As summer arrives, so too does big culture. The Hay festival has just wound up, while later this month comes Glastonbury. Glyndebourne will have kicked into high gear just before the Edinburgh festival begins. All this, before mentioning the arrival on British shores of a thirtysomething singer-songwriter rarely referred to as Taylor Alison Swift.
Big productions, big crowds, big prices: the trend is established both in the UK and far beyond. The owner of Ticketmaster, Live Nation, recently reported a 20% jump in concert attendance in 2023 over the previous year and a 13% rise in ticket sales. The result was that its annual operating income soared 46%, to over a billion dollars. Yet while a few cash in, other parts of our culture are in grave danger. In Birmingham, the bankruptcy of the council means that local arts organisations face the loss of all their municipal funding by 2026.
Over the long decade between the start of austerity and the end of the pandemic, cash-strapped arts organisations have got used to pleading their usefulness in cash terms. Theatre is worth £2.39bn in economic output, according to one industry group. TV and film production comes in at £4.23bn. The entire fine art market chips in over £1.5bn to the Treasury’s coffers. Such figures emerge out of a melange of spurious precision, questionable economic modelling and depressing insistence on the bottom line. Fuelling such beliefs is the idea that defining value in cash terms is how causes show they are truly deserving. Except politics is full of policies that make little financial sense.
In this election campaign both main parties are promising to cut immigration, despite its economic benefits, and they agree that the UK will remain outside the EU, even though that is a sacrifice of some GDP growth for the gain of some political autonomy. Justifying culture in monetary terms is especially egregious. Consider Franz Kafka, who died 100 years ago this month: he never finished a full-length novel, and burned around 90% of his own work. Over his four decades of life, his prose provided far less of economic value than his “brotberuf” (literally, bread job) as an insurance clerk. But who today would argue for Kafka’s claims administration over his Gregor Samsa?
In his new book Culture Is Not an Industry, the university professor Justin O’Connor argues that culture should be placed “alongside health, education, social welfare and basic infrastructure”, as something to which the public is entitled as a human right and that needs to be funded. As he notes, the UN declaration of human rights from 1948 states: “Everyone has the right freely to participate in the cultural life of the community, to enjoy the arts and to share in scientific advancement and its benefits.”
This is the real culture war: to fund it properly, in the face of politicians bemoaning a lack of money, and to remake the case for it outside the marketplace and in our democracy. Only by examining the way of life of our own society can we conceive of alternative ways of organising it. Culture should provide not just expensive spectacle but ways in which anyone can express themselves and their dreams. A society that makes tickets too expensive, that deprives children of exposure to the arts and that lets libraries close for lack of funding is a society no longer interested in the ideas and energy whereby it can renew itself. A grim prospect.
