Cultural value in twenty-first-century England

The case of Shakespeare

Kate McLuskie, Kate Rumbold

• Publisher: Manchester University Press
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781526103000
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Literature
• Subtopic: North American Literary Criticism
• Index: Literature

This book deals with Shakespeare's role in contemporary culture. It looks in detail at the way that Shakespeare's plays inform modern ideas of cultural value and the work required to make Shakespeare part of modern culture. It is unique in using social policy, anthropology and economics, as well as close readings of the playwright, to show how a text from the past becomes part of contemporary culture and how Shakespeare's writing informs modern ideas of cultural value. It goes beyond the twentieth-century cultural studies debates that argued the case for and against Shakespeare's status, to show how he can exist both as a free artistic resource and as a branded product in the cultural marketplace. It will appeal not only to scholars studying Shakespeare, but also to educators and any reader interested in contemporary cultural policy.

1

Advocacy and analysis

On 26 October 2004 the Arts and Humanities Research Board, the agency then responsible for research and postgraduate funding in UK universities,¹ hosted a seminar at which Estelle Morris, the culture minister, Neil MacGregor, the director of the British Museum, and Joan Bakewell, a journalist and media personality, engaged in a debate on ‘Government and the Value of Culture’. The discussion had been triggered by the publication, in May, of a personal statement on the topic, written by the then culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, and circulated for comment to the UK’s cultural institutions. Tessa Jowell’s paper signalled the importance of the issue it addressed by linking the question of culture to the founding principles of the post-war labour movement. She quoted the 1942 Beveridge report’s commitment to ‘slaying the five giants of poverty – want, disease, ignorance, squalor and idleness’. The implementation of the Beveridge report had had real and lasting effects, establishing national insurance for those in want, a national health service that would combat disease, an education policy to address ignorance, a housing programme for the devastated cities that would eliminate squalor and a public work programme that would drive out idleness. Fifty years on, Tessa Jowell proposed to slay a further giant: ‘the poverty of aspiration’. Her weapon, she said, would be ‘Culture’.²

The Secretary of State was aware that ‘culture’ was ‘a slippery concept’. She nevertheless proposed a comprehensive definition that included ‘the cultural life of the nation’ but almost immediately modified it to cover ‘the intellectual and emotional engagement of the people with all forms of art, from the simplest to the most abstruse’. In shifting from ‘the cultural life of the nation’ to ‘all forms of art’ she deftly elided the more general and more limited uses of the term ‘culture’: ‘the engagement of the people’ was not to be separated from the material with which they would engage even though it became clear that her concern with the ‘poverty of aspiration’ was precisely with the difficulty of ensuring a connection between the ‘cultural life of the nation’ and the particular forms of cultural production that her department was tasked with supporting. Her definition thus shifted the application of ‘culture’ as an inclusive and unifying concept to a more specific and limited concern with the material with which they would engage. She referred to that material as ‘the complex arts’ and, as the paper developed, it came to include the canon of western music, fine art and theatre as well as more recent work that, she claimed, ‘makes demands not only on the makers or performers but on those to whom the work of art is directed’.³

Jowell’s statement signalled an important shift away from the reflexive populism of the previous minister’s arts policy, and opened up the space for a renewed discussion of the role and value of culture. As the statement of a government minister, it raised concerns about the implications for government policy on funding, not only for producers of the arts but also for institutions responsible for their dissemination and reception. And yet, by invoking value as well as culture, it seemed to insist upon wider principles that were thought to be common to the whole population and to apply beyond the considerations of particular government policy.

Jowell’s suggestion, that the value of culture lay in the desired connection between the work of art and those who engaged with it, was shared by the other speakers at the seminar, and by the audience. Estelle Morris agreed that value was to be found in the effects of the arts in the private world of personal taste and life-enhancing individual experience. Neil MacGregor extended this idea of value to the international arena in his characteristically passionate account of the British Museum’s policy of national and international display of the objects in its care. It clearly mattered to him that the Museum’s recently acquired Abyssinian tablet had been displayed across the nation in order to present a reminder of the rich and ancient culture of Mesopotamia that had been looted and destroyed during the recent war in Iraq. He celebrated the fact that the British Museum was able to lend an ancient Ottoman tunic to an exhibition in Kuala Lumpur in order to celebrate an international Muslim tradition that was not confined to the Arab world. Values associated with international education and global sharing of cultures were, he suggested, the foundations of the British Museum’s curatorial care of the treasures in their collection. Those values, he asserted, could only be realised in an active programme of circulation and display, and he took evident pleasure in young people queuing up to learn how to write ‘fuck off’ in cuneiform at a schools workshop in Newcastle. Other participants in the seminar agreed that the arts demonstrated their value through the spontaneous engagement of children, and they offered moving accounts of disadvantaged youngsters whose creativity had been awakened by access to musical instruments or the chance to work in ceramics.

The discussion rehearsed familiar starting points for the discussion of cultural value. Cultural value was assumed to be located in the personal or collective experience of those who engaged with it: it could be a product of creative work (with music or ceramics, especially in the hands of children) but cultural experiences also included engagement with particular exemplars of culture (an Ottoman tunic or an Abyssinian tablet) that were already acknowledged as culturally valuable because of their ancient, unique or religious significance.

The participants did not suggest any hierarchy among those experiences. They did not value the experience of children entranced by music less or more than the value of children extending the range of their graffiti languages, and no one addressed the controversial topic of the historical provenance of the precious items from overseas that now constitute the global collections in British museums. Among the arts researchers, curators and educators in that gathering, controversies about high and low culture, pushpin or poetry, the ancients and the moderns, were forgotten or unmentionable in the demonstration of an open-minded celebration of cultural engagement wherever it was to be found.

The seminar participants’ responses demonstrated an important distinction between advocacy and analysis. Their advocacy for the value of culture offered a post hoc justification for their existing enthusiasm rather than an a priori analysis of culture that called into question its definitions or addressed the process of assigning value in particular social and economic conditions. Consequently, their enthusiastic consensus about the role of the arts in creating cultural value by-passed the principal aim of Tessa Jowell’s paper. By giving it the title ‘Government and the Value of Culture’, Jowell opened up the uncomfortable question of how the value of culture could be given priority in government policy and funding. Estelle Morris had reminded the audience of the fiscal constraints faced by ministers making a bid for the arts’ share of ‘the taxation pot’, for which all of the arts organisations and practitioners in England competed in the zero-sum game of public funding. In spite of the year-on-year increases that had been allocated to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport since Labour took office in 1997, the re-allocations of those funds to arts organisations seldom satisfied the winners, always outraged the losers and could never completely rely on a supportive consensus in either Parliament or the general public. It was easy for a gathering of arts academics and cultural brokers to agree that a thousand cultural flowers should bloom; it was much more difficult for policy makers and civil servants to decide which of them should receive the sustaining subsidy that would allow them to flourish.

When Jowell’s paper turned to the questions of subsidy and selection, the rhetorical alignment between ‘the life of the nation’ and ‘the intellectual and emotional engagement of the people’ was complicated by the contest for subsidy between particular works or forms of art.

Why is it right for the Royal Opera House, to receive huge public subsidies? Why do we subsidise symphony orchestras but not pub bands or pianists? Why do we subsidise performances of Shakespeare and Mahler but not Coldplay or Madonna? Why do we spend millions on a square foot or so of a Raphael? Why is the Madonna of the Pinks more important than The Singing Butler?⁴

Her list of questions conflated cultural organisations (The Royal Opera House and some symphony orchestras), the performance of works from the classic repertory of western art (Shakespeare and Mahler) and an individual artefact (The Madonna of the Pinks) all of which had been priorities for previous public funding. They were contrasted with a commercially successful singer (Madonna), an ‘indie’ band (Coldplay) and a visual artist (Jack Vettriano). The principles of selection, however, were less to do with the artistic forms or their effects on audiences and more to do with the economics and politics of state support for the arts.

The Secretary of State’s questions could have been answered in obvious, pragmatic terms: subsidy (whether provided by the state, philanthropic trusts or investing ‘angels’) is a means to meet the costs of acquiring, sustaining and conserving artistic products that may not be able to be met by ticket sales or other forms of return on investment. The Royal Opera House receives huge public subsidy because without it the range and quality of its productions, its ability to attract international performers for relatively short runs and its huge, enabling infrastructure of a city centre building, a chorus and orchestra, stage technicians and organisational overheads would be unsustainable. Symphony orchestras similarly need subsidy because the number of performers in an orchestra makes their performances more expensive than pub bands or pianists. Performances of Shakespeare and Mahler too, require larger numbers of more extensively trained performers than Coldplay or Madonna and have less capacity to balance the costs of live production with mass-market sales of recordings.

The Madonna of the Pinks involves a more direct form of expenditure. It includes the costs of acquisition as well as the subsequent costs of conservation, insurance and secure and controlled conditions of display.⁵ There is no scope for a return on investment in an art market where accumulated value can only be realised, if at all, on re-sale. By contrast, The Singing Butler has achieved its fame through mass-produced prints that return annual royalties of £500,000 while also raising the re-sale value of the original painting.⁶ In other words, Jowell’s opposition between cultural forms that attracted state support and those that did not was less a matter of the particular characteristics of the art works and productions themselves than the costs of the infrastructure required to sustain them, the extent to which they could be disseminated by new technologies and the complex market relations that exist between the objects and their role in ‘the cultural life of the nation’.

By posing the question of value in terms of an opposition between expensive, heritage forms of art and technologically distributed contemporary forms, Jowell was reiterating the early twentieth-century responses to mass production, when people were, by turns, fascinated and appalled by the capacity of mass production to meet the demand for cultural as well as material goods.⁷ She acknowledged that debate by asking ‘Why is mass public demand not the only criterion of perceived cultural “value”?’⁸, but in the rest of her paper she clearly distinguished the demands of ‘the mass’ from ‘the life of the nation’ (p.3). The mass was assumed to be the generalised quantum of consumers who, as Featherstone puts it, are assumed to ‘participate in an ersatz mass-produced commodity culture’⁹ while ‘the life of the nation’ represented an aspirational idea of culture that existed in an ideal locus of value, located in individual life experiences: ‘the internal world we all inhabit – the world of individual birth, life and death, of love or pain, joy or misery, fear and relief, success and disappointment’¹⁰. Unlike mass-produced artwork, the ‘complex arts’ apparently had the capacity to enhance these fundamental human life processes, and failure to engage with them was a regrettable result of a ‘poverty of aspiration’.

Tessa Jowell’s advocacy for a culture valued by ‘the whole nation’ was an attempt to argue that ‘culture’ that could be best ensured by the state’s financial support for the complex arts. However, by the later years of the twentieth century, the political critique of the state’s role in supporting failing industries had been extended to the state’s support for culture, and, as cultural critics had observed, ‘the status and the canonical force of “official culture”, and the agenda set by the defenders of cultural orthodoxy’¹¹ had also been challenged by theorists and cultural activists making a case both for new commercial cultural products and the cultures of marginalised social groups. The calculation of resources or the potential conflicts between the tastes and experience of different groups of people existed in an entirely different frame of value that did not enter the discussion. In order to avoid any suggestion of bias in favour of any exclusive taste community, the advocates of ‘culture’ invoked a universal hum...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Half Title
• Title Page
• Copyright
• Contents
• Acknowledgements
• Introduction: culture, value, Shakespeare
• 1 Advocacy and analysis
• 2 The value of value
• 3 Value and Shakespeare
• 4 Value and culture
• 5 Making ‘Shakespeare’ culture
• 6 Government and the values of culture
• 7 Value in Shakespeare institutions
• 8 Branding Shakespeare
• Afterword: The continuity of cultural value
• Bibliography
• Index