Henley The Arts Dividend Revisited

How Investment in Culture Creates Happier Lives
1. Auflage 2016
ISBN: 978-1-78396-278-5
Verlag: Elliott & Thompson
Format: EPUB
Kopierschutz: 6 - ePub Watermark

E-Book, Englisch, 300 Seiten

The Arts Dividend looks in depth at seven key benefits sustained and strategic public investment in creativity and culture across England bring to our lives every day: • encouraging our nation's creativity • advancing our education and skills • increasing our happiness, health and wellbeing • supporting our innovation and technology • animating our villages, towns and cities • growing our economic prosperity • enhancing our reputation for creative and cultural excellence on the global stage This book encourages us to consider our country's innate creativity and the invaluable rewards to be gained from the public investment that enables the arts, museums and libraries to be part of everyone's lives, no matter who they are or where they live. The result of a decade-long journey across the length and breadth of England, Darren Henley reflects on our remarkable national cultural landscape from Cumbria to Kent and from Cornwall to Northumberland - and why he believes that public investment in creativity and culture can help us all to lead happier lives.

Darren Henley is chief executive of Arts Council England. His two independent government reviews into music and cultural education resulted in England's first National Plan for Music Education, new networks of Music Education Hubs and Heritage Schools, the Museums and Schools programme, the BFI Film Academy and the National Youth Dance Company. Before joining the Arts Council, he led Classic FM for fifteen years, first as managing editor and then managing director. The author of thirty books, he studied politics at the University of Hull and holds honorary academic awards from Birmingham City University, Buckinghamshire New University, Canterbury Christ Church University, Guildhall School of Music and Drama, Liverpool Institute for the Performing Arts, Liverpool John Moores University, Royal College of Music, Royal Northern College of Music, Trinity Laban Conservatoire of Music and Dance, the University for the Creative Arts and the University of Hull. A companion of the Chartered Management Institute and a fellow of the Royal Society of Arts, London College of Music and the Radio Academy, he is a recipient of the Sir Charles Groves Prize, the British Academy President's Medal and an OBE for services to music

Autoren/Hrsg.

Henley, Darren

Leseproben

introduction

This book argues that public funding for art and culture is critically important because a sustained, strategic approach to cultural investment pays big dividends in all of our lives.

I understand that words such as ‘investment’ and ‘dividends’ might be dismissed as economic rather than creative terms. Where’s the art in all this? The point I’ll make is that these dividends flow only when the art excels. Quality and ambition sit at the heart of ,1 the Arts Council’s ten-year strategy for creativity and culture in England from 2020 to 2030, and they are at the heart too of the examples I will share throughout this book of artistic and curatorial excellence. While there will always be healthy debate about what quality means within the artistic community, the public tend to know straightaway when they are being fobbed off with something less than the real deal. To my mind, if you want truly popular, memorable and resonant art, it has to be the best.

Before I joined the Arts Council, I spent fifteen years leading the UK’s biggest classical music radio station, Classic FM, bringing some of the greatest works of art to a mass-market audience, so I have never understood the distinction some make between ‘great’ and ‘popular’. There are works of art that are ahead of their time, but few artists have ever striven not to be read, or to have their work leave people untouched. The greatest art is the most human. Given time it will always find its audience.

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That doesn’t mean that all art will be equally popular in every public constituency. Taste, custom and history have to be taken into account – elements intrinsic to the richness of our national culture – and these are every bit as influential as the aesthetic traditions of an art form. Kwame Kwei-Armah, the artistic director of London’s Young Vic, says that theatre, for example, is a ‘catalyst for debate about the big themes’ in society. And I reckon he’s right.

Artists must be able to challenge preconceptions, to think differently and freely, to imagine new possibilities, and to create great art in new ways. Imagination in particular is vital to creativity: if we can draw on our experiences to call up an image of the world in our consciousness, we can create an environment ripe for experimentation. For me, the words of the poet Lemn Sissay capture this beautifully:

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It’s only by encouraging the diversity of individual artistic perspectives that you can ensure that you are reflecting the lives, loves and interests of audiences – that everyone is getting the best. From a funding perspective, what matters is that you support talent and champion ambition, imagination, innovation and risk. These are integral to creativity. We don’t want to dilute these values.

Great art changes people’s lives. I’d like all our museums, our libraries, our artists and our arts venues to be genuinely popular, to be a part of the lives of all their communities, so that everyone in England can enjoy the Arts Dividend and have their lives enhanced, no matter who they are, or where they live.

Over the past five years, I’ve travelled the length and breadth of England, coming to know and understand how our creative ecology works, and I believe we’re on the way to realising a vision in which everyone everywhere can have equal access to the best culture we can make close to where they live. But while we are moving forwards and have identified our desired destination, there remains a considerable distance to go. It is this challenge that ,3 Arts Council England’s strategy for 2020 to 2030, aims to tackle and I will be reflecting on how we plan to do so in these pages.

Across England I’ve visited exciting new venues, many of which have been transformed through major capital investments made by Arts Council England using taxpayers’ and National Lottery funds: Storyhouse – the new library, theatre and cinema in Chester; The Word – a brand new national centre for the written word in the heart of South Shields; The Box – the new gallery, archive and museum in Plymouth; Leeds Playhouse; the John Hansard Gallery in Southampton; and Hallé St Peter’s – a new home for the Hallé Orchestra in the heart of Manchester’s burgeoning Ancoats district.

I’ve seen work of ambition and innovation: from the modern art exhibitions at Nottingham Contemporary to the technology embraced by the creative community at Pervasive Media Studio at Watershed in Bristol; from the work created by local young people at the Studio 3 Arts Centre in Barking to the terrific writing, acting and production values of produced by Improbable, Manchester International Festival and Manchester’s Royal Exchange Theatre.

Everywhere you go in England, you’ll find brilliant art breaking out in unexpected places: an opera about football in Sunderland Minster; a contemporary dance performance as part of the Dance Umbrella festival on top of an NCP car park in Farringdon; or the Birmingham Opera Company performing Shostakovich’s epic with the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra in a disused nightclub by Edgbaston Reservoir.

All this sits alongside the consistent celebration of all that is best about our national culture, whether it’s a concert by the Black Dyke Band at the Sage Gateshead, the opening night of the London Jazz Festival at the Barbican Centre, the celebration of Diwali at the BAPS Shri Swaminarayan Mandir in Neasden (more popularly known as the Neasden Hindu Temple), or a brilliantly curated exhibition of the work of eighteenth-century artist George Stubbs at Milton Keynes Gallery.

These are just a few of the many events and places that I have experienced for myself since I’ve been at the Arts Council – and I am only able to take in a fraction of what is on offer, every day. Put together, they make up a wonderfully interconnected cultural ecology that extends across our villages, towns and cities. And, separately, each of them also shows the value of public investment in arts and culture.

Seventy-five years of public investment

In 2021, the Arts Council will mark the seventy-fifth anniversary of the granting of its first Royal Charter. The Arts Council grew out of the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), which was set up in 1940 with the aim of supporting Britain’s culture as part of the war effort. The driving force behind the creation of the Arts Council, and its first chairman, was the economist John Maynard Keynes.

It is salutary to note that it was an economist, rather than an artist, whom generations of creative minds since the Second World War have to thank for the body that provides public investment in their work. Keynes was a passionate believer in the arts. He collected paintings and regularly attended the opera, ballet and theatre. More than half a century ago, he recognised the value that arts and culture bring to our lives.

In a BBC Radio talk in 1945 to announce the Arts Council’s establishment, Keynes underlined the importance of creative freedom for the artist:

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Keynes was the architect of the Arts Council’s Royal Charter, although he died shortly before it was ratified. The Arts Council was funded with a grant from the Treasury, operating at arm’s length from the government. The principle is still upheld today. In addition to government funding (known as ‘grant in aid’), since 1994, the Arts Council has also distributed National Lottery Good Causes funding to arts and culture activities across England.

In his first speech in the job in 2017, seven decades on from Keynes’s radio talk, the current chair of Arts Council England (and one of Keynes’s successors), Sir Nicholas Serota, argued that culture and creativity should be on offer to everyone in twenty-first-century England:

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Things have changed since the days of Keynes. Back in the 1940s, there could sometimes appear to be a lofty separation between artists and the rest of the population, and politicians and funding organisations took a rather patrician view of audiences, who were offered what the...