Tartan and tantrums: critical reflections on the Creative Scotland “stooshie”

Abstract

On the 1 July 2010 a new cultural development body for Scotland was established. However, by 2013 the organisation was embroiled in a public dispute with a number of the individuals and organisations it was established to support. This short paper considers this “crisis” as a discursive event [Wodak, R., & Meyer, M. 2009. Methods of critical discourse analysis. London: SAGE], and informed by a discourse analysis of various texts, it identifies the core narrative as being one in which a distiguishable body of “artists” and their supporters are resisting a dangerous ideological power-grab by “non-artist” bureaucrats. It proposes that this relies upon the well-worn discursive knot of the instrumental versus the intrinsic, which facilitates a continuing obscuration of the prevailing power relationships within the network of publicly subsidised culture in Scotland. In its discursive focus on the relationship between an imagined egalitarian “cultural community” and Creative Scotland (CS), the narrative of the dispute overlooks the extent to which both CS and the majority of organisations it funds are primarily tools of governance by which the Scottish Government seeks to strategically shape the production and dissemination of culture in Scotland. It concludes that many of those individual artists arguing for various degrees of change were thus unwittingly complicit in supporting a status quo that makes the change they desire unlikely while simultaneously limiting public input into what sort of culture merits subsidy.