Anti-elitism is a familiar truism to anyone tuned in to public debate over the past five years or so. Phrases like “liberal elite” are bandied about in the press without us really knowing what they mean. The British public are constantly being told that universities are awash with cash, while the arts and the media are synonymous with elite privilege – despite evidence that they are struggling, particularly in the wake of Covid-19. And because they are considered a luxury, these institutions feel the need to show that they are useful in order to receive any funding at all.
The real economic elites have pulled off a grand deceit. They are diverting public anger away from the obscene profiteering of billionaires, banks and global corporations and turning it onto cultural and educational high standards. Vast disparities of wealth and power thus escape scrutiny, while everything that gives life value and meaning becomes worthy and dumbed down. How were we so easily hoodwinked? And what can we do about it?
A phrase that we hear a lot today is the need to “democratise the arts”. Even while budgets are squeezed more than ever, arts organisations and humanities departments within universities are under increased pressure to “justify” the use of taxpayers’ and students’ money by performing acts of social and cultural reparation and proving their commitment to inclusion and diversity. “Outreach” and “impact” have the ring of a social good, but they are actually the flipside of monetary measurement: as the phrase “public accountability” indicates, this is also about bean-counting. The requirement to “account for yourself” indicates a lack of legitimacy, as if you have to justify your existence.
Forcing arts and culture organisations to be socially useful and “engage new audiences” is an unquestioned good to many right-thinking people, but I believe it undermines their core purpose and imposes burdens on them that they are hard pressed to fulfil. The point of these bodies should be to make great art and great culture, and to create and disseminate the highest forms of knowledge. It should not be to solve social problems that are the rightful preserve of governments and the state. By making culture, education and journalism into public relations arenas for tackling inequality, politics has given up on trying to improve society in any kind of organised way.
This approach fits right into a world where screen-based, social media-fuelled appearance matters more than substance. The actual structure of society remains largely unchanged. Productivity is plummeting and our manufacturing industry is rusting away, but instead of addressing the problem of what we are doing as a country economically, and bridging the north–south divide meaningfully, arts centres, museums and arms of the BBC are simply plonked down in deprived areas: let them eat culture!
We create a society that is materially unequal, but those who get clobbered about diversity and representation are at the very end of the food chain. It’s a little hard to get equal numbers of women and men onto Start the Week, say, when fewer women are writing books and giving high-profile public lectures, because they lack the economic wherewithal and the social circumstances to get on and achieve those goals. These are deep structural factors that arts and media organisations have little capacity to alter.
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A glance at the funding guidance published by Arts Council England (ACE) illustrates the tendency I’m talking about. Anyone seeking support for their exhibition, ballet or book has to demonstrate, exhaustively, “whether access and diversity have been considered effectively”, whether their project exhibits “inclusivity and relevance”, and if it constitutes “public engagement” and delivers “civic and social benefits”. ACE’s vision is not restricted to supporting the arts: “We want to see communities that are more socially cohesive and economically robust”, it says, “in which residents experience improved physical and mental wellbeing as a result of investment in culture.” In a section on its website entitled “Why art and culture matters”, ACE lists the key “facts”: “Art and culture contributes £10.6 billion to the UK economy”, and “Arts and culture help tackle social injustice”. It’s not really ACE’s fault: the injunction to prove social value is imposed top-down by ministers; but it’s a dispiritingly instrumental rationale nonetheless.
The equivalent funding body north of the border, Creative Scotland, does state that creativity “challenges us, entertains us and makes us think”, but also that it makes society better: it “makes an invaluable contribution to our health and wellbeing – both physically and mentally”, “opens our minds to cultural diversity and social inclusion” and improves “social mobility”. The Heritage Lottery Fund, meanwhile, places great emphasis on “outcomes”, defined as “a result of what your project does. It’s a change that happens, rather than an activity or service you provide.”
Outcomes are different from outputs: “the output of cooking dinner is a plate of food. But the outcome is a full and satisfied person,” the document clarifies. Project outcomes are really important to us because we want to back projects that make a difference, rather than projects that just make some stuff, they say. “Just make some stuff”: the impatience with art for art’s sake is palpable. A “mandatory” outcome for grants is widening participation: “if your project is a success, then the range of people benefiting from heritage will be more diverse than before your project started”, in terms of “a broader range of ages, ethnicities and social backgrounds, more disabled people, or groups who have never engaged with your heritage before”. Other outcomes to be demonstrated include “greater wellbeing”: “Participants will report, for example, increased happiness, greater satisfaction, reduced levels of anxiety, and/or that life feels more worthwhile as a result of their involvement in your project.”
I realise I’m being a bit hard on these promoters and upholders of the arts. They are themselves responding to government stipulations. I’m also not criticising public art as such. But why can’t a piece of art be valuable in itself, like a delicious plate of food? Yes, we should take steps to widen access to those artworks – but as a society the best way to do that is to address the material problems of overwork and low pay that deny people the time necessary to produce and appreciate culture. The pressure we put on artists themselves is a symptom of that collective failure to take action further back up the chain.
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How do we get out of this mess? A first step would be to recognise that high arts are for everyone, not only for the economically privileged. When a public consultation was launched into the future of the BBC licence fee, one tweet summed up the prevalent view. “Oh yes. Ordinary working-class folks really do love those orchestras [sceptical face emoji] The BBC need to do more to appeal to the working class folk, and then they can also do the high brow stuff,” they wrote. “Keep going the way they are and disaster looms.” This kind of attitude falsely assumes that those on low incomes are unable to appreciate excellence, ignoring this country’s rich history of working-class intellectualism and cultural activity. Myriad examples of genuine blue-collar engagement with arts and ideas are buried in the past. The late 19th century saw the emergence of individual and collective proletarian efforts to achieve the best education and experience the highest culture: to read the greats, go to the theatre, listen to classical music. Workers set up mutual improvement societies and mechanics’ institutes. Ruskin Hall, later Ruskin College, was established in 1899 to provide educational opportunities to those denied access to university. It was deliberately placed in Oxford, the home of elite scholarship.
The cultural institutes set up by miners in south Wales were particularly impressive, with reading rooms equipped with a range of daily newspapers, well-stocked libraries, concert halls, ballrooms and rehearsal rooms. Miners read widely – Das Kapital but also Jane Eyre. By the Second World War, the Tredegar Workmen’s Institute had a library that circulated 100,000 volumes per year, a cinema that could seat 800, regular concerts and a film society. In The Intellectual Life of the British Working Classes, the historian Jonathan Rose uncovers through unpublished diaries and memoirs a lost world of autodidacticism and informal education. A Nottingham hosiery worker, recalling his childhood at the start of the 20th century, wrote: “We loved nothing so much when I was a kid as going to my auntie’s and listening to her records – the Messiah, the ‘Triumphal March’ from Aida, Il Trovatore. And a lot of people read Shaw, the pamphlets and the plays, Robert Blatchford, H. G. Wells, Dickens, Thackeray.”
One of the foremost proponents of high culture for all was William Morris. For Morris, beauty was not anathema to manual labour: good work was bound up with the elevation of the mind. Morris fought the narrow utilitarianism of Jeremy Bentham – for Morris, utility and beauty must be intertwined. He became one of a series of thinkers and campaigners who worked to bring culture and education to the masses. There were Beatrice and Sidney Webb, socialist philanthropists who helped found the Fabian Society, and the poet, free-thinker and sexual rebel Edward Carpenter, who moved to Leeds as part of the University Extension Movement, pioneered by academics who wanted to bring higher education to working-class communities in deprived areas of the country. I’m not denying that these figures could sometimes come across as high-handed or hypocritical, but at least they expressed ideals and opened up debates that are now completely unthinkable.
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This 19th-century tradition of universal art and education would extend into the 20th century with the great idealist upsurge of brutalist municipal and council house architecture, and avant-garde theatre. Glasgow’s Citizens Theatre combined ambitious repertoire with cheap tickets, free previews and free programmes for every member of the audience. Public bodies such as the British Academy and the Open University expressed the widespread ethos that the arts and humanities were a public good in and of themselves.
Public service broadcasting beamed the work of television auteurs into ordinary living rooms around the country, including Dennis Potter’s Pennies from Heaven and The Singing Detective. BBC1’s Wednesday Play and its successor, Play for Today, broadcast between 1964 and 1984, featured innovative, on-location dramas by Mike Leigh, Alan Clarke, Stephen Frears, Ken Loach and Stephen Poliakoff: sometimes, it should be said, in the teeth of objections from BBC executives. Cathy Come Home, Loach’s realist drama about homelessness, attracted 12 million viewers, a quarter of the British population at the time. ITV launched The South Bank Show in 1978; Channel 4 screened arthouse films late into the night. It was the era of what the late cultural theorist Mark Fisher called “popular modernism”, enabled by the post-1945 settlement with its generous social security and university grants for working-class art school students. As Fisher wrote:
In a seeming irony, the media class’s refusal to be paternalistic has not produced a bottom-up culture of breath-taking diversity, but one that is increasingly infantilised. By contrast, it is paternalistic cultures that treat audiences as adults, assuming that they can cope with cultural products that are complex and intellectually demanding.
The rot set in from the 1980s onwards, as Margaret Thatcher dismantled the welfare state and the public began to automatically associate popular demand with the commercial imperative. This shift was not the result, as is commonly stated, of the expansion of higher education. As Raymond Williams argued in his 1958 essay “Culture Is Ordinary,” mass education did not lead to bad mass culture. Nor is it the case that the highest criticism always concerned itself with the highest culture. Figures like Clive James, and publications like the Modern Review, were intelligent takes on popular culture – TV soaps, mainstream pop, even adverts.
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Culture is more than entertainment: it makes us reflect, it stretches us; it lifts us away from the everyday. The best art and ideas should be available to everyone, not just the wealthy. When asked about the charge that his poems are “difficult”, the poet Geoffrey Hill responded, “Human beings are difficult. We’re difficult to ourselves, we’re difficult to each other.” He continued, “Why is it believed that poetry, prose, painting, music should be less than we are?” It is genuinely difficult art, he concluded, that is truly democratic.
We must also protect culture as a political act. Culture that exists in its own right is an inherent riposte to the utilitarian overwork ethos that has taken over our lives. And art is also politically challenging. Rather than simply being a source of pleasure and diversion, novels symbolised radicalism and revolution to Victorian factory workers, “not just because they preached the right kind of left politics”, Jonathan Rose writes, “but because they allowed working people to control their own minds.” The same is true today. Culture should not be the continuation of politics through other means, but culture is political.
At a time when newspapers are folding, galleries are struggling and theatres are closing their doors, our precious cultural institutions must once again have confidence in their true value and purpose. Only then can they enjoy public legitimacy and the financial support they so urgently need – and deserve.
Eliane Glaser’s book “Elitism: A Progressive Defence” is published by Biteback.
This article is from the New Humanist spring 2021 edition. Subscribe today.
