| Thank you for the invitation to speak to you today. It is a considerable responsibility for a non-musician to talk to a hall full of musicians. Wisely, your President set me a specifically non-musical subject to address and I will do my best to say something that will be relevant to your everyday work. I will set out the framework within which government and opposition arts policies are developing and will suggest ways in which this will affect everyone in the world of the arts and of music.
While I have been thinking about today’s event, I have been randomly collecting articles about music from the press – there’s been nothing systematic about it. You will probably take it all for granted; you will have noticed some or all of these as well. But there’s an awful lot of it around. For instance, last December we thought we were approaching Nirvana; every school child, according to the Education Secretary Ed Balls, is to have access to five hours of cultural learning and activity every week. Good. At the risk of sounding carping, one has to ask:
‘What culture, what learning, what activity? And how much money?’ We wait for answers, though first indications about the sums of money available are not reassuring.
In January, we read of a new Taser stun gun – that’s the one the riot police use to control violent crowds without shooting them. The latest model will have an MP3 player and earphones built in. Just think of it – what tracks would you load onto your player to divert you while fighting off an assailant or subduing a violent crowd? How did law enforcers keep their sanity without this facility? I do hope it is stylishly designed or it will never become a fashion ‘must-have’.
Later that month, Tasmin Little announced she was recording a new album,
The Naked Violin, and would make it available for free on her website. Her justification was characteristically feisty: ‘I want to prove once and for all that the only reason why people don’t sample classical music is that they don’t have open minds, or they are lazy’. Well, that’s unfashionably fighting talk.
Also in January, we heard of the Yellow Lounge in Berlin. DJs spin classical discs as video artists project edgy images on the screens. Later the Mahler Chamber Orchestra play a set – Schumann’s Violin Concerto and the Jupiter. It’s a classical rave. The young British violinist Daniel Hope is there:
‘It’s fantastic to play to a room of young people who will listen to John Cage and Xenakis’. (Will someone follow suit in London?)
In February, Harry Birtwistle was awarded the Instrumental Solo Category at the British Composer awards.
‘There are thousands of children out there who don’t know what music is; for them only
music which has a drum mechanism with it is music’. Last year, when he won an award at the Novello Awards, Birtwistle was asked what he thought of contemporary pop:
‘Why does it have to be so
f***ing loud?’
In March, we caught up with Alex Ross, music critic of the
New York Times, whose daily blog enthrals readers with his discoveries of anything and everything from the classical to the most current and innovative.
‘I’m not trying to manufacture a canon,’ he says, ‘I’m just offering a lot of possibilities and openings. It’s the whole mechanism of the link; it’s endless’. Please note – the music critic of the
New
York Times.
Daniel Barenboim’s survey of the Beethoven sonatas became a huge public event. And he uses his artistic position to try to influence the tragic politics of the Middle East. As he complained when a Palestinian musician was banned by Israeli security forces from performing in a concert:
‘A Baroque music concert in a church in Gaza has nothing to do with security’.
And Margaret Hodge. Well, I don’t have to remind you. She seems more worried about who she is sitting next to than with what is being performed. I liked Steven Isserlis’s letter, attacking
‘the mindless twitterings of people who understand absolutely nothing about music’, adding:
‘She wouldn’t dare to attack a concert by a rap artist for failing to appeal to the vast majority of British listeners for fear that it might lose her votes’.
There has been more, much more. Whoever thought that music and the musical world wasn’t central to people’s lives? It’s all around us. We can almost take it for granted.
What we can’t take for granted is the economic and policy environment in which we all work. Over the last six months, decisions have been taken, policy directions set, and new suggestions made about the arts which will influence our world and could reshape it dramatically. I’m referring to three things in particular: the public spending round announcements; the government-commissioned McMaster Report; and the Conservative-commissioned Arts Task Force report which I chaired. I’ll take them in that order.
Comprehensive Spending Review
The results of the government’s public spending review were announced in October 2007. For months beforehand, artistic blood had been made to run cold with ever more threatening warnings of cuts to come:
‘Prepare for 5% off everything’ was one of the less alarming.
‘Or possibly 7%!’ The arts world, to its credit, refused to
be intimidated, hung together, argued back and made a strong case not only for funding to be at least maintained, but for the absolute value of the arts to be recognised. ‘Being good’ was held up as the
best reason for keeping up funding, not as something to be
apologetic about.
In October, Arts Council England came out of this process with a 1.1% increase over inflation over the next three years. The DCMS’s own capital allocation for museums and galleries was increased by 147% in cash terms, largely for Tate Modern and the British Museum. So far so good; relief all round. It was a ‘we can live with that’ sort of settlement.
In another part of the landscape, things were darker – the overruns on the 2012 Olympics had lead to another raid on lottery funds supposedly dedicated to the arts. A huge tranche of formerly arts directed lottery funding was diverted to sport – no less than £112 million. Lamentably, much of those funds had previously been directed to the smaller arts organisations, so the diversion of funding damaged the more modest organisations disproportionately.
Yet the 2007 public spending settlement is important: the first building block in the scene in which we will all live for the next three years. First, there was an increase in Arts Council core funding. Second, the collective persuasive powers of the arts community had an impact on government decisions. Third, the Treasury at least nodded towards the possibility that the most valuable impacts of the arts could not be measured – that is to say, they did not have to prove that they were first and foremost instruments of economic growth or social change. Fourthly, the new secretary of state James Purnell signalled that the spending round would be less ‘prescriptive’ – i.e. there would be less telling arts organisations what to do – but would be based on a few headline priorities rather than scores of objectives and targets, what he rightly termed ‘targetolatry’.
So the financial framework is settled. What of the policy framework? Here, I’m going to step out of chronology and look at the McMaster report which appeared in January this year. Commissioned by James Purnell, it gives us a clear view of what government intentions and policies towards the arts will be at least until the end of this parliament.
The McMaster Report
Though the report will always be associated with Sir Brian McMaster, another person deserves recognition for the role he played in masterminding it. Alan Davey was an Assistant Secretary at the DCMS responsible for the arts. For at least a year before the report appeared, Davey had been privately lamenting the fact that the Arts Council seemed not to understand the importance of values in the arts and of the need for excellence in what the arts did. They seemed more concerned with what they called ‘outcomes’ of an incidental kind – do they improve education, increase social cohesion, advantage ethnic minorities – rather than with the overriding need for the arts to be excellent in themselves.
By the time McMaster began his inquiry, he was partnered by Alan Davey who had then just become the next Director of Arts Council England. Nothing could have signalled more clearly, if signals were needed, that a huge change of policy was in the air. After all, for the better part of the previous decade, the policy language that emanated from New Labour’s DCMS was filled with the language of management speak – objectives, outcomes, deliverables – aiming at results that had nothing directly to do with the arts. The arts were not valuable in themselves, it was held, but were valuable and fundable only if they were useful in achieving other ends. The arts, in other words, were simply instruments of social and economic policy.
Heavily trailed in advance, McMaster’s title said almost all that was needed.
Supporting Excellence in the Arts: From Measurement to Judgement. In the Foreword, the then Secretary of State, James Purnell, threw down the governmental gauntlet.
‘The time has come to reclaim the word “excellence” from its historic, elitist undertones and to recognise that the very best of art and culture is for everyone’.
Again, I do not wish to carp, but the only people who used
‘excellence’ as an elitist boo-word were New Labour and its outriders. If reclamation was needed, then it was from Labour’s own side. Still, the word has now been reclaimed, revalidated, and properly restored to its place at the pinnacle of how we judge and value the arts. Interestingly, in the glossary of terms at the back of the McMaster report, the word ‘excellence’ is not defined. But in his own conclusion, McMaster calls for a
‘more confident articulation of the concept of excellence – from government and funders to artists and cultural organisations’. So please set to it. If we don’t shape robust
definitions of our own, then someone else will produce some very tendentious ones.
The report drew a broad welcome but raised many questions. The National Campaign for the Arts did indeed want rather more definition of the term ‘excellence’ and was rightly anxious about a timetable for putting it into practice. Local authority representatives were worried about the idea of taking risks –
‘the right to fail is a very hard one to sell to councillors’. You bet! And they saw no reference to the idea of community. Another local authority voice feared that a fixed idea of excellence could reinforce a ‘culture is not for us’ mentality. The independent cultural think tank, Mission Models Money, thought McMaster did not recognise the complexity of the issues he addressed and was alarmed by what it called the
‘language of the patrician old school of “gatekeeper”’!
The Tory Shadow Arts Minister, Ed Vaisey, attacked it as a rather bland woolly document, combining hubris with bathos … quite an achievement!
What was less well noticed was the comparatively small but pointed reference in the report to the role of television in creating an audience for the arts.
‘The decline in the provision of cultural programming through the public service broadcasters is an issue that few can have failed to notice and I believe that it has been to the detriment of
public understanding of the arts and the depth of engagement in cultural activity’.
In the Guardian, the TV director John Wyver noted that TV channel commissioners demanded that a programme must establish total understanding with the audience in the first 30 seconds, otherwise the audience will zap to another channel. Wyver noted approvingly McMaster’s observation that
‘too many organisations are trying to second guess what their audiences want and are therefore cheating them of the deepest and most meaningful experiences’.
I’ve already made it clear that I welcome the strategic shift away from demanding the arts to be ‘instrumental’ in creating a better society and a stronger economy. While definitions do matter, at least ‘excellence’ sends a clear signal about what is expected and intended. We can’t over-estimate the importance of this shift. How the Arts Council puts it into practice is another matter. We will watch carefully.
Yet McMaster is far from perfect and has probably received a far softer press than he deserves. Many of his less reported recommendations are dubious and questionable. Let me question them for a moment.
‘I recommend that innovation and risk taking should be at the centre of the funding and assessment framework for every organisation, large or small’. So no risk taking, no innovation = no funding? It’s hardly that simple. I can see what the recommendation is after but it’s far too sweeping in its formulation.
‘Funding bodies and arts organisations should prioritise excellent diverse work that truly grows out of and represents the Britain of the 21st century’. Does he really mean ‘prioritise’? Be part of the world we live in, of course, but the commitment to the 21st century above the preceding ones sounds glib and facile.
‘The Arts Council should have an international strategy with the British Council’. This is a very bad idea. The Arts Council should be encouraged to do its work nationally far better than it does before
it spreads its wings internationally. And the British Council itself is finding considerable difficulty in defining what an international arts strategy should be in any case. Someone in the arts world should mastermind an international arts strategy, but just at the moment,
it is far from clear who it should be.
‘Every cultural organisation’s board should contain at least two artists and practitioners’. This sounds attractive but having sat on boards where this applied, I must puncture the balloon. Whether an arts board works well or badly is unrelated to the presence of artists and practitioners. So-called ‘suits’ are quite smart enough to work out that they are advising an organisation that is not a business but should be business-like. Artists often find it hard to make hard financial decisions that may inevitably involve artistic compromise.
‘Funding bodies should be involved in the appointment processes of the organisations they fund’. Oh no, they shouldn’t. Where did this come from? This would lead to a degree of intrusion into the managerial responsibility of the organisation – and funding bodies are not managerially responsible. I have had direct experience of how this recommendation would work in reality. In one major instance, our funders heartily endorsed a very senior appointment; but when it proved to be less of a success than anyone hoped, the funders very publicly disclaimed any responsibility for their part in the decision. They couldn’t be seen for dust.
There are many other dubious recommendations, many recommending new kinds of, or extra, activity, involving major additional resources but not indicating how they should be funded. Let’s leave it there.
I’m not, incidentally, saying anything about the way the Arts Council allocated grants under its new policy. That is a slightly different story, but I will happily answer questions about it.
Conservative Arts Task Force
Now let me turn to the report of the Arts Task Force that David Cameron commissioned more than a year ago, which reported in October 2007, and which he invited me to chair as an independent figure. We were less concerned with high principle, valuable though that is, and more with how the arts can be better run. I don’t claim this makes it a better report, but it certainly offers a different and additional view. We called it
A New Landscape for the Arts.
First, how should central Government run the arts? At the DCMS,
we suggest separating sport from arts. They are ill-sorted bed fellows, with sport – especially the Olympics – always pinching the bigger share of the blanket. It’s got to stop. I know this makes the Culture Department too small to warrant a seat at Cabinet but it could be strengthened by having the Creative Industries attached to it.
We also believe that the DCMS – in its new form – should have direct responsibility for the national ‘regularly funded organisations’ – the big performing arts houses. The objection to this is that it abolishes the cherished so-called ‘arms length’ policy. No one has ever explained to me why the national museums – the British Museum, V&A, National Gallery, Tate – can deal directly with DCMS, and the equivalent performing arts institutions can’t. In fact, if you ask the national museums if they would rather have an intermediary body such as the Museums and Libraries Association dealing with their contacts with government to give them so-called ‘arms length’ protection, they run screaming.
Such a change immediately impacts on the nature and role of Arts Council England. About time too, you may say. Any body that can dream up the current notorious Clause 22 in their funding application forms (the one about declaring the gender inclination of the members of the applicant body) surely has a death wish. Despite that, Arts Council England does have a role to play.
All the evidence the Task Force heard suggested that regional arts councils did a good job. We believe Arts Council London should behave more like its fellow regional councils which, once the major performing institutions are removed from their control, they could do. The outer London boroughs, for instance, badly need an injection of thinking about arts provision. Apart from anything else, Arts Council London’s record of contributing positively to any of the recent crises affecting the major institutions has been patchy, to say the least.
We think Boards of Trustees and Governors should suffer less interference from government – especially about their composition and functions; after all they are legally constituted bodies, regulated by the Charity Commission.
We think local authorities should play a bigger role in supporting the arts. This is achieved not by making it yet another statutory obligation but by including support for the visual and performing arts as a significant part of the ‘Culture Bloc’ – that’s the technical term for the way local authorities’ efficiency and effectiveness is measured. Local authorities care about the grading they get in these assessments. As things stand, the ‘culture bloc’ includes sport, swimming, leisure and parks, but not the arts as we would recognise them. You can provide no performing or visual arts but still be rated an effective local authority within the terms of this way of measuring.
The City of London Corporation, funders of the Barbican, recently risked getting a low score in the culture bloc assessment. Despite being the third largest funder of the arts in Britain, they ranked low on swimming pools and parks. What idiocy!
We believe Gift Aid needs to be drastically simplified and that the Treasury’s puritanical aversion to giving donors the tax benefits on their charitable gifts in their lifetime has to be overcome.
In education, we believe that what is taught about the arts is as important as what can be experienced from taking part in arts activity. We believe that the benefits of technology to the arts are still imperfectly understood and that many organisations need help and advice in ways that they can harness technology to their aid.
Those are some of the key features of this new landscape for the arts that we set out for the Tories.
Many, most, cost no money. Many, most, could be put into practice very quickly. If you say it doesn’t sound very much like a Tory document, you would be right. But watch what they do with it.
What I think has been less noticed is that the McMaster and Task Force reports are not antithetical documents. They are complementary; they fit. Take the broad philosophical statements from McMaster and the detailed practicality from the Task Force and you have a very good arts policy, joined up, broad ranging, coherent, practical, with a strategic vision and a tactical awareness. Who will join them up first?
What does it add up to? A restructured DCMS: more C, less S. Ministers must stop worrying that sport is popular with everyone – especially the Olympics – and that ‘culture’ isn’t. The Blair/Campbell administration famously did not ‘do God’. Neither did they ‘do’ culture! They might reap unexpected rewards if they ‘did’ what they believed in.
A restructured ACE – more concentration on the regional; more advanced on how to harness technology, more advice on how to maximise tax benefits; an ACE of small things rather than huge projects. ACE as enabler rather than as supervisor.
Local authorities which take on board the opportunity offered by encouraging the arts. Costs are involved, but they must see there are rewards for the community too. A tax regime that rewards givers in their lifetime rather than when they are in their grave. A real breakthrough in harnessing technology. These are the features of a new landscape for the arts.
But we can’t leave it all to the politicians and civil servants. What’s left for us to do? A lot.
I’ve been struck recently by the number of times that those involved in the arts and humanities – both as practitioners and as academics – have spoken about their fear of marginalisation, the pressure on their resources, the poor understanding of their role and purposes. An air of defeatism leading to neglect or outright hostility has coloured what they felt and had to say.
I offer only one observation, and one lesson. The defeatists are the most likely to be defeated. A daft policy becomes a daft reality if no one says it is daft. Daft policies are put forward by civil servants – with two eyes and two legs – and politicians (same applies). They do not know more than you do, usually less. They are not cleverer than you – usually less. What they suggest is usually a try on, rather than reasoned policy. Treating it like unchallengeable tablets of stone only concedes defeat. It’s a surrender signal. Consultation, challenge, contradiction are the stuff of debate. Give them up and you surrender the only weapons you have. We do it too often. And we do face some unbelievably negative attitudes.
Fiona Millar, you will recall, is the partner of Tony Blair’s former press secretary, Alistair Campbell. Last Saturday, she reviewed a book in the
Guardian about so-called ‘hyper parents’ – competitive people who will do anything to make their children great. Millar confessed to having been a short lived, would-be hyper parent thinking that playing Mozart to her unborn child could turn him/her into a violinist. She gave that up. But her review continues:
‘It is now a family joke in a household where no child has ever picked up an instrument and most forms of culture are considered, by the male members at least, as being “for losers”, especially when the alternative is a good night in watching sport’.
Think about it. First, she’s proud of it. Second, she only played Mozart because she wanted her child to be a success – not because Mozart might be richly valuable in his own right. Third, if you need an explanation for the Blair government’s attitude to the arts, there it is. Culture is ‘for losers’. Straight from the Downing Street couch.
I’ve got a message for Fiona Millar. Stop being frightened of being a loser. Give old Mozart a go, and all those other weirdos with foreign names. You might be a better journalist than you are if you did!
But we will continue to bother about the arts. Why? Because they matter to us and to large numbers of people everywhere. Let’s never forget that. We must continue to stand up for what we believe in, for what we know is good, especially when the attitudes questioning us are so negative. We have nothing to lose.
|
SIR
JOHN TUSA