COMMUNITY ART

I have nothing against either word, Community or Art, but I am very leery about what happens when you put the two together. When someone puts the two together it inevitably means that the goalposts are put a long way from each other, or the bit of bamboo on the high jump is set so low that a leprechaun could step over it. Community Art is almost always patronising in its regard of people who occasionally paint a bit or write a few lines that don't run on and have about the same length. It also has a proselytising quality; 'Everyone's an artist really, you just have to get out there and do it and it'll be great'. And when it is done, when that crayonned picture of a house with the sun over its roof is done, or when those few lines whose end words vaguely rhyme are written then it's 'Let's have a community arts festival!!!'. 'Let's apply for a grant!!!' I am not talking about children here - it's splendid when a child of four does a crayonned picture of a house with the sun over its roof. I'm talking about grown-up people.

The truth is that if a person, of whatever social background, or whatever measurable intelligence, has any creativity, a talent for any of the arts, it will be visible to others - doesn't it happen at school, for example? Teachers just adore kids with creative talent, they encourage them, they talk about them in the staff room so that other teachers look out for them, they use them as exemplars for other kids who might need a bit of bringing out. They the teachers, don't need do-gooders waving the Community Arts banner because they are already doing it on a one-to-one basis.
My belief is that the Community Arts world is so desperate to find examples of where its  naive enthusiasms have pulled artists out of the rude clay that they abandon all notions of standard so that the fact that a poem or a story has been written or a painting painted,  makes it good and praiseworthy - and needing a festival as its showcase.
Mussolini, wrong in so many ways was so very close to expressing a valid reaction when he said (or it is said he said) 'Whenever I hear the word culture I reach for my gun'. 
Your humble blogger (humble, who d'you think you are kidding?) when suffering extreme agony during a community arts event, grabbed a paper napkin, borrowed a pen and scribbled the illustration to the slightly modified quotation from Musso. Look, I've dunnit. Good innit? Go on, gissa grant.