"I look forward to the debate," wrote Tessa Jowell at the end of her recent document called Government and the Value of Culture, and maybe she has not yet had the response that she was expecting. Surprisingly (as David Edgar pointed out in these pages last week) what Jowell was attacking was a philosophy intimately associated with her own government, and indeed her own department: that the arts were to be supported, to the extent that they were seen to advance certain desirable social aims.
Supposing you were a potter, and you went to your bin of clay and scooped out a lump, and threw it on a wheel, and took the result, and baked it, and glazed it, and baked it again, and at this point the minister arrived and asked what you were up to, and you had the wit to say, "I am attacking adult illiteracy" - you would be a very savvy potter indeed. This is precisely the kind of potter the government has been on the look-out for. This is the kind of rhetoric they have wished to reward.
It descends from Stalinism, from the old questions of the form: "What has your string quartet done, comrade, to further the cause of revolution?" One might have expected such perverse rhetoric to die with Stalinism. Instead it morphed into a social-democratic "instrumentalism" - the arts were to be judged as instruments of social change. The oboe concerto was expected to help young mothers escape the poverty trap.
"Too often," writes Jowell, "politicians have been forced to debate culture in terms only of its instrumental benefits to other agendas - education, the reduction of crime, improvements in wellbeing..." One might quibble, perhaps, at this way of putting it: too often it is the politicians themselves who have forced others to justify their activities in these terms. Too often they do so still.
After all, where was it coming from, the pressure that led to all this instrumentalism? It came from the politicians, who lent heavily on the funding bodies, and from the funding bodies it was imposed upon the museums and galleries, and on the various centres for the performing arts. Enormous skills are needed in the filling out of forms for grants, and enormous amounts of time and effort are spent in learning and deploying this rhetoric.
To give a minor example from a campaign that worked out well: it was built into the agreement, whereby Lottery funding was awarded for the purchase of the Raphael Madonna of the Pinks, that the painting when acquired would go on a national tour. Access was the aim, and it was not considered sufficient that the painting would be accessible, free, in normal museum hours, to four and a half million people a year, in Trafalgar Square. In the first instance, at least, it must tour, which is indeed what it is now doing.
The painting in question is on a wooden panel, but it was considered in stable enough condition to make such a journey. Had it not been, had it for instance been a less stable panel by Giotto, the National Gallery could not have given this undertaking. The logic of the gallery's conservation department's own policy would have militated against the acquisition.
And at the same time as the National Gallery's Raphael campaign, the National Art Collections Fund, bizarrely, was looking for an object which it could buy for £1m or so, and tour, in order to celebrate the centenary of the fund. The NACF is nothing to do with the Government. It is one of the few bodies that are truly at liberty to create its own criteria. But on this occasion it had simply become infected with the Inappropriate Access Fetishism virus.
What Jowell says in her document, although not precisely in these words, is that there is no point in fetishising access, if access means access to crap. "Access to the substandard is access to disappointment which will translate into an unwillingness to keep paying. It will not inspire or raise levels of aspiration, and in the end is not worthwhile. That is why excellence has to be at the heart of cultural subsidy, and that is what we must insist on."
Everyone in the arts world will be asking: what is Jowell signalling here, and why? A part of the answer to the second question seems to be that she never was impressed by the instrumentalist argument. She never bought it. She always thought that when you go to hear the string quartet that is something you do for its own sake. She never believed that oboe concertos can help reduce crime, or binge-drinking, or indeed obesity in children.
In much of the arts world, people have fallen cynically in line with the rhetoric, not because they are cynical about the social aims (they would sincerely desire a reduction in crime, obesity in children, etcetera), but because, though they never believed in instrumentalism, they saw no option but tacit compliance. Now Jowell says this cynicism should come to an end. It should indeed. She is absolutely right, and deserves our support. We should back her before they sack her.
