SLAYING THE SIXTH GIANT –
on being Chair of Arts Council England
Christopher Frayling
In the last year of the Second World War, and just afterwards, for obvious reasons,
tall stories about the slaying of giants were much in vogue in Britain. Ralph [Rafe]
Vaughan Williams was putting the finishing touches to his opera The Pilgrim’s
Progress, which had its first complete performance in 1951, as part of the Festival
of Britain on the South Bank. The BBC put on a celebrated radio production of
The Pilgrim’s Progress, with John Gielgud in the lead role. It told of the pilgrimage
from the rubble of the City of Destruction, via the Slough of Despond – to Doubting
Castle, home of Giant Despair, and eventually to the celestial post-war city. And
there were numerous illustrated versions for children of Jack the Giant Killer,
where Jack – well-armed with his cloak of invisibility, his cap of knowledge, his
shoes of swiftness and sword of sharpness – takes on and defeats various giants,
with one, two or even three heads.
So giants were all over the land, and William Beveridge set this country a
challenge: that of slaying the five giants of physical poverty – want, disease,
ignorance, squalor and idleness. The National Health Service and public
education were to be the indirect results. Maynard Keynes, meanwhile, was
working on ways of slaying a sixth giant – the poverty of aspiration which got in the
way of all attempts to lift people out of physical poverty, and which engagement
with the arts could help to alleviate. In this, too, he saw a great gulf between the
haves and the have-nots, and the government ought he felt to take this gulf just as
seriously as the other great issues of national life. The giant was just as
challenging, just as fierce and fell as the other five – or, to put it another way,
making the arts available was – in the immediate post-war years – beginning to be
articulated as a right on a level with healthcare and education. That’s why I have
called this lecture ‘Slaying the Sixth Giant’ – and it will be full of John Bunyan-style
temptations along the way: there’ll be plenty of people telling dismal stories;
Doubting Castle will be quite crowded at times; but to keep us going there’ll be an
unswerving commitment to reach the Celestial City – via the Royal Festival Hall.
I want to begin with two short film extracts, to set the scene:
The first is from a film called Battle for Music, made by Strand Film in 1943 for
cinema distribution – about the London Philharmonic Orchestra, its nearbankruptcy in the early months of the Second World War, its revival under the
collective management of the players – and the case it makes for long-term
financial stability. Many of the key issues about public funding of the arts are
raised by Battle for Music, in very stark terms. Two short clips: in the first,
members of the Orchestra – which is performing in France shortly before the Nazi
invasion – listen to a wireless broadcast from Germany; in the second, J B
Priestley, introduced by Sir John Barbirolli in the Queens Hall before it was
bombed – makes an impassioned plea.
EXTRACT ONE
“We all know what we’re fighting against”, concludes J B Priestley, “but don’t you
think we sometimes forget what we’re fighting for?”.
The second extract, made in 1944, is from an issue of the newsreel 'Warfront
Magazine – No.10', issued by the Ministry of Information – and it shows a ballet
company, Ballet Rambert under Madame Rambert herself, performing a
contemporary dance version of Peter and the Wolf in a workers' hostel in the
Midlands, during a dinner-break, under the aegis of CEMA, the Council for the
Encouragement of Music and the Arts. The Prokofiev has been chosen in homage
to our allies in the Soviet Union. The item begins with the thought that "there
would be many more admirers of the ballet, if only there had been time". Maybe
the performance will “cheer people on to better times”.
EXTRACT TWO
On 12 June 1945, Maynard Keynes – sitting next to the Chancellor of the
Exchequer – launched the new Arts Council with a speech at a press conference,
which was adapted into a BBC radio broadcast a few days later. It was headed
The Arts Council – its policy and hopes. The speech began with the wartime
story of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which had, as
Keynes put it, “when our spirits were at a low ebb . . . carried music, drama and
pictures to places which otherwise would be cut off from the masterpieces of
happier times”. CEMA had originated at the beginning of the conflict as a
protection of the best in our culture against the barbarians – putting a wall round
the arts – but soon, as Keynes said “we found [to our surprise] that we were
providing what had never existed even in peacetime”, and that there was a much
larger public out there than his Bloomsbury friends – and indeed the intellectual
élite of the day – had ever anticipated. The British had an innate suspicion of the
word ‘culture’ – but under attack, they’d decided that the national culture was when
all was said and done well worth defending. So it was not just a question of
replacing what had been taken away – it would one day become a question of
providing what had never existed before. And in the process, CEMA had turned
into a social as well as artistic service, almost despite itself; and this in turn directly
led to the foundation of the Arts Council. “I do not believe it is yet realised what a
very important thing has happened. State patronage of the arts, entirely supported
by the Treasury, has crept in. It has happened in a very English, informal,
unostentatious way.”
Over the last six months, where the economy is concerned, we have all become
Keynesians again – following a period of some twenty-five years when he was
seriously out of fashion. Where the arts and culture are concerned, we have I’m
glad to say never stopped being Keynesians. He was certainly a visionary.
The first priority, Keynes said – the prime function of an Arts Council – would be to
ensure that although the money came from the public purse, the independence of
the artist and the arts organisation would be protected at all costs. There was
much talk in the air of nationalising industry. That must not happen to the arts.
The Nazi regime had shown what happens when government runs the arts on the
one hand and tries to aestheticise politics on the other. So had the Italian
Fascists, by harnessing avant garde art to the cause. But there would be no
nationalisation of culture in Britain. In Keynes’s inimitable language:
“The artist walks where the breath of the spirit blows him. He cannot be told his
direction; he does not know it himself. But he leads the rest of us into fresh
pastures and teaches us to love and to enjoy what we often begin by rejecting . . .
The task of an official body is not to censor, but give courage, confidence and
opportunity.”
How many economists talk like that these days?
Although the Council was ultimately responsible to Parliament “which will have to
be satisfied with what we are doing”, satisfied with the spending of public money,
the Council also had to be as independent as possible. This came in time to be
known as “the arm’s length principle”, and it was a large part of the point. The
government would, it was hoped, provide money, policy and silence. The Council
would be accountable to government. It would also protect the government from
angry artists, a kind of cultural shock-absorber.
The second priority was – with the “little money we have to spill” – to listen to the
lessons of wartime, and open the doors as widely to “the masterpieces of happier
times”; open doors to the best – by which Keynes meant the arts he liked, as the
Chairman of Covent Garden, who was also married to a ballerina and who had
founded the Cambridge Arts Centre. “Insofar as we instruct, it is new games we
will be teaching you to play and to watch”, he said to his BBC radio audience, new
games which up to now “only the few used to play”. Important opera companies,
theatre troupes and orchestras were on the brink of bankruptcy and the new Arts
Council would do what it could – in partnership with others, through a complex
system of grants and loans in the first instance – about these.
The third priority was the buildings in which the art would happen. The urgent
rebuilding of blitzed, blacked out and evacuated cities and towns should, Keynes
said, be accompanied by the rebuilding of the culture as well – as, he said, was
happening so successfully in the Soviet Union. The two would go together. Not
just rebuilding, but building from scratch because “there never were many theatres
in this country or any concert halls or galleries worth counting”. This would of
course have to be largely a matter for local authorities and local enterprise,
because – he thought – the Arts Council would never in a million years have
enough money for such a project. But “there could be no better memorial of a war
to save the freedom of the spirit of the individual. We look forward to the time
when the theatre and the concert-hall and the gallery will be a living element in
everyone’s upbringing and regular attendance at the theatre and at concerts a part
of organised education”.
This would mean working through the ten regional offices of CEMA, which were
based on the early warning regions which had sounded the sirens in the war
before becoming staging posts for the arts. Yes, the regional structure of the
publicly-funded arts was originally based on air-raid early-warning areas. It would
also mean raising London – Phoenix-like – as a great artistic metropolis out of the
rubble of the blitz. What if Covent Garden could show opera again, rather than
belonging to Mecca Cafés? What if there were to be a National Theatre? What if
Sadler’s Wells and Sadler’s Wells Opera could find new or permanent homes?
And what if every city had its own theatre, gallery and concert hall. What if? It
would require a new kind of enlightened partnership, Keynes said.
Keynes’s punch-line was a rallying cry, and a characteristic one: “Let every part of
Merry England be merry in its own way. Death to Hollywood!” The reference to
Merry England is interesting. In Martin Wiener's book English Culture and the
Decline of the Industrial Spirit, he looks at social surveys of beleaguered Britons
during the Blitz – some by mass observation – which asked "what are the values
we are fighting for?". The answers were more often than not about rural England
– the countryside, the hedgerows, the thatched cottage, the small garden, the
roses growing up the wall, a green and pleasant land, a haven of peace and quiet,
a paradise regained, even when those being surveyed lived in blackened terraced
houses in the East End of London. There'll always be an England, while there's a
country lane. The reference to 'Down with Hollywood' is interesting too. There
was much debate after the end of the war about English culture defining itself in
opposition to American mass culture, which was seen as bland and sleazy and
hollow – with no past and therefore no real depth – all part of a cultural invasion.
By the early 1950s, there was already a corner of the English mind that was
forever Ambridge.
Well, all this was soon to be carefully drafted into the Arts Council’s Charter,
granted in summer 1946. Keynes drafted it, but died on Easter Sunday 1946
before it was ratified, so although he was the first Chairman, he never actually
chaired a single meeting of the Council. I’ve noticed that in the portraits of all the
previous Chairmen of the Arts Council at Great Peter Street, he’s the only one with
a smile on his face:
to increase the availability of the arts to the public
to improve standards in the arts
to encourage people to participate in the arts
to advise and co-operate with government departments and local
authorities in any matters concerned with these purposes
Keynes’s speech of June 1945 – and indeed the Charter, as they always do –
contained all sorts of ambiguities
how would co-operation with government departments actually work?
access, improved standards or both? the best or the most or both?
professionals and/or amateurs? like that art exhibition in the film clip.
housing the arts and/or running the arts?
the balance between London and the regions
the arts and city regeneration – what would be the relative roles of Councils,
philanthropists and other institutions?
relationships with local authorities
and so on.
In short, the Charter offered a spectrum of possibilities, and we’ve been
positioning ourselves on different parts of that spectrum ever since. The total
grant to the Arts Council in 1946 was £235,000 – that is £7 million in today’s
money, using the retail price index – the annual grant to the four symphony
orchestras was £18,000 – and the Council’s second Chairman Kenneth Clark soon
went on record as saying to a parliamentary Select Committee “I am not in favour
of giving the Arts Council a very much larger grant than this because it will simply
get itself into trouble”. The Council in 1946 supported 22 theatres and 8
orchestras – and all was well with the world. Most of the money went to London –
on Covent Garden, Sadler’s Wells, Sadler’s Wells Opera, the Old Vic and the
orchestras. Over the next few years, as memories of wartime faded, the regional
offices would all be closed down, the strolling minstrels and teaching players and
amateur artists of CEMA days – much to the annoyance of Ralph [Rafe] Vaughan
Williams – would be disbanded, and the best for the most soon turned into the
best for the educated few. This was the era which many look back on today as
some kind of golden age.
Demand for the arts, greater expectations of what they could offer, would soon rise
again to the surface – thanks to publicly-funded education post-1944; to the local
government act of 1948 which for the first time authorised spending on the arts –
and the role of local authorities would become increasingly important, even if the
spending was not to be mandatory; increasing social mobility (depending on how
you measure it), the growth of the mass media and especially television – the first
dedicated arts slot on BBC Television was February 1958 and Monitor; changes in
the definition of culture from the culcha of aristocratic connoisseurs to something
more inclusive and all-embracing; to the rise of the new universities – red-brick,
plate-glass and post-1992 – and the expansion of both further and higher
education; in 2007, there were 97,000 first degree graduates in the arts and
humanities in Britain alone; and to the concept of equal opportunities – still a new
idea to some in the arts. This long trajectory, by the way, has been categorised by
some professional pessimists as a long period of “dumbing down”. Others have
rightly stressed that over the years the public has become a lot smarter about the
arts than anyone gives it credit for.
But successive Arts Council annual reports responded to these tendencies in the
1950s by saying (and I quote) “We must provide oases of comfort in this Sahara of
mechanised mediocrity.” In other words, ‘Stop the world I want to get off’.
Literature was allowed in as an art form – eventually – but that was about it. As
someone said, the Arts Council was systematically filtering out from public subsidy
much of the creative art in this country. The Arts Council’s reply? In the 1950s
again, “the motto carved over the door of a patrician nursery in ancient times might
be one for the Arts Council to adopt – ‘few, but roses’.” The assumption of a
classical education – and the idea of a patrician nursery – were both very
characteristic of the times. One critic was to add that "the opposite of 'few but
roses' is 'many but dandelions'."
The original vision remained a great vision, but the cultural assumptions of 194555 remained very different from today's. Very patrician, very Senior Common
Room, and very much within the classical European tradition. The best that has
been thought and said in the world, in classic aesthetic forms. As much of a
heritage as a contemporary project, in today’s terms. When Maynard Keynes was
shown a scheme for opening new arts centres in small towns outside London, in
1945, he retorted "Who on earth foisted this rubbish on us?" But in the wake of
the Arts Council – and it was something Keynes hoped would happen – the Third
Programme was launched on the BBC in 1947. The main worry of the then
Director-General was that the programme might prove too popular – and thus fail
to meet the very high standards it had set itself. Some people have a kind of
nostalgia for this period. A wistful sense that – in some ways – these matters were
once so much more straightforward, unlike today. That the postwar years when
'culture' was singular – and usually pronounced culcha – somehow represented a
more golden age. When one instinctively knew what was right, and one knew
where one was.
Now – after 63 years of the Arts Council and its work – let’s revisit Keynes’s
priorities and his chartered objectives and see where we really are with them
today. How far have we got in slaying the sixth giant?
His priority number two – opening the doors to the arts. Well, we’ve moved on
from “we come bearing of gifts to the few” via “we come bearing gifts to the many”
in the 1960s, to “we don’t bear gifts at all – we support the best in the arts, great
art for everyone”, with an emphasis now on audiences as well as on excellence,
and on a changing, dynamic arts scene. As Joan Littlewood once said, if you offer
the public anything less than the best, you’re just being patronising. The annual
grant has risen from £235,000 to £429 million (that’s from 7 to 429 million in
today’s money) plus the arts proceeds of the National Lottery. Instead of a handful
of regularly funded organisations, we now have over 880 of them spread all over
the country – not to mention our open application programmes such as Grants for
the Arts. In 1946, as we've seen, the Council supported 22 theatres and 8
orchestras. By 1955, this number had already doubled, taking in organisations
such as the Royal Opera House and the Royal Court Theatre. The focus
continued at that time to be on rebuilding the capital after the losses of the war. A
sense of preservation rather than development. Between 1965 and 1975 the
figure had again increased – to 262. This decade included the tenure of Jennie
Lee as the first arts minister, when there was a step-change in the relationship
between government and the arts, and when the Arts Council's mission moved on
to making the arts much more widely available, although definitions of the arts
hadn't yet changed that much. From Senior Common Room to artist’s café in
London, as my friend John Drummond was to put it. In 1967, asked a question
about the regional arts – and about what today we'd call a more inclusive
approach – the Chairman Lord Goodman said " I do not believe that, with the
immense present demand that exists in various localities, any other policy [than
the present one] is a possibility; but it may be, as time goes on, we will have to
consider a change". But if Keynes was the visionary, Jennie Lee was undoubtedly
the enabler – as Patricia Hollis's biography has shown.
During the 1980s, the Arts Council looked outwards, away from London and
towards what were still in those days known as the provinces. The number of
regularly funded organisations doubled again. But funding was becoming
increasingly tight – by the end of the decade in 1988/89, the Arts Council's grant
was running six per cent below inflation.
So by the early 1990s, the arts were demoralised. The money had become very
variable and yet expectations ran higher than ever. A little extra money one year,
a cut the next. Money taken from one place to shore up an acute problem in
another, without changing the landscape. Not surprisingly, this resulted in a drop
in artistic confidence and in some places an aversion to risk. Richard Eyre, in his
diary, writes of taking part in an angry meeting about 'the crisis in theatre', at the
Young Vic in 1990, when the complaint was that the Arts Council never made any
decisions: it parcelled the money out to every existing organisation, creating equal
misery for all.
Today, over 880 regularly funded organisations. And support from the public for
government investment in the arts has risen in tandem – with 79% of the adult
population now strongly agreeing, according to the latest surveys, that arts and
culture should receive public funding. That really would have surprised the
Bloomsbury set, with their condescending views on “the masses” – as outlined in
John Carey’s marvellous study The Intellectuals and the Masses. 79% is –
astonishingly – only just below the figure for health and education, in equivalent
surveys. I could give you other statistics and examples till the cows come home –
and I’ll be talking about arts statistics in a minute – but whichever way you slice it,
Keynes’s priority number two has come true in ways he could only dream of, for
the first time ever, though there is still that 21% to go.
Keynes' priority number three – the buildings.
Even before the National Lottery Act of 1993, the story here – of housing the arts –
was a good one. The National Theatre on London’s South Bank, ENO in the
Coliseum, the Royal Opera House, the Hayward and the Serpentine galleries; arts
centres all over the country beginning with Bridgwater in Somerset; Liverpool
Everyman, Glasgow Citizen’s and Nottingham Playhouse – I could go on – none of
these would even exist today were it not for the Arts Council. Again, by the early
1990s, some of the older arts buildings were in a pretty miserable state. The
inventiveness – and the entrepreneurial flair – of artists and arts organisations and
their boards did a lot to keep the arts going in this period. But things were getting
bad. Since 1993 and the National Lottery Act, of course, the picture has improved
beyond all recognition – all credit to John Major’s administration. Keynes said the
Council would never be able to afford the proper housing of the arts. Well, he was
wrong about this – but in a good way. Following the Lottery, for the first time ever
a major programme of modernisation and refurbishment could take place across
the country: new buildings designed, old ones renovated, new organisations
developed and placed in new settings, equipment replaced. Some newspapers
continued to moan, of course, but the arts in every part of the country have
benefited and hugely. We had some lively discussions about where the
boundaries of the arts should be drawn – including a fierce debate about Morris
dancing, in which one member of the Council referred to the practice as “rural
fascism”; and another debate about conjuring – during which we discovered that a
scary number of MPs, some of them senior MPs, had a deep interest in magic.
And another debate about brass bands now that the collieries have closed (they
became eligible). I can remember the first chairman of the Arts Lottery Board
saying "we'll very soon run out of arts organisations to fund". Well, he was very
wrong about that. But on the whole I think we got it right, and the entire arts
ecology changed in this country, for the better. There still remain areas of the
country and sections of the community which haven't seen their fair share of lottery
investment – there are new communities being built which should have a heart to
them, which aren’t just about bricks and mortar; there are new projects, new ideas,
new collaborations; and the capital projects have created new needs and
challenges – not that the consultants said they would at the time. In fact, I can’t
remember a single consultant’s report which predicted these things – or if they did,
they weren’t saying. I’ll be talking about advocacy and research, and how they get
confused, a bit later. But, of course, Keynes’s priority number three has happened
– again well beyond what he could even dream in 1945.
And so to Keynes’s first priority – the independence of the artist and how to draw
the line between accountability on the one hand and interference on the other.
Well, on the first part of this – the independence of the artist – I know of no
attempt, on the part of a government of either party, since I’ve been involved with
the Arts Council – that’s over twenty years – no attempt directly to interfere with
the content of the arts or the behaviour of artists. Unlike in the United States and
on the continent of Europe, for example, where this happens all the time – in the
States largely because of corporate investment in the arts, in Europe, largely
because of the state monopoly of the arts. There have been nervous flurries – I
remember one about the title of the play Shopping and Fucking, for example. We
did get phone calls about that. And there’s been a surprising amount of selfcensorship in the arts since 9/11 – usually involving the Koran, from Marlowe’s
Tamburlaine to John Latham’s famous eating of the books. But there’s been no
direct interference from the government. On the ‘arm’s length principle’, though,
this is – of course – always tense, always difficult to draw the line, always needing
vigilance. In the 1960s Jennie Lee was worried that as the arts moved higher up
the political agenda, there would be a growing temptation to politicise them.
Having a minister for the arts, she said, should never be confused with having
political control. And she added, 'Political control is a shortcut to boring, stagnant
art: there must be freedom to experiment, to make mistakes, to fail, to shock – or
there can be no new beginnings. It is hard for any government to accept this'.
It was hard for officials and politicians to accept that the arts are about individual
voices speaking to individuals. And they might well be controversial voices.
She was right. That is one of the reasons why the Arts Council exists. Not as an
arbiter of taste, but as a buffer between individual artists or organisations and
government and vice versa – to champion creative independence, and to insulate
politicians from direct decisions about individual artistic choices. To ask not 'Do I
agree with this?' – nor even 'Do I like it?' – but: Is it original? Is it worthwhile? Is it
inspirational? Does it have something important to say? Is it excellent within its
genre? Could it be a classic or does it take an artform in a fresh direction? What
does the profession think about it? Will it work? Is it well done? For most of its
life, the Arts Council was funded directly through the Treasury or through the
Department of Education. Now that there’s a Department of Culture, exDepartment of National Heritage, the arm’s length principle has sometimes
become more of an issue. I’m not breaching any confidences when I say this.
And I have to admit there were moments, at the beginning of my time as
Chairman, when the arm was reduced to Venus de Milo length – in other words,
very short indeed. But these have passed, and we have continued with our
respective roles. Today, the relationship works very well. I can honestly say that
there is now a real understanding of the principle – and why it exists – in the
Department of Culture and at the Council itself. This was tested to the limit a year
ago – with lobbyists of all descriptions and various volume levels contacting the
Department, as you can imagine – but the Ministers and officials stood firm and let
the Arts Council get on with its job. This I count one of the achievements of the
last five years.
But where does broad policy end – the role of government – and detailed policy
and implementation begin – the role of the Arts Council? Policy and
implementation, easy to say. The line was always going to be difficult to draw –
but that doesn’t mean it isn’t worth drawing; and it does most certainly mean that
the price of independence is eternal vigilance. When first I took over as Chairman
I reintroduced the phrase “arm’s length” into public debate, after it had fallen out of
favour for many years, in a speech at the RSA – and I said then I believed in the
principle passionately, just as passionately as Maynard Keynes. And just as
passionately as JB Priestley, who wrote – in a passage often quoted by both
Jennie Lee and Lord Goodman: 'The State can only clear the ground and build a
wall against the cold wind. It can not pull out of the dark soil the flower of art.
Only the artist can do that.' Another aspect of this – even within overall policy –
has been the government obsession with targets and funding agreements and
boxes to tick, which applies right across Whitehall and not just to the arts. I’ll be
talking about this later. The Arts Council, tedious though this may seem, tries hard
to protect the arts from as many of these as it can but of course has to pass some
of them on to meet Treasury-set targets, the so-called Public Service Agreements
for second-tier organisations. A criticism of this is not a criticism of the Arts
Council, or even of the DCMS, but of a whole over-controlling Whitehall culture
ever since the 1980s: a very different thing. There’s a lot of risk aversion, back
protection and micro-accountability about, which doesn’t suit the arts. Secretaries
of State may issue pamphlets and make speeches about ‘targetology’ – which
always play well in the arts community – but the key audience is the Treasury, and
persuading them to make crude targets less crude.
CLIPS START – SILENT: THE ARTS IN 2008 etc.
Which brings me, finally, to some thoughts which have arisen during my time over
the last five years and which I bequeath to my worthy successor Liz Forgan, and
to the excellent new team under Alan Davey at the Arts Council.
First, there’s the well-known spectator sport – much loved by arts correspondents,
broadcasters, writers of political newsletters, performers and even artists – of
chipping away at the Arts Council by constantly criticising everything it does; and
never, ever acknowledging its achievements. When I took over, I said publicly that
“no-one will ever love the Arts Council” and that’s another fact of life, but I must
confess I had no idea how relentless and venomous the chipping could be. The
cloak of invisibility and the sword of sharpness would have come in very handy at
times. Shortly before I started, a journalist on the Evening Standard referred in
print to a senior officer of the Council as a “Nazi” because she was involved in
some much-needed reform of the governance arrangements of one of our
regularly funded theatres. A Nazi. No apology, needless to say, was ever printed.
When Ken Livingstone said much the same thing to a reporter from the same
paper, all hell broke loose. It really does seem to be open season on the Arts
Council – which is treated and kicked as a “bureaucracy”, a solid thing – rather
than a collection of well-intentioned individuals who are themselves professionals,
many of them originating from the same worlds of the arts and journalism as their
critics. Then there was the press conference when the Arts Council‘s work was
very publicly categorised as “bollocks” – a new critical category in a debate about
the arts and society that goes back some 2,500 years to Plato’s Republic. It’s so
easy to play to the gallery.
Anyway, more broadly, and more importantly, there’s the phenomenon of people
individually having a wonderful time at the theatre, at a concert, at an exhibition or
performance – but when asked about the system which underpins them and
indeed makes them possible they tend to say, “oh, that’s dreadful”. Individual
happiness and generalised complaints – the subject of Dan Gilbert’s interesting
book, Stumbling into Happiness. I’m optimistic about my family but I think that
families in general are in deep trouble. I’m optimistic about my neighbourhood, but
I think that cities in general are going to the dogs. Ditto that operation I had and
the way I was well looked after in hospital, and the NHS which stinks. Maybe this
is inevitable – yet another fact of life – and maybe it doesn’t matter. What matters
– of course – is the individual experience of the arts rather than the infrastructure
which supports it. But if the column inches about the Arts Council are constantly
harping on about controversy rather then content – and if they are so relentlessly
negative – when there really is something to write about, no-one’s listening any
more. They’ve all glazed over. And there is so much to write about – why the arts
matter, why they aren’t the icing on the cake, where they are going and where in
public terms they could lead us. There’s a whole rich debate, which as I say goes
back 2,500 years to ancient Greece, about the moral and social impact of the arts
– and counter arguments – a debate which includes the origins of the concepts
“the arts are good for you”, “the arts and cultural identities”, “the transforming
power of the arts” and “art for art’s sake”. All of these go right back. The
‘instrumentalist’ or ‘extrinsic’ arguments about the arts, far from being introduced
around 1997 as claimed by some grumpy commentators, have been in the
intellectual bloodstream since The Republic, and have been debated ever since by
a cast of characters which includes the philosophers of the Enlightenment, Kant,
the romantic poets, Matthew Arnold and in this century Eliot, Orwell, Leavis and
Raymond Williams. The phrase ‘art for art’s sake’ – now a cliché of the counterargument – is based on a misreading and distortion of Kant’s Critique of
Judgement, and was famously adopted as a slogan by artists in the midnineteenth century to turn their isolation and aloofness from the modern world into
a badge of honour. It is this fertile tradition – on both sides – a real resource, even
today – which has sadly been reduced to name-calling and talk of “bollocks”. I can
recommend Eleonora Belfiore and Oliver Bennett’s The Social Impact of the Arts
published last year as a real nourishment to public debate. Just after I became
Chairman, Tessa Jowell – then Secretary of State – published in 2004 the
pamphlet ’Government and the Value of Culture’, which asked the excellent
question “how, in going beyond targets, can we best capture the value of culture?”.
The public debate about this pamphlet soon polarised into ‘intrinsic’ versus
‘extrinsic’, as if the polarity was something new, as if they could be so easily
separated – but the question remains on the table. Evidence-based policy-making
– which originated in the medical field in the early 1990s and subsequently spread
to all other areas of public policy – assumes that everything is measurable in
quantitative terms. Since then there’s been a lot of research – actually it has
mainly been advocacy masquerading as research – full of unexamined
assumptions desperately trying to prove all sorts of things about the power of the
arts in relation to the economy, society and public value, even the individual. But
we all know that evidence-based policy, resting as it does on a relatively narrow
range of measurable indicators – has serious limitations when applied to the arts.
We all know that. So, how can we best capture the value of culture? How can we
discuss why the arts matter? This is not a commercial, but the Arts Council’s
recent survey of attitudes towards the arts – and towards arts subsidy – which
started as a ‘Public Value Enquiry’ and soon became ‘The Arts Debate’ – was the
most extensive survey ever undertaken in this country, because it crucially
included people who do not participate in, or experience, the arts as well as people
who do. The Arts Debate was launched in 2007. With one or two honourable
exceptions it was met with complete silence in the press.
When I took over as Chair, I argued in a lecture – and this was taken up – that
most politicians of all persuasions tend to be embarrassed and even suspicious
when talking about the arts; there’s an upward cadence in their voices. The
vocabulary is either reductive or sentimental. That’s true, but I now think that most
journalists and even arts professionals have a similar problem. We’ve debated
‘Government and the Value of Culture’ after a fashion, what about now debating
‘Culture and the Value of Government’? As the recession bites deeper, we’re
going to need to. And to explore in much greater depth the contribution of and the
relationship of the publicly-funded arts to the profit-making sector of the creative
industries. And the ways in which public money unlocks private money: good
spending rather than bad spending. And the contribution of the arts to the national
reputation – which in other areas is at a pretty low ebb at the moment. And the
role of the arts at a time of ethical and community confusion. Not as advocacy but
as research – the kind of research which convinces our paymasters.
One issue that came up during The Arts Debate was the visibility of the Arts
Council in the public mind. A significant number of the people surveyed said that
the Council’s work did not touch their lives, that the publicly funded arts didn’t
touch their lives, when in fact they did. I, too, can remember meeting a senior
banker at a conference on the arts, when senior bankers still came to conferences
on the arts, who said in all seriousness “I go to the theatre a lot, but my theatregoing is nothing to do with the Arts Council”. “Where do you tend to go?” “Oh I go
to the Donmar and the Almeida”. Who on earth did he think provides the public
funding for the Donmar and the Almeida? Donmar £513,000 a year; Almeida £1
million. To be honest, the Council’s logo does not help. It bears an unfortunate
resemblance to a rubber stamp – just as one of its predecessors was a red
paperclip: too small, too invisible, too well-mannered, too unmemorable, too
discreet, and if you’re not careful it looks like the stain left by a coffee-cup. If you
look at theatre or opera or music programmes of, say, thirty years ago, there’s
often a full page explaining what the Arts Council does and how it spends money
on behalf of the public. Today sponsors who have put in a fraction of the Council’s
contribution get a huge and flamboyant logo – like the breast pocket of some
ghastly blazer – and a fulsome message of praise from the chief executive or the
artistic director. Again, I never used to think this mattered but now I’m beginning
to wonder. The public funding of arts organisations and events is taken for
granted, the Arts Council itself is too tentative about its contribution – to that
extent, the logo is an accurate representation – and the net result could, if we’re
not careful, become corrosive. Let’s shout the Council’s achievements from the
rooftops and stop being so British about it. Let’s celebrate a great institution,
which Arts Councils overseas regard with envy. I’ve been to two summit meetings
of the international Arts Councils and there always comes a moment when they
turn to us for advice. My favourite moment here was talking to someone from the
National Endowment for the Arts – about a Shakespeare in American communities
project – and being told “Shakespeare – now there’s a real red meat author”.
Shakespeare meets rawhide.
When the Council was founded its logo was the unicorn: the Lion represented
solidity, strength and the heritage; the unicorn represented imagination and letting
go. This was all over the Festival of Britain – including in the Lion & Unicorn
Pavilion. When, this time last year, the papers announced that the National
Theatre on the South Bank would be opening on Sundays, they failed to mention
once that the Arts Council had given it £150,000 to make this possible. When
there was a debate challenging the ‘dumbing-down’ thesis in the arts on Start the
Week, 22 December – about the gains that have been made since the 1950s – the
Arts Council wasn’t mentioned once. Bring back the unicorn, I say.
And, connected with this question of visibility, there’s the arts and their relationship
with broadcasting organisations. We’ve seen how Maynard Keynes launched the
Arts Council on the wireless, how the Council’s origins were part of the same
impulse as founded the Third Programme in 1947. Well, the Arts Council and the
BBC remain by far the largest patrons of the arts in England – both investing
significant public funds to support artists, encourage new talent, produce original
work of high quality and engage the widest possible audience in the results. Part
of the BBC’s ‘Public Service Remit’ is “to stimulate creativity and cultural
excellence”, which chimes exactly with the Arts Council’s mission “great art for
everyone”; and the BBC has access to means of distribution far beyond the reach
of the Arts Council’s live networks. So you’d think this was a marriage made in
heaven. In 2005, we both signed a Memorandum of Understanding – or a
Concordat – at a high strategic level during the BBC’s own discussion about Public
Value and Charter renewal. But since then, things have stalled. There have been
real difficulties, too many of them, for the arts and the wider cultural sector to
establish equitable and successful partnerships, with the BBC. Too often,
squabbles about intellectual property, credit-titles, branding, digital rights, and the
after-life of programmes mean that good arts ideas and people end up in the legal
department rather than on the air. At present the Arts Council finds it easier to
deal with other channels, such as Channel 4, than with the BBC, and that can’t be
right. It seems to me to be a question of generosity of spirit – and of old
institutional habits which die hard. As I’ve said before, the last ten years have
been in anyone’s book a golden age for the arts in England – but you certainly
wouldn’t know that from mainstream television.
However, we live in hope. Yesterday, the BBC announced a new approach to the
arts, and this in itself has to be good news. The proposals include a new BBC arts
board composed of senior management from across the organisation and a
commitment to working in partnership, which if realised in practice and in a spirit of
generosity, could go some way to make these difficulties a thing of the past –
giving the arts more status and more opportunity. I must say, though, that it does
seem to be a missed opportunity in terms of real partnership not to have included
some arts people as members of that board who could bring a fresh perspective
from outside the institution. There are non-execs on the BBC Board after all – and
part of the point is to reflect, on behalf of all of us, what’s going on in the arts out
there.
PAUSE
There remain some commentators who as an unshakeable article of faith continue
to disapprove on principle of the Arts Council and all or some of its works. They
tend to come at this from four radically different perspectives.
The first is that the arts should not be publicly funded at all – and I can remember
talking to politicians and businesspeople in the early 1980s who really believed
this and maybe still do. Let the market find its own level. Forget about the patrons
of the past – the Church in the Middle Ages, the Florentine bankers in the
Renaissance, the Court in the 17th and 18th centuries, the Victorian
philanthropists, all of whom gave opportunity and confidence to serious artists.
But let’s draw a veil over that perspective. Actually, it goes back a surprisingly
long way – and many of the arguments we now respect were made in response to
it. The second – and this was suggested last year by the working party on the
arts commissioned by the Conservative Party – the second is that direct
government subsidy of at least some arts organisations would work better. That
is, subsidy implemented by ministers and career civil servants in Whitehall rather
than by people who are passionate about the arts, and who have devoted their
lives to the arts for the simple reason that they believe in them. Subsidy from a
source which believes that r-i-s-k is the ultimate four-letter word. Where central
government in effect nationalises part of the culture – the “national companies” –
in breach of Keynes’s most deeply held principle.
There are so many arguments against this, if you think about it for just a moment.
First, it is wrong to separate the 'national companies’ from everyone else –
companies which are part of the fundamental infrastructure of the arts in this
country and have a leadership role connected with the artforms in which they
operate - this would inhibit the leadership from happening, and the Arts Council
would not be able to work with them nearly as effectively or closely.
Previous discussions about this – for example in 1996: I can remember them –
have started from the very dubious premise of a desire for privileged access to the
centres of national power – and a very narrow view of the scope and quality of the
arts in the country as a whole. Well, the world has now changed – thank
goodness – the national companies are not part of the old boy network as they
once were and we should not seek to re-invent it.
Funding the ‘national’ bodies directly would involve classifying them as ‘NonDepartmental Public Bodies’ – meaning they would come within treasury pay
remits, with limits on their ability to move money across years and on the
management of their estate. Appointments to their boards would be made directly
by politicians. Would they really want to give up the relative freedom they have
now?
The recent experience of this in Scotland suggests the costs of administration
would increase three-fold – largely because it involves setting up a whole new civil
service infrastructure that doesn’t currently exist to cope with all the individual
companies separately: do the people arguing for this really want to expand the civil
service, take money away from the arts to administration, and centralise on
Whitehall? Do they really?
Believe me, I worked at the Royal College of Art when it was directly funded by the
DfES, and more recently when it was funded through an agency dedicated to
education. Dedicated is best.
The third perspective is that the Arts Council now has too broad a definition of
culture – all the way from community arts, public arts events and where the arts
touch the creative industries, right across the spectrum to the kinds of
performance which CEMA used to tour during the Second World War. I'm
unrepentant about this, too. The arts have changed and evolved just as society
has changed and evolved – and there are even lessons to be learned from
Hollywood as well. It's not a matter of ‘high’ versus ‘low’. Or of multi-culturalism
versus mono-culturalism. Or of a fall from grace since the good old days when the
Third Programme broadcast for just three hours a day, which it did in the early
days. It is a question of arts which are contemporary – and of having confidence
in the creative abilities of one's contemporaries, in a country obsessed with the
heritage. Too many populetists hark back to a golden age – muttering “I don’t
believe it” – when in reality the golden age is now.
The fourth perspective is about the function of the Arts Council itself. Some see it
as just an inert funding body, a letter-box between the Treasury, via the
Department of Culture and the arts community – whose job it is to look at the arts
landscape just as it is – and ever more shall be so – and divide the Treasury
money into equal parcels which fit into it. Not to judge but to measure. I described
this definition of the Arts Council on my arrival as Chairman – as “a cashpoint
machine with an over-complicated PIN attached”. But Maynard Keynes saw the
Arts Council as much more than this, and I completely agree with his vision. He
saw it as a development agency – although he wouldn’t have called it that –
bringing on new organisations, seeing where the action is, rewarding success –
and, yes, deciding when an organisation has run its course, as arts organisations
sometimes do; or when it will no longer benefit from public subsidy; not seeing the
arts landscape as a fixed landscape, but as an evolving one. A year ago, during
the Council’s announcements of its investments, there was a lot in the press about
this. Most people seemed to agree with the principle of redistribution while not
accepting its practical consequences. Well, the principle does have practical
consequences – not all of them very nice. They are about judgement as well as
measurement. I believe passionately that this is a key part of the Arts Council’s
role. How the decisions are to be made is another question – one that we’ve been
working on since January last – the role of peer review (a very complex issue),
more artists on the Council, a recalibration of regional and national councils,
streamlining our structures to deliver the best for the arts. At the time the Arts
Council was founded, there was concern expressed that it might be tempted to
turn itself into a trade association for artists, a kind of citadel, or that it might be
treated as a trade association. This thought came to me forcibly during the heated
debate with Equity in January 2008. An official from the union said to me, over
lunch after the public inquisition at the Young Vic, “I represent the actors”. “Do
you?” I replied. “I represent the audience as well”. That’s important. There has
been a definite shift, in policy terms, since 1946, from funding the producers of art
to funding the producers and the consumers of art – to use the economic jargon.
Keynes would I think have understood that completely, wearing his economist hat
at any rate. He also saw the Arts Council as a mapping agency – taking a bird’s
eye view of the arts – and as a place where the latest intelligence could be
discussed. Much, much more than a cashpoint machine. Or else what’s the
point? Where’s the added value as the money flows from the Department via the
Council to the arts? This added value is another of the arguments against direct
funding from Whitehall.
One aspect of the Development Agency role over the next few years is the
opportunity presented by the Olympics. We’re now halfway between winning the
bid and the opening of the Games. Keynes originally launched the Arts Council
two years before London hosted the first post-war Olympic Games – a small-scale,
make do and mend ration-book affair by today’s globally competitive standards.
This was the last Olympic Games in which art competitions were held for
architecture, literature, painting, music, sculpture and the crafts, and the results
were exhibited at the V&A. The competitions seem to have been chaotic. The
judges couldn’t agree on any medals at all for literature. No gold medals were
awarded in any category, and a Swiss gentleman managed to win both silver and
bronze – all the medals on offer – in the crafts, not easy to do in a sports event! At
a meeting of the IOC in 1949, it was sensibly thought better to have exhibitions
and festivals instead. Well, in 2012 all sorts of opportunities will present
themselves – beyond the opening ceremony and the cultural commitments made
in the original bid. What has sometimes happened in the past, by the way, since
1948 is that all sorts of arts events have been included in the bid document, to
make the city seem attractive – with most of them falling by the wayside as the
budget gets squeezed. But this time, there’s a real opportunity. If my reading
about the Festival of Britain in 1951, and my own experience of steering one of the
Zones in the Millennium Dome, if these are anything to go by, you need a single
creative ringmaster – or ringperson – with a vision, to hold such a project together
– like architect Hugh Casson in 1951 and film director Zhang Yimou in Beijing
summer 2008. At present, there are too many front doors – one called LOCOG,
one called the ODA, one called the IOC, one called DCMS, one called the Mayor’s
Office, and one called the Arts Council. Not a recipe for creative success, and
giving artists the lead. Have a single creative intelligence leading the project – and
give it to the Arts Council to run. We have just the right structure for it: national
policy, regional distinctiveness and delivery. If you make an anagram of the initials
of all the organisations involved in the Olympics, you get “sad”, “comical”, and “I’m
logo mad”. No comment.
My term as Chair of the Arts Council comes to an end in two days’ time. Over the
last five years much has happened, from the redefinition of our role as a
development agency and a clearer understanding of the ‘arm’s length’ relationship
to government to a new approach to our investment strategy, to the important
lessons learned from it and the successful refurbishment of the Festival Hall,
hundreds of other major arts centres, and the building of Sage and The Curve.
There’s been the maturing of our Creative Partnerships with schools – which have
had very tangible results, and which I helped to invent – and of our work with the
Home Office on the arts and potential young offenders. Our national office has
also been reorganised and there have been some terrific new appointments at
senior level. We’ve humanised the restructuring of 2002-4, and emphasised ‘arts’
as well as ‘council’. We’ve at last got beyond the old and fruitless ‘excellence and
access’ argument with which my term of office started. At least I hope so. We
want both. We want to fund great art and we want to have more people come to
see it. To separate the development and funding of the arts from engaging people
is nonsense. There isn't good art and accessible art. There's good art and there
are ways to make it more available while retaining its integrity as art. You bring the
two together. And then it works. To do otherwise is like separating train operation
from the operation of track. And look what happens when you do that.
And I’ve given a lot of speeches. I keep them all in hard copy, and the pile of
papers is now taller than me – like a seventh giant, one that’s made of paper.
But there have been moments when I’ve felt like the famous line from Ronald
Reagan
when he was introduced to Lech Walesa. He is said to have turned to his
presidential aide and asked "Isn't he a Communist?". "No, Mr President, he's an
anti-Communist." "I don't care what kind of Communist he is, I don't want to see
him". In some ways, you're damned if you do and you're damned if you don't.
You're damned if you exercise judgement and damned if you don't. Individual
happiness, generalised complaints. So it can be frustrating, to say the least.
During the heated debates of January 2008, I said on the radio “you certainly don’t
take on a role like this to increase your circle of friends”. That’s true, and it’s one
of the perils of Chairing the Arts Council while simultaneously working in the arts.
So why do it? The answer is contained in Keynes's original speech at that press
conference. "I do not believe it is yet fully realised what a very important thing has
happened." The Sixth Giant – poverty of aspiration – was and is in my view every
bit as serious as the other five, and it makes all the rest of it worthwhile, and worth
trying our very best to get right.