It really is creative people - artists, innovators, entrepreneurs - that drive growth

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We've become a little obsessed by a thing called STEM - science, technology, engineering and maths. And I think this is great is what you're planning is a technocracy - don't get me wrong scientists, engineers and tech folk are great, indeed if you want your child to get on in life never - under any circumstances - let them cop out from studying these subjects, never. But, just as you shouldn't let your child give up maths and science, you shouldn't let them drop arts subjects either.

And this is why arts matter - from some top French academic economists:

Historical accounts often assert that notable individuals matter for the growth of particular cities. This column uses a new database of 1.2 million people from 2,000 cities since 800CE to show that some types of ‘notable’ individuals have made a difference. Specifically, the presence of many entrepreneurs and artists is associated with faster long-term growth, but the association does not hold for notable military, political or religious figures

And - this is a moment of View from Cullingworth prediction - arts and creative subject will be more important to future jobs than they are at present. Robots will take over and routinise jobs we pay expensively trained technicians to do today and in doing so raise productivy giving us more time and money to spend on good stuff. And the good stuff is arts, culture and creativity - that's where the future jobs are. For sure, our technical world means those creative people will need a pretty sound understand of STEM but it's the people with this understanding as well as skills or knowledge in art, language, history, architecture and music who will be the future elite. Maybe.

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A bad week for culture in Bradford (and The North)

It has been a lousy week for culture in Bradford. First we had the announcement that the Royal Photographic Society (RPS) collection of art in photography would be transplanted from Bradford to a new 'centre' somewhere in London. And then today we got a second bombshell as the National Media Museum pulled out of the Bradford International Film Festival.

My view of all this is that it underlines the utter and complete domination of arts and culture by a narrow, London-focused elite. The Trustees of the V&A are all based in London and it wouldn't surprise me to discover that many of them, while they've visited Paris, Venice and New York haven't visited Bradford, Gateshead or Wolverhampton. For this elite such places are for talking about - you know 'deprivation', 'poverty', 'the underclass', gritty Northern films on a left-wing theme - rather than visiting. For the London elite the best that can be said is that some of them consider the North somewhere to be patronised - not in a physical way but by appearing on late night arts shows and saying how important it for the North to be recognised culturally (just so long as we don't have to go there).

There's nothing new with this problem - it remains perhaps the biggest challenge facing England. We talk a lot about the imbalance between London and 'The North' - indeed the Arts Council spends most of it's briefing pages on funding trying to demonstrate that it really does care about 'The North' and that most of the money doesn't go to London. It remains the case that roughly twice as much money goes to London that to the whole of the North. And let's remember that The North's population is around double that of London. meaning that per capita Londoners get four times as much arts funding as Bradfordians.

More to the point, London is also much richer with more access to the private sector funding that being one of the world's great cities brings. And this means that the wider infrastructure of arts and culture - commercial theatre, art markets, music and so forth - is much stronger (or at least appears that way). So while the efforts of the Arts Council, Heritage Lottery Fund and others to redress the imbalance is welcome it doesn't get close to the heart of the problem.

This heart - the central challenge - is the assumption that major national institutions have to be based in London. This was the essential problem with the decision by the Science Museum to hand over the RPS collection to the V&A. Not that a new 'centre' for art in photography isn't a great idea but rather that the centre could only be created in London. It seems that the Trustees of the Science Museum Group, at their meetings in London, didn't even consider suggesting to their new partners at the V&A that locating the new centre in the North might be the right idea (we can't be sure because the minutes of this almost entirely publicly funded organisation are not public).

So the RPS collection goes to London, which is sad. But worse than this, there's nothing but a gap left behind. Bradford no longer has that inspiring collection and nothing will replace it (a new 'interactive gallery' at the National Media Museum doesn't work since it's not really new and isn't really culture). The decision is a narrow one driven by a combination of cost pressures on the Science Museum Group (mostly being resolved by cutting the budgets of its three Northern museums) and the in-built bias towards London.

The actual decision was taken - without engaging with stakeholders in Bradford so far as I can tell - back in July 2015 with the time since then presumably spent thrashing out the details with the V&A. I don't know when the second decision, sacking the Bradford International Film Festival, was taken but it's announcement in the same week at the RPS collection decision suggests either a similar timetable or else a desire to get all the bad news out in one week. And now the museum, from being to go-to place for the culture of photography, film and TV, has become a mere adjunct of the science museum proper, a place of buttons and levers dedicated solely to showing off science stuff rather than curating the artifacts and the content of these classic media.

What's missing - from the V&A as well as the Science Museum - is any sense of the damage these decisions are doing to Bradford as a city. London is awash with film festivals whereas Bradford had just three - all now gone or under threat. All killed off by the narrowing of the National Media Museum's focus and by the blind ignorance of that London elite running the museums. The closure of a gallery or reconfiguration of a museum in London may be agitating but it does little real damage to that city's arts and culture infrastructure. Here in Bradford - just as almost everywhere in the North - the decisions made by the Science Museum to withdraw from involvement in culture has left a raw, bloody gash in the UK's only UNESCO City of Film.

It's true that Bradford people will pick themselves up, will gather together and put what pressure they can on government, on the Arts Council on the museums. And maybe a few conciliatory crumbs will come our way as a result, doubtless loudly trumpeted by those London institutions as great news for poor old Bradford. Of a considered approach to that bloody gash in Bradford's cultural life there will be none. The big arts and culture institutions won't set up a group to work on mending the wound their decisions have made, instead they'll spin what little (and it is vanishingly tiny) they've done until such a time as the national media stop taking any notice.

Even more, without some sort of big stick from government there's no way for us 'stakeholders' in Bradford's culture to influence the decisions made by that rich London-based elite that makes the decisions about how England's arts and culture infrastructure should be developed. I'd like them to visit Bradford - let us ask some questions of them. Not just about why everything has to be in London but about how they can support those of us who want to create a cultural heart for the North of England, who want to see the arts infrastructure developed and who are fed up with being supplicants to grand men and women in London who have - as we've seen in Bradford - the power to thoughtlessly tear great chunks from the cultural life of Northern cities.

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Martians, ignorance and rudeness: on reading the Spectator's 'Books and Arts" section...

I read the Spectator every week. In the old-fashioned way by sitting or lying holding the words printed on paper and reading them. None of this fancy la-di-dah modern technology malarkey - a little moment when part of the mind thinks Ogden Nash was right about progress:

Progress might have been alright once but it has gone on too long

Really though I read the front part of the magazine - the politics bit - and then arrive at the page labelled: "Books and Art". At this point I enter a bewildering world filling with things I know nothing about and that, even after reading the words of clever Spectator contributors, I remain completely confused by.

A masterpiece of this confusing genre is a piece written by Philip Hensher that begins:

It’s important not to be too immediately dismissive of poor Craig Raine. Book reviewers and editors like him, who invent rigid literary principles and then dismiss anything that fails to embody them, have been on the decline since the 1970s. It’s true that one would probably sooner go for guidance to a generous reader who tries to discover what an interesting book is seeking to do, and how it achieves it. But the principle-wielder is an endangered species, and however ill-founded the principles themselves may be, as readers we might welcome the existence of one or two.

I am, my friends, immediately at a disadvantage since, until this moment, I had never heard of Craig Raine (although I have heard of Craig Davies). What I gleaned from this paragraph is that Philip Hensher doesn't like Craig Raine very much. In the spirit of adventure and discovery I venture further into the article - this is a full two page hatchet job with a cartoony picture (presumably of Craig Raine) and find out that the target of Philip Hensher's wrath is, or was, a poet:

Raine has carried on publishing poetry since his heyday in the late 1970s, when he founded a minor fad called ‘Martian’ poetry. 

'Martian' poetry tickled my mind a little so I looked some up - here's a chunk from one called "A Martian sends a postcard home". I leave you to judge:

Mist is when the sky is tired of flight
and rests its soft machine on ground:

then the world is dim and bookish
like engravings under tissue paper.

I think the poem's OK but it was, Philip Hensher says, "a minor fad" so what do I know.

Further into the article - after the bleeding corpses of Raine's novels are left twitching in the dust of this arena, we get to read about the actual book being reviewed. But first we meander down the side alley of Raine's magazine - Areté. Nope, I'd not heard of it either. Philip Hensher doesn't like it:

...I picked up a recent issue to find an essay by Raine attacking Penelope Fitzgerald. He found her similies, as well,  lacking — being not extravagant enough (Raine’s poetry was praised back in the 1970s for its extravagant way with simile). 

I am drowning in my ignorance now as - not only had I not heard of Philip Hensher or Craig Raine but I've not heard of Penelope Fitzgerald either. Although having checked, I should since she's one of the "50 greatest British writers since 1945" according to The Times (in some list designed to depress folk like me who won't have read much by anyone on that list).

The article continues - and my ignorance extends - as Philip Hensher actually comments on the book he's reviewing:

Don Paterson is done over; Raymond Carver is ingeniously declared to be a less brilliant writer than his editor, Gordon Lish; the wonderful Derek Walcott is savaged. These are all quite entertaining essays— though twice as long as they need be — and are fine examples of what Oxford used to specialise in: the perverse case, vigorously made.

A glimmer of hope here - I'd vaguely heard of Derek Walcott (although if asked "who is Derek Walcott", I would probably have answered that he's a West Indian cricketer) but otherwise more of someone I don't know of writing about another person I have never heard of writing about some other people I've never read. I must admit to feeling no loss at this lack of knowledge if it is to create such gushing unpleasantness as Philip Hensher's article.

I have learnt from this read that I am ignorant, Philip Hensher is rude (but not ignorant) and Craig Raine wrote some OK poems about - well not really about, as such - Martians.

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Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/o/ogden_nash.html#SYYFoJrqXGsVSoYX.99

Progress might have been alright once, but it has gone on too long.
Read more at http://www.brainyquote.com/quotes/authors/o/ogden_nash.html#SYYFoJrqXGsVSoYX.99

On the banning of harmless fun...the case of Hebden Bridge Burlesque Festival

Not a good week for Parish Councils I'm afraid - this time it's Hebden Royd Council (which covers what we more usually call Hebden Bridge). These fine upstanding representatives of the people have banned Hebden's Burlesque Festival:

"The Picture House Committee does not feel that it is appropriate for Hebden Royd Town Council to be associated with the Hebden Bridge Burlesque Festival. Burlesque arouses strong feelings, and many people feel it is demeaning to women, and raises issues of gender equality. It is also inevitable if held in the Hebden Bridge Picture House that it would be seen to be associated with Hebden Royd Town Council, so the committee declines the approach to host a part of the Hebden Bridge Burlesque Festival.”

Now while I'm resisting screaming out "political correctness gone mad" this strikes me as a typical judging (and ignorant) decision from a local council spoilsport - in this case a left wing spoilsport.

The Burlesque Festival is - like Earth - mostly harmless and it's banning an act of po-faced puritanism. And some local folk think so too and have got up a petition where they say:

Far from being demeaning to women burlesque has enabled the organisers (both women) to run their own very successful business, employ other people (both male and female) , support local businesses and provide some jolly good entertainment, both comedic and titillating but never sleazy or demeaning to women. The council has also overlooked the fact that around 70% of burlesque audiences are made up of women. Women do indeed find certain things demeaning and patronising, one of those is having their decisions made for them and assumptions made about what they find offensive.

Absolutely - especially the last sentence. You can sign the petition here.

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Michael Dugher is right - arts funding is elitist

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Barnsley MP, Michael Dugher has focused our attention on the plight of the Grimethrope Colliery Band - one of the superstars of the brass band world:

Labour MP Michael Dugher said it was “snobbery” that the British Federation of Brass Bands, which supports bands such as Grimethorpe, got just £23,000 last year while the Royal Opera House in London got more than £26million and the English National Ballet was handed more than £6million.

Dugher is right - traditional English arts are a poor relation next to elite international arts. Even when we look at arts funding in the north, we see that it is still skewed towards those same dominating areas: classical music, opera, ballet and theatre.

The problem is that these traditions - and if Dugher thinks brass bands are hard done by take a peek at Morris dancing - are disliked by the arts establishment. In their song 'Roots', Show of Hands make this point:

And a minister said his vision of hell
Is three folk singers in a pub near Wells
Well, I've got a vision of urban sprawl
There's pubs where no-one ever sings at all

Folk music and other arts traditions are disdained by the arts elite. Funding goes to grand and exclusive establishments that make no mark on most of the population. Bands are to be tucked away out of sight brought out only when we want some sort of Northern 'authenticity' - in Bradford we built a new City Centre park. And, in a City that's home to two of the world's best brass bands, we didn't include a bandstand.

While millionaire actors and opera singers strut the subsidised stages of London, the traditional arts of England - choirs, brass bands, dance troupe, folk music - live a hand-to-mouth existence. Arts funding is overwhelmingly spent in London and directed to the preferences and interests of an arts elite rather than the mass of the population.

Michael Dugher is right - arts funding is elitist.

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