The best bits of Boris Johnson's approach to culture in the capital are those that seek to break down barriers. He insists there is no reason why kids from poor homes steeped only in rap and trash TV shouldn't appreciate or even play the cello. In his Telegraph column - ker-ching! - today he calls for the children of England to be taught more classic English poetry, and not only in the out-of-town grammar or independent schools he seems to prefer visiting. His culture director Munira Mirza echoes his line. She recently explained to me that the Mayor's forthcoming Story of London festival will seek to show how the histories of the capital's different communities merge and overlap.
It's good to nurture broad horizons and appreciation of the creativity and customs of people different from ourselves. They are the ultimate objectives of multiculturalism, or ought to be. They are liberal objectives too, though Boris is a cultural liberal in the same sense that he is an economic one. He believes that people's cultural lives, like their lives as a whole, are the richer the less they are regulated by the state and ideology: by "nannying", "political correctness" and so on.
Mirza is with him there too. She and Johnson would, I think, argue that their interventions in London's culture market are of a different (indeed, truly liberal) kind: encouraging participation, asserting the intrinsic value of the arts over their deployment as instruments of social policy, enabling London's cultural institutions to go more effectively about their business rather than telling them what to do.
Again, there are things to welcome here. Tony Sewell touches on them in The Voice:
Mirza was bang on the money when she said: "Working-class students may be steered towards popular culture like hip hop, new media and film on the basis that they will find older art forms such as opera or ballet irrelevant." She also said this approach was "extremely patronising".
But Sewell's argument continues:
When it comes to access to the classics, it's not just knowing Shakespeare and the Greeks - what about jazz? There is so much to learn from Louis Armstrong, John Coltrane and Miles Davis. What about the classical folk culture of the Caribbean?
Sewell is writing specifically about black school children. But his point highlights general aspects of the Johnson approach that could be characterised as illiberal and quite the opposite of culturally liberating. Would the Mayor categorise Kind Of Blue among music's classics? If not, why not? We can applaud Boris enlisting the support of Julian Lloyd Webber in encouraging musicianship among young Londoners, but we might wonder if it even occurred to him to see if, say, Courtney Pine too was available. If his objective is to raise the artistic aspirations of the young, why so narrow a definition of the higher artistic forms?
We could, of course, now revisit that related and equally fraught debate about what constitutes "higher" and how valid or productive are distinctions between high and low in the first place. I think I'll pass on that for now, except to note that when I asked Boris if the Story of London will be an exercise in popular culture or posh he declared the opposition false. He implies the same in his column:
I propose universal saying lessons in English poetry. I propose that this should involve learning two or three poems a term, off by heart. And if necessary let's put the best declaimers on TV and get them judged by Simon Cowell.
Point taken, but the argument is still not entirely convincing. For all the relish with which he starred on Have I Got News For You, I think it's accurate to call Boris a cultural elitist in the sense that he regards some cultural forms as self-evidently inherently superior to others, and that those are the ones he should most encourage.
I don't think that damns him. After all, don't we all have our favourites? Boris is no less entitled to compile a hierarchy than anyone else. What's more, he has a mandate to promote one. My misgivings are less about any posh/pop pecking order than about the potential effectiveness of the Johnson-Mirza mission to challenge what they see as preachiness, condescension and "dumbing down".
Are English poetry and Western classical music the only "difficult" bits of culture working-class children of whatever ethnic origin might benefit from being put in closer touch with? Aren't some film and television "difficult" too? And, what the hell, isn't the genius of some popular culture that it communicates complexity with a vivid economy that only appears to be "easy"?
Boris declaims:
Some will say it is a defect of the corpus of English poetry that much of the best stuff tends to be by dead white males. I say that I don't give a flying fig. We are in a Kulturkampf, my friends, and the barbarians are winning.
I don't give a flying fig either. But barbarians have written a few decent lines too.
