Michael Foot and the smashed watch trick

On the radio last night they played a great clip of Michael Foot in Parliament assualting Keith Joseph with typical wit and grace. He compares Keith Joseph (one of the hard men of the Thatcher cabinet at that time wandering the country in bewilderment at the industrial 'reorganisation' they had set off) to a magician he used to see in the theatre in Plymouth as a young man, who would obtain a watch from someone in the audience, carefully place it under a handkerchief and then smash it with a mallet. He would then look completely puzzled and announce he had forgotten the second half of the trick...

This made me think two things. Firstly, how the genuine the 'laugh' is when it comes, from the other MPs, and how different that is to today's yahboo behaviour in the house - although there are one or two genuine wits left, notably William Hague, perhaps surprisingly, in themain the barracking and pantomime behaviour would get MPs excluded from any decent comprehensive. Secondly, and more importantly, how relevant the story is today. As all parties try and sound both tough and magical about cuts, hearing Michael Foot's elegant scorn illuminate the real issue, I couldn't help wonder whether the second half of the trick is any better known thirty years on. If it is isn't, only those with the money to buy new watches will be laughing.

(You can hear the clip 55 minutes into the programme here for the next few days.)

Michael Foot and the value of hope

I was really sad to hear the news of Michael Foot passing - although at the ripe old age of 96. I saw him speak a couple of times in the 1980's, once in the run up to the 1983 election and once after that heavy defeat. He was as powerful an orator as I've ever seen in this country. Perhaps not unrelated, he was also one of the most cultured politicians you would find. For him politics and culture and history were not seperate categories, nor were they contained from the real world struggles of real people.

Inevitably much reference has been made to that 1983 election, although his life had been a long and distinguished one even by then, and the tributes have tended to subtly state he was, well, mistaken but passionate and committed. Even at the time of the 1983 election, I thought he was treated unfairly. (I got to vote for the first time in that election, on the day of an English Literature A level exam. We played The Beat's Stand Down Margaret through the 6th Form Common Room in a vain - in all sense of the word probably - attempt to influence voters using the school. It was 14 long years before I got to vote for a candidate that actually got in.)

Thinking about that, and what (and who) Michael Foot represented, I was reminded of something Vaclav Havel said: “Hope is not the conviction that something will turn out well but the certainty that something makes sense, regardless of how it turns out.” Checking that quote , I came across this: “Hope is a state of mind, not of the world. Hope, in this deep and powerful sense, is not the same as joy that things are going well, or willingness to invest in enterprises that are obviously heading for success, but rather an ability to work for something because it is good.” That seems to me what Michael Foot was about, win or lose. In that he differed from the breakaway SDP who really cost the country that election, and their spiritual progeny in all parties. Would that there were more like him still around.

(I know I'm leaving very shortly, but I suppose I should state: personal views, not Arts Council views.)

What's the state of the arts?

The RSA and Arts Council England collaborated to produce the ‘State of the Arts’ conference last week – a long and packed day of presentation and discussion. We heard from both Jeremy Hunt and Ben Bradshaw, two very similar men to the naked eye. Bradshaw’s speech seemed to me to have a certain valedictory feel to it, Hunt was clearly trying to not to appear too cocky, but came across as passionate and open. Neither really broke any news, although Hunt’s proposition that emerging policy makers should aspire to have jobs at DCMS rather than, say, ACE, did make a small shudder run through the 500 plus crowd.

The sessions I attended varied in their impact. The session on business models had some interesting speakers – I wanted to go and work for Coney immediately, or at least volunteer for the Society of Codenames – but reinforced the need for more people in the sector who can frame a model, or a theory about how the sector actually functions. It only takes us so far to say ‘be great at what you do’. We need replicable models if we are to convince politicians and policy makers. (And voters too, actually.)

Highlights of the day were (therefore, I might almost add) the highly contrasting Helen Marriage and Bill Ivey. Helen Marriage spoke about the work of Artichoke in transforming cities – but only on a temporary basis. She made a sound argument for ‘the power of the temporary’ and the ‘cultural value of the merely spectactular’, based not just on what she’d seen work in London, Liverpool and Durham, but on how she thought that actually happened. She put together an argument for large-scale investment in the temporary in a way I’d never quite heard before, stronger for having what I can only a methodology behind it. And she ended by reciting a poem, which I always think is a good trick, though don’t all start doing it please, it’s one of my own favourite techniques.

Bill Ivey could learn a thing or two about powerpoint from some of the other speakers, but apart from that was really impressive in applying his ‘Expressive Lives’ thinking (see here for my thoughts on that) to the idea of a cultural bill of rights. Challenging and intellectually rigorous, the tone wasn’t quite maintained throughout the debate. The questions from the floor suffered from a kind of solipsism, a framing of things only within the arts. Freedoms of expression and of movement are not being restricted for artists because those people are artists primarily, but because of broader political issues. They can’t be addressed simply as artistic issues, but need to be put in a bigger context. But then the earlier discussion around whether artists could change society suggested a deal of nervousness about getting explicitly and deliberately political… For this reason, allied to my inate triviality, I therefore had the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy running through my head for the latter part of the day. (‘You gotta fight – for your right – to PAAA-RTY’ and ‘Party for your right to fight’ respectively.)

I believe there are already plans a foot to make this an annual event – we shall see in what roles Messrs Hunt and Bradshaw might be there. That's a really healthy thing, as this kind of serious discussion needs to happen on a regular basis, and be informed by more serious research and provocation.

Who's got the power?

According to The Power Gap, a new report from Demos, people in the Guildford constituency are the most powerful in mainland Britain, whilst those in Glasgow North East have the least power to be in control of their own lives. I live in the constituency at 294 in the list of 628. Doesn't sound great, but it is the 3rd most powerful part of the North East region, which illustrates one aspect of the gap the title of the report refers to - some very big regional disparities.

The relative power or powerlessness of people is calculated using 8 indicators, including education, occupational status, income, employment, freedom from crime, health, voter turnout where you live and the marginality of your constituency. So although Stockton South and Stockton North share many socio-demographic factors, the relative marginality of the seat may help explain why Stockton North is much lower at 519 in the index.

The report is an attempt to break through essentially class and deprivation-based analyses of inequality to focus on capability. As they put it 'it is power, not more narrow approaches of income or mobility, that is the critical inequality in Britain. This is the divide that matters to our wellbeing and progress as a nation, and the challenge to which politics and leaders must rise.'

Although I think you could argue the approximate nature of the indicators and the proxies used to measure them could lead to some misleading conclusions, the map looks and feels about right to me. The value of seat marginality is interesting. It's certainly the case party machines will be ignoring people in safe seats in the next few months, and concentrating on those in marginals. This can make you even more powerful if you already have a decent job, education etc. And much less so if your area suffers from multiple deprivation but is unwinnable by anyone but one party. Logic therefore suggests people in, say, Middlesbrough, should make their seats less safe in order to have more influence. (This could, of course, be a risky strategy.)

This matters - and here I agree absolutely with the authors because feeling you have control over your life breeds confidence and virtuous circles, whilst powerlessness leads to anger, depression and spiralling disconnection.

That the arts can sometimes make someone feel more in control of their life, with great positive effects, is a familiar argument, and a thing I've seen in reality many times. I've not had chance to do a detailed comparison, but I suspect from a quick look there is some correlation with arts attendance, albeit complicated by the spread of indicators. The recent figures for national indicators of cultural participation suggest the disparities run roughly parallel, although they are reported on a local authority basis rather than constituency so it hard to compare exactly. There is something in here for someone to mine. We might then look at how building capabilities could impact on participation, and how that may relate to control over one's life, and where the arts can usefully join up with other players. (I'm reminded of the lack of power some people said they felt in relation to the arts in the Arts Debate.)

So, it's worth a look, even just to see how their view of where you live compares to how powerful you feel. There is a nifty little 2 minute video version, too, which you can see above, or here.

74% of Everybody's Happy Nowadays

I’ve done a presentation on the headline results of our ‘Stakeholder Focus’ survey twice this week, once to staff and then to Regional Council. It’s a kind of customer satisfaction survey, where people get the chance to say what they think of Arts Council England, their relationships with us, how we work, our impact and so on. So it’s always a bit nerve-wracking opening the document and seeing how you come out.

Fortunately, things are heading very much in the right direction, and it's certainly a far more positive feeling than last time we did it, when there a few 'difficult messages'. Obviously not everyone thinks the Arts Council’s great (1 in 10 respondents consider us ‘unfavourably’, for instance), and there is, as ever, plenty to work on – reducing bureaucracy, being even more flexible and responsive, being more open with partners, for instance - but also lots to build on – being supportive, helpful and strategic are already strengths we can use. (According to the 896 people who responded, not according to me.)

There’s lots more interesting stuff, such as that 7 out of 10 members of the public have heard of the Arts Council, but most of those know nothing about us and that North East respondents have a very low propensity for taking the ‘Don’t know’ option. This may help explain why more people than average would be critical of us whilst more people than average also think we make a positive impact difference in the region. (In fact that welcome group seems, according to my maths, to include some of those who'd criticise us when asked.) So lots of useful feedback and issues to dig deeper into over coming months so we can carry on improving. (Blimey, that sounds a bit corporate, doesn't it? Rest assured Alan Davey is not standing over me whilst I write this. I can't think of anyone in the organisation not genuinely committed to listening and improving.)

There was one figure which puzzled me, staff and Council members alike. 15% of arts organisations, artists and partners thought that the Government benefited most from Arts Council activity at present. This is more people than thought artists benefited most, and nearly as many as said the public (18%). When asked who should benefit most, only 1% of respondents said the Government. (I will return on another occasion to which categories came out top in perceptions of current benefit and ‘should benefit’.)

This feels really interesting, assuming it's not some kind of blip. One in eight people think the government benefit more than the public, or artists or arts organisations from our work. It may just be a survey poke in the ribs for us from the Intrinsic School. It may be a sign of scepticism about government full stop. But what returns is it thought the government are getting that the public aren't? How does a government benefit without the public, or the economy benefiting, anyway? Popularity-by-announcement? Given the government decide on levels of funding, what should they get in return for their money? What image do arts organisations and our partners have of government - and, of course, the Arts Council? Is that a sign of healthy scepticism or of a kind of solipsism and myopia, expecting, presumably, continued government funding with no 'return' to government? I'm not saying the Government should benefit most, I just find it very interesting.

You can read a summary of headline results here, though there will be more detail and a full response in due course. This is not part of the Arts Council response!

(By the way, those of you who get this by email subscription, and read it on your blackberry or some other mobile device, do go to the actual site and you'll find a free gift, courtesy of Manchester and YouTube that you might not see in your hand. You could even leave a comment - Arts Counselling is also committed to listening!)

Younger than that now

There’s been lots of coverage in the last couple of weeks of 20th anniversary of the fall of the Berlin Wall in 1989, and the subsequent ‘domino’ effect across Eastern Europe. Whenever I think of that November, I also remember my first naïve steps into 'arts development', as it’s when the first issue of Scratch, the poetry magazine I used to edit and publish, came out. I recall stuffing envelopes with fresh-smellign magazines whilst watching the news on tv.

I started the magazine with a strong interest in how poets were reflecting the 2nd decade of Thatcherism with a kind of expanded, po-mo-realism, wise-cracking and allusive but political at a deep level. Although there were some signs of hope (the Green Party got 15% of the vote in the European Elections in 1989, for instance), it could feel as if nothing was ever going to change. So why not start a poetry magazine that would show that, as I put it in the first editorial, ‘the exercise of the imagination is an act of liberation’?

As is only normal and proper there’s a lot about that first issue that now makes me cringe and smile simultaneously – the youthful self-righteousness, the slack use of Letraset. But no one can deny that within a year of me starting a poetry magazine, the Berlin Wall was paperweights across the world, repressive communist regimes had crumbled, Ceausescu was dead, Thatcher was out of power, Nelson Mandela was free and my wife gave birth to our first child – who says poetry makes nothing happen? (Of course, I can make a strong case for personal responsibility for only one of the things in that list.)

Why am I sharing this, other than to mark the occasion? Well, it’s something to do with change. In that first editorial, I also quoted Greil Marcus:

‘It was too easy to lose touch with rage, with a sense of what is good and evil, to lose touch with the idea that its worth something to make, and try to live out, such a distinction. These are the politics of the freeze-out. They turn into a culture of seamless melancholy with the wilful avoidance of anything that one suspects might produce really deep feeling. Raw emotions must be avoided when one knows they will take no shape but that of chaos.’

Change runs through a number of recent posts – perhaps because I’m personally very alive to it right now, mainly because it’s in the air. I suspect we’re not in a melancholic freeze-out, with two tribes eyeing each other guardedly, but in something both more manic and more ersatz than that. (As with the ridiculous attacks on Gordon Brown last week.) It can feel like raw emotion or personal interest is all that’s allowed. Whether we are actually shaping chaos to a greater degree feels highly debatable. We seem to know change is-a-coming, in a way few did in 1989, but are we any better prepared?

The question I keep returning to, in our culture and in our Culture, is how we bring into actual being a proper combination of emotion and analysis, imagination and intent, change and continuity. And as in 1989, I have a hunch that if the arts can’t help, we’re going to struggle.

Does democracy have customers?

I wrote about cuts and choices recently , suggesting the debate needed to be about what we are prepared to do without. Matthew Taylor, on his RSA blog, puts his finger on the underlying problem: which is, as it so often is, an inappropriate metaphor:

'Modern representative democracy, as it is practised in England, is based on a false metaphor – that of consumerism. We think the task of democracy is to give us what we want, the customer is always right. In contrast, I want to argue that representative democracy is actually much more about trying to agree what we can’t have and coming to accept the reasons why. This, after all, is the question posed by the public spending deficit and by the even bigger challenge of reducing our national carbon emissions by 80% by 2050. But deciding how to make sacrifices is much harder than promising everyone goodies. The way we think about and undertake representative democracy is incapable of supporting this kind of discussion.'

I also relate this false metaphor to my unease when people - especially in the media - say certain things are 'owned' by the tax payer, or that 'the tax payer now pays some bankers' wages' because the government invest in them. It feels inaccurate. And maybe that's because it's based on the metaphor of consumerist shareholding for profit/goods rather than (jargon alert!) community stakeholding.

Matthew also says 'every policy option has a downside and involves a real political choice' which is something I feel is often overlooked by the sector in responding to arts policy. (And sometimes by policy makers themselves!)

This could be explored further, but no time for that now unfortunately - but felt it was a useful insight.

Are there really no innocent songs?

One of the speakers who caused the most breaktime-buzz at the IFACCA World Summit was Stojan Pelko, the State Secretary in the Slovenian Ministry of Culture. After a tour-de-force of Minister-as-tourism-advocate from the Jamaican Minister of Culture, this was a totally different kettle of fish. There may be other State Secretaries who end by exploring a metaphor from Gilles Deleuze, but I’ve missed them so far.

His topic was whether cultural diversity was the source of world peace or the root of all conflict. Coming from a part of the former Yugoslavia, as he put it, once you have known poets shooting from the hills it is hard to see culture as therapy or something than can overrule ‘real power’. Using a devasting clip from Goran Markovic’s The Tour, he suggested that in global capitalism ‘there are no innocent songs’, and that the discontinuities of history - where old certainties break down - are where the universalities emerge. (Certainly at that point, this seemed a world away from the ‘dodgy advocacy’ I mentioned yesterday, and suggests a positive outcome to recession.)

Where the arts could be ‘real arms’, Pelko argued, was in creating what he called ‘subterranean solidarities’ – by encouraging a sense of non-identity with the collective where people became ‘raw, free and vulnerable’. (As opposed, I take it, to the security of common identity and values that can, in extremis, lead to intolerance.)

He then concluded by exploring the central images of a short text by Gilles Deleuze, ‘Desert Islands’. (You can find this on Scribd here. It’s a very short essay and well worth reading - and not as difficult as much of his later work.) At the time this simply resonated as a metaphor, and I’ve yet to have chance to read the full text of Pelko’s talk, so I may have misinterpreted things. Deleuze sets out how islands are of two sorts, which I think now may be both two kinds of cultures, but also apply to different strands of artistic practice. There are he says, continental islands, ‘accidental, derived islands… separated from a continent, born of disarticulation, erosion, fracture; they survive the absorption of what once contained them’ and oceanic islands that ‘are originary, essential islands…display a genuine organism.’ (There’s no suggestion one is better than another.)

Deleuze says ‘Continental islands serve as a reminder that the sea is on top of the earth, taking advantage of the slightest sagging in the highest structures; oceanic islands, that the earth is still there, under the sea, gathering its strength to punch through the surface.’ That speaks to me of tradition and innovation, of growth and decay, of the power relations within culture over time. This is where Pelko seemed to take his talk, suggesting a need to ‘become the stranger’ on the desert island, before moving from solitary to solidarity, in the knowledge that songs will not save alone but must be seen in relation to real power. As he said, quoting Delueze in French, ‘il faut l’imagination collectif…’

Metaphors defy the need for practical conclusions, so I’m going to refrain from drawing any right now. I’ll end with an amusing and provoking quote from Deleuze’s essay Stojan Pelko didn’t refer to, but I’ve written down for future use as the epigram to a poem:

‘That England is populated will always come as a surprise; humans can live on an island only by forgetting what an island represents’.

The heritage of expectancy

The first roundtable I attended at the IFACCA World Summit on Arts & Culture focused on the likely effects of recession on intercultural dialogue. Shelagh Wright drew on ‘After the Crunch’ for her introduction, with some especially telling comments about the ‘phony hierarchy and dodgy advocacy’ that limits much British debate. Even more challenging was the contribution from Farai Mpfunya of the Culture Fund of Zimbabwe Trust. He drew on 8 years of official recession in Zimbabwe to suggest a more fundamental questioning of our ways of life was necessary. He used a phrase I found really resonant in describing what he hoped to pass on to his family, ‘the heritage of expectancy’.

This led to a discussion about who was actually wealthier (and/or perhaps healthier) – people/countries with huge amount of credit/debt leading to spending power, or those with no access to credit, but therefore correspondingly little debt? Farai's phrase also echoed many conversations I've had in the North East about the so-called lack of aspiration in the region's young people, and whether actually what is missing is not so much aspiration as expectation - the lack of which will eventually quash many people's hopes.

In the context of recession, however, the phrase is more debatable. It struck me there was in the cultural sector's thinking, as in the general population's, a continuum, only part of which was actually healthy. This continuum might go something like this:

Despondency - Aspiration - Expectation - Optimism -Entitlement -Dependency

Discussing the different ways of investing in culture, notions of trust and social capital became central to emerging out of the recession in a healthy manner. There being no genuine dialogue without trust, for instance, and the connections which make up social capital building trust, potentially forming a virtuous circle. But holding the centre of that continuum above is perhaps also dependent on the health of our social capital. (I'm picturing trying to keep a seesaw balanced on your own - you need to avoid both ends.)

What might this mean practically in the cultural sector? Well, perhaps things like:

• leading organisations playing prominent roles in creating apprenticeship and other development opportunities
• funders not colluding with dependency
• an increased focus on sharing of stories to create a heritage of healthy expectancy
• (even) more collaborative working and social networking
• avoiding business as usual.

First cut is the deepest?

The c word is now being spoken out loud on all sides of the political spectrum. There are good cuts and bad cuts, it seems, but the focus is all on cuts in spending. Joe Hallgarten on his arm’s length state blog makes the point that politicians needs to be talk more honestly about the limitations of their power over the world, and thus encourage in us, the ‘public’, a more realistic and probably more forgiving attitude. (He kind of praises Arts Council with one hand, for at least grappling with change, and then digs us in the ribs with the other, which is probably fair enough.) Politicians, he suggests, need to point out they cannot do the impossible - eg keep costs down but make sure no one ever gets hurt. (I'd say the same goes for funders.)

Also this morning someone sent me a link to a report called ‘How to Save £50 billion’, which is at least honest enough to have a clear and relatively unequivocal list of cuts in spending that the Institute of Directors and the Tiny Minority of Tax Payers Alliance think would be a good idea. Read the list and you can see which Tax Payers the Alliance voice might represent: not those like my dad living on the Basic State Pension, or families being helped by Sure Start or Education Maintenance Allowance, or the children being educated in dilapidated buildings. Not to mention the people employed as a result of the things on their little list.

This is not to deny savings are possible or even necessary in some areas. But what needs to be considered is not which expenditure lines should be reduced, but which of the outcomes we want to do without. (We do also need to remember that some of the ‘savings’ also have a direct financial cost, in terms of unemployment, but also indirect social costs – conveniently left out of most of the equations.) I’d happily live without ID cards, but I don’t want the state education system on starvation rations in horrible old buildings. (I know there are some horrible new buildings, but let’s not go there right now.)

In a sense, the public spending cuts debate could then become a part of a wholly necessary discussion about how we are living beyond the means of the planet and our real economies, and what we are prepared to forgo, and how we can reinvent our ways of living and working. That’s obviously also a discussion that is ongoing in culture, and we at Arts Council are constantly making the case as strongly as humanly possible that money spent on culture is well spent and productive. A more mature language for the overall debate can only help us in that.

Plus ça change?

The Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation have done an interesting thing and republished a seminal report from 1959, Help for the Arts. The aim is to stimulate debate about how we meet today’s questions of how best to support the arts. It’s a fascinating read. Many things are different – and not just the ‘surface’ signs such as language. (I’m pretty sure I don’t want to bring ‘patronage’ and ‘provinces’ back into regular usage for instance, let alone phrases such as ‘men of means’.) The post-Austerity landscape does look free of agency ‘clutter’, and the text has a refreshing directness – though that may simply by style of the report, unafraid to be patrician where necessary.

There are also many things that are oddly similar through the differences –sometimes in an ‘eternal question’ way. What’s the best balance between support for individuals and institutions? Is it simplistic to say that ‘artists not institutions create art’ – where do ‘producers’ fit in, let alone commissioning ‘bodies’ public and private? If institutions endure, in a way individuals (as opposed to their artwork, of course) may not, is that a good or a bad thing?

Funding interventions are the key theme of the report – which led to the Gulbenkian’s crucial work in developing arts in the regions, and some key 'arts spaces'. I’ve been involved in some discussions in the North East about ‘intelligent funding’ (as opposed to stupid funding, you might say!) and was struck by this paragraph:

The reluctance of the State to help new needs in the arts has been emphasised by the tendency for State grants to take the form of meeting deficits (and to some extent the same criticism applies to local authority grants). No doubt grants on this basis are more easily justified where public money is concerned. Nevertheless the deficit basis of finance has a crippling effect on creative work. Moreover, since bodies which receive deficit grants cannot build up reserves, they are prevented from putting their finances on a sound basis: in the long run this system is therefore uneconomical. This criticism is not, however, valid where guarantees of fixed amounts are made to new and adventurous enterprises.

This is something Arts Councils and both local and national politicians grapple with today, further complicated at times by lottery regulations - well, either grapple with or studiously ignore. (It applies across the voluntary sector as a whole.)

The report posits four key things that need to be addressed, and again, whilst acknowledging how much progress has been made, it’s startling to see how unchanged they are from the list many would draw up today. I’ll end simply by quoting them:

The first is that far greater support is needed for the arts than in the past. Nor is this a temporary need. Once high standards of artistic creation and performance have been established, an increasing sum is required to maintain these new standards. This means
that over the years public authorities will have to find more money for the arts.

The second is that far more needs to be done today to render the arts accessible, particularly in the provinces.

The third point is that there should be more scope for experiment in order to invigorate the arts.

The fourth point is that we think that more should be done to foster appreciation of the arts among the young. The introduction of music and drawing into primary schools has been of the highest importance. But in grammar and secondary modern schools, the practice and appreciation of the arts is apt to be crowded out after the age of 14; while little incentive or encouragement is given to boys and girls after leaving school to develop whatever interest in the arts they have acquired. The best means of doing this is something which would well repay enquiry.

What next for the left and ex-Culture Ministers?

James Purnell was in the process of making quite an impact when he was promoted out of DCMS, not least in allegedly reintroducing the word excellence to the daily lexicon of petty bureaucrats everywhere. (Just as an aside, I was looking through Raymond Williams’ Keywords recently - as you do - and neither ‘excellence’ nor ‘quality’ is discussed. ‘Standards’ is though…)

Purnell came to speak to the National Council and Executive Board and was straightforward, frank and clearly committed to the arts, culture and social justice. I rather warmed to him, and was sorry to see him go off to DWP so soon. (I was especially sorry when he seemed to fall into cack-handed Daily Mail-appeasing workfare proposals, but that's another subject.) Anyway, earlier this year he find himself on the back benches in a classic example of an assault that ended: ‘You and whose army?’ ‘My army…oh, where have they gone? Damn…’

He has now reappeared heading up Demos’ Open Left project, ‘a project aimed at renewing the thinking and ideas of the political Left … an open conversation across the Left about the kind of society we want and how we can best bring it about’. There are a small number of artists featured on the site so far, with their ideas of what it means to be on the left. Some are obvious – Billy Bragg being no surprise – others less so. I’d never clocked Anthony Gormley as an artist of the left, for instance, though some of his work obviously has a real interest in ideas of self and community. His essay is typical of many in being kind of interesting, but also disappointing for anyone expecting an articulation of a vision for social change encompassing the poor and excluded. I struggled slightly to find the socialism in his essay, as in some of the others, but perhaps that’s not really the right thing to look for, even in its mildest or most liberal forms.

The Open Left project should also be read in relation to Demos’ set of essays, What Next for Labour? Beneath the howls of despair (it was written about the time James Purnell was drafting his resignation) are some really important ideas and debates. A stronger emphasis on ‘a stronger sense of the social — of communities, civic associations and social institutions…. a politics of social life’ sits alongside voices emphasizing the empowerment of individuals, usually in the context of the state withdrawing from ‘interference’ or ‘regulation’. You can feel this dichotomy running through cultural policy, for course, although interestingly cultural policy is more or less absent here.

Whether this moves us beyond right and left (now, and arguably always, tribal terms as much as anything else) and perhaps past worrying about the S word and its presence or absence, especially given the rather new thinking from the Red Tory zone of Thinktankland, that is at least interested in the social, we shall see.

Isn't it better to seek forgiveness than permission?

Last week I hosted an ‘Artsmark Celebration Conference’ at Dance City in Newcastle – probably the first time the words celebration and conference have been conjoined in such intimacy. This brought together heads and teachers who’d just received Artsmark awards to listen to a couple of inspiring speakers, as well as get their awards. Poet Kate Fox, who you may have heard on Radio 4’s Saturday live (she talks about the experience here), rewrote the ‘levels’ primary teachers work within. And QCA adviser Robin Widdowson talked about the changes in the primary curriculum coming out of the Rose Review, which puts understanding the arts much more central to developing successful learners, confident individuals and responsible citizens – and hopefully some people who are all three.

Robin was particularly interesting as he rather challenged the assembled teachers to push at the boundaries, and to use the freedom they had – which was more than many assumed. He suggested that many schools had operated as if they were much more restricted in how they worked than they actually were, assuming or imagining limits to be placed upon them that had never actually been written into guidance. They were following rules that weren’t there, and unnecessarily distorting their practice.

It struck me this was a parallel to what I’d observed when talking to RFOs at a couple of recent briefings, where the sense that ‘Arts Council was now a voice of government’ forcing people to ‘do social inclusion’ at the expense of quality of experience came across strongly from some people. They clearly felt far more directed or pushed than we intended. (I'll defend our right to challenge 'normal service' at times, of course - but I've never once felt we were doing that around diversity or inclusion, say, or the use of arts in regeneration 'because government tell us we have to'.) Things were being heard that were not being said. Our intent, even our statements, are not the issue. The unheard melodies are more powerful. The result in education, or so Robin suggested, was teachers not teaching to the creative limits of either the curriculum or their natural confidence. The question is, in the arts or the classroom, how we break through that syndrome?

More on sharing and digital

All the dots do join up, you know...

After struggling to get yesterday's blogs up I was reading Wired - the new, easily available for reading on trains UK version I'd been too busy working to read on the train. And what do I find but an article by Kevin Kelly about 'The New Socialism' - digital online collectivism. He talks, as I did yesterday about sharing: 'Sharing is the mildest form of socialism, but it serves as the foundation for higher levels of communal engagement.'

It's a fascinating article that posits the online nation as exemplifying 'a third way' which combines 'individual autonomy and the power of people working together' to enhance 'creativity, productivity, and freedom', free from the clumsy ruling hand of either the state or the market. His analysis of the potential impact of common purpose not driven by individual profit I find really powerful.

You might conclude that the lack of comprehension the government show for such a vision of the digital world in 'Digital Britain' (even the term sounds parochial after reading Kelly's essay, he is of course an internationalist, drawing attention to the lack of borders to this new socialism) is precisely the traditional response to the suggestion that we might be better off driven by creativity and collaboration rather than property and profit.

How can bad paintings be good?

Here's a little light relief for a Friday afternoon: a website showcasing (if that's the word) bad paintings of Barack Obama. Apparently there is an ongoing wave of artistic representations of the US President which shows no signs of abating. I find these bad ones - and some are quite spectacularly awful - rather fascinating, more so perhaps than 'better' ones. I once visited the Nelson Mandela Museum in Umtata (near where he was born) and there were rooms of similarly bad but somehow touching portraits by children from all over the world.

I wonder if there is an equivalent phenomenon of portaits of Gordon Brown I don't know about?

How do you measure the intrinsic value of the arts?

I meet lots of people who say you can’t measure the intrinsic value of the arts – only extrinsic or instrumental side effects. I meet a fair few people who say that even trying, or measuring the instrumental benefits as well, is actually damaging to the art. Most of both sets still feel that public and private money is well-spent on the arts though – ‘for its own sake’, as the saying goes.

This often feels like a reductive and circular discussion to get into. If we can’t talk about the value of the arts in some kind of way that allows that value to be compared to the value of other things – tanks, traffic lights, speed-bumps, care for people with Alzheimer's, doctors, nurses, education, MPs' salaries, whatever – we are forever beholden to ‘supporters of the arts’. Whether we like it or not politicians have to do that invidious job of comparing apples and oranges and bricks. We need to help them, not ask for an exemption.

Mission Money Models have just published an interesting paper by Hasan Bakhshi, Alan Freeman and Graham Hitchen, entitled, simply, Measuring Intrinsic Value. This argues for greater use of cultural economics to explore the value of the arts and help with that difficult comparison. Two metholodologies are suggested as key to this: ‘contingent value’ (roughly speaking, defining the value the public put on things they may or may not actually use themselves) and ‘willingness to pay’ (measuring how much we'd be prepared to pay for things - though I think this can often be overstated, or not align with our voting patterns.) Measuring public estimates of these, the authors argue, can free ‘the value of the arts’ from the advocacy mode instrinsic value often sits, or the reductive mode of direct economic measurement or instrumentalism, and allow a new statement of the case for the arts.

It’s a challenging and useful paper – and, being far from an economist, I may not have grasped it all and may have simplified the key concepts horribly. My main challenge to it would be this. If the problem is, as the authors argue, that the arts are damaged not by economics per se but by bad economics, what confidence can we have it’s possible to shift to good economics – given that to the untrained eye there seems to be a dearth of good economists in positions of power?

Or perhaps I’ve misunderstood the last year or so completely…

Why are amateur arts ignored?

A few weeks ago, Reemer Bailey of Voluntary Arts England persuaded me to do a quick interview for her blog. This was done electronically at the end of a hectic week before a week off, and was then heading for their website, where you can now see it. It's the first in a series of interviews with policy makers. (Though it does slightly read as if it's the first in a series of interviews with me - fear not, VAE readers, I'm only doing it once!)

Amongst other things directly relevant to voluntary arts such as my title question I was asked to say something controversial (the Bill Grundy approach) and to choose between Gordon Brown and Barack Obama. You can go straight to the interview here to see what I said, but best to go via the VAE site front door as you may see lots of other more useful information such as their very useful new briefings on sustainability and resilience of voluntary groups.

Why is North East England important in the world of poetry?

I may have given regular readers cause to think that North East England is the centre of the poetry world. (Or indeed the world period.) Further evidence of that, if it were needed, can be found – if you’re quick – in a Radio 4 programme by Lee Hall of Billy Elliot/Pitman Painters fame. This looks at the Northern working class tradition of poetry, in particular the influence of Basil Bunting on Tom Pickard, Barry MacSweeney and others involved in Morden Tower and the Newcastle Poetry Scene in the 60s (and subsequently.) It’s a great programme – not just for poetry buffs but for anyone interested in Lee Hall’s ongoing analysis of the role of class in cultural life. If you come across this post after it’s been taken down from the BBC i-player, have a dig around Morden Tower’s website and be sure to check out the brilliant Flickr sets of photos by David James.

There’s some brilliant recordings of Bunting, and of tv and radio coverage of Briggflatts, too. Giving similar pleasures is this bit of footage Neil Astley of Bloodaxe has recently shared, which tells the Bloodaxe story, but in 1985, when they were but bairns, and very much pre-digital in their production methods. Neil and Simon Thirsk may have aged slightly, but sadly not so much as the prospect of regional telly giving more than 10 minutes to coverage of a poetry publisher…

It being the 5th of March, and as I’ve just mentioned Billy Eliot, here’s a Miners’ Strike 25th Anniversary link to some of Side Gallery’s archive: to a project capturing (pun intended) Easington in August 1984.

Obama - the North East arts connection

Whilst the UK waits with baited breath to see who will be crowned the next poet laureate (well, waits with a slightly bemused amusement, anyway: see here for just one example), Barack Obama has revived the practice of having an Inaugural Poet, in the shape of Elizabeth Alexander. What's more she's published - in the UK - by Northumberland-based international poetry phenomenon Bloodaxe Books, whose 30th birthday I wrote about in October. Elizabeth Alexander is one of a number of fine American poets published by Bloodaxe. You can read about her role in Obama's inauguration here. I just knew there had to be a connection between the new President and Arts Council England's RFOs...

It's good to see the new President including poetry in what is bound to be an emotional occasion. Perhaps the new laureate - whoever she or he is - could pop up in Parliament from time to time?

Are we now post-black or just post-election?

Continuing the Obama theme just till the weekend...

Novelist Diran Adebayo is a member of the Arts Council's National Council. Every now and again I get to spend time with National Council and, whilst marvelling at how Diran looks cool in a pinstripe suit while I look like an 'Executive', I always find he's got a stimulating take on things. He 'spotted' Barack Obama early on, and has now written a great piece on his website about why he likes him so much, and the highly debatable concept of 'post-black'. I am going to think whether I can become 'post-white' - although if I get many more grey hairs I will certainly eventually achieve 'post-ginger'.

Further proof, if it were needed, that novelists can do more than make stuff up comes from academics at the LSE and Manchester Universities, as reported in the Telegraph. Apparently novels like The Kite Runner are better at informing the public about development issues than reports. Who'd have thought?

(Andrew Taylor, the Artful Manager, also talks about Obama's arts policies - didn't you just know he had some - and good taste in advisors, with Michael Chabon amongst others on the committee.)