Whenever, as now, there’s the prospect of serious cuts in arts funding, there will always be someone who’ll say ‘no matter what happens to the funding, artists won’t stop making art’. On annual leave last month, what turned out to be an unexpectedly cultural week’s holiday in East Lothian gave me plenty of opportunity to reflect on that statement.

Sculptures at Seacliffe (© Fran Collins)

For a start, the obvious response is ‘yes, but who’ll get to see it?’ On a very wet Wednesday we went into Edinburgh to revisit the National Galleries’ two marvellous Festival exhibitions (see back a blog or two). If you’re not entitled to any concessions, admission to ‘Impressionist Gardens’ costs an eye-watering £10. Now, any exhibition with those two words in the title is always going to pack ’em in regardless, and sure enough the galleries were crowded, even though the Festival had ended the previous weekend. But the equally wonderful Christen Købke downstairs, though a very much smaller show, nonetheless costs £7 if you have to pay top whack, and for many I imagine that will cause a certain hesitation if Købke’s ravishing work is unfamiliar to them.

At the end of the week, on our way home, we stopped off again in Edinburgh to see the survey of Edward Weston’s photographs at the newly reopened City Art Centre. This is an exemplary exhibition, lucidly curated and beautifully presented, and the work, often very small and rather dark, is also often mesmerising.

But it is a minority taste, and on a Saturday afternoon there were perhaps half a dozen other visitors over the two floors of the exhibition. Perhaps the admission price of £8 had something to do with it. I first got to know Weston’s work when I began working at the Third Eye Centre thirty years ago, and we hosted a touring exhibition from the recently established Stills Gallery. But that exhibition, of course, was free.

You can see the vicious spiral in prospect here: if such a high admission price puts people off fairly specialist subject matter like this, then the City Art Centre, like many other galleries with high overheads, will be tempted to put on more ‘blockbusters’ that are guaranteed to bring in the crowds. After all, Glasgow Art Gallery has just broken all records for its art exhibitions with a survey of the Glasgow Boys (being Glasgow, this is more modestly priced at £5). But it’s only a few years since an earlier, excellent survey of many of the same artists’ work was on at the Dean Gallery—did we really need another one?

Just the day before, in Haddington, we’d stumbled on an excellent example of the kind of arts venture that’s soon going to become increasingly hard to fund. At the long-established Peter Potter Gallery we met two artists who were putting the finishing touches to a project initiated by the Dunbar Arts Trust, which had involved the local community in ‘Knitting Dunbar Harbour’. Now, I don’t know whether the end result was craft or art, amateur or professional, high or low, but it was certainly wonderfully inventive, great fun, and a huge collaborative achievement, and I’m sure that the undertaking of it will have had beneficial impacts within the community of Dunbar that will be long lasting. But how do you measure and assess those impacts (especially if they are long lasting), and how therefore do you put a value on them?

We had rendezvoused in Haddington the previous Saturday with our friends from North Wales with whom we were going to share a self-catering cottage (kindly recommended to us by artist Kirstie Cohen after she read my blog about North Berwick—it belongs to her parents). The great restored church of St Mary’s seemed an obvious landmark to aim for, and we all met up there only to discover that, six days later, as our holiday ended, the inaugural Lammermuir Festival would be launched in the kirk with a concert by the Scottish Chamber Orchestra. A quick phone call booked us tickets, and it proved indeed to be a fitting climax to our break—‘beautiful music in beautiful places’, as the Festival’s strapline put it.

As the Festival’s Chair said in his opening speech at the concert, this is perhaps a rash time to launch a new festival, and it was good to hear him pay tribute to East Lothian Council, whose early support had made it possible to bring on board major private donors and sponsors. But for how long will any Local Authority be able to continue to justify such support, as schools and care centres close? Even though, if the new festival is the success I expect it to be, it will have a significant economic impact on the area (we’ll certainly be planning a return visit)?

Of course, it’s absolutely true that artists will go on making art, whatever happens, and whether or not anyone sees it. I feel a Zen paradox coming on here: is it still art if nobody other than the artist gets to see it? On our first full day at the cottage we had walked down to the beach at Seacliff which is just one of the many truly fabulous (and often empty) beaches on this stretch of coast. We made our way round a rocky outcrop, and stumbled—almost literally—on an extraordinary sight: the rocks, pebbles and flotsam of the beach had been used to construct scores and scores of little abstract sculptures.

The more we got our eyes in, the more of them we began to spot, until finally we realised that there was a second, and even more ambitious, group at the other end of this short stretch of beach. I have no idea who the artists were—perhaps a summer school from Edinburgh College of Art—but I am quite certain that they were artists, and that there was more than one of them. The combination of aesthetic judgement (in the use of colour, texture and scale), technical skill (in achieving some dazzling feats of balance, and moving around some pretty hefty stones), and invention (in creating witty echoes of animal and plant forms) pointed to artistry of a fairly high degree, and the sheer number and variety could not have been achieved by one person. Some of the structures were so delicately poised that it was hard to believe that they’d survive even one high tide. The next two days were dominated by gale force winds, and after that we couldn’t bring ourselves to go back and, perhaps, see these joyous creations in scattered ruins.

This was art at its most basic–in materials and location—its most playful, and most private. The four of us may well have been the only people (apart from the makers themselves) to see the whole installation intact. Yet for us all the experience was almost on a par with that of seeing ‘Impressionist Gardens’, perhaps all the more so because we hadn’t expected it and didn’t have to share it with thousands of others. We could pretend, for a moment, that it had been placed there for our own special benefit, like Mad Ludwig of Bavaria putting on productions of Wagner for which he was an audience of one.

I can’t bring these assorted reflections to an easy conclusion. All I can say with any certainty is that the way we encounter and experience the arts is going to change radically in the near future. We’ll be paying more to see a narrower range of work. Large sections of the community will increasingly find themselves excluded–by price, by context, or simply by lack of access—from meaningful, enriching cultural experiences. We’ll need to rely much more on the kind of private patronage that made the new Lammermuir Festival possible, and hope that those private patrons won’t want to interfere too much in programme content or presentational style. But, to end on a more positive note, it may be that the Internet will make it possible for us each to become much more closely involved in the actual funding and creation of individual events and works of art, and thereby make possible a sense of discovery and engagement similar to that we experienced on the beach at Seacliff. That new approach could be achieved through crowd-funding and micro-patronage. But those concepts—new to me until just a few weeks ago—will have to be the subject of a future blog.

PS: if the makers of the Seacliff sculptures read this, do please add a comment below!

© Robert Livingston, 2010