Those London theatre lovers living south of Watford might not have noticed, but Scotland’s small but lively cultural sphere has recently become the latest contested territory in the UK’s unrelenting culture wars. It was revealed last week that a part-time literature officer working for Scotland’s arts body, Creative Scotland, contacted staff at an Edinburgh bookshop to advise them against stocking poet Jenny Lindsay’s forthcoming book, Hounded. Dr Alice Tarbuck did not make her views known in her professional capacity, it is understood, but nonetheless, that a member of staff working for the organisation responsible for supporting Scottish artists went out of her way to try undermining the career of a Scottish artist should ring alarm bells.
The apparently objectionable book promises to detail Linday’s experience of being accused of transphobia by fellow poets a few years back. After she called out a magazine for publishing a transactivist defending their call to harass and intimidate women at Pride, many of Lindsay’s former friends in the poetry scene turned against her.
For those well initiated in the dynamics of this conflict, and the specifics of Lindsay case, this is already pretty cut and dry. If you’re an intersectional trans-ally, fuck Lindsay. If you’re a gender critical feminist, she is basically Nelson Mandela.
That’s not the whole story though. There is another dimension here: the story of the petty and vindictive competing factions in small tight-knit creative scenes, and how their rivalries find expression as intense culture-war conflicts. There’s plenty to disagree with Jenny Lindsay about, but anyone working in the arts in Scotland already understands how running ideological battles both major and minor can dictate which of us are granted opportunities and which of us aren’t.
This latest stooshie erupted just days after Creative Scotland announced it was cutting the Open Fund — a pot of money ring-fenced for individual practitioners. The announcement has created an atmosphere of anxiety among artists, now less likely to take the morally correct position on Tarbuck’s gentle lobbying of bookshops, which was, at best, deeply unprofessional. This endemic insecurity, engendered by 14-years of austerity, also played a role in many looking the other way when Lindsay tumbled from atop the Scottish poetry community four years ago and speaks to the unwritten cultural commandments which must be adhered to if you wish to survive as a creator in the current climate. Thankfully, as an artist and writer who has never depended on Creative Scotland for much, I am not afflicted by this anxiety.
Since my twenties, I’ve been publicly criticising Creative Scotland for one reason: being tone-deaf to working-class creators. It’s a criticism common among artists from deprived backgrounds, rooted in our experience that the arts as well as the bureaucracies that oversee them favour artists, works and processes generally that reflect their own middle-class sensibilities. There’s a safeness, for example, in much of the work that gets supported, as well as a tendency among many in-vogue artists across the various disciplines to expressively dance around the real causes and conditions of the issues being tackled.
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