Let me introduce a very special person. Wealthy, influential, powerful, able to command armies, populations and indeed artists: the Archduke Heldenwurst was the divine ruler of a small Germanic statelet in the late eighteenth and early nineteenth centuries. The Archduke was not just a consumer of artistic product, he was a participant in creative projects (he played the cello). He paid the salaries of his own orchestra and commissioned the great composers, painters and writers. Only one direct equivalent of the Archduke exists today: the Sultan of Oman, who has his own symphony orchestras and concert halls. In the West at least, that age is past. So, who are the archdukes now?
The Arts Councils, our Trusts and Foundations, our Local Authorities and our sponsors are the patrons; arts and other organisations, and some individuals, are our commissioners; countless amateur and professional artists and groups are our performers; ticket-buyers and consumers of the arts in various media, new and old, are our audience.
Politicians would like to think they are New Archdukes, but in fact they are the New Archdukes’ butlers. This sounds derogatory, but it’s not: the butler has huge power in a household to manage matters, decree spending and organise the staff. More on politicians later.
Terms of engagement Arts Council England has just produced (though at the time of writing, not yet finalised or published) a report on what it has started to call ‘public engagement’. The document is concerned about meeting the needs of archdukes who do not see the arts as ‘relevant’ to them. RFOs will be required to report on the numbers of people engaging with the arts, and to show evidence of audience research and development activities. Perhaps more challengingly, it seems to imply that organisations will have to adapt their artistic policies. They may be asked to
develop “agreed steps to further understand the impact and relevance of the organisation’s artistic programme, if required, and/or agreed steps to make the organisation’s product relevant to its current and potential audience”. Look out of the window – and there’s a crowd of archdukes as far as the eye can see.
Buying the product of, and participating in, artistic and creative activities is for most people easier and cheaper in the UK than it has ever been before, relative to people’s income. The idea that opera tickets are expensive can be blown apart by a simple glance at a website, or by buying the Sun newspaper. The BBC offers record-breaking free downloads of newly-minted live recordings from the Proms. It is the equivalent of the cheap flight – we can all go to Ibiza. We now know that the barriers are psychological rather than financial. The sight of Goldie ecstatically conducting the Intermezzo from Cavelleria Rusticana should tell us that the mental barriers can melt away. We just need to find the right kind of energy to do it.
Definitions and definability But we are on shifting sands. We have to know what we are talking about, yet wherever we look, definitions are harder to pin down. What are the arts? A few years ago, street dance, video-gaming and DJ-ing wouldn’t have had a look-in. Now the range of creative activities which we have to consider has ballooned. Can we tell whether achievements in the new art-forms are excellent or not? Will the archdukes be the ones to decide?
The ‘creative industries’, as defined by our politicians and policy wonks, and embraced by us, encompass everything from the orchestral oboist, to the fashion designer, to the web-master. Is someone buying a ticket to ‘Batman’ or a new handbag, or setting up a website engaging with the arts too? How can we tell?
The so-called museum culture, raged against for so long, is being left behind – but is that an entirely good thing? We are in a faster-moving age than we have ever been – the rate of change in technology means that much of our knowledge becomes obsolete within months and must constantly be renewed. And yet that technology was used a few days ago to offer the public a download of a live performance of Vaughan Williams’s Flos Campi, written in the 1920s, played by Lawrence Power on a viola made in the 1590s. Just because the present is exploding around us, and the future sucking us into its embrace, doesn’t mean that past has disappeared. The very phrase ‘museum culture’ can no longer sustain its meaning when you look at how museums have evolved in the past two decades. We can afford to relax and look upon the ‘museum’ of past Western cultural achievement as a treasure-house, which is still being worked on.
The idea that we should somehow go completely virtual, knock down the concert halls, make schools obsolete, and so on, was put into question only a few months ago, when ACE put the future of a whole range of arts organisations at risk during their funding review. Thousands signed up to save their local theatres – the Derby Playhouse and the Northcott in Exeter among them. We have to tread the very narrow path between welcoming and facilitating the new, and preserving and renewing the old. Feel the astonishing, reckless creative energy of the teenage digital artist who works mainly on YouTube to blow the minds of his or her contemporaries. Feel the equally astonishing, highly disciplined and refined energy of the 75-year-old Bernard Haitink, working with the LSO to hold eight thousand people breathless in the palm of their collective hand with a performance of Shostakovich’s Eighth Symphony. The former does not supersede the latter: it joins it.
In the pantry I’ve been talking to several politicians – butlers – lately. Most know next to nothing about the way the arts world works. It’s sad, but it’s true. They all sincerely love
the arts, and some are very knowledgeable about them. Yet Margaret Hodge (Arts Minister) felt able to tell me several times during a recent interview that “arts organisations must see themselves as social enterprises”. Jeremy Hunt (Shadow Culture Secretary) said that the best arts training was to be found in independent schools. What planet have they been on?! Hopefully the new Heritage Minister for Wales, a writer for TV, will be somewhat more in the know. However, there are a number of things that all arts politicians want out of us.
1. To please the general public.. They all love the idea of McMaster’s ‘free week’ because it would be a big win and gain votes. The logistics do not seem to concern them – how to reach still-virgin audiences, the necessary research and follow-up, whether it will work, and what all the non-funded arts organisations should do that week – get a cheap ticket to Ibiza, perhaps. 2. To appear to be better able than other parties to get good value for money out of the arts. Leftists and centrists do this by ensuring that the arts can be shown to achieve good things for society which would cost more by other methods. Rightists (and we’ll probably be dealing with them before long) do this by getting rich people and businesses to pay for ‘elite’ work and let the arts councils mop up the ‘community’ side. Both now want to move towards “the American model” where archdukes of all conditions start donating to the arts – from fifty quid to a few million. They also like bigging up the achievements of the creative sector in order to enhance Brand UK – almost as good as the Royal Family. 3. To get their hands on the economic potential of the creative industries, and to be able to enhance their own political capital by associating themselves with their development. The UK government is hampered by having allowed responsibility for culture and the creative industries to be devolved to the national parliaments, in the period just before it was realised at the top table that they weren’t just an embarrassing burden on the taxpayer. This means
that it can only influence cultural and creative policy directly in England: it is forced to negotiate on unaccustomed ground against strong nationalist feelings when it wants collaboration from Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland. (Incidentally, while the DCMS covers only England, the DCSF covers both England and Wales, and the DIUS (Department for Innovation, Universities and Skills) and the BERR (Department for Business Enterprise and Regulatory Reform) cover the whole of the UK. Oops.) There is also insufficient networking between the four nations. We now have four different models which aren’t learning much from each other.
There may also be an awareness that the development resources and cash poured into UK sport, which has been reaping such a glowing harvest over the summer, could be a model for the arts and creative industries. Nah – I made that up. No way are the arts, or training for the arts, ever going to get that much attention.
What then is the major change that arts organisations need to embrace for the future? Developing a new aspect to their relationships with participants and attenders must be paramount. But remember that though the archdukes – and the butlers – are powerful, some may be ignorant. It is not ‘elitist’ or patronising to say so. The tasks of educate and enable, and to create, recreate and preserve excellent arts both ancient and modern are still there, however unfashionable certain aspects of that idea may currently be. The challenge is to respond to the new without bowing to faddism or allowing our work to subordinate itself to outside agendas. We must retain a belief in the importance of our calling.