Out there on the parched grass of England, or at least of the sunny south-east, culture is having a Summer of Love. The weather, in tandem with the maxi-dress renaissance and the proliferation of open-air events, has set up a kind of perfect storm for festival-style live performance.
When performing alfresco, there doesn't seem to be much concern about mixing up genres. Classical music has been incorporated into Glastonbury for a while now and English Heritage's summer concerts are happy to schedule all sorts. Blondie is followed by Rufus Wainwright and then the more orthodox picnic concert fare of a bit of Vivaldi in the grounds of Kenwood House. Audiences seem happy to eat their sandwiches in front of any of it.
But news broadcasters are a bit more worried about how they handle these categories. Is pop music truly part of the arts correspondent's brief? Or are we only needed for the bits of culture that are not quite so mainstream? Following on from the appointment last summer of Will Gompertz as the first ever BBC arts correspondent to have a wider remit to re-invigorate coverage of all things creative, we learn today that Channel 4 has appointed Matthew Cain as Channel 4's first culture editor. Like Gompertz, Cain will appear on screen as well as having a go at breathing fresh air into Channel 4 News's wider reporting of the arts.
It is as if TV news editors know there is a lot of culture going on, but aren't quite sure how to get at it all. Gompertz so far has adopted a curtain-raising approach, drawing our attention to big events before they happen (such as La Bête's first night last week). Perhaps it would sound more like news if he reported afterwards on what the critics and the public thought of a show, good and bad; more like a sports report. But then that would be to leave behind the dubious, implicit function of the arts correspondent as some sort of cheerleader for creative talent.
I am called an arts correspondent and so it's often assumed I only cover visual art. About eight years ago I could have opted to become a culture correspondent instead, but back then I thought it sounded as if it had associations with high culture. Now I am not so sure. The title chosen for Cain at Channel 4, I suspect, points to their desire to send him out to cover the whole artistic waterfront. Fine, as long as he doesn't forget the esoteric bits that don't get monitored elsewhere in the media and often end up proving the most influential and controversial.
