The opening of Billy Elliot on Broadway this autumn offers a neat parable of culture in the credit crunch. A hit in London for the last three years, it's one of a small group of successful musicals set during economic recessions; others include Annie and Cabaret. But the American premiere of Elton John and Lee Hall's piece faces a potential misfortune: the economic hardship on stage—the northeast of England during the 1984 miners' strike—will be echoed by the financial crisis hitting the people being asked to buy tickets. The strenuous advertising and special ticket offers on display in New York indicate trepidation that as well as depicting hard times, the show may be a victim of them.
A bust may be a good subject for entertainment—the experience of poverty has inspired more significant art than wealth has—but the resulting works should ideally be offered to consumers during a boom. Because culture is a relative luxury (even the most artistically sensitive person cannot claim to need books, music or plays in the absolute way they require food or shelter), the consumption of it is bound to suffer when the economy stutters.
But it is not quite as simple as that. At least under the British system of subsidy the culture industries aren't necessarily hit by a financial squeeze in the direct way that producers of other luxury goods—sports cars, foreign holidays and so on—tend to be. Moreover, while no travel agent that loses half its customers finds any benefit in the experience, in art there is the nagging implication that adversity can be turned to advantage: lower budgets and a harder fight for audiences may increase creativity.
Culture is funded in three ways: income from purchasers; sponsorship and donations; and state subsidy or grants. The US has traditionally depended most on the first, Britain on the third. Both have an increasing need for supplementary cash from the second.
Money from both customers and private patronage will fall when belts are tightened. An article in the New York Times in late October reported on the consequences of the financial crash for the classical music industry, which is mainly privately funded. The retrenchments listed included Michigan Opera Theatre's cancellation of a planned production of Pagliacci, the abandonment by the Pasadena Symphony Orchestra of three advertised concerts and reductions in benefits to staff at the New York Opera and the New York Metropolitan Opera. The production of high culture in the US is directly linked to stock market performance. Classical music houses are usually funded from the returns on endowments and bequests. The crash has reduced both cash flow and the size of future bequests.
In Britain, where the equivalent artistic institutions tend to be heavily subsidised by the state, falling markets are most likely to affect the availability of commercial sponsorship. Banks and finance houses have always been among the most prominent business backers of opera productions and art shows.
And even before the recent downturn, there were concerns in the artistic powerhouses around Covent Garden and Trafalgar Square that private money was becoming more reluctant to back high culture. This was not a commercial judgment but an aesthetic one: rather than funding Wagner and old masters, companies preferred to be associated with modern art or innovative material of some kind.
Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, observed recently in a radio interview that individual investment in British culture will always fall short of American levels, perhaps because the depth and strength of the state safety net discourages other sources of funding. This means that in a time of more tightly-held wallets, the flow of sponsorship and patronage is likely to be even slower.
The two areas of culture, on both sides of the Atlantic, that depend most on money handed over by the public are films and book publishing, and so these businesses would be expected to be the most pinched. Anecdotally, this seems to be the case: it is said that managers in at least two big British publishing houses have imposed a six-month ban on any new deals until the state of the market becomes clear. Every day, emails between writers shudder with gossip that yet another well-known novelist—the sort of names that are shortlisted for prizes or receive prominent TLS reviews—can find no takers for their latest manuscripts. In one recent case, a deal was offered but, when the banking crisis intervened between the we-love-it lunch and the signing of the contract, the advance was reduced by more than half.
The influence of the downturn on cinema will take longer to judge because movies are usually completed long before release, and so the only meaningful comparisons are year-on-year. In 2008, British cinemas had their best summer since 1969. Steve Wiener, boss of the Cineworld chain, has forecast that the heat on its seats will continue. On the day that the new Bond film, Quantum of Solace, was released in all 75 Cineworld multiplexes, he said: "It's ideal for forgetting about falling share prices and other real-life gloom. Cinema visits rise in economic downturns."
The weakness in this theory is that Quantum is far from escapist—the most feel-bad film ever released in the Bond franchise (to be fair it did break British box office records in its first week). Meanwhile, Cineworld's share price has halved in the last year, suggesting that investors do not share his view that moviegoing is bust-proof.
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Yet, outside of publishing and cinema, this gloomy prognosis should not apply, at least in Britain. Because of the way that British culture is funded, a recession will tend to increase the overall seriousness of what's on offer. As box office and sponsorship income fall, those institutions protected by subsidy—and hence best positioned to resist the drift to desperate populism—will be in the ascendant.
This expanded space for gravitas is one of the most intriguing consequences of credit crunch culture. George Steiner, while acknowledging the moral horror of communist regimes, pointed out that one positive aspect of these spirit-crushing governments was their cultural high-mindedness. Communism showed "a terrible over-estimate of man's capacities for… intellectual-philosophic sustenance. The theatres in East Berlin performed the classics when heavy metal and American musicals were wanted. The bookstores displayed Lessing and Goethe and Tolstoy, but Archer and Collins were dreamed of." In the British system, this division broadly remains: the state, through the arts councils and the National Theatre, funds classics, while the novels of Jeffrey Archer and American musicals are paid for commercially—except for the period when Trevor Nunn was running the National and taxpayers stumped up for Broadway shows.
The British version also incorporates a remarkable variation on the communist model of state culture: our rulers have been expected to finance criticism of their system. Over the last 30 years, almost every new play staged at the National—from Robert Bolt's State of Revolution through David Hare and Howard Brenton's Pravda to Hare's Gethsemane, premiered in November—has been critical of the political regimes (Labour, Tory, Labour) under which they were staged. On television, the most savage dramatisations of the Thatcher era—Alan Bleasdale's Boys from the Blackstuff, Jim Allen's United Kingdom—were made possible by the licence fee, administered at arms length from government.
This system under which politicians put up the money to be punched in the mouth has not escaped criticism—it was one of the reasons that Thatcherism targeted the BBC and the arts councils—but it has healthy consequences in a recession. The parts of art that will survive are those that are most likely to analyse and criticise the decisions which have created the mess. And so optimists may look to the credit crunch to throw up another Boys from the Blackstuff or Pravda, although pessimists will note that non-economic factors—a BBC enfeebled by rows over editorial content, a theatre culture more interested in form than ideology—may have made such a consolation less likely this time.
And, if the subsidised sector proves to be less welcoming to serious work than in previous recessions, the problem will be exacerbated by the natural tendency of the commercial world to offer feel-good material in a recession. Recent statements by senior commissioners at both the BBC and ITV suggested that schedulers will prefer comedy and fantasy projects during dark financial times. Future historians may find it significant that the most successful British movie of the year in which the banks went bust was Mamma Mia! Although it included a number asserting that "money, money, money must be funny in the rich man's world," it must represent as sheer a piece of silly escapism as has been released for some decades.
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Examining the last two British recessions—1980-1983 under Thatcher and 1991-1993 under Major—and their aftermath (as things don't snap back immediately), it seems that culture threw up a reasonable combination of the brain-lift and heart-lift. Retrospectively, it's striking that many of the most successful movies during the Thatcher recession took refuge in a nostalgic past or sentimentalised present—Chariots of Fire, Local Hero—or employed a distancing science fiction: Blade Runner, ET. Commercial television also looked backwards—Brideshead Revisited and The Jewel in the Crown were deployed to titillate reluctant advertisers—but state-funded television and theatre created several works that looked the times of crisis in the eye: apart from Boys from the Blackstuff, the BBC also screened Troy Kennedy Martin's Edge of Darkness, while the Royal Court staged Caryl Churchill's major political play Top Girls.
A decade later, when the late 1980s boom turned to bust, the division was less clear. While Hollywood still offered much historical or sentimental escapism—Forrest Gump, The Age of Innocence—the movie market also produced a surprising amount of tough stuff: Oliver Stone's JFK and Natural Born Killers, Tarantino's Pulp Fiction. Even films that had the manner of feel-good comedies—Groundhog Day, Four Weddings and a Funeral—had dark undersurfaces and grievously flawed central characters.
On the small screen, both public service and commercial television were able to create police procedurals of remarkable reach and realism: ITV's Prime Suspect, BBC1's Between the Lines. It was also smack in the middle of this crash that Damien Hirst displayed his first stuffed shark (The Physical Impossibility of Death in the Mind of Someone Living), beginning the journey that would make him the most profitable artist of recent times.
Based on these two case studies, the cultural reaction to financial crisis looks rather random. Two broad trends, though, are clear. Although public subsidy of the arts in Britain has an increasing number of detractors across political lines, the existence of this piggybank does increase the likelihood of intelligent and challenging work surviving a recession. The three-year funding of the arts council secured during the Blair years will, on this occasion, stiffen this guarantee even further. Conversely, market-funded art will tend towards the most safely profitable products, although the early 1990s recession was less prone to this than that of the early 1980s.
So, if the entertainment of these tight times does look backwards, we should hope that it follows the model of the Lamont bust rather than the earlier Howe one. I fear, though, that this third recession will not result in another Boys from the Blackstuff. That will not be the fault of the recession itself, but of the preceding 15 years of capitalist triumphalism that encouraged a softer, less political populism.
