On Art and Truth

by Nicolette Bethel

Ours is a society of liars.

Now before you throw down the paper in disgust and pick up the phone to call your local hit man for me, stop a minute. I'm not talking about the everyday kind of lie, the "my-dog-ate-my-homework" or "no-you-gave-me-a-twenty-not-a-fifty" kind of lie. I'm talking about something far more fundamental than that, something that perhaps we don't think or talk about because we have never been taught to.

I'm talking about the fact that ours is a society that places very little real emphasis on the arts.

Why, you may wonder, is this a problem? After all, the arts are a frill, a luxury that not everybody can afford. We don't need the arts. We need education, yes, and health care, and security services like the police, and public works. Some people may even argue that the arts are irrelevant, or things that individuals should choose for themselves.

I've heard these arguments often, and I actually believe that because they have so much currency, this why we don't have any real collective development of a Bahamian artistic vision. People are working in pockets, but as a whole, our society is impacted by the arts of other places.

And this is a problem.

This is how we get to be a society of liars.

You see, the development of the arts helps keep a society honest. This is because the arts provide avenues for communication. Communication doesn't just happen in speech, and it doesn't simply take place in words. Communication also happens musically, through shapes and colour, through the positioning of the body in space. The arts, therefore, provide an outlet for the kind of communication that moves from the individual to the collective, that affirms the individual's existence as part of the wider whole.

What is more, the arts provide a medium of communication for our deepest selves: that part of us that is primarily emotional and instinctive, that part we can't verbalize in any normal, coherent fashion. Even writing, which (because it uses words) is perhaps the most conscious and analytical of the arts, connects with emotion; when playwrights and novelists create people who act in ways that we recognize, we relate to those people emotionally. When poets craft word-images that speak to us, we receive them emotionally. Beyond that, when choirs sing, when dancers dance, when actors play parts so truthfully that we believe them, we react to them emotionally. And from those emotions our lives may be changed.

I never saw The Passion of the Christ, and I don't know when or if I will see it. This is because I am not sure that I can bear that much truth about a subject that has always upset me every time I imagine it. Everything I have heard about the movie tells me that it is artistic expression at its best; it is the life-changing kind of expression, perhaps because it is too honest, too disturbing.

You see, artistic expression, whatever it may be, requires a certain level of self-knowledge on the part of the person doing the expression for it to be successful. That's the first thing. After that, it requires a certain amount of courage for it to be shared. One cannot truly paint, or write, or act, or sing, or play an instrument, or take a photograph, or sculpt, or dance, or compose, unless one is willing to dig a channel to the core of one's being and reveal what one finds there in all honesty.

But in a society where we don't provide avenues for artistic expression, where the arts take last place, where they can be shunted aside for the bigger sports story or news story or whatever else happens along, that kind of communication cannot, and does not, take place.

And where we don't explore ourselves, we pay the price. We make assumptions about ourselves and one another that are flawed. We call ourselves "African American", ignoring the fact that The Bahamas is a different country with a unique and special culture of its own. We assume idiocies about White Bahamians that would be impossible if we knew ourselves. We create realities out of falsehood because we have no avenues to express ourselves and ponder that expression.

Ours is a society that pays lip-service to the arts, but does so reluctantly. We pay service to them, but we don't pay money; we hold the expectation — unreasonable, surely, in a culture that does not question the millions paid to movie stars and gangsta rappers — that creation happens for free.

Ours is a society that uses the arts for practical ends: for the celebration of Independence, to show off for the Queen, to impress lesser Heads of State, and (of course) to sell to the tourists. But we do not use the arts for ourselves. We do not even believe that artistic creation ought to be paid for; I'd venture to say that there isn't an artist in the nation who hasn't been asked to deliver his or her services "for the love of country". (No one seems to expect that level of patriotic love from preachers, lawyers, doctors, bankers or even politicians.)

And ours is a society that is searching for constructive ways to teach its young people how to be civil, how to respect themselves, how to find ways of expressing themselves that are more constructive than pulling out knives and killing one another.

It is time for us to recognize what other nations are beginning to admit: that investing money and time and manpower in the development of the arts, in the training of the talented, in the employment of professional artists, is investing in the development of the self. It is time for us to pay our children and our artists and our performers the kind of respect that ought to be paid to people who have committed their lives to honesty. It is time for us to invest in the truth.

Comments

[Erik Russell]

Excellent perspective. As an artist, producer and media person I am very sensitive to the disrespect and lack of value that our society and our business community places on artistic expression.

Two prime examples: businesses see nothing wrong with using a piece of recorded music in a radio or TV commercial without licensing that music from the owner. So many people believe that they can just use it without paying for the use of it. And they certainly don't see the need to pay an extra fee for the use of even royalty-free music, which by definition allows you to use the music commercially without paying ongoing royalties for each use; but there is still a COST for that music.

Second example: newspapers and web sites in the Bahamas completely disrespect the work of photographers, and particularly photographers that are not on their staff. They show this by not crediting photographers for their work, a practice that is not only accepted worldwide but that they always provide for their own photographers. Often, photographers provide P.R. photos at no or low cost to organisations, especially not-for-profit ones. A photo credit (that is, including the name of the photographer and company that supplied the photo) is often the only value that the photographer will receive. But even if the photographer WAS paid for the job, he/she must still be appropriately credit for their work, just as writers and staff photographers should be.

On a related note, electronic-based media (e.g. e-mail newsletters and web sites) should embed (or allow to be embedded) the photo credit directly onto the image, so that, if the image is "lifted" and used elsewhere, the credit goes with it.

Sorry for being so long-winded, but these matters are important ones.

Thanks -- continue in your great work.

~ejr~

[larry smith]

The commercial non-viability of the arts here is largely a function of market demand.

Our tiny population reduces volumes for so many endeavours. And in this case it affects both supply and demand.

Subsidizing the arts may be necessary if we want them to survive at all.

For example, ZNS owes more than a million dollars to the Performing Rights Society for the playing of copyrighted music.

Perhaps a similar obligation could be applied to support local performing artists?

Or should the government budget realistically for artistic contributions to national events?

There are probably many more creative concessions or incentives that could be offered.

[Interested]

One of the problems with Bahamian art & culturural expressions and productions is indeed the limited audiences they appeal to, and the limited pockets a large percentage of these audiences possess.

While the products may be acceptable and appealing to us, they are not competitive in the wider global community particularly in multicultural communities like the U.S. market which actually serves as a testing ground for global apppeal because of its multiculturalism and deep pockets.

Bahamaian artists have been advised for years to make their product more globally accepted in a commercial way but generally have not responded. Listen to the words and lyrics of most Bahamaian music and you will understand why globally they are generally not appealing and even in the Bahamas do not compete well against the more multicultural music we naively describe as "American Music".

I think Bahmaians do support the arts, but its all relative, with a miniscule market, limted budgets and significant competition from more globally appealing multicultural artistic productions and performances it may appear that we don't support our own. In fact I think we do well under the truthful circumstances.

Globally much of Bahmaian artistic production is looked at and has been described in international reviews as promotional touristic endeavours and true art afficianados tend not to take it serious.

We therefore also have to look at our artistic expressions and see whether much of it trually can compete commercially against more multicultural artistic expressions and productions.

[interested]

Indeed the Bahamas has some excellent arists and productions that can compete globally, but as with many third world economies financial support for the arts both publicly and privately will usually not be supported to the extent it will be in first world economies or truly wealthy economies.

We have problems in the Bahamas supporting some of the most basic needs of society and to many that comes first. It will be up t the artistic community to demonstrate that support of the arts is just as important a societal objective.