However deplorable one might find his self-declared socialism or dining habits, the Mayor of New York at least has an eye-cathing approach to opera. Last month, Zohran Mamdani, announced a partnership with the Metropolitan Opera to give away 70,000 tickets to New Yorkers who have never attended, declaring that ‘opera is one of the greatest art forms we have’. He believes that one of the world’s great cultural institutions should be experienced by more people: no more, no less.
Britain has no settled idea of what cultural policy is supposed to accomplish
Compare this with Britain. The Government has found the time to produce a framework for culture and local authorities. It would like the latter to have a larger role in deciding what gets supported, how cultural provision is organised and, in time, how money is spent. To that end, enamoured with its own processes and catch-phrases, the new National Cultural Framework speaks of ‘place’, ‘partnership’, ‘ecosystems’ and learning ‘what works’, asking local authorities to begin with ‘what is rather than what should be’.
The mirage of practicality should ring alarms bells for anyone used to following Whitehall economy of ideas. Because ‘what works’ is an incredibly vague threshold for assessing what culture is, let alone what it is for.
A full theatre works, presumably. So does a museum which draws tourists. But an orchestra performing Tippett to half a house may also be doing precisely what we keep orchestras for. A conservatoire cannot be judged by the same measure as a community arts centre. Nor should a museum collection be shaped by the preferences of its current visitors alone. Before asking what works, one has to decide what the work is.
But the prior difficulty, which no one in politics seems to cares about, is that Britain has no settled idea of what cultural policy is supposed to accomplish. Lacking a clear idea of what cultural policy is supposed to accomplish is not quite the same thing as having no cultural policy. We have plenty of it. Over the past few decades an extensive machinery has developed around the arts: arm’s-length bodies, local authorities, trusts, charities, lottery distributors, funding agreements, monitoring regimes and strategies. What has faded is confidence about the object at the centre of all this administration.
Since the late twentieth century, and especially under New Labour’s ‘creative industries’ drive, cultural policy has increasingly justified art and culture through benefits external to them: ‘access’ and ‘participation’, ‘wellbeing’, ‘growth’, ‘regeneration’, ‘inclusion’, and the currently very trendy ‘place’. It has less – if anything – to say about whether a work is good, whether a tradition should survive, or whether an institution knows what it is doing.
Just as importantly, local government has lost much of the capacity required to assume new cultural responsibilities. Expertise is uneven and money scarce. Devolving power under those circumstances will amount to little more than devolving problems, if not creating some more.
In an ecosystem, everything has a function by virtue of being there. Ferns do not have to justify themselves against oaks. Applied to culture, the metaphor has the advantage of making judgement (as in ‘taste’, a controversial concept in the art sector, if you can believe it) disappear. The vocabulary shifts attention from the work to the structures around it, such as institutions, audiences, networks, and capacity. The cultural artefact itself into something curiously incidental.
Yet public spending cannot work like this. As soon as money must be allocated, the instruction to begin with ‘what is’ rather than ‘what should be’ collapses. Funding one organisation rather than another is a judgement about what should exist. It also introduces another bias. What works tends to be what has survived long enough to prove that it works.
In theory, institutions themselves should already be doing much of the work of assessing ‘what works’, from museums that collect and preserve to conservatoires and art schools that teach. All these functions, and more, require knowledge accumulated over time. Local knowledge matters too, but it is different in nature. Knowing that a town lacks rehearsal space does not tell you how to develop a collection or whether an orchestra is good.
France offers a useful contrast. Cultural administration there has been extensively decentralised, but the regional DRACs remain arms of the Ministry of Culture, working with local authorities while retaining specialist expertise and a national conception of the state’s cultural responsibilities. The arrangement descends from a much older habit of public involvement in academies, collections, artistic training and institutions. One need not admire every result to see the advantage: France can devolve decisions without asking each locality to invent cultural policy from scratch.
What the British government proposes today is something stranger. Having become wary of cultural judgement at the centre, it would pass more responsibility to localities, where success is increasingly legible through participation, audience reach, economic impact and other measurable effects.
Whitehall’s record on artistic taste hardly inspires reverence. But a national culture is more than the sum of local needs assessments, any more than a repertoire can be built by asking audiences what they already like. Some things have to be preserved, taught, or commissioned before anyone thinks to ask for them. Yet this is precisely what the state has mismanaged for quite some time. Devolution does not resolve the question of what culture is for. It simply moves that question downwards, without a budget, and without a clear answer.
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