‘The bad news is that culture and creativity are being erased from the classroom, and that audiences for the arts are substantially white, middle class, affluent and well educated.’
Yesterday the BBC launched it’s ‘Get Creative’ campaign to encourage greater participation in the Arts of all kinds and broadcast a programme talking especially about the Arts, or lack of, in schools.
Ostensibly very worthy ideals but is there a very political underlying message to this when you realise the background to the project, what ‘sparked’ it, and who supports it and why?
Is there a message other than ‘Get Creative’ to this campaign launched in the run up to an election? Are we being peddled a Labour policy from 50 years ago?
The BBC tells us that:
“For those who take part, this activity becomes an essential part of their quality of life. Expressing yourself creatively enhances your skills, understanding, confidence and wellbeing – and taking part in creative activity collectively in a group strengthens communities.”
Today the Labour Party says ..
Labour promises more arts in school
Mr Miliband says he wants to put “policy for arts and culture and creativity at the heart of the next Labour government’s mission”.
He warned there was insufficient access to the arts in school, pointing to evidence from last week’s Warwick Commission on the Future of Cultural Values.
The report from Warwick University warned that creative subjects were at risk of being squeezed out of schools.
I’m certain it is just a coincidence that Labour launches its Arts policy for schools, usng the WU report as a basis as the BBC launches its ‘get Creative’ campaign…. just as the launch of the BBC/Guardian attack on tax evasion came within days of Miliband’s announcement of Labour’s own attack on tax havens.
However, in this programme at around 09:25 the presenter admits it is the declining number of children in the last five years doing Art at school (so linked to the Coalition’s education policies there) that ‘sparked a new BBC led Campaign ‘Get Creative’….where lies, he asks, the responsibility for nurturing the Arts? Do we need these top down approaches whether from the BBC or a new education policy from Government?
The programme references the ideas of Labour’s Jennie Lee way back in 1965. So you might guess where they are going with this.
Tony Hall, BBC Director General and afficonado of the Arts himself, has been instrumental in setting this up in conjunction with Warwick University, amongst others, which produced this report….which we are told…
….gives a clear message to society: that government and the cultural and creative industries need to work together to ensure that everyone has equal access to a rich cultural education and that conditions are in place for culture and creativity to play their part in our economic success.
A ‘clear message’….the State must be involved in the Arts and that of course means handing out the money.
Why the need for this campaign by the politically neutral BBC? It is sending a ‘clear message’ to voters and government….cuts to the Arts are bad, vote for the people who will fund the Arts and enhance your life.
Creativity and the arts are being squeezed out of schools, a major report has said.
Squeezed out of schools by the Coalition’s education policies and cuts….or so we are led to believe.
Yesterday R4 broadcast this programme which I referenced above:
The Front Row Debate
Are artists owed a living? John Wilson hosts a public debate to mark the launch of the BBC’s Get Creative campaign and to open a national conversation exploring the relationship between the state and the arts.
The programme was supposedly a debate but essentially had one message…we need more Art and more funding from Government…Government cuts are damaging the Arts and without the Arts life is hardly worth a candle.
The pogramme admitted that the ‘get Creative’ campaign was intended to change Government policy on the Arts and that the present Arts’ funding shames the Coalition, it’s a tragedy, the Arts are dying we are told.
As an added extra we had the usual tirade against Middle Class or Upper Class artists…there are just too many of them…too much ‘Oxbridge’ thanks. Presumably Art is only authentic if ‘Working Class’….and of course it goes without saying, more non-white people needed….more ‘Diversity’.
The programme was highly political on its own without any connection to a BBC campaign launched to undermine and discredit Government Arts’ policy.
As said before the programme referenced the ‘vision’ of Labour’s Jennie Lee in 1965 as a possibly ideal way forward for the Arts and Government…as described by the Guardian..
Jennie Lee’s vision for the arts is as relevant today as it was 50 years ago
Fifty years on, we are still fighting for arts policy changes that Lee considered as crucial to our everyday lives and wellbeing as the NHS.
Last week, the Warwick Commission’s report on The Future of Cultural Value was published. The good news is that the arts are a significant contributor to the economy; the bad is that culture and creativity are being erased from the classroom, and that audiences for the arts are substantially white, middle class, affluent and well educated. Worryingly, there is a downward trend in participation.
Here’s what Tony Hall, director general of the BBC and a PHF trustee, said about Warwick University’s report:
“The Commission’s Report is a blueprint for the continued success of arts and culture in Britain. It’s written for everyone – right across our industry and in every walk of life – and I join with its authors in calling for all of those who have a part to play to give themselves permission to believe in a better future for the arts. Its conclusions will help us all deliver that vision.”
An entirely neutral BBC DG, head of the impartial BBC, just before an election, the day before the Labour Party launches its own promise about support for the Arts in schools, launches a campaign to support the Arts, especially in schools, and to promote the need for more State funding. Tony Hall was once Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House and someone who had a close working relationship with the Labour government in relation to the Arts….and when you look at who produced the Warwick University report it is just Tony Hall’s old mates….nearly every one from the Arts world.
Not saying this is at all political, or indeed in the BBC’s own interest, but this is what some of the ‘Stars’ who are supporting this BBC campaign said in 2011:
Entertainers warn over arts cuts
The 46 names from British film, TV and the stage say they feel compelled to ”speak out”.
In an open letter, they say that arts and culture across the UK are facing ”the biggest threat” in decades.
The letter states: ”Before the last election the Government promised to usher in a ‘golden age’ for the arts. The reality couldn’t be further from this.
”With the reductions announced in last year’s comprehensive spending review, the withdrawal of huge amounts of local authority support, the abolition of the UK Film Council and the financial pressures faced by the Arts Councils and the BBC, we are currently facing the biggest threat to funding the arts and culture have experienced in decades.”
The ”deep” cuts will not only hit film, regional theatre, the BBC and others, the letter adds, but audiences who experience the arts through the likes of outreach and education projects.
So we have had 3 policy areas launched by labour at the same time as major BBC themes. Weaponising the NHS at the same time as the BBC launched a tirade on a (non)failing NHS winter crisis. The tax avoidance scandal, (that labour knew about from 2008) and now this combined launch of an arts policy.
The BBC really is the labour party’s media wing.
The Arts Mafia have bleated about the lack of taxpayers funding for decades. Interesting to see among the 46 ‘great and good’ signatories there are at least a dozen firmly committed hard-line Socialists.
No change there then.
However , I’d willingly stump up a bit more cash for the arts if it meant no more “cutting -edge comedy” from Miranda Hart.
Harry, I would remortgage my house if it meant no more Miranda Hart.
I’ve seen an embargoed copy of the Culture, Media and Sport Committee report on the future of the bbc. It will be released on Thursday for general viewing. I’ll be interested in the views from people here on the report’s findings but as a taster, I’m very disappointed and not a little concerned at some of the recommendations.
Yes Geyza the BBC have really gone into an all out offensive to promote the Labour party just as everyone is getting their heads round the election in May. That art funding debate was a disgrace, John Wilson is an insufferable toady.
I am a professional artist, a painter. So the arts are of great interest to me as well as a passion, however I loathe the ‘art world’. The very idea of the state financing art is one I reject completely, I do not think the state should choose the art it favours, we saw what happened in Germany & Russia in the 1930s. State selection is bad enough, we have had to put up with Saatchi & Serota defining British art according to their own definitions, so much so that the Tate, the depository of examples of all contemporary art being done for future reference is now a very selective & limited cross-section of what artists are doing now.
Obviously arts, such as opera companies, orchestras, & theatre, that require many people all to receive salaries would have to have some help from the tax-payer, but also, as happens already, funding from business & industries. Individual artists do not need funding. The Arts Council is I believe a complete waste of time & money, I struggle to find any evidence of it benefitting art (it benefits the art scene though).
Today we had a phone-in on Radio 4 on You & Yours, many agreed with my stance, they loved art but didn’t see why it needed state funding. One person said that funding encourages art to become merely a hobby, he was correct. The opposite opinion of art being beneficial is all very well but tends to be all about low-brow art, giant puppets in Liverpool – that sort of thing. Yes, that is all great fun but lowers art to a mere entertainment. Entertainment is not art!
What is missing though is art appreciation & knowledge in our schools. The ignorance of a lot of people is alarming. Just watch intelligent students on University Challenge suddenly become startled rabbits if asked to identify a painting by Goya or some music by Berlioz!
Hardly mentioned in all these programmes of this week was the tough position we are in financially as a country. Number One priority is to attempt to sort this out, the arts will survive. They have throughout history survived war, revolution, famine & disease, cutting the arts budget is not going to cause any serious damage to the arts in the grand scheme of things!
The BBC & Labour are completely cynical in playing this card, the timing proves it to anyone with a nuance of intelligence!
Well said CP. Artists have a special gift which can be channelled and enhanced through proper training. This applies to all talents. Hand-eye skills in sports etc. You don’t see a sudden clamour for funding of football classes to produce David Beckham/Wayne Rooney clones.
Skills, all skills need to be recognised and enhanced and channelled especially in the sciences and engineering that bring about positive results for the living standards of all.
“Number One priority is to attempt to sort this out, the arts will survive.”
They will. The issue, in my opinion, and thinking of my earlier years, is whether people from poorer backgrounds will have access.
I agree with most, if not all, of what you say though. There is a difference between funding supposedly creative individuals to produce worthy, modish, “art”, a lot of which seems to disappear into obscurity very quickly, and funding the means by which people can access some of the greatest achievements of the last few hundred years.
You mention orchestras. Orchestras, in the UK at least, have a good record of outreach work for children (eg: LSO St Luke’s). They also supply most of the experienced teachers and professors at our music colleges, without which the supply of future musicians would dry up, along with much of the foreign currency they earn through film and session work – something the UK is very strong at.
People who oppose all arts subsidy have a tendency to pick and choose. If subsidy is removed, it must apply across the board, including sport, military bands, etc.
I would still support the BBC Tax (at a lower level) if the BBC did what it was supposed to do, ditching the bias and filling the gaps left by the commercial stations. It hasn’t done that for a long time.
Whether poorer people will have access?
I don’t think the arts are that expensive, even the high arts. Most art galleries are free. I know theatre & Opera seats are expensive, but a lot of concerts are not at all overpriced, last month I saw The Sixteen do Monteverdi’s Vespers in Rochester Cathedral, all I payed was £20,
One can enjoy opera & plays on DVDs & play them over & over again. Never has access to culture been more open to everyone. Of course the desire to explore the arts is the big stumbling block, but judging by audiences & people visiting art shows I don’t think the arts are being ignored. Lower numbers in the National Gallery doesn’t bother me, nor does a lack of ethnic minorities – it isn’t their culture, though I think they ought to make an attempt to understand the cultures of the country & continent they have chosen to live in.
The Left are so out of touch with the ‘working class’ they claim to represent they fail to twig that it costs more to go and watch a Premier/Championship match (and many Div 1 and 2 matches) than it does to go and see a top notch regional theatre/opera/ballet production.
Customer choice and market forces – forever a mystery to thick, bubble-dwelling socialists.
CranbrookPhil, couldn’t agree more. I have always found it depressing that absolutely anything creative, from the arts to science and all points in-between, attracts an industry composed of cheer-leaders, bullies, fixers, campaigners, agents, and various other hangers-on. Most of these people could not create a rice pudding, but somehow they end up ‘managing’ (and consuming much of) the funding they are so adept at shouting for. Not content with that, they have the nerve to presume that they should be influencing some ‘direction’ in which things should be going. This has nothing to do with their far-sightedness in pursuing their own financial interests, of course.
Would YOU let the BBC into any of its our schools?
If they`re not raiding the kids piggy banks to pay for Lenny Henry or Terry Wogan in their “charitable” guises, they`ll be seeing if they can follow up on Jimmy Saviles reign of tolerance as he bounced from school to charity to NHS and then back to school.
All under the BBCs “Flag of Convenience”.
I`m only reminded of this, on hearing some old BBC puff piece for the Greens just before 4pm on Radio 4.
Some old ceaseless guff on Bristol being a Green City, and so it must ban all cars, plough up allotments for diesel buses and light the Avon Bridge green…yada yada.
Usual tokenism for all but BBC Bristol I`d imagine. Some car trips are more eco-deserving than others.
Relentless 24/7 Green agitprop as ever…and using primary schoolkids to “research” early deaths due to car fumes.
No agenda there then-but with a vague promise that the UWE(only the best!)will “follow up” what the primary school kids found in their plastic cups re nitrous oxide in their “anthropogenic particulate survey”.
Using six year olds to prove that Big Auto is killing their grannies?…only OFSTED, the Greens and the BBC would presume to do this.
To be fair, got to be more “robust” than anything Natalie Bennett or Roger Harrabin could devise though, surely?…
STFU , you BBC Greenies…not a clue!
The land of Adge Cutler never bowed and broken like this.
One Green Party policy is to give every individual an annual carbon allowance.
Presumably if you exceed it you get shot, neatly dovetailing with another of their policies: population control*.
* Except for immigration, which will be unrestricted.
‘The pogramme admitted that the ‘get Creative’ campaign was intended to change Government policy on the Arts and that the present Arts’ funding shames the Coalition….’
Which brings us back to the repeated failing of the BBC to ask any lobby group demanding more money: ‘What would you cut instead to fund your scheme?’
Worrry not . In certain towns and cities the population mix is well on the way to making most of the arts redundant. Now what group think that music, painting and sculoture could very easily be dispensed with I wonder
I go to lots of plays and some classical music concerts in Central London(one Mozart last weekend). I remarked to my wife last weekend that there were NO Afro-Caribbean members in the audience and only a few Asians(barring what appeared to be one or two Japanese/Chinese) :this in an audience of over 200 people.
This is often the case at plays in the West End(excepting obvious tourists).
Pretty soon , ALL the indigenous audiences to these events will be coming in from the suburbs and outside London ,and ‘bussing’ straight out again afterwards.
The Left have a big problem here-the Effniks are NOT INTERESTED in our Kultur …….and yet the Leftards in the audience EXPECT the subsidies and Govt. Patronage of the Arts to continue.
Thus , the Arts as we know them , become more elitist , not less.
HAhahahaha.
Yet another liebour promise, they are desperate to be all things to all people. They do need to put something back into education though, most kids left school barely able to read and write after 13 years of their dumbing down and turning education into their usual race to the bottom.
The thing is : arty farty people tend to be lefty wefty. If they could do economics, mathematics or sciences they would be centre-right.
‘arty farty people tend to be lefty wefty’
Thank you Russell.
I’m a Philistine myself . I’m not proud of it , nor am I ashamed of it . I just think that too much time and money is wasted on the Arts rather than getting on with trading to earn our way in the world .
You can live without art . You can’t live without paying your mortgage and going shopping for groceries .
Picasso is rubbish .
“I just think that too much time and money is wasted on the Arts rather than getting on with trading to earn our way in the world.”
Germany seems to manage both.
That would be the Jennie Lee who was notorious for parking her Rolls outside Wolverhampton before travelling to the Wednesfield part of the then Cannock constituency by more appropriately proletarian means, would it?