CULTURAL DEFICIT - Oxford Forum [Issue Two]

ONE OF THE most violent rows I have ever had with my close friends was on holiday in Brittany three years ago. Our drunken conversation somehow meandered round to the subject of arts funding. How disgusting it was, said my friend, that public money was given to the Royal Opera House, when the only people who went in the first place were “rich arty toffs” like me. Presumably, I snapped back, my friend wanted to keep the ROH for the rich arty toffs: without any public money only the wealthiest city bankers would be there. And so it went on along well-known, predictable lines. My friend accused me of being an elitist with my head in the clouds; I duly called him a Philistine with a chip on his shoulder.
    The decision taken in December 2004 by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to freeze arts funding is not disastrous, but it is deplorable. The arts industry in Britain is booming after several years of relative financial securit. After the post-9/11 slump, the Americans and Japanese are now back in London and our theatres, concert halls, art galleries and opera houses are full again. Artists are able to stage more experimental work, and we are moving back to the cutting edge of the global culture scene, which is where we belong. The real-terms £30m cut won’t kill the arts but it will have two effects. First it will remove that cutting edge, which exists on a financial tightrope and relies on subsidy. Second, ticket prices will rise again. The director of Arts Council England, which has just cancelled funding for 121 organisations, warned in March: “We cannot do this again”.
    Over and above these two practical concerns, the decision was symptomatic of an endemic attitude towards the arts. They don’t matter; they are at best a harmless bunch of people in long coats and scarves and at their political worst a minor irritation, a fly to be swatted. In the run-up to the election I haven’t yet heard a word about arts funding. It’s not a popular topic – in fact it’s a vote loser, because it’s shrouded in myth. First among these myths is that art is the preserve of the financial elite, Glyndebourne perhaps. But our national museums are now free; our national theatre runs a £10 season all summer; you can stand at the back of our principal opera house for a fiver. You have to be booking a pretty good seat at a pretty posh West End theatre before you encounter the same prices as Premiership football tickets, but does football provoke the same inverse snobbery? Of course not. Ironically enough, most of the shows which command high ticket prices are ‘populist’ in nature – Andrew Lloyd Webber musicals that pack houses night after night. Even on a student budget, most art in this country is affordable, and so-called ‘high art’ is even more so.
    The idea, then, that the arts are necessarily the preserve of the moneyed middle classes is nonsense. But there is a grain of truth here: audiences are predominantly white, middle-aged, and middle-class. Richard Eyre’s diaries from his days as director of the National Theatre reveal his constant worries about where to find ‘the new audience’, if indeed it exists. The problem is not one of financial reality but social perception. And of course it’s naïve to expect a group of teenage kids from the East End to roll up at Covent Garden to pay for their standing places, but the government and media certainly don’t help by labelling art elitist.
    Very broadly speaking, the American arts are unsubsidised, and work on a long-established tradition of sponsorship, while the European arts are government-funded. That is why one can sit in the front row of the Austrian national theatre for a couple of euros, and hear the Vienna Philharmonic at the Musikverrein for only a little more. In Germany there is a major producing theatre in every town of any size. Classical music thrives in France. In Italy every church is always booked up with concerts and full of ad hoc art exhibitions; operas are staged in tiny villages in the summer. Britain, meanwhile, is stuck in a strange limbo between government subsidy and corporate investment. Business isn’t quite prepared to throw its weight behind the arts – sport represents better advertising. The government can’t see any advantage to being nice other than making sure it doesn’t get slammed on TV by a famous actor.

LET’S CONFRONT THE underlying questions: why should the arts be subsidised? What practical good do they do? Well, a surprising amount. Not only are they a major employer, they also generate an enormous income through tourism and for related industries – cafes, restaurants, pubs, shops. Outside London, many rural communities survive on income from what we now call ‘heritage’, and venues like the theatre by the Lake in Cumbria have become tourist attractions in their own right. The arts do more in a hidden capacity – a thriving arts industry is indicative of a country on a roll. We only need to contemplate how much poorer a tourist destination London would be if we removed its theatres, galleries, and concert halls in order to realise that these places are far from being a drain on the state; they are in fact an investment – a loss-leader that ultimately enriches.
    The real reason why the arts deserve subsidy is more amorphous and, well, arty. It is a reason that will make no sense to hard-headed taxmen, and still less to those people who think the arts are for rich snobs who should pay for their own entertainment. It is that the better our arts are, and the more of us enjoy them, the better our country is and the better we are as people. If we want to live in a cultural desert that is all very well, but it must be a conscious decision to live in that desert.
    What does art give us? Whether it is a mirror held up to life, or a mode for entertainment, or a tool for attacking the state, art that is worth the name has one overriding function: to ask questions. Great art asks great questions; it makes us see the object as it really is. Without art we think in clichés because our knowledge is all received. We accept that A plus B equals C simply because that is the prevalent and unquestioned belief. Art may be deeply political or it may be entirely personal, but if it is good art it makes us think. No wonder governments don’t like it.
    David Hare’s recent play Stuff Happens at the National Theatre was one of a number to interrogate what happened in the run-up to the Iraq war. The last decade has seen a burgeoning of political and so-called ‘documentary’ theatre – re-enactments, trials, plays based on real events and real characters. Most of it has been even-handed but critical of the status quo. It asks questions. All of that has, ironically, flourished partly because of increases in arts funding. And art still has incredible capacity to shock – witness the Sikh riots spawned by the Birmingham Rep’s production of Bezhti – Dishonour last year, which showed sexual abuse taking place in a Sikh temple. Writers, composers and visual artists have always asked the toughest questions, and some of the world’s greatest art has been born out of the most repressive regimes: Shostakovich’s Fifth Symphony has an infamous climax which appears to be a celebration of Russian communism, but on closer inspection the supposed ‘triumphal march’ is written in a deeply ironical and critical vein.
    But art does not need to be explicitly ‘political’ to ask questions. The most classically formed of ballets, the best made play, the most Raphaelite painting – though apparently conservative in form – can still probe the most obscure regions of human life. Swan Lake, with its good and bad heroines, asks us how we can tell the difference between good and evil. An apparently trivial Noel Coward play like Private Lives investigates what love means and whether we can live with those we love. Raphael’s exquisite Madonna and Child paintings are not just about aesthetics but about the nature of maternity and the mortal’s relationship with the divine.
    If the measure of our success as a country is that we are, in Alan Milburn’s phrase, going ‘forwards not backwards’, then what does it mean to go forwards? If it is to develop an increasingly smooth-running economic machine in which we are all slightly more wealthy and healthy, and enjoy slightly better bus services, that is all very well. But nobody will look back on the year 2005 and remember the buses. The arts should stand up for themselves and make the case that they are not a sideshow, but an end in their own right. If our arts are standing still, we are an undeveloped country: a slick machine producing nothing of worth. We are asking no questions and learning nothing; we are going backwards, not forwards. So if the government really does want to live up to its own slogan it can start by giving the arts subsidy back.

[Illustration Nick Hayes]

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