Culture in a time of crisis

The arts are on the warpath. With severe cuts to both public and private investment threatened, an alliance of arts leaders, museum directors, heritage and archive organisations has come together to plead for continued generous public funding.

Their argument is not, principally, that they have produced good art or heritage—though there are audience figures and critics’ reviews to support that claim. Rather, their manifesto—entitled “Cultural Capital” and published in January—lays out an economic idea that is spelled out in its subtitle: “Investing in Culture will build Britain’s Social and Economic Recovery.” With government investment of just 1 per cent of the NHS budget, the argument goes, the arts and heritage sector contributes disproportionately to the British economy. As defined in the report, it is said to account for 10 per cent of GDP, as well as contributing incalculably to national prestige.

One purpose of the manifesto is to express gratitude for a decade of sustained financial support for the arts from a government that has been instrumental in promoting the idea of “creative industries” as crucial to the economy. And yet, beneath the bravado, lies a distinct note of anxiety. Is it merely the fear felt by all institutions in times of recession? Or is there something unsettling in the argument itself?

In the 12 years since Tony Blair declared “We must write the arts into new Labour’s core script,” the government has found safety in two key, intertwining arguments about the value of culture—the first social and economic, the second conceptual. Each is, in its way, fundamentally flawed.

The first argument is encapsulated in the notion of “cultural regeneration.” It was in the late 1980s that the idea that culture might draw investment to a post-industrial city took hold. It came to be known as the Bilbao effect—after the transformation of the rundown Basque city, credited to the opening in 1997 of Frank Gehry’s spectacular Guggenheim Museum. In Britain, it began with Glasgow’s election as the first European city of culture in 1990, which was regarded as a vindication of the idea that a vibrant cultural scene could transform a city’s reputation, and that this in turn could trigger economic development and urban regeneration.

There is no doubt that Glasgow 1990 was a successful moment for the city, both in terms of the artistic events and the brazen publicity encapsulated by its massively billboarded “Glasgow’s Miles Better” slogan-cum-logo. But did this also result in urban “regeneration”? It did not. Neither 1990, nor the city’s follow-up as “UK City of Architecture and Design” in 1999, improved Glasgow’s infrastructure or altered the fact that it has the lowest life expectancy in Britain. It is not art that can do that job, nor even architecture—even when they raise levels of expectation.

In fact, far from proving to be the city’s key to prosperity, the arts have instead proven a continual headache for Glasgow, demanding more money to sustain than the declining local audience figures can justify. The Tramway, in particular—the flagship venue for the arts built on the under-developed south side of the River Clyde—has (despite some notable successes) suffered continually from under-investment and controversy, not least over the 2003 decision to let Scottish Ballet take over and redevelop a large portion of the venue, squeezing the visual art exhibition space.

The comparison with Bilbao is telling. It wasn’t a museum that improved that city, but comprehensive investment, development and growth at all levels. As Jack Pringle, former president of the Royal Institute of British Architects, has commented: “Bilbao was a spectacular example of how to regenerate a city. The lesson to learn is that they had a strategy which included both infrastructure and iconic landmarks. It’s the combination of the two that works—a cocktail that can make the most amazing difference if you get it right.”

That’s a very big “if.” For every showpiece building which has been constructed in Britain and for every successful institution—mima in Middlesbrough, Tate Modern in London, the New Art Gallery in Walsall—we have a catastrophe: the £15m National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield, closed down in 2000; the £1bn disaster of the Millennium Dome; the delightful £54m building designed by Will Alsop—“The Public,” in Sandwell—which has never fully opened. The arts are certainly crucial to the cultural health and prestige of a successful city, region or nation. But to expect an arts centre or festival to be the primary trigger of regeneration has been the fallacy of a generation.

The second, related argument attached to this notion is one which views the arts not as things-in-themselves, but as nodes of activity on a much larger circuit-board of human “creativity”—one which links the skill of an actor to the inspiration of a Dyson designer to the business innovations of an entrepreneur.

It’s this that underpins the entire concept of the “creative industries.” Just a year after Labour came to power, the idea of these industries and their role in the “knowledge economy” became a dominant theme of Chris Smith’s newly created department of culture, media and sport (DCMS). The creative industries encompass advertising, architecture, art and antiques markets, computer and video games, crafts, design, designer fashion, film and video, music, performing arts, publishing, software, television and radio. In other words, industries that generate value from creative material subject to copyright. They represent the market face of the arts. Recognising Britain’s excellence in most of these fields led to the wonktastic notion that they were, in fact, one field, and that it represented one of the fastest growing areas of the world economy.

The DCMS, in alliance with the department for business, innovation and skills, duly set out to make Britain “the world’s creative hub.” Institutions like the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) were set up to foster innovation and encourage ideas to grow into marketable forms.

There were problems from the start. Besides the difficulty of making policy to support simultaneously all these different micro-industries and personnel—from playwrights to impresarios, from potters to chairmen of auction houses—the temptation for government was smoothly to elide the differences in aims, values and requirements of the artists themselves (as funded by the Arts Council). Today, everyone is a creative, and “creativity” is a skill one can learn. A vibrant cultural scene is valued because it attracts workers in the creative industries, while art schools are valued because they equip students to take jobs in this thriving “sector.”

According to Andrew Nairne, executive director of arts strategy at Arts Council England, “the arts are the R&D, the venture capital part of the creative industries.” Yet this sector—the creative economy—does not actually exist. In the real world, if you are a student, you do not set out to get a job in the creative industries. You might get turned down for a job in publishing, and, by a strange accident, wind up working as a stage manager in a fringe theatre. Are you working in the same industry as your friends in publishing? Or are you, rather, working as a stage manager in the theatre world? The creative industries exist as a sector of the economy only in the remote abstract. You can get what it means, in a seminar-room sense, but you wouldn’t want to be employed there.

So pervasive has this thinking become, however, that it has infected not just the Arts Council, but many of the arts institutions it patronises, and even those others it does not. It has forced arts administrators, curators and producers to contort their language and their practice to match this picture of what it is that they do. As for audiences, nobody wishes to watch a play because of its role in a local economic hub. Nor should that be the reason for funding a theatre. Audiences want to watch a good play, in a vibrant theatre, in an interesting part of town. If it can be calculated that the vibrant theatre has helped make that part of town more active, this can be brought into a wider audit of the culture and economy of that town. But when Nairne reports that, “Regeneration is a very big story—in every case where property is recovering it is because of the ACE funded arts centre…” the prosperity benefits are being put before the quality of the art.

The problem with this thinking is that if you fail to fund art for its own qualities, people will not come and the prosperity benefits will not follow. It was partly in response to such critiques that the government published, at the start of 2008, Brian McMaster’s report “Supporting Excellence in the Arts: from Measurement to Judgment.” By then, however, the damage had been done. So eviscerated of meaning was the idea of “excellence” that no one any longer understood what the government meant by it or how they might define it.

Both culture secretary Ben Bradshaw and shadow secretary Jeremy Hunt assert the value of art as “a national good,” and promise to guard the government’s relatively small investment. Yet there is still a limpness to the Arts Council’s mission statement: “great art for everyone.” One senses no vision or courage—and, above all, no language—to take us into a new era.

Instead, when the Cultural Capital manifesto brandishes figures such as the £800m brought into Liverpool’s economy by its stint as European capital of culture—rather than singing up the great events that took place there—it is persisting in a language and an argument that downgrades the value of those events. Compare this to the case of Edinburgh, home to the greatest arts festival in the world, established in 1947, to “provide a platform for the flowering of the human spirit” during a time of bone-chilling austerity. It was only 40 years later that a serious audit (produced to save the event during a period of crisis) demonstrated the huge economic benefits the festival had brought to the city.

Now, as the years of new Labour plenty end, the culture of the economic audit is driving the patronage of the arts. And this argument actively removes the real case for arts funding—which is that art serves needs that both predate and supersede its capacity for creating capital. If, as is now the case, the arts are justified principally by that economic capacity, and yet they cannot be shown to regenerate cities (which they cannot)—and if the economic sector to which they supposedly belong is shown to be a chimera (which it is)—there is no very good reason to finance them in times of austerity.