Arts Lab at Dartington

Never were the arts more necessary than in the technocratic (*) culture of the early 21st century.

It is not a question of which arts we need, nor even of how they are done. It is a matter of having faith in what they can do unhindered by agendas that are irrelevent to them and not chosen by them.

Arts practices, as well as ideas about them, need time and space to form, to question themselves and to work themselves out. They need time to develop and a space in which success and failure are, at best, provisional concepts. The Arts Lab aims to provide such a space free from issues of commerce and competition, self-preserving hierarchies, the dominance of funding systems and academic pressures.

Arts practices also need specific projects, opportunities to show and share, and a culture of focused commitment.

The Arts Lab's five-day courses aim to provide both the space and focus, the time and commitment.

(*) Technocracy is based on three ideas: that our needs are basically technical or material in character and that these can be expertly assessed and provided by economic programmes, procedures, consumerism and mechanical or material gadgetry; that our society is basically on the right path; and that the right experts - or the right kind of experts - are in place. This formula is that put forward in 1969 by Theodore Roszak in The Making of Counterculture. In the 21st century it expands to include corporatism.