Up and down the UK, arts organisations are proving to be models of competence, ingenuity and integrity. They are creating new communities on the web, like the Edinburgh international book festival, where the usual tented village has been swapped for a studio, and fellowship between readers and writers is being recreated in chat rooms rather than chats in the book-signing queue. They are combining live performance in foyers and bars with a presence online, like the Bristol Old Vic. They are teaming up with partners, as London’s Wigmore Hall is doing this autumn with BBC Radio 3, broadcasting and livestreaming concerts from an otherwise empty concert hall.
Compare this with what is happening to arts policy in Westminster and the contrast would be laughable were it not so depressing: here bungling, ignorance and indifference are the watchwords, and the only creativity appears to be in inventing new ways of engendering chaos.
It should be said at once that the overwhelming majority of arts organisations should, and do, consider public health to be the most important guiding factor for their activities. No one wants to imperil the health and wellbeing of audiences, artists, staff or the wider community; a desire to “get back to work” is tempered by the caveat “when and only when it is safe to do so”.
Even so, they do require, as a baseline, clarity on how and why decisions are being made. This is not forthcoming. Instead they see a Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport that is insecure on the detail of how the arts sector actually operates. They observe a department that appears at times unaware, until the very last moment, of decisions being made at No 10.
They sense an indifference and even disdain for their work from Downing Street, and hear rumblings that the arts should move towards a future of operating on an “American model” where private fundraising replaces state support. But this is pure fantasy, and a stale one at that, endlessly mooted a decade ago when Jeremy Hunt was the secretary of state for culture. Unlike the US, the UK does not have a deeply embedded culture of philanthropic giving. Even if it did, in a tanking economy it is laughable to imagine huge sums of money being raised privately; and the possession of large endowments has certainly not protected American arts organisations from the ravages of the pandemic.
Arts organisations observe a continued opacity around how the £1.57bn cultural rescue package will be allocated, and no sign of an emergence of a sensible set of policies looking towards the medium term. On top of it all, leaders in the arts are now reluctant to speak out, fearing a backlash of hostility from the government.
The Tories may regard the arts as a mere irritant, dominated by noisy, needy, left-leaning liberals. But to do so would be to ignore the arts’ value to the economy, to social cohesion and to wellbeing. When the “red wall” towns have nothing but locked museums and theatres to show for their switch to the Conservatives, and London’s West End is stilled and shuttered, they may begin to see things differently – by which time it will be too late.
