22 ***^ Tuesday 6 August 2019 The Daily TelegraphArts
broad cross section of the country, is
very hard to create. If it were easy, then
everyone would do it and every West
End musical would be a Hamilton.
So why, on those rare occasions in
the UK when we do succeed in doing it- in music, on stage or on television –
are so many quick to damn by saying,
“it’s populist”? And imply that because
it’s popular it must be “downmarket”
or “lowbrow” – words I dislike, and
which sum up everything I feel is
wrong with British snobbery around
arts and culture. We too often think
discernment in art and culture
shouldn’t come so easy – it must be
earned, it must be difficult, it ought to
feel like an exam.
This attitude lies at the heart of what
the arts establishment needs to address
if culture in this country is genuinely to
be inclusive. Most UK arts
organisations sign up to values and a
vision that say they are “open, inclusive
and diverse”. We do too at the
Southbank Centre – and I believe in it
wholeheartedly. But we must practise
what we preach: being inclusive also
means reaching out to and including
the 52 per cent who voted Brexit, the
ones who have felt alienated, and those
who feel we do not care to programme
what they enjoy.
Access to arts never used to be a rare
privilege. It used to be a central piece of
every school curriculum and it wasn’t
necessary to buy books, because there
were well-funded local libraries.
Southbank Centre was born out of the
1951 Festival of Britain, an innovative
idea by a post-war British government
to offer its weary, rationed, bombed-
out people a chance to take part in a
huge cultural fair: a celebration of the
latest ideas in art, science and music.
The festival was for everybody,
regardless of class and background,The Arts can unite a country divided by Brexit
Mass appeal: Circus
1903 returns this
December,
featuring elephants
by the War Horse
puppeteers, above;
visitors at the
Festival of Britain in
1951, top right; and
Hamilton, belowN
othing unites us more in
this country right now
than the understanding
that we are divided: no
longer simply between
Labour and
Conservative, but between Remainers
and Leavers. Wherever the Brexit
chaos leaves us over the next few
months we’ll be a country in need of
healing and we’ll want to find those
moments and spaces where we can
enjoy the pleasure of shared
congregation – and celebrate what it is
that makes us human, social animals.
It’s our nation’s cultural
organisations who most obviously have
these open, accessible, civic spaces,
and it’s the responsibility of those of us
who work in art centres to create the
sort of cultural entertainment that will
bring our communities together. For
many people, voting Leave was their
one chance to send a strong message
that they felt the globalised economy- the political and economic orthodoxy
- had offered them few benefits. In
some northern towns, and the
Midlands in particular, many felt they
hadn’t prospered from the result of
public investment in the economic and
cultural infrastructure of large
metropolitan cities.
For some, the “liberal elite” arts
community seemed part of the
problem, perceived as receiving public
funding to programme work which
was aimed only at – as they saw it –
niche sections of society, or in pursuit
of a certain kind of narrow cultural
activism and overt political correctness
(it’s true that the vast majority of the
arts sector supported remaining in the
EU and are mostly a liberal Left-leaning
cohort).
Those of us who are in receipt of
valuable public funding (at the
Southbank Centre, 37 per cent of our
funding comes from Arts Council
England) have to be careful that we
can’t be accused of living in a liberal
cosmopolitan bubble and in
consequence, alienate half the
population. We also have to recognise
that there are large sections of our
communities who don’t see our
buildings as places likely to be
welcoming, including the white
working-class men and women and the
HEATHCLIFF O’MALLEY FOR THE TELEGRAPH; MATTHEW MURPHY; GETTYOur cultural
institutions must
cater for all – not just
Remainers, argues
Elaine Bedell
ethnically diverse neighbourhoods on
our doorstep. We need to demonstrate
that with the privilege of our public
funding, we are capable of attracting a
broad cross-section of society. One sure
way to do this authentically is to make
sure we have people in charge of
programming at our cultural
organisations who genuinely reflect
the make-up of our towns and
communities and whose tastes
instinctively mirror the tastes of those
we’re trying to attract. It’s a hopeless
and creatively empty exercise to try to
second guess the appetite of audiences- we need to be the audience: we need
to understand this taste subliminally
and embrace it wholeheartedly.
At Southbank Centre, we benefit
from managing a number of spaces, in
which we can programme a wide range
of work for all demographics: from big
entertaining family shows at
Christmas, like Circus 1903, to
LGBTQI+ club act Little Gay Brother, to
a mass participation choral version of
because enjoyment of the arts and
access to cultural activity was seen as a
universal right. And over half the
population attended.
As our new Government establishes
itself and decides on policy and
spending strategies, arts centres have a
wonderful story to tell about their
purpose as a place for congregation,
debate, exploration of ideas – and yes,
popular entertainment. One of Boris
Johnson’s headaches will be to decide
whether to proceed with the UK
Festival of Creativity, for which
funding support was allocated by
Theresa May last year to the tune of
£120 million. This new version of the
Festival of Britain (now a Festival of
Great Britain and Northern Ireland)
will not be the whole answer to a
divided country – and certainly not if it
comes at the cost of regular arts
funding cuts. But as the 2012 Cultural
Olympiad and the 14-18 NOW artworks
commemorating the centenary of the
end of the First World War
demonstrated, there’s a great appetite
for a public art programme that reflects
us back at ourselves and celebrates us
as a nation: 81 per cent of the 14-18
NOW programme took place outside of
London and the extraordinarily moving
poppy installation by Tom Piper and
Paul Cummins attracted huge queues.
The Edinburgh International
Festival and Festival Fringe are a local,
national and international success
story and sit side by side with the
Military Tattoo. Whatever your taste,
there will be something for you this
month in Edinburgh. The UK City of
Culture programme has enabled
residents of cities around the country
to rediscover their civic pride through
culture that is often born from, and
created with local people, just as the
Sage Gateshead Folkworks programme
keeps the North East’s musical culture
alive for future generations.
Subsidised cultural venues like
Southbank Centre should be town
squares, not cathedrals – living,
breathing, dynamic spaces, not
forbidding, exclusively priced, exotic
islands.
We look after the Southbank Centre
buildings on behalf of the nation – it
used to be referred to as “the People’s
Palace” – and these civic spaces are
becoming fewer in number but
increasingly precious. Up to 50 per
cent of our events here are free. A few
weeks ago, young people with gold
crowns were dancing on our Riverside
terrace to a performance by Pecs Drag
Kings and were joined with bemused
delight by the (much older) Rick
Wakeman fans leaving the Royal
Festival Hall after his epic orchestral
rock piece Journey to the Centre of the
Earth. For an hour or so, in the balmy
summer air, everyone of all ages forgot
about Brexit and what might divide
them, and simply danced together.
So as we look to the next chapter in
our national story, cultural
organisations must work together to
ensure that those stories which are
relevant to the whole of the population
are told through music, dance, visual
art, literature and theatre, in spaces
that are welcoming to all.The arts
sector needsto address its
snobbery ifit’s going to
bring the
nationtogether
Elaine Bedell is
chief executive of
Southbank
Centre, London.
Her debut novel
About That Night
is out now (HQ,
£7.99)Beethoven’s Ninth or the forthcoming
Bridget Riley exhibition in the
Hayward Gallery. The V&A has moved
smoothly into the popular arts space
with its blockbuster exhibitions of
Bowie, Pink Floyd, and now, Dior (it’s
worth remembering that the Pink
Floyd exhibition sat side by side with
Opus Angelicum – an exhibition about
medieval embroidery – truly,
something for everyone). Catering for
all cultural tastes doesn’t preclude
experimental, cutting-edge,
provocative work: it’s perfectly
possible to embrace it all (who’d have
thought that a hip-hop musical based
on the life of the least well-known of
America’s Founding Fathers would be
the breakout musical hit of the
century?)
Excellence and quality is what
attracts people and it should drive our
programming – but it’s not easy. Truly
irresistible, popular work which
effortlessly reaches huge numbers of
people and necessarily, therefore, aРЕЛИЗ ПОДГОТОВИЛА ГРУППА "What's News" VK.COM/WSNWS