With as usual due acknowledgment given to the likes of Southwark Notes's posts on the matter, a smaller personal note about how artists are great - and would be even better if allowed to get on with their work - but artwashing is not. Rather it's another nasty little side effect and hustle.
It is used mainly to get people on side with the council and their plans and to help get planning permission, to pretend that the council and developers are making plans to benefit the locals in the area they see as just another exciting and lucrative project, and as a distraction while homes are destroyed, promises broken, deals made, communities dispersed and land grabbed, it's unclear how many of the people invited to art clubs and the like truly benefit in any way that compensates for how they are treated, or really want such things suddenly available at all. When councils, councillors, mayors and local recycling businesses support such new schemes, how many truly benefit - especially when people working in the arts (or trying to, while also fighting to be treated fairly by a council showing an eagerness and impatience for demolitions and threats of bills they never do when dealing with repairs, compensation etc.) who are benefitting area organically and from within while supporting estates and neighbours they have formed good relationships with, are being priced or pushed out, or feel they want to move just to get away from the council, its behaviour, its attitude and its plans? How many who do/can stay will remain when the next predictable stage of regeneration, the inevitable super-rich influx, takes place?
As with claims of caring for the environment while chopping down trees and building on green space, claims to care for art, artists and culture, and the ways it can and does improve an area - if people are left to get on with it rather than being bought up and used by authorities - claims to be supporting estates, local lives and mental health while destroying all those are so much, well... artwashing. It remains to be seen how much support art clubs and enterprises will really get once the plans the council truly care about get through. Hopefully all this sudden rise for the support of creativity is genuine, I would love that and for it all to truly benefit and succeed and enrich the area. Support art, artists, those enabling in their communities, culture and its help to the economy, cultural life, mental health. See through, mistrust, artwashing.
Above a photo of the Elephant and Castle, taken recently.
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