CULTURE: Blair versus the Barberini
Why Labour's arts policy could learn a lot from Baroque Rome
Sometimes the obvious needs to be stated – and documented and publicised, too. Thus The Times is to be congratulated for its recent article titled ‘Labour accused of giving arts posts to cronies’, which notes that Arts Minister Baroness Blackstone has been criticised recently for her habit of insinuating various underqualified trustees onto the boards of Britain’s greatest museums. There is, of course, nothing very new or different about state intervention in the arts – at the crudest level, it’s the price art pays for accepting state funding – but there is, perhaps, something in the nature of Labour’s recent interventions that deserves further investigation.
It goes without saying, of course, that the ‘criticism’ of the government mentioned in the Times article did not issue forth from the Conservatives. The shadow arts team surely stands more or less at the end of the queue when it comes to those emergency aid parcels of new policy that CCO keeps promising, but which have yet to be delivered. Presumably, in a few years’ time the opinion polls will be commissioned, the focus groups convened, and in due course some freakishly unsatisfactory hybrid policy will be promulgated from the steps of Smith Square. For the moment, however, those howls of complaint are coming only from shadowy figures within the museums themselves.
What do their howls reveal? Apparently, on one recent occasion, Baroness Blackstone, presiding genius at the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, rejected the Museum of London’s own short-list of three possible candidates for its board of governors, and instead appointed a person possessing no very obvious qualifications other than, as The Times puts it, ‘an active membership of the Labour Party’. The Times goes on to quote a senior Museum of London official:
Blackstone did not even have the courtesy to inform the museum. She just had her department issue a press release announcing the new appointment. There’s a danger that only people with politically correct access to the Labour Party will be considered and that this will cut out a huge number of experienced people who give their time voluntarily.
Another contact apparently spoke about ‘a sinister and overbearing interference from the government’ which hoped to pack museum boards with political cronies in order to silence criticism of government policy. The Times, though, while garnering some very interesting quotations, could only cite its sources indirectly, since museum officials were too scared to speak on the record:
The problem for museum directors, trustees and chairmen who spoke to The Times is that, if they say too much, they are frightened that their institutions will be penalised when the Culture Department announces its grants for the next three years later this summer.
In other words, this heavy-handedness of operations has, from the government’s point of view, the pleasing power pour encourager les autres. All that is left to those who run museums is a passive-aggressive strategy of accepting cash on one hand while complaining plangently to The Times on the other. All of which is more or less inevitable in a situation in which broad swathes of public culture have been made dependent on an unreliable and generally irksome system of political patronage.
There are plenty of people on the right who will argue that state domination of the arts is always and in every case a thoroughly bad thing. Few of them can, I think, have much of a background in art history. It is true that art flourished in the oligarchic rancour of quattocento Tuscany and the mercantile order of the Dutch Republic; it is also true, however, that art flourished under the cheerfully nepotistic despotism of Urban VIII, the forceful patronage of Richelieu and Mazarin, and the large US government subventions that treated American Abstract Expressionism as a worthwhile adjunct to Cold War military spending. Art benefits from wealth, from relative physical security, from cultural cross-fertilisation and from the sort of self-confidence that intelligent and generous patronage instils – no matter whether than patronage is public or private. Incompetent state patronage can, however, be particularly damaging to cultural endeavour. A mean, manipulative and unreliable private patron has to accept the reality of competition from better patrons, whereas a cultural sphere which has become habitually dependent on a state patronage may lack the ability to attract or engage alternative champions once state patronage becomes unsatisfactory.
At all sorts of levels, the flaws in Labour’s arts strategy are arguably more serious and disturbing than those which afflicted the Conservative arts strategy that preceded it. The Tories were conflicted about the nature of their engagement with the arts. They were generally uncomfortable with the assertion that the state might have a role to play in the arts and yet were at the same time unwilling to withdraw entirely from the arts, retreating instead into a number of comfortable and flexible fictions such as public-private partnership and lottery funding. The example of the ill-fated Millennium Dome shows that their problem had at least as much to do with limited aspirations as with limited funds. Yet out of this confused neglect came Sensation, Oasis, Trainspotting and the rest of the Cool Britannia phenomenon – which, whatever one thought of them individually and severally, represented some sort of flowering of the cultural scene. Labour, despite its early embarrassing overtures towards the arts, has largely repeated the 'confused neglect' pattern, but with a sinister twist. Whereas the Tories were unwilling to disengage themselves from the arts because to do so would have given life to the caricatures that branded them as materialists and philistines, Labour shows every sign of retaining its bond with the arts chiefly as a cheap and innocuous means of social engineering. Hence the scary fascination with ‘access’, ‘relevance’ and the avoidance of ‘elitism’. Where the Tories simply hoped to shield themselves from a certain type of criticism, New Labour actually wants something out of the arts. But what they want risks being very harmful indeed.
Why does Labour want more people to ‘participate’ (another buzzword) in the arts? For three reasons, I think. First, those New Labour politicians who have a real feeling for the arts want to the arts to thrive and wish for themselves a flatteringly central role within the arts scene, but realise that there is something unpleasant about taxing the majority to fund the pleasures of an elite. Hence that majority must be forced not only to participate in culture, but also to be grateful for it. Second, I think that there persists within parts of the Labour Party the old liberal hope that exposure to high culture will not only to civilise the masses but will make them more peaceful and virtuous, too. This liberal superstition is a flexible and a resilient one, able to survive even in the complete absence of any evidence for its validity. Finally, there are those within the Labour Party who distrust the arts precisely because they are an elite pursuit, and hence feel a strong desire to retain some sort of control over their content, delivery and audience. Each of these three desires benefits from the present situation, characterised as it is by uncertain but vitally-important state funding, increased state intervention in the more visible aspects (the ‘presentation side’) of cultural life and ever-more intrusive tinkering with the minutiae of arts institutions.
The state is, obviously, only one of a number of actors in British cultural affairs, but this hardly matters. Of course great private patrons still exist. The marvellous Sir Paul Getty has created for the National Gallery an endowment that produces an average sum of £5 million per year for acquisitions; Christopher Ondaatje has been a generous friend both to the National Portrait Gallery and to the Tate; there are many hundreds of people in Britain who will happily provide six-figure sums if not more to fund the arts projects that matter most to them. But at the end of the day, virtually all Britain’s most significant cultural institutions are hopelessly dependent on public funds, and they know it. They can complain to The Times about being lumbered with inappropriate trustees or can privately lament the ‘dumbing down’ which invariably accompanies an effort to increase ‘access’, but at the end of the day this is more or less all they can do. None of which would matter much – at least from a Tory point of view – if it were not for the fact that the results of Tony Blair’s cultural policy are so evidently unimpressive.
The Labour Party’s fears and preferences percolate down through funding bodies and planning bodies, through boards of trustees and social networks, to make an impact on the high cultural world that surrounds us. A Labour propagandist might, at this point, point to the apparent successes of the Blair government in the field of visual arts – Tate Modern and the National Portrait Gallery extension, Imperial War Museum Manchester and Anthony Gormley’s Angel of the North – the list is a considerable one. All of these have drawn visitors and attracted favourable comment. At the same time, all of these may come to have, in retrospect, a certain unity of aspiration, style and finish that results in part from their common patronage. The buildings are flashy if sometimes built on the cheap; the collections are often a bit on the ‘lite’ side; there’s a somewhat forced reliance on ‘interactives’ and gimmackry at the expense of real substance; there’s an inbuild anxiety about attracting the right sort and size of audience; there’s a slightly apologetic attempt to re-brand an elite pursuit as a democratic entertainment experience. Meanwhile older cultural institutions languish or make desperate attempts to appear more relevant, more demotic and more accessible, hence destroying what might otherwise be the unique selling point of their own, earlier historical context. Everyone hopes for private money but realises that they must continue to play by the rules, stated and unstated, which eminate from public funding bodies. Anger simmers. Resentments fester. It does not take much to bring these to the surface, as anyone who spends any time around arts professionals will certainly attest.
Contrast this, for a moment, with the pontificate of Urban VIII (1623-44). Whatever his defects, Urban VIII at least knew what he wanted from the arts – he wanted them to proclaim the unrivalled prestige of the Catholic Church, of Rome and of the Barberini family. To this end he happily bankrupted the Papal States in order to lavish fantastic riches on, inter alia, Bernini and Borromini, Domenicino and Caravaggio and Pietro da Cortona. Urban’s love of the arts was profound and intelligent, and although this was not invariably the case with the many members of his family who ended up in positions of power during his pontificate, even they were able to attract brilliant and learned advisers such as Cassiano dal Pozzo who, in turn, drew into the Barberini orbit artists of the stature of Van Dyck and Poussin and Claude. Broad avenues were constructed which linked the great churches and classical ruins of the city; the transformation of St. Peter’s was more or less completed; palaces were built and made splendid with frescos and furnishings. Urban was perfectly capable of seeing off rival patrons and of forbidding ‘his’ artists to work for anyone else. For artists whose work he admired, the rewards – in material terms as well as those of prestige – were handsome indeed. And the visual legacy he left behind has been an enduring one. Even today, the products of Urban’s patronage project a confident, assertive, refulgently positive style of religion and of rule. He had plenty of critics during his lifetime, incurred the lasting hatred of classicists for his decision to strip the bronze from the Pantheon, and his successors must often have had cause to grumble over his extravagance, but at least he managed to achieve the results he had wished to achieve – results that many generations have understood and often admired.
Tony Blair is, needless to say, no Urban VIII; Baroness Blackstone, with her stated preference for a small ditch to serve as the national memorial to Diana Princess of Wales, is certainly no Cassiano dal Pozzo. Obviously there are many differences between Baroque Rome and our own postmodern London, none of which need be spelled out here. Yet mean-mindedness, paranoia and lurking class envy stand in clear contrast to liberality, self-assurance and magnificence wherever these are to be found. And some of these qualities, it must be said, generally end up getting a better write-up from posterity than others.
What is shocking about Baroness Blackstone’s intervention in the affairs of the Museum of London is less its almost endearingly blatant quality – sleaze in broad daylight no longer counts as sleaze, apparently – than its wholly dispiriting banality. It’s all a matter of jobs for the boys here, a stupid requirement for funding there, united in an overall vision that is defensive or manipulative when it isn’t just downright vindictive. Could the Tories do better? Almost certainly not. Insofar as there’s a moral to this unremarkable little tale, it is this: that if governments can’t rise to the challenge presented by culture, they should abandon culture to the private individuals and corporate bodies which would be only too glad, once they’d got used to the idea, to fill the breach. And by the same token, if the Tories want an alternative arts policy, they should make it simple: with a tiny handful of exceptions, a lot of tax incentives and a bit of notice, get out of culture altogether and leave it to the private sector. As plans go, it has the sort of infuriating boldness of conception that even Urban VIII might have admired – but since the production of policy, let alone bold policy, is hardly the dominant CCO aesthetic these days, I suspect we may be reading such stories in The Times for many years to come.
Bunny Smedley is ERO's Arts Editor.
Bunny Smedley, September 2, 2002 10:37 AM