The budget came and went. The worst the arts feared did not happen; there will be no draconian cut in funding, just another year of steady haemorrhage as the cash for the arts fails to compensate for the rate of inflation. It could have been much worse; many feared it would be. It could have been so much better. As it is, every arts institution, ground down by years of relentless underprovision, will make do. Meanwhile the great British arts debate-do we really want to fund them at all?-rolls on, illuminated over the past few months by two 50th anniversaries.
The Third Programme's 50th anniversary was properly and widely celebrated in 1996. But none of the tributes expressed any confidence that today's BBC would create a Radio Three of the existing kind from scratch, still less anything remotely resembling a Third Programme of the kind on which William Haley, the then director general, so confidently chanced his arm. Few of those praising the Third's birthday, myself included, bothered to conceal their fear that Radio Three would be lucky to exist in a decade from now, or that the existing funding for the BBC's orchestras (a bellwether of cultural commitment) would survive the decade.
Even more gloom surrounded the quieter 50th anniversary of the central pillar of public funding for the arts-the Arts Council of Great Britain. Instead of dwelling on 50 years of success, the annual news conference of the Arts Council of England turned into another blistering attack on Treasury cuts in funding, led by Grey Gowrie, the council's chairman.
Despite the very real financial problems facing several important arts companies the picture is a complex one. I do not propose to discuss here the lottery, which is adding about ?300m a year to the ?420m of public money which already goes to the arts in Britain. The lottery is not a panacea, but it is a subject in itself. Neither do I intend to argue here about funding models-about whether the American model or the continental model is preferable. The American system springs from a view of republican citizenship which has no equal in British society. It cannot be transplanted. Similarly, the continental model, where even conservative governments assume that generous state funding of the arts is an essential expression of the idea of the state jars against more individualistic British sensibilities. The federal president flies to Berlin to attend the opening of a new Ring cycle because Wagner is part of German identity.
such actions are unthinkable in Britain. We are locked in a more intractable internal debate. Do we want to make our own system work at all? Do we want to pay for a decent supply of the arts which cannot survive in the marketplace? And are we prepared to pay for the sake of art itself rather than for another economic or social reason?
From one perspective the gloom surrounding those two anniversaries of 1996 is scarcely justifiable. We are not looking back in anger at half a century of failure. Fifty years go there was no Royal Opera, no English National Opera, nor an opera company in Wales, Scotland, the north of England or Ulster. Fifty years ago, there was no Royal Shakespeare Company, no Royal National Theatre, no Royal Court. Fifty years ago, there was no Royal Festival Hall, no Barbican, no Birmingham Orchestra Hall, no Glasgow Orchestra Hall, no Bridgwater Hall in Manchester, no Grand Opera House in Belfast, to name only a few. Fifty years ago, there was no Sainsbury wing extension to the National Gallery in London, no Museum of Modern Art in Edinburgh, no Burrell collection in Glasgow, no Tate Gallery in either Liverpool or St Ives. The Courtauld collection was not housed in Somerset House. Fifty years ago, the suggestion that the Tate might be contemplating a huge new gallery space in the still working Bankside power station would have been dismissed as arrogant and unnecessary. The possibility that we as a nation would find ourselves in a position where we could modernise every significant arts building from scratch, and often build something entirely new into the bargain, would have been treated as ludicrous fantasy.
Writing in 1948, TS Eliot was apocalyptic about the British cultural scene. Standards were lower than at the start of the century, he said: "I see no reason why the decay of culture should not proceed much further and why we may not even anticipate a period, of some duration, of which it is possible to say that it will have no culture." Today's cultural scene hardly fits his gloomy predictions. For, over 50 years, something has changed-and changed hugely for the better.
Yet our problems today are as utterly real as that more cheerful historical perspective. There is a crisis for many theatres, orchestras and opera companies which are having to cut costs beyond the core. Cuts in grants are leading to cuts in performances, reductions in quality, cuts in activity, cuts in planning, imagining and risking in order to leave time for fundraising, budget balancing, sponsorship raising and sacking.
This is a familiar litany, but demonstrably true, unlike the argument which insists that the arts are spendthrift or just for the elite. The arts do not have that option. Most top class British actors and actresses are paid a weekly rate rather less than the daily charge-out rate of the management consultants constantly inflicted upon them. Most singers, good ones at that, are not paid as Luciano Pavarotti or Pl?cido Domingo or Jessye Norman or Angela Gheorghiu are paid. Although, incidentally, if you work in a profession where you are asked to tumble out of bed as you sleep off a flight from California in order to sing the count in Figaro at a couple of hours notice and you have never even seen the countess before, then I think that is worth a bob or two.
Most of those who attend plays, concerts, dance, opera or galleries are not paying the super-gala prices for their seats, but prices that are below those for a West End musical or rock show, and well below the cost of a seat at a premier league football match. Half the seats at the Coliseum, the home of English National Opera cost less than ?25. A seat at West Ham for a premier division match is ?27.
When the lottery grant for Sadler's Wells was announced (some ?35m) the press sent photographers to the evening performance to witness dinner jacketed nobs landing from their limos, or taking the interval air with their champagne. Instead they found an audience of the young and the black, casually dressed, drinking beer from the bottle. The arts audience is a vastly diverse, cheerfully informal, seriously inclined, well informed body of people, carefully spending a comparatively small sum of the money they have for discretionary spending.
as grey gowrie has observed, the arts are not for elites; but they are undertaken by elites, by the best in any field, just like in sport. None the less, in our modern mass democracy public subsidy of art does not enjoy the unquestioning cultural support it did in the late 1940s when the Arts Council and the Third Programme were born. John Maynard Keynes himself, the first chairman of the Arts Council of Great Britain, was severely realistic about arts funding. As he offered to pay from his own pocket the first two thirds of the costs of the brand new Arts Theatre in Cambridge in 1935, he observed to his wife, Lydia Lopokova: "The greatest comfort of all, I think, from having money... is that one does not need to badger other people for it."
Keynes believed that a university needed a theatre in exactly the same way as the sciences needed laboratories. Only in a theatre can the complicated dependence of drama upon literature, music and design be put to the test and understood. As to the arts as a whole, he saw their justification in philosophical beliefs that held that goodness in society increased as a result of the amount of beauty. Claims of this kind today would walk straight into the reductive comment: "Well, since there is so much more of what you call art around, why is there so much crime today?" Best take a different tack. Still, those more absolute propositions were good enough in their time and persuasive enough to establish a process of arts funding that still survives-however uncertainly-today.
At the same time as the Arts Council was founded the BBC was also putting a price on culture-too high some said-and was insisting that the minority interest Third Programme was a price worth paying. Its director general, William Haley, said that he saw every civilised nation as a cultural pyramid with "a lamentable broad base and a lamentable narrow tip." But he insisted that it was not a static pyramid. "My conception was of a BBC... which would slowly move listeners from one stratum of this pyramid to the next."
This wish to be inclusive is one that we recognise today, but Haley's terms of reference for the new programme were austere and unyielding by contemporary standards: "The programme is designed to be of artistic and cultural importance. The audience envisaged is one already aware of artistic experience and will include persons of taste, of intelligence and of education; it is, therefore, selective and not casual, and both attentive and critical."
Such were the foundations on which a cornucopia of music, talk and drama was unloaded onto a nation previously deprived of them in anything like such quantity. Haley was under no illusions about the likely popularity of the whole activity. But he and the intellectual middle class he represented were supremely self-confident in their values and their definitions of culture. No one 50 years ago had to qualify the word by explaining why culture did not mean mass culture. For Haley and his class, it meant the great continuum of inherited western creative artistic activity of which they were and felt to be part. Haley noted that "the surest way to increase the number of listeners is to debase the standards," a statement that echoes to this day. Reflecting on that observation, the Newcastle Journal observed: "We are, in general, a low brow rather than a high brow people. We should aim, at least, at being soundly middle brow people, with aspirations towards higher planes."
Haley's view of culture, indeed the general view of culture half a century ago, was less broad-minded than it is today. We have absorbed some aspects of popular or mass culture into painting, music, literature and dance. There is, too, a far greater readiness to include influences from around the world into the activities that could once be simply defined as western culture. That said, it was extraordinary that the BBC should create a project of the kind they did on such casual foundations. If there is one explanation for the comparative ease with which Haley could state and win the case for setting up the Third Programme, it must be because of the war and the nation's cultural experience during those years.
In 1939, when the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (Cema) was created, it was as an emergency operation to save the arts from blackout. Many of its aims were utilitarian: to keep up morale; to entertain bored evacuees and shift workers; to employ otherwise unemployed artistes; and, almost as an afterthought, to spread knowledge and enjoyment of the arts themselves. Under the Cema umbrella, the Old Vic had three touring companies on the road playing one night stands in town halls, miners' institutes, and factory hostels. In 1940, a travelling exhibition called "Art for the People" attracted 300,000 visitors during its journey through 80 villages and country towns. By 1944, Cema provided no fewer than 6,140 concerts of which 840 were leading symphony concerts. Even given that many of the audiences were captive, and conceding that not all experienced a sudden conversion to the fine arts, it is hard not to conclude that this exposure to the arts had a lasting effect on the creation of a new national cultural base. Looking back on it, it has a very dirigiste feel to it, but like rationing and utility clothing, it had a striking effect.
So successful was Cema in creating a new audience, that the Arts Council built on its example as the war ended. Keynes believed it would "carry the arts throughout the countryside and maintain metropolitan standards." But Keynes was not, according to Kenneth Clark, "a man for wandering minstrels and amateur theatricals. He believed in excellence." Many believed that after the hideous dangers and sufferings of the war, the nation deserved something better. That included the arts. As the novelist, Paul Bailey, has observed: "Art is a good reason for living."
It was against this background, too, of an appe-tite awakened, that the Third Programme was born. Despite constant niggles at the smallness of the audience, and its disproportionate cost-disproportionate, that is, to the rest of radio-the BBC has persevered over the decades with a third network, tacking and trimming to the prevailing financial and cultural winds, but trying to keep intact something that was recognisably a cultural network with terms of reference beyond those of its mainstream or populist partners.
When Robert Ponsonby, a former BBC controller of music, wrote that "what is unarguable is that the BBC should be unreservedly committed to a radio channel devoted to music and the arts at a discriminating level of quality, intelligence and articulacy," his vocabulary and approach were not that different from Haley's 40 years earlier. When, too, Nicholas Kenyon, the current controller of BBC Radio Three, observes that "the tension between high brow culture and popular culture and the cost of what we do and the number of people who use it has changed little over 50 years," it emphasises that the battle for publicly subsidised culture is never won.
certainly, the implied case for much of the last half century that the arts were good in themselves has now been rudely set aside as other, and perhaps unsuitable, yardsticks have been introduced and set against the claims made by and for the arts. The fact that they have been imposed at all reflects a failure by all of us in the arts to frame our justification in terms that command political and public support.
The difficulties began in 1983 when the newly created National Audit Office (NAO) introduced new ways of looking at the finances of the arts. Using the still novel criteria of "economy, efficiency and effectiveness" which it applies without fear or favour to all the institutions it scrutinises, the NAO created a climate where performance indicators were the yardsticks of effectiveness; forward plans with specific activity targets the measures of efficiency; and tougher accounting systems ensured economy. We were in a new world. We were no longer the arts, pure and simple, but rather part of a great national cultural industry, just another sector of the economy.
In 1985, William Rees-Mogg, the Arts Council chairman, joined in with relish. In his lecture on the "Political Economy of the Arts," Rees-Mogg stated: "The Arts Council gives the best value for money in job creation of any part of the state system... The arts are to Britain what the sun is to Spain." It was a good try but failed to notice two facts: first, the Thatcher government was less interested in job creation than in wealth creation; second, everybody in Spain likes and enjoys the sun.
In 1985, the Arts Council proclaimed the arts as "the great British success story," and issued "an invitation to the nation to invest in the arts." Unlike recent privatisation issues, that prospectus was undersubscribed. In 1986, it tried still harder. "Partnership: making arts money work harder" held up the arts as an instrument of urban renewal. Inner cities would be revived, cultural industries would grow as a result and employment would follow. Education would improve, too. As arts and musical education faltered in schools, arts institutions were left to carry out emergency, remedial work in schools. The case for the arts, therefore, was that they were a kind of super-welfare industry, another arm of Treasury economic regeneration policy.
By 1988, the economic argument was in full flood. The "Economic case for the arts" claimed a gross turnover from the arts sector of ?10 billion; it employed 500,000 people directly; accounted for 1.28 per cent of gross domestic product; and ranked fourth in the list of invisible export earners. Think, too, how much the state earned in VAT and taxes paid, by taking people out of unemployment. Later still, the arts were presented as a key ingredient in the move from an industrial to a post-industrial society, in the transition from a working society to a leisure society, and in the generation of economic multiplier effects-if a successful theatre opens, the nearby leisure and dining area follows. We no longer promoted concerts, mounted exhibitions or put on a production of a play; we delivered "product." Gone were the days when viewers went to galleries, audiences attended concerts or the theatre; they were all "customers." Subsidy or public patronage were out of date words; the arts were looking for "investment."
The trouble is that the language is all wrong. It is not merely that it is not ours; it is not suitable to our activity. An audience is different from customers. A customer buys a predictable good or quality of service. An audience member expects the service but is buying an experience-a very different thing. A product is a predictable, measurable, quantifiable object which is expected to perform jobs, tasks or functions. A play, opera, exhibition or concert is varied, variable, untried or tested, often unpredictable and occasionally experimental. But the real trap occurs with the word "investment." As the arts world queued up with its proposed investments, there was one response: "What is the return on the investment?" To which the only answer was: "There is no return on the investment in the sense that the word is properly understood." Back came the reply: "Then why are you asking us to invest in you at all?" Words matter. Vocabulary must be appropriate and we will get nowhere by using words which conceal what we are and why we do what we do.
Suppose Sergei Diaghilev had had to work within the parameters of such vocabulary, would he have created The Firebird, Petrushka or the The Rite of Spring? What would the 20th century have been without Stravinsky, or the designers and choreographers who mounted the ballets? Would there be a mass audience for Riverdance today if Nijinsky had not created the image and myth of the heroic dancer? If the language is that of business, can the result be art? My answer and my experience is that it can, but only if you mind your concepts. Too often in recent years, the arts have behaved as if they will only be funded properly if they lean over backwards and pretend to be what they are not; pretend to be an industry. We may have some of its characteristics, but we remain different. Unless that difference is stated and restated, then the wind will change and we will end up thinking of ourselves as a business and forget our responsibilities to art.
Let us do a deal. We in the arts should not resist using the business jargon that has been forced upon us. It is not difficult to use; all too easy in fact. Many of its principles are useful and do help you to run the theatre, the orchestra or the gallery better. But we should only do so if our interlocutors accept that we are different. We will learn their tricks; but they must understand that instrumental arguments have only limited application in the arts.
the arts matter because they are universal; because they are non-material; because they deal with daily experience in a different way; because they transform the way we look at the world; because they offer different explanations of the world; because they link us to our past and open the door to the future; because they work outside routine categories; because they take us out of ourselves; because they make order out of disorder and stir up the stagnant with movement; because they offer a shared experience rather than an isolated one; because they encourage the imagination and attempt the pointless; because they offer beauty and confront us with the fact of ugliness; because they offer explanations but no solutions; because they offer a vision of integration rather than disintegration; because they force us to think about the difference between the good and the bad, the false and the true. The arts matter because they embrace, express and define the soul of a civilisation. A nation without arts would be a nation that had stopped talking to itself, stopped dreaming, and had lost interest in the past and lacked curiosity about the future.
"Why the arts?" is not a question that you can answer on the back of a Kellogg's cornflakes packet competition, or if it is, then I have certainly not won it. Matthew Arnold defined the arts as "the best that has been thought and said in the world," and of course sung, acted, danced, painted and any other performance you care to include. William Blake, quoted by Robert Hewison in his excellent book Culture and Consensus, stated: "Let it be no more said that the states encourage arts; for it is the arts that encourage states." Let the present day British state allow itself a moment of encouragement by permitting the arts to flourish. And let us, the professional defenders of the arts, explain them in ways that do justice to them for what they are. TS Eliot was wrong 50 years ago. But we should not assume that without determined advocacy he might not be right in the next 50.
