François Matarasso

On the long train journey to Barcelona, I read Avram Alpert’s new book, The Good Enough Life. I’m not finished yet—I’m a slow reader, especially when I’m thinking and making notes—but I know it’s one of those books that permanently changes my ideas. I think we can only understand or learn things when we’re ready for them. That’s why artists don’t control what people get from their work, whether participatory or not. Each of us finds what what we need in experience—what we are looking for, even if we don’t know were are looking for it.

Alpert’s book is like that. Some of his ideas confirm things I’ve long believed; others are new and unexpected. Together they open a path towards another way of looking at things that aligns closely with the ideas I’ve been developing in A Selfless Art. And some of them are quite radical.

Take the idea of meritocracy. I’ve long had reservations about that, confirmed by Michael J. Sandel’s analysis in The Tyranny of Merit: What’s Become of the Common Good?. Of course, we want skilled and talented people to perform important tasks, especially when they are demanding. But how we achieve that at the moment is very costly to the individuals who succeed, to those who don’t, and to society as a whole.

You can see this in classical music teaching, which raises the bar steadily until only the most brilliant can get over. They become soloists or get places in orchestras while the rest find something else to do with their lives. I’ve met so many people with an instrument under the bed or at the back of a wardrobe that they never touch. Unable to take pleasure in being able to play music to an exceptional standard, they see themselves as failures and their years of practice as an embarrassing delusion. A narrow, exclusive idea of excellence thus becomes a system of mass exclusion and unhappiness.

In a recent podcast, Alpert suggests that lotteries might replace competition as a way to award life’s prizes. He says that this solution was adopted by the University of Basel in the 18th century as a way to break the nepotism which placed 50 professorships in the hands of 15 families. His reasoning is both pragmatic and subtle, and echoes some of Sandel’s thinking. If a system of selection does not pretend to make judgements, those affected by it do not internalise its outcomes. One problem with competition is that both winners and losers tend to think of themselves in those terms too. Alpert says that when people are selected by chance, they recognise their luck and therefore have more humility about their achievement. Likewise, those who do not win know that this is not an assessment of their worth. It’s simply that there is one post and several qualified applicants. Better luck next time.

So now I wonder whether Arts Council England might do better to adopt such a system, which, as Alpert says, is only to acknowledge that the existing system is in reality governed by chance. Actually, it is imperfectly governed by chance since, as with the families who controlled the Basel professorships, there are many ways in which social capital can unfairly advantage some candidates over others.

Many artists who apply for project grants take the Arts Council’s rejection emails very hard. It doesn’t matter that applications greatly exceed funds, rejection feels very personal. It is being told that your work, even you yourself, are not good enough.

The alternative would be to set a benchmark for eligibility and then randomly select award winners from the eligible applicants. Artists who got awards would feel lucky, not confirmed, and those who didn’t would feel disappointed but not rejected. They could submit their proposal unchanged in the next round.

And a 1:10 or 1:20 chance of winning an Arts Council grant is dramatically better odds than those faced by the National Lottery players whose money is the source of all this largesse.

Update

Mark Robinson and Susan Jones both told me that Jerwood Arts tried this with the 1:1 Fund in 2021. You can read it about it here, and read some commissioned responses to the idea here.