 Britain see Ray600d Williams' lecture 'Middlemen: The Arts Council' in Ray600d Williams, What I Came to Say, edited by Neil Belton, Francis Muihern and Jenny Taylor, London: Hutchinson Radius, 1990, pp.98-107.

9. See Anne Kelly, Cultural Policy in Ireland, Dublin: UNESCO/The Irish Museums Trust, 1989, pp.9.

10. See The Arts Act 1951, Dublin: The Stationery Office, 1951, section 3.1a. 11. See Brian Kennedy, op. cit., Chapter 8. 12. Brian Kennedy, ibid., p.222. 13. This was not of course the first time that such criticisms were voiced. Thomas

Bodkin raised them in his Report on the Arts in Ireland, Dublin: The Sta tionery Office, 1949, as did the Report of the Scandinavian Design Group In Ireland, Design in Ireland, Dublin: Coras Trachtala, 1961.

14. See Clive Bell, Art, New York: Capricorn Books, (1958 (1913). 15. Quoted in Brian Kennedy, op. cit., p.170. 16. For a fascinating treatment of this period, particularly in relation to the

moral sources of self, see Charles Taylor, Sources of the Self The Making of the Modern Identity, Cambridge, Mass.: Harvard University Press, 1989.

17. See, for example, Su Braden Artists and People, London: Routledge & Kegan Paul, 1978: Owen Kelly, Community, Art and the State: Storming the Citadels, London: Comedia Publishing Company, 1984: and Another Stan dard, Culture and Democracy: The Manifesto, London: Comedia Publishing Company, 1986. The major British (or, as he would have preferred, Welsh thinker on questions of culture, community and democracy was Ray600d Williams. A600gst other works, his Culture and Society 1780-1950, London: Chatto & Windus, 1958, and The Long Revolution, London: Chatto & Windus, 1961, were hugely influential.

18. Charles Taylor, op. cit., pp.394-395. 19. This is why cultural democracy would be closely allied to the thinking of

educational theorists of action such as Paolo Freire. 20. See his What I came to Say, p.106. 21. On this see, for instance, Fredric Jameson's 'Postmodernism and Consumer

Society' in Hal Foster, ed., Postmodern Culture, London: Pluto Press, 1987. 22. The short-lived 1987 White Paper, Access and Opportunity: A White Paper

on Cultural Policy, promised to offer an alternative approach. 33. See, for example, Ciaran Benson, The Place of the Arts in Irish Education,

Dublin: The Arts Council, 1979: Don Herron, Deaf Ears, Dublin: The Arts Council, 1985: and The Arts Council and Education 1979-1989, Dublin: The Arts Council, 1989. See Ciarin Benson, ed., Art and the Ordinary: The ACE Report, Dublin: The ACE Committee/The Arts Council, 1989.

Article Contentsp. 23p. 24p. 25p. 26p. 27p. 28p. 29p. 30p. 31p. 32p. 33

Issue Table of ContentsStudies: An Irish Quarterly Review, Vol. 81, No. 321 (Spring, 1992)Front MatterEditorial: The Arts [pp. 5-6]Irish Art: Does it Exist? Illusive or Allusive? [pp. 7-13]In the Porch of St Trophime [p. 13-13]The Failure of the Cultural Republic: Ireland 1922-39 [pp. 14-22]Towards a Cultural Democracy [pp. 23-33]An Isle Full of Noise? Recent Developments and Current Status of Music in Ireland [pp. 34-40]Looping the Loop with Tom Murphy: Anticlericalism as Double Bind [pp. 41-48]Women's Contribution to the Visual Arts [pp. 49-56]The Emptiness of the Image: The Case of Seurat [pp. 57-70]Dublin: Gentrification or Urban Revival? [pp. 71-80]What Glory for Mine Eyes? [p. 80-80]Banville, Science and Ireland [pp. 81-88]An Interview with Eavan Boland [pp. 89-100]Book ReviewsReview: untitled [pp. 101-104]Review: untitled [pp. 104-106]Review: untitled [pp. 106-108]Review: untitled [pp. 108-110]Review: untitled [pp. 110-112]Review: untitled [pp. 112-113]Review: untitled [pp. 114-115]Review: untitled [pp. 116-119]Review: untitled [pp. 119-121]Review: untitled [pp. 122-124]Review: untitled [pp. 124-126]Review: untitled [pp. 126-128]Review: untitled [pp. 128-129]Review: untitled [pp. 130-131]

Books Received Spring, 1992 [p. 132-132]