Check against delivery:
Six years ago, I was on the board of the Young Vic. The new artistic director, David Lan, came to us with a choice. We could cut back the number of our productions, and stage more visiting shows. Or we could increase our own productions to six that year, but set a deficit budget of about £300k, and try to fundraise the rest. The board took the risk, and today the Young Vic is one of London’s great success stories – inventive, inclusive and world-class.
Eight years ago, Chris Smith and Gerry Robinson set the government a similar choice. Find an extra £100 million for the arts, and they could become truly world class.
Some warned them off – some said that voters didn’t value the arts, that there would be a backlash. But the then Prime Minister and the then Chancellor took the risk. And three years later, Tessa Jowell staked her career on getting a further increase, and delivered another £75 million.
Ten years later, the Arts have delivered. London can stake its claim as the world’s creative capital. But it is also surrounded by world class creative cities - Manchester, Liverpool, Newcastle, Birmingham, that don’t consider themselves anyone’s poor relation. The Manchester Festival, for example, where I am going after this breakfast, demonstrates the transformation, as does Gateshead, with Music and Art in the Sage and Baltic.
That transformation would not have happened without Chris Smith and Tessa Jowell. Their courage and vision, their fight to increase public investment, hugely enriched the arts and I’m proud to have learnt so much from them.
They insisted that the condition of the extra funding should be wider access to the excellence of the arts. I remember the accusations that followed – that widening access equalled dumbing down, that the government had a secret plan to ensure that every orchestra played classical variations of REM.
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Ten years on, that debate is old hat. We said that the choice between excellence and access was false. You’ve shown it to be false.
Take the orchestras. Ten years ago, their business model had collapsed, there was increasing criticism of standards, especially in London. But with money for stabilisation from the Arts Council and new business models, our orchestras are once again on the rise. British orchestras lead the world in the excellence of their playing, their exploration of new repertoire, and their ability to attract not just new audiences, but the best talent from around the world.
The National Theatre’s Travelex season is perhaps the most well known example of how access and excellence don’t just go together, they reinforce each other. Anyone who saw Punch Drunk’s Faust in a huge disused warehouse in Wapping can testify to that. Wandering around that warehouse, with dozens of others, of all ages and backgrounds, trying to piece together that old story, I was proud it was London that was drawing the boundaries.
The lesson of the last ten years is that wanting the world of culture to be available to everyone is not, as some say, dumbing down, an artistic version of ‘all must have prizes’. Far from it. The lesson it teaches is that people of every background deserve to have access to the very best, and to have help to become the very best. Because some barriers are overcome not by lowering them, but by increasing the ability of people to leap them.
The public see that. The Arts Council’s emerging work on public value suggests that the public see the importance of excellence as well as the need to encourage more people to try it. The truth is, Westminster has been behind public opinion on this – they don’t mind aspiring to the best – in culture as well as sport. It’s just that in culture we’ve shied away from grappling with how to express it.
So, as I was preparing for this speech, people said to me that I should be confident that access is now in the bloodstream of British culture.
The question I want to ask today is: what’s next?
I spent last Saturday night in the Royal Festival Hall, celebrating the 21st Birthday of the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment – a world class orchestra with three world class conductors from three generations. The RFH illustrates everything I believe in – it’s a temple of high art, yet one which welcomes and encourages audiences to try a thrilling range of different things.
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St Etienne called the film they made about the refurbishment of the Royal Festival Hall ‘This is Tomorrow’ – the possibility of tomorrow, firmly rooted in the history of yesterday.
What I want to talk about today is how we can take the symbol of the renewal of the RFH and apply it to cultural policy today and over the next ten years.
There is something else that should be taken for granted: that the arts matter in themselves. Of course, the arts, like sport, are some of the most effective ways of reaching disaffected teenagers, of helping people to think about mental health, of regenerating inner cities or coastal towns.
But the arts would still matter – and I believe this passionately - even if they did none of those things. They are intrinsically valuable before they are instrumentally so. The arts hold the ring for our national conversation. They are where we find our meanings, individually and collectively.
As Peter Sellars said recently, the arts have “the capacity to reach beyond the public self, deep into the private self, and, if we are lucky, to re-energise the public self.”
In other words, the arts help us be who we are – and they help create Britain. It’s not just the old cliché that our public face to Thailand is Man United, to America Harry Potter, to Germany Simon Rattle. It’s that an open, iconoclastic culture is a precondition to being a modernising, tolerant country. That things are better for Britain is in part due to innumerable artistic acts, from political satire to arts education, from the National Theatre to community arts in Bradford. The arts are incalculably diffusive, and that diffusion is at the heart of Britishness.
So, the arts matter, and in Britain they are world class. But that has not happened by accident. It has happened because of the genius of people in this room and beyond. And it has also happened because of the British model of public subsidy: at arm’s length, in contrast to other countries where politics still affects which plays, films or music gets made.
Public subsidy of the arts needs less defence than it did in 1987. We no longer need to quote export figures to get a hearing.
But it’s worth reminding ourselves why public subsidy works: because it makes possible art of public value that would not otherwise have been made, and allows audiences to find it, who would otherwise not have had access to it. And public subsidy of culture acts as a springboard for commercial enterprise in culture and in the creative industries.
In fact I wonder, given the degree of entrepreneurship shown by the cultural sector, if the division we articulate between ‘Culture’ and ‘Creative Industries’ is relevant anymore.
Akram Khan is one of our finest choreographers and dancers but he’s a creative entrepreneur as well as a great artist. With their first opera under their belt, are Damon Albarn and Jamie Hewlett now part of culture, or the creative industries?
And it’s also worth being clear that a similar process of diffusion has also happened within art forms. The boundaries between genres, between heritage and modern, between classical and electronic have all been relaxed. And that also is unique to Britain.
I remember talking to a New York sound artist, after he’d performed in the Tate’s Turbine Hall, to an audience of hundreds, hanging on every scene of his remixed version of the 1927 film Berlin, Symphony of a Great City. And he said that such a fusion of genres and audience could never happen in an American museum.
So, if this were tomorrow, if we were in 2017, what would we have liked to have done back in 2007?
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As I was talking to people over the last week, the same theme came back again and again: we need to make sure we stay truly world class. The Tate may be the best contemporary museum in the world – but that will only spur MOMA to try to catch up. We think the National Theatre is world class – but are we aware of what is going on artistically in other countries? When the Chinese are aiming to build 1000 museums, will we still have the widest breadth of collections in ten years?
My goal is simple – I want us to be world class, from the grassroots to the top. But achieving that will mean we need to continue to take risks – and I want today to start a conversation with you, and with our audiences, about how we achieve that. Because the greatest risk would be to take no risks at all.
First, a mea culpa. Targets were probably necessary in 1997, to force a change of direction in some parts of the arts world. But now, ten years later, we risk idolising them. Without change, we risk treating culture like it’s an old fashioned, unresponsive public service – not a modern, complex network of activity, with plurality of funding, with a sophisticated and complex relationship with its global audience. Without change, we’ll create an overly technocratic approach when we should want a transformational one, where we give you the power to take risks and be the best.
The arts are probably one of the most highly regulated parts of British public life – it’s just that instead of OFSTED, you have critics, and instead of parents and pupils, you have audiences. You are highly regulated, but through self-regulation.
The question we should ask ourselves now is what is necessary on top of that self-regulation. In the past, we’ve chosen a small part of the picture to look at – the Department’s current targets for culture refer to attendance by priority groups. Access will continue to be vital, and there is still more to do. But it’s not all I’m interested in.
I’m interested in what people have access to. If any part of our cultural sector is substandard, doesn’t take risks, doesn’t push barriers, ducks difficult questions, it’s not worth subsidising. Garbage in, garbage out. If culture is offered to an indifferent standard people will sniff that out, and take the easier path of other offers for their time and money.
So, I want us together to review the role that Government and public funding can play in enabling excellence, how we can move from top-down targets, to empowering and risk-taking.
That emphasis on excellence should not be seen as a sign to take the foot off the pedal of access. Because if it was false choice in 1997, it’s even more of a false choice now. I see cultural policy as a pyramid – with participation the foundation, education the way up and excellence the apex. These different levels reinforce each other – the bigger the audience, the greater the resources for excellence. The more adventurous the audience, the more risks artists can take. The broader the tastes, the wider the range of work. We need to go further on education – we just need to do it in a three dimensional way that builds on the success of the last ten years.
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First, reaching those who don’t come.
Second, encouraging those who do to attend more.
Third, deepening their experience.
This means thinking of the creative development of audiences, and not just about access.
As Nicholas Serota told me this week, today’s audiences are much more demanding about the informative experience that they want. They use the web to inform their visit before they come. They want a rewarding time when they’re visiting, but many also want to be able to deepen their knowledge after they’ve left.
And creative development is also about routes into the cultural professions. A wider audience also means a deeper pool of talent. But do we truly know what transforms participation into excellence? Are the paths from school to professional work open to everyone? Are they properly meritocratic, open to all but as challenging as we need?
We need the frank opinion of experts who’ll be able to tell us how we can remove crude targets and empower artists and organisations to be the best. Can we free up the majority of cultural organisations who are already succeeding, and focus our targets on the minority who need to change? Can we assume that organisations are good at what they do, yet have zero tolerance for complacency? And can we do that without allowing some to slip back from palaces to fortresses?
I have asked Sir Brian McMaster, who has run the Edinburgh International Festival, and is a member of the Arts Council of England to advise me on the preconditions for excellence and how my Department can promote this in a rational, non bureaucratic way in the future, working closely with the Arts Council. I have asked that he reports to me in the Autumn.
So, those are the questions I want to shape our cultural policy. How can we stay world-class? How can we keep on taking risks and pushing boundaries? And how can we make the most of that pyramid of talent, to focus on the creative development of all?
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It is only possible to ask these questions because of the success of the last ten years.
And money, of course is an important part of the whole thing. Core funding has made wider access and better standards possible. And Gordon Brown made clear at the recent Brighton festival that we do not want to return to the artistic boom and bust of previous decades. But I do have to say at this point that this is going to be a tough spending round. And I don’t have a magic wand. The best magic I do have is what you have done. You’ve got to help me keep telling the story of your success, and the possibility of what more you could do – to paint a picture that is totally compelling.
Britain does have talent, and I see creative development as helping everyone to develop their own. In January 2006 Gordon Brown mourned the waste of talent in a society where life chances are still unequal. He talked about all the great pieces of music, books, and plays that hadn't been written because young people couldn’t and didn’t have the best chance to make the most of their talent. He called it an incalculable loss, thousands upon thousands of mute, inglorious Miltons.
If there’s one area of public life where governments should cut loose and show passion, it’s in the promotion of culture. We want our art to be the best, our museums and collections to be the greatest in the world. We need to work to keep them there, and never stop to think that we have arrived at our destination. And everyone should have the chance to get a taste for the best, to expect the best, to engage in the best way they can.
I want to keep the passion and throw away the packaging of targetolatry. Setting culture free to do what it does best.
We have to grab every chance we can to do this. And with the Olympics in 2012 we have the best chance in a generation to show the best we have to the world
I feel proud of having been part of the Young Vic board that took that risk, six years ago. I want us all to be able to be proud, in another ten years time, of the risks we took in 2007 to make sure Britain’s culture stayed truly world class, from the grassroots to the top. I hope you’ll join me. "
