Late last summer, I was invited to a Society of Bookmen dinner, a dusty gathering of largely veteran publishers, agents and booksellers who meet once a month at the elegantly dishevelled Savile Club. John Tusa was the guest speaker that evening, and his performance was melancholy. Here was a man who had made a career in several great cultural institutions but on whom a sad twilight was settling-a man out of time. He lamented the impoverishment of Britain's arts; the disappearance of anything like a common culture; and the triumph of a crude relativism, in which all cultural works were "equally valid." I couldn't help feeling that I'd heard it all before, that I was listening to the late-middle-aged voice of the post-war elite who had done well out of subsidy but who were struggling to adapt to a more complex and diffuse cultural climate.
Tusa, like his friend and fellow public pontificate, John Drummond, is an unashamed paternalist: he believes in the supremely civilising qualities of great art and in the government's duty to provide large-scale state funding, even for those performance arts enjoyed by only a tiny (and often wealthy) minority. It hardly needs saying that Tusa despises the Blair government-again in common with his old pal Drummond, and also with George Walden, the disaffected former Tory MP who has just published The New Elites: Making a Career in the Masses (Penguin Press), an eccentric diatribe against contemporary populism.
John Drummond, John Tusa and George Walden are archetypal representatives of post-war Institution Man. They have all dedicated the best part of their lives to historic British institutions-Tusa to the BBC and the Barbican; Drummond to Radio 3, the Edinburgh Festival and the Proms; Walden to the foreign office and to Westminster. Their experiences have been rich and varied but have left them with a sneering disdain for contemporary society, a conviction that there is a crisis at the heart of modern civilisation, and a belief that ordinary people (mass man, in Walden's phrase, borrowed from Nietzsche) are the victims of a populist conspiracy which privileges the mediocre and the banal above the difficult and true.
Implicit in everything that Institution Man writes is the belief that someone does know what's best for the public-namely, himself, the wise connoisseur of high civilisation. And what the public needs most-certainly if they are to improve the grimness of their daily lives and the poverty of their ambition-is the best that culture can offer; and to hell with the cost.
As it happens, state funding for the arts is at an all-time high. The department for culture, media and sport is spending more than ?840m this year, in addition to the ?180m of National Lottery funds (a sixth of all lottery money raised), which has contributed to the modernising and broadening of the cultural infrastructure of Britain. It is probable, although not proveable, that more people participate in high culture than ever before. The high arts may have lost some of their lofty status and some of their mass media presence, as other forms of culture have grown in weight, but to argue that there is no future for high art because society only honours those things appreciated by everybody is an absurd caricature.
But Institution Man is not impressed by statistics and is instead obsessed with the personal cultural preferences of our political leaders. "Does Tony Blair really enjoy talking to Noel Gallagher more than he might, say, to John Tomlinson, the greatest Wagnerian bass in the world?" asks John Tusa, in his book Art Matters: Reflecting on Culture (Methuen). "Does he really enjoy chatting to Chris Evans or to Zoë Ball more than he might to, say, Beryl Bainbridge, Ian McEwan or Martin Amis?" Peering into the near future, Tusa has had a "nightmare" of a Britain "without arts and therefore without arts centres [note the assumption that arts require a centre in which to flourish]. It will come true in the next century. Perhaps within a few years of it starting." The problem is that the arts "are a marginal and thinly-rooted side of Tony Blair's experience." So all that public money and all those independent bodies charged with promoting the arts mean nothing because Blair seems in thrall to the populist world of rock, pop and sport. This is bizarre logic.
Even if it were true that Blair is a philistine, would it matter? Did Harold Macmillan's love of Mozart and Jane Austen mean that the arts flourished more during his period in office than during that of the less culturally-inclined Margaret Thatcher? To complain that Blair-or Gordon Brown-is a lesser politician because of an assumed lack of interest in the arts (as Tusa does) is to commit a category mistake. More than that: it is to misunderstand the role and demands of the modern politician in the media age.
To promote his book, Tainted By Experience (Faber), Drummond spent August dismissing the cabinet as cultural barbarians. He said in one interview: "There is too much reliance on focus groups and audience research rather than genuine ideas. The BBC has... working parties and the Arts Council has strategies. But you can't have working parties on orchestras."
To which one can only say: why not, John? Why shouldn't the value of subsidising an orchestra be quantified, in the same way that we might quantify the value of supporting a local library or theatre-or indeed the building of a new hospital? Drummond, in an interview with The Times, recalled that Lord Gowrie had warned him of how Blair's government would have "real trouble in coming to terms with [the cost of] high culture." And so they should. I, for one, would feel uncomfortable if they were not having "real trouble" with how much it costs to subsidise the Royal Opera House and the National Theatre. After all, high culture is not essential to people's lives in the same way that the NHS is. Institution Man is unwilling or unable to understand that many millions of people in this country lead fulfilled, valuable and moral lives while having no more than a glancing acquaintanceship with high culture-great works of literature, music or visual art. Yet the same people contribute, through taxes, significant sums to subsidising cultural pursuits in which they have no interest. Is this right?
It is also worth remembering that genuine radicalism and creativity often take place outside institutions and arts centres; that true experimentation, particularly in the "popular" arts with which Institution Man feels so uncomfortable-design, pop, dance, fashion- exist in a realm beyond subsidy and patronage, at street level or in the loneliness of a dislocated imagination.
JG Ballard has complained of the "bourgeoisification" of the novel, of the emergence of the "career novelists," who spend their lives at literary festivals, or British Council jamborees. As Ballard points out, the best work tends to be produced by mavericks, by independent spirits answerable to no one. The subsidised art world promotes the view that writers, painters, musicians, have a right to earn a living from their art. Yet great art is not a means to an end, it is an end in itself: it is a truth-seeking discipline which we enjoy because, as Iris Murdoch said, "it disturbs us in deep, often incomprehensible ways." What role the government has in promoting such art is unclear.
"In a true democracy," George Walden writes, "it is not the job of the ministers to lay down strategic directions for the arts." Indeed. But as Noel Malcolm pointed out, in his Sunday Telegraph review of The New Elites, government direction is inevitable "so long as the arts require large-scale state funding." That is the heart of the matter. Institution Man cannot have it both ways: on the one hand, disparaging the government for its philistinism and cultural guidelines, but on the other hand, demanding that it spend ever more public money on the arts.
There is much that is good in The New Elites, not least Walden's (now familiar) critique of what he calls the private/public "apartheid" blighting our education system, and the mediocrity of so much contemporary television. Reading his book, though, is a deflating experience. In the cultivated disdain of his jerky, fragmentary prose you can hear, at times, echoes of the French-Romanian nihilist EM Cioran, the great Austrian pessimist Thomas Bernhard, and C?line, whom Walden reveres. But The New Elites, though angry and amusing, is really no more than a longer version of one of the author's own hasty columns in the Evening Standard, a newspaper which embraces the contemporary celebrity culture which Walden purports to despise.
So what we are left with, in the end, is an attack on populism which is itself deeply populist, which in its hectoring, bullying style, its relentless use of ad hominem abuse and crude generalisations, reads less like a work of considered social criticism than an attention-seeking shout of despair. And despair is the authentic tone of Institution Man: he who cannot find release for his energies in a sterile, philistine world, and who holds "the people" in such low regard that he thinks that they are willing victims of populist conspiracies.
Institution Man seems to have, too, no sense of the excitement of the contemporary condition, no understanding of the energy of cities or of the anarchic potential of globalisation-of web talk (for Drummond the internet is a mere "telephone system"), cultural fusion, miscegenation. The shock and strangeness of the genuinely new disturb him. There can be no discovery in Institution Man's Britain because Duchamp, Joyce and Schoenberg have done it all before, and better. Institution Man demeans the small cultural gestures which make life worthwhile, beyond the parameters of high culture-a village cricket match, a new pop song downloaded from the web, a steel band concert. So all that remains, for Institution Man, is a certain sourness-and a culture of complaint. n
