Ed. Munira Mirza (2006, Policy Exchange, ISBN 0-9551909-0-8)
Post-war British governments, suggests the political scientist David Marquand, have been successively moralist and hedonist in nature (1). The 1990s Major government was remarkably hedonist introducing the National Lottery, David Mellors Ministry of Fun and Majors own vision of a society sipping warm beer in the invincible green suburbs(2). In contrast, the Blair government has reverted to moralism in which social justice has to be accompanied by social responsibility or replaced by an ASBO. Just as arts organisations have started to adapt to Blairs practical instrumentalism, a bunch of sharp-eyed analysts and academics argue that claims that the arts can deliver government social policy objectives are unquantifiable, intrinsically harmful and dishonest.
Literature on the role of the arts in an increasingly diverse and changing society is fairly thin on the ground and Culture Vultures is thus a welcome addition. James Heartfield gives a delicious and plausible de-construction of government creative industries policy. Sara Selwood provides a useful re-iteration of her concerns about the reliability of factual evidence. And, in a deep and troublesome piece, Andrew Brighton argues that the Arts Council has become progressively politicised and, through this, emasculated, with damaging effects for the integrity of art and the artist.
But despite periodic perceptive observations, Culture Vultures is maddeningly uneven and, worryingly for a serious book, has an exaggerated and partisan tone about it. Josie Appleton, Eleonora Belfiore and Munira Mirza writing on public art, social impacts and arts and health, all call for reliable evidence to support claims made for the social power of the arts whilst peppering their critiques with unsupported assertions. They bemoan the creeping instrumentalism of arts policy without providing any credible evidence of a negative impact on the arts institutions they claim it affects. Have any arts companies closed because the government wants them to reach a new and wider audience? Have artists and arts companies ceased to create interesting new work? Or has a more socially responsive direction actually opened up new possibilities, new partners and new audiences? On these important questions, this book is worryingly silent.
But Culture Vultures biggest failing is, I suggest, one of human understanding. Our nineteenth century forefathers who created a new Jerusalem on which much of todays culture is built, did so not from cast iron instrumental proof but from a prosleytising belief in the moral value of culture that has echoed down the subsequent decades(3). Proof is frequently troublesome but it counts for little without belief. The governments instrumental populism is far from faultless and the analysis shows their claims of cultures social impact are full of puff and fudge. But to suggest that the public sector should cease supporting arts programmes in hospitals, public places and for socially disadvantaged groups because it lacks cast iron quantitative evidence of impact threatens, surely, to take us back to a 1950s cultural ethos of few but roses.
Review by Paul Kelly, Principal Arts Officer, Plymouth City Council, who writes in a personal capacity.
1. Marquand, D. & Seldon, A. (Eds) (1996) The Ideas That Shaped Post-War Britain,
Fontana Press
2 John Major quoted in Henry, I (2001) The Politics of Leisure Policy, Palgrave
3 Hunt, T, (2004) Building Jerusalem, Phoenix Press, chapters 2 and 8