***

The problem of portraying the public as ignorant—from newspapers to official government policy—is perhaps what’s at the heart of Lee’s paper Can The Man On The Street Speak? He observed that during the first Substation conference in 1993, Art Vs Art, fretting over the idea of “audience” was hardly something that participating artists thought about. Everyone was saying “we”, he said, but no one was bothered enough to define it—as opposed to reps from the government, broadcast and print media sectors who were preoccupied with this idea of audience. It’s in this historical context that Lee had kicked off with the letter published in the Straits Times’ Life! from a certain Pek Li Sng completely and recklessly dismissing Loo Zihan’s recent Fringe Fest performance Cane prior to the actual performance. It was the only such letter published and, until performance artist Lee Wen’s impassioned rebuttal much later, was the sole opinion on the matter. Here was a member of the public that by virtue of being the only published letter became representative of a supposed collective view on the matter. It’s the first in a number of examples Lee gives on how print media has continuously framed/represented the "public" as ignorant/antagonistic/skeptical/dismissive about art, primarily contemporary art. He follows it up with the infamous ST editorial Art, We Don’t Get It (that dismissed the slipper installation of the Aquilizans during the 2008 Singapore Biennale), taking to task the use of “we” in an editorial. There’s also an earlier example of The New Paper taking a simplistic approach in doing a story about a contemporary art festival by The Necessary Stage in Marine Parade, using the strategy of following an “uncle” experiencing contemporary art, releasing it under the headline “Ah Pek, Catch No Ball”. Fast foward to the ACSR and the mention of the phrase “man on the street” with the implied question of whether or not to dumb down arts appreciation for such a construct. Not only, it would seem, that certain organs/strategies of power and influence construct the public but do so in a dismissive manner.

*** Linked perhaps to the example of the Pek Li Sng letter is Rowland’s exploratory paper From Bums On Seats To Censor, which looks at the new phenomena of the public as censor, which is in turn tied in to cultural policy making. She interestingly uses as a starting point the brouhaha surrounding the recent cancellation of musican Erykah Badu’s concert in Malaysia as an example of the rise of the “citizen censors”. Despite having the word “Allah”, which was tattooed on Badu’s shoulders, erased in publicity materials, an un-DI’d image was published in a newspaper, which fired up certain sections of the public. Rowland posits that the events surrounding it was not religious but political. That there had been “pro” and “anti” camps but the government had decided to side with the “anti”, the reasons having to do with the idea of courting/cementing (?) the Malay Muslim vote base. It’s here that she then expands the argument further, which I hope I’m paraphrasing and interpreting correctly. What accounts for this so-called “citizen censors”? The rise, generally speaking, of cultural policy that takes into account this boom for the arts. With the arts sector/industry exploding worldwide, constructing arts and culture policies have now been put under the spotlight more than ever before. It has become important. And with this sudden importance to a government comes the idea of accountability. Arts becomes, articulated clearer than ever, accountable to the man on the street, to the public that pays taxes. Rowland earlier pointed out how the government (I forgot if she was referring to Malaysia, Singapore or in general) has constructed, in the context of censorship, the public into three categories: “dangerous” (Riots! Social unrest!), “vulnerable” (Easily corrupted! Don’t know what’s good for them!) and—here’s where the complex Badu example comes up—“empowered”. A public empowered enough to voice out displeasure over (or taken to the extreme, censor) art or entertainment because it is accountable to them.

*** And so it winds up with the final presentation by Tan, which looks at the specifics of ACSR as the pivotal cultural policy of Singapore until 2025 and explores why it is so. The ever-deadpan playwright begins by asking—with all the money pouring into the arts because of the ACSR and other recent cultural policies, why are artists/arts community so unhappy? He surmises it’s because policy makers “don’t get it”, i.e. don't get what art is about. Which is precisely the problem with the policies. He posits this conundrum: If 10,000 office workers pass by the Botero sculpture at the CBD area during lunch, are they considered arts audiences? Is it an arts event? (It’s no doubt a dig at the whopping figures surrounding the Merlion Hotel during the recent Biennale—but one I don’t necessarily subscribe to because the Merlion situation was, IMHO, different in its attempts at defamilarising and disrupting a normalised space/structure. But I digress.) Anyways, yes, Tan brings forth a number of points regarding arts policies, it’s imagined (or perhaps conveniently un-nuanced) audience and the money it pumps into events/programmes for this audience. Similar to Rowland in some ways, he discusses the idea of public accountability. This time accountability of moolah, of why so much is being pumped into the arts. And the easiest way to rationalise it when it comes to dividing up the public coffers is to invoke the public. Not just any public but the “community”. And here, Tan points out, is where things get muddled. For him, arts audiences are simply part of a number of different kinds of publics. But if one is putting so much financial support into the arts, it becomes more convenient and easier to talk about it in a more homogenous manner—the Public aka the Community. And here’s where the Botero point comes in. Tan posits that a problem regarding arts policies is “the need to count”. Significance is measured in terms of attendances, of audience figures (which has ballooned immensely through the years in direct proportion to the budget). But the rub, for Tan, is this the second part of the Botero anecdote. Who among cultural policy makers really know what is art and what is an arts encounter? How does one value the arts? It is no surprise that the word “community” comes out a lot in the ACSR, perhaps precisely because, as he likewise pointed out later on, there’s always a need to justify the arts budget. That arts is seen as “instrumental” towards something tangible rather than, well, being. That there is always a “function” attached to it—a means to build a gracious society, to bring in tourist dollars, etc. That it has always had to defend its existence harder than, say, the health, science or defense sectors. And, in the case of the current policy, which envisions as an example the “man on the street” (or auntie or whoever) suddenly being able to create better-framed photographs of his or her family thanks to all that money, would the collective word “public” or “audience” or even an enlightening term like “community” take on somewhat ominous tones?