Does art need buildings? Writing recently in The Guardian article 'Let the elite's building funds dry up. Outside, cultural Britain is flourishing' [1], Simon Jenkins thinks not. With patrician certainty, he suggests that most of the high profile capital lottery projects of recent years have been a waste of money – the self-indulgence of a cultural élite obsessed with memorialising its own endeavours and determined to foist its values and preferences on people who are well able to find satisfying cultural experiences elsewhere.
Festivals, Jenkins says, are the future. In his arcadian vision of the cultural scene outside London ‘there is hardly a valley, meadow or disused airfield in Britain that is not hosting some event’ [2]. People flock to Hay-on-Wye, Womad and T in the Park, happy to consume their culture in the open air or in temporary makeshift venues. The Edinburgh and Manchester international festivals, he argues, use their cities as locale and thereby demonstrate the irrelevance of multi-million pound arts buildings. Glossing over the fact that these events are generously subsidised and cost plenty to attend, not to mention their dependence on the architectural legacy of civic investment, Jenkins confidently pursues his thesis:
‘A conceit of ageing arts directors is to be erecting a structure, be it a theatre, concert hall or museum wing… Time and energy go on inducing the government to give them money – with accusations of philistinism and no more party invitations should it be denied… They boast their generosity while millions of pounds walk out of their door each year, with the taxpayer footing the bill. They are thus unable to benefit from the surge in attendance and ticket revenue now benefiting most visitor attractions.’ [3]
The New Art Gallery Walsall
Some of what Jenkins says is beyond dispute. As he points out, the business plans that accompanied the lottery programme were at best over-optimistic and at worst a fiction designed to minimise alarm about the revenue implications of running a new building. It’s also true that, in a small number of cases, insufficient thought was given to content. Who could forget or forgive the banality of the Millennium Dome? (Though hang on a minute… wasn’t Jenkins a Millennium Commissioner?)
And although Jenkins doesn’t say as much, with hindsight it’s hard not to have doubts about the ‘regeneration agenda’. Much of the rhetoric surrounding the lottery capital programme focused on regenerative benefits that were easy to predict before the event and difficult to prove in the aftermath of completion. Culture-led regeneration reached its high watermark in the late 1990s and promised urban renewal on an epic scale, with businesses and loft-apartment-dwellers clustered around a landmark architectural centre-piece. It was a philosophy that began under Heseltine and Thatcher as a means of encouraging competition between cities and culminated in a New Labour vision of culture as the catalyst for raising aspiration and ameliorating people’s lives.
In practice, the hoped-for economic, social and educational effects of such schemes have been hard to verify and measure. But this doesn’t necessarily mean that there were none. And culture was surely only ever envisaged as part of the solution to deep-seated social and economic decline. As a political issue the ‘inner city’ remains an intractable challenge for governments of all persuasions at both local and national level.
The arts lottery programme is an easy target for professional controversialists such as Jenkins and its evident shortcomings should not allow him to get away with arguing that art does not need buildings.
Here I must declare an interest. Over several years I was part of the team that developed The New Art Gallery Walsall, one of the lottery projects condemned by Jenkins in his Guardian piece for its ‘clutch of deficits’ and supposedly expensive Costa coffee bar. I know at first hand how difficult it is to run an art gallery in classic nineteenth-century cohabitation with the local library, in a cramped room at first floor level, with poor lift access, restricted education facilities, inadequate floor-loadings and disastrous environmental conditions.
The Big Party ’08, The New Art Gallery Walsall
The Big Party ’08, The New Art Gallery Walsall
Neither artists nor audiences are well served by this outmoded infrastructure. They (and not just the cultural élite referred to by Jenkins) deserve better. The fact is that buildings conceived at the end of the nineteenth century are no longer fit for the display of twentieth-first century art. You can’t easily show the work that artists make today in spaces designed with conventional plinths and picture frames in mind.
As to whether particular arts organisations are well run and merit high levels of public subsidy, that is another matter. Jenkins’s ill-informed generalisations and use of emotive tabloid terminology (e.g. taxpayers ‘foot the bill’ as opposed to ‘pay for a valuable local resource’) do not encourage rational debate. In common with many other lottery projects, Walsall’s early fortunes were mixed. But the gallery occupies a large centre of population with precious few other cultural amenities to call its own; last year it attracted no fewer than 197,000 visitors; the Costa coffee outlet derided by Jenkins in his piece contributes welcome revenue to the gallery; and the programme itself is lively, wide-ranging and ambitious. It’s hard to see how anyone could write it off as a ‘white elephant’.
So roll on all those other lottery-funded galleries that are currently under construction in such places as Nottingham, Wakefield and Margate. By all means let’s promote and enjoy cultural experiences outside the conventional gallery. But artists and audiences alike need spaces in which works of art can be cared for, studied, displayed and experienced on a permanent basis. It would be a sad day if an influential cabal of media commentators (for let’s face it, Jenkins too is part of an élite) were allowed to persuade us otherwise.
©Sheila McGregor 2009
NOTES
[1] Jenkins, Simon (2009) 'Let the elite's building funds dry up. Outside, cultural Britain is flourishing', The Guardian, 23 July
[2] ibid
[3] ibid
This article has been written in response to the theme for the Autumn 09 issue of Dialogue: Art and Regeneration, inspired by Future Perfect - the 2009 engage/enquire annual conference.
Future Perfect: Art, Gallery Education and Regeneration will take place in London from 4 - 6 November 2009. For more information about the conference and how to get an early bird ticket deal and artist's bursary tickets, see the engage website for more information.
www.engage.org/conference/index.aspx
