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Arts

My Lords, I, too, congratulate my noble friend on securing this debate and on launching it with his usual irresistible optimism and eloquence. I particularly responded to his passionate words on the power of the imagination, which I hope to be able to touch on. I remind the House of my interests as a member of the board of several arts organisations. In addition, I recently chaired a peer review of the Arts Council England and I was privileged to have the noble Baroness, Lady Young of Hornsey, who is to speak later, on the team. I want to talk about two things; something I read and something I saw. The thing that I read was a pamphlet, Cultural Value and the Crisis of Legitimacy, published earlier this year by Demos, which reflects usefully on issues that came up through the peer review that I chaired. The author, John Holden, addresses a problem which has been with us for a generation. He puts it as follows in his introduction:"““Politics has struggled to understand culture and failed to engage with it effectively. Cultural professionals have focused on satisfying the policy demands of their funders in an attempt to gain the same unquestioning support for culture that exists for health or education; but the truth is that politicians will never be able to give that support until there exists a more broadly based and better articulated democratic consensus””." This is somewhere close to the heart of the problem articulated by my noble friend Lord Bragg. He rightly points out that we have invested hugely in the arts over the past decade, with wonderful effect. It is, of course, right that governments should want assurance that such investment represents value for money and that arts organisations should strive to prove themselves both useful and accountable. But, we have no consistent and politically sophisticated way of talking about the impact of this investment other than through the language of instrumental value—the attempt to connect art directly and measurably to social outcomes. My right honourable friend the Secretary of State for Culture, Media and Sport made a spirited attempt to move the debate forward in her 2004 essay, Government and the Value of Culture, but I do not sense that politics has yet begun to change its ways. Meanwhile, the public has moved on. As a 2004 RAND Corporation report, quoted by John Holden, puts it:"““What draws people to the arts is not the hope that the experience will make them smarter or more self-disciplined. Instead it is the expectation that encountering a work of art can be a rewarding experience, one that offers them pleasure and emotional stimulation and meaning””." In other words, people do not care much about instrumental value. But politicians do; hence the tendency of arts professionals and their supporters to concentrate effort on demonstrating the ability of the arts to contribute to a huge variety of other agenda in order to get and to keep the attention of their political paymasters, rather than progressing a new, more comprehensive dialogue with the public. The consequence has been frustration and confusion on all sides. John Holden puts it like this:"““Politics finds culture difficult to define, but we also have to recognize that the language used where culture and social policy meet is maddeningly obscure, riddled with jargon, not understood by some of the people who use it, and not understood by the public at all. Terms such as social inclusion, diversity, quality of life, health, well-being and community safety sometimes have technical meanings, sometimes not, but in any event the meanings are not widely shared. There is a huge disconnect between the public’s idea of culture and what it is for, and the way politics and policy talks about it””." Overcoming that disconnect is a real challenge, but one that we must surely face. I quote John Holden again. He states:"““Just as in other areas of public life, such as health and education, what matters most is the public’s own assessment of the value that it is getting from what politicians do. Messages about spending more, increased delivery, outputs and outcomes—that is, about instrumental value—tells us nothing about what the public itself values””." This brings me to the thing I saw, which was an elephant. Last weekend, the Sultan’s Elephant came to town. Parts of central London came to a halt as the 40-foot high mechanical beast, accompanied by an almost equally gigantic puppet girl on a scooter, and a vast army of beautifully costumed retainers, made their way slowly through the streets, stopping from time to time to visit a friend or have a party. The whole enterprise was the work of the French street theatre troupe, Royal de Luxe, and it was made possible through an inspired partnership between Arts Council England, the Mayor of London, the London International Festival of Theatre and a number of other agencies and individuals, public and private, who together found the enormous financial and operational resources needed to bring this extraordinary event to London. The brilliant way that it was achieved augurs well for our ability to put on a good show come 2012. I spent a large part of last Friday in the elephant’s company along with an amazingly disparate crowd of others, and I can honestly say that it was one of the most uplifting, joyous, life-enhancing days I have ever spent. Why? I can put it no better than Lyn Gardner, writing in The Guardian, who said:"““This is a show that disrupts the spectacle of everyday life and transforms the city from an impersonal place of work and business to a place of play and community. It does something very simple and important; it makes you feel incredibly happy and gives you permission to let your imagination take flight. It turns us all into beautiful dreamers with silly grins on our faces””." Upwards of a million people turned out to see the elephant and its entourage over a four-day period and many of them have testified to the power of the event. But, although it is wonderful to know that statistic, no amount of statistical analysis will capture the value of the elephant’s visit or why it will be remembered, and there will be no way of demonstrating any direct causal relationship between it and economic, social or educational outputs. So what were all these people responding to? I think they were recognising that art, like cuckoos and spring, makes you feel better just by being itself. This is what the public value. This is what political discourse about the arts must once again learn to embrace.