John Humphrys asks: should the focus of the arts be its economic impact?
Maria Miller, the Culture Secretary, has thrown down the gauntlet to the arts world this week by saying it must focus on culture’s economic impact. In particular, referring to government subsidy of the arts, she said it needed to demonstrate “healthy dividends”. At a time when further cuts to the arts budget are expected, is she right to claim that it is the economic benefit of subsidy that matters?
Ever since governments started subsidising art, with the foundation of the Arts Council of Great Britain immediately after the Second World War, the policy has been controversial. Advocates argued it was essential in a world where there was no longer a sufficient number of wealthy private patrons to pay the bills of impecunious artists and where leaving the job to commercial interests would corrupt artistic freedom. Opponents complained that it was wrong to use taxpayers’ money to subsidise what they regarded as elitist activities such as opera which, they claimed, only the well-heeled would want to see anyway.
Inevitably, such controversy becomes more acute during a time of austerity. Since the financial crisis struck in 2008 government subsidy of the arts has certainly been hit hard. The coalition government’s first spending review in 2010 slashed funding for the Arts Council of England by nearly 30%. Last December further cuts amounting to a reduction of £11.6m by 2015 were made.
Major arts institutions like the National Theatre and the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden, have responded by increasing their efforts to raise more money from the private sector with the result that the proportion of their income coming from the state has fallen sharply. Nonetheless they and other arts organisations are still very dependent on state aid. And in the spending review for the year 2015/16, currently underway, it is known that the Treasury is seeking cuts of 10% in many departmental budgets with the Department of Culture, Media and Sport unlikely to remain unscathed.
It is in this context that Ms Miller made her speech at the British Museum on Wednesday. She claimed that she was fighting the corner for art within government as vigorously as she could but that she need the sector’s help in doing so. And she made clear what sort of help she wanted. She wanted the arts world itself to make the economic case for its existence.
She said it needed to “hammer home the value of culture to our economy.” “When times are tough and money is tight, our focus must be on culture’s economic impact,” she said. Arts organisations needed to “demonstrate the healthy dividends that our investment continues to pay.”
Some in the arts world are very ready to respond by picking up the challenge of seeing their role in economic terms. But the result has not been exactly what Ms Miller will want to have heard. Sir Nicholas Hytner, the retiring director of the National Theatre, saw a contradiction in her argument. He said: “She seems to be acknowledging that the arts are an engine for growth, but growth is what we are desperately in need of. Cutting what produces growth seems to me not a good policy in art.”
Of course there is very much more to Britain’s ‘creative economy’ that simply those organisations partially funded by the arts councils of Britain. A recent report by the National Endowment for Science, Technology and Arts, reckoned that that the country’s creative industries employ 2.5 million people and account for about 10% of national income. The government points out that its help for this sector comes from far more than Arts Council subsidies. For example, it spends over £200m a year on tax relief for the film industry, a policy recently extended to the burgeoning video industry.
Nonetheless, government funding of the arts is important because, it is argued, it’s the creativity fostered among subsidised artists who have no direct interest in the commercial or economic implications of what they do that produces a wider culture of creativity that underpins the so-called creative economy. The point made here is that to focus so intently on the economic value of art is self-defeating.
This was the point made by Dame Liz Forgan, the former chair of Arts Council England, in her response to Ms Miller’s speech. She said: “The danger in what she is saying is that people actually start to believe that because art produces huge economic benefits, we should start diverting our investment in culture for its commercial potential. That’s not only philistine, it’s self-defeating, because then you get accountants making artistic decisions, which is as silly as having artists making accounting ones.”
Others will take an even stronger line against the thrust of the Culture Secretary’s speech. Their objection is to what seems like the purely economic aspect of her talk about the “healthy dividends” that “investment” in art “pays”. The value of art, they argue, is far more than anything merely economic. Art, they say, makes for a richer social world that is not measurable in financial or economic terms. Some go even further. They argue that to see art in any utilitarian terms, economic or social, is to misunderstand what it is. Art is the expression of the human spirit and should be valued as such, irrespective of whether or not it has any use.
Should governments, which are paying much of the bill, adopt the same view?
What’s your views?
Do you agree with Maria Miller or not that the focus should be on culture’s economic impact?
Do you think Nicholas Hytner is correct when he says her argument is contradictory since she is presiding over cuts to the arts budget?
Do you think Liz Forgan is right to say that focusing on the economic value of the arts could be self-defeating?
Do you think it would be good for art if arts organisations raised more money from the private sector and relied less on government subsidy, or do you think it’s better if more of their funding comes from government?
And what do you make of the purist argument that we should be wary of even thinking of art in utilitarian terms, still less in trying to quantify it?
