Apart from a laudatory piece on Newsnight, there has been little media response to culture secretary Tessa Jowell's essay on government and culture, published earlier this month. Maybe this is because - at a cursory glance - its surface message appears to be self-evident bordering on bland. The arts are a good thing, they are at the heart of what it is to be human, high art is more demanding than entertainment but that's why it's better for us: could anyone possibly disagree?
In fact, set against the cultural politics of the past 20 years, Jowell's piece represents a pretty major sea-change. Certainly it is a departure from the perceived instrumentalism of recent government thinking, and as such it undermines some fairly sacred progressive assumptions. In redressing a trend towards market populism, it's more than welcome. But in its re-assertion of the traditional aims and purposes of the arts, it leaves a vital element out.
In her paper (which tends to use the word "culture" as a virtual synonym of "the arts"), Jowell notes that the original purpose of government arts subsidy was essentially patrician: the defence of elite art forms against a rising tide of popular culture, a policy mitigated but not reversed in the 1960s and 70s. By contrast, during the Thatcher governments, arts producers were seen not as guardians of the culture but as "lazy teenagers who needed to stand on their own two feet". To justify their existence, subsidised arts organisations sought to emphasise their contribution to other agendas: under the Conservatives, economic; under New Labour, social. Now, Jowell argues, it's time to argue for the arts not in terms of their contribution to tourism, education or reducing crime, but in terms of what they do themselves. And that looks suspiciously close to the aims and purposes of the high (she calls them "complex") arts, which the patricians sought to trumpet all those years ago.
For all its virtues, the problem with this model is that it takes an over-simple view of history. Yes, you can see the postwar culture battles as a Manichean struggle between the patrician principles of high art (expressed by great institutions, directed to an elite audience) and the mass populism of the market place. But that leaves out a third view of how the arts should function in society. Indeed, through the 1950s, 60s and 70s (when the free market was pretty much on the ropes) the main challenge to patrician elitism came from artists whose ambitions were culturally - and often politically - provocative.
For all their differences, both the patricians and the provocateurs were primarily concerned with the supply side of the process. What happened in 1979 (in culture as in all spheres of life) was a power-shift from the interests of the producer to that of the consumer. Like passengers, patients and parents, arts patrons became "customers". As a result, the challenge to the major national arts institutions no longer came from agit-prop playwrights or performance artists or squeaky-gate composers but from the needs of the audience. The first victim of this was the high avant garde - people were no longer prepared to accept that if they didn't understand something it was their fault. Then new populist forms emerged to meet market demand, from Andrew Lloyd-Webber musicals to Raymond Gubbey pop opera to a renewal of narrative in the novel, television drama and the visual arts. And, finally, postmodern cultural theorists noted the enticing possibility of a popular/provocative alliance that would collapse the traditional high/popular art divide and expand culture to embrace not just the electronic arts but fashion, advertising, design and sport.
It was this context that defined Labour arts thinking through the 1990s. In his 1998 book Creative Britain, New Labour's first culture secretary, Chris Smith, celebrated the power of art in cementing community identity, drawing people together and overcoming isolation and rejection. This argument was echoed if not extended by the then new Arts Council chair, Gerry Robinson, in a 1998 lecture in which he celebrated the role of the arts in urban rejuvenation, reskilling, strategies for disablement and even healthcare. For both Smith and Robinson, the key constituent was the audience, the key purpose social and the key policy access.
It's this perspective that Jowell has set out to challenge. In doing so she echoes complaints by arts producers that despite the arrogance of producer power, the pendulum has now swung too far the other way. Reservations about the dominance of the customer interest go all the way from small theatre-in-health-education theatre groups given checklists of morally improving messages to insert into plays about bullying, to National Theatre director Nick Hytner's peroration against "a relentless and exclusive focus on the nature of our audience" (Observer, January 2003). For Hytner, "We want a diverse audience because we want a diverse repertoire", not the other way round. Art is there not to help the balance of payments or combat anti-social behaviour, but because "a vibrant society thrives on self-examination".
Well, yes - as long as it's accepted that it might not like what it sees. Citing no less an authority than John Ruskin, Jowell defines the purpose of art in defiantly premodern terms as the exploration of "the internal world we all inhabit - the world of individual birth, life and death, of love or pain, joy or misery, fear and relief, success and disappointment", revealed to us by artists "who can show us things we could not see for ourselves". For her, the capacity to access these insights is a "sixth sense", and the lack of that capacity a sixth giant for progressives to slay (along with Beveridge's want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness). But while acknowledging that England has a tradition of importing and exporting culture, and that much of what we are inventing now transcends national barriers, Jowell edges uncomfortably close to a new social mission for the arts when she argues that culture has an additional part to play "in defining and preserving our cultural identity - of the individual, of communities, and of the nation as a whole".
What this leaves out - if not denies - is art's provocative role. Through much of the past 50 years, art has been properly concerned not to cement national identity but to question it. In that, it continued the great modernist project of "making strange", of disrupting rather than confirming how we see the world and our place in it.
Further, the most productive periods of postwar arts have been when the provocative has challenged the patrician - at the Royal Court Theatre in the 1950s (and the 1990s), at the BBC during the era of That Was the Week That Was and Cathy Come Home. By contrast, the promise of the popular/provocative alliance has come to naught; promising to dethrone high art in the interests of rap music, street art and alternative comedy, the postmodernists have served only to give a progressive imprimateur to girl bands and reality TV. And why not. The recent history of cultural forms from television drama to rock music demonstrates the deadeningly homogenising effect of the notion that the culture customer is always right.
If art isn't there to serve tourism or policing, then nor can it form a branch of the community cohesion industry. If the arts are to have the centrality to our human experience that Jowell rightly expects of them, the inevitably patrician institutions that provide them need to be challenged and held to account by the spirit of provocation rather than flattened out by the market. The shift towards the arts consumer was a necessary corrective to a period in which composers, writers and painters wantonly baffled if not abused their audiences. Now there is a danger that in pandering to the inevitably conservative market demand ("I'd like more of that thing I liked yesterday, please"), the arts are falling down on their job to challenge and provoke. Yes, art should hold a mirror up to its audience. What it sees, however, will not always be happy customers, but sometimes guilty creatures at a play.
Read Tessa Jowell's essay on government and culture (pdf)
