A few days ago anyone who’s anyone in the British arts world received an email from John Kampfner, chief executive of the Creative Industries Federation, probably the arts world’s most important, and ostensibly independent, lobbying body.
His first words were: “Although many were disappointed by the referendum result…”
Now you might think this is a bit presumptuous. After all, the arts world is a large world, an eclectic world, a world embracing many points of view. But the uniform noises emanating from the arts in the last few weeks would tell us that Kampfner wasn’t being presumptuous at all. The arts, certainly its leading lights, have spoken or shouted or lamented or despaired with one uniform voice.
The Creative Industries Federation’s own chairman, Sir John Sorrell, talked about us “hurtling into turbulent times.” But this was mild compared to the dire warnings from household arts names.
Sir Nicholas Hytner, former head of the National Theatre, warned that our creative industries would be “miserably impoverished.” Alistair Spalding, head of Sadler’s Wells, said Brexit is like “stepping back to a time when our lives are so much poorer as a result of isolation.”
And Jude Kelly, head of London’s Southbank Centre, said that leaving the EU means that arts and culture will be “more driven on pounds, shillings and pence.” While it’s a rather sweet irony that a champion of Remain still thinks in pre-EU currency, she is totally typical of an arts world that has reacted to the referendum result with dire warnings and apocalyptic visions.
The language grew ever more heated. The former Tate trustee and Turner Prize-winning artist Wolfgang Tillmans, summoned up a Churchillian spirit to exhort us: “The only thing that helps is not to lose courage.”
Matthew Slotover, co-founder and co-director of the Frieze art fair, said: “The Leave campaign preyed on fear, ignorance and prejudice to vote through a misguided return to an antediluvian Britain.”
This is all rather depressing for a number of reasons. Firstly, the tone of the reactions is so over-the-top that one would think it related to the end of cultural activity in Britain, rather than the potential (though far from certain) loss of some funding and exchange opportunities. In reality Britain, and especially London, will continue to enjoy the golden age for culture that it has been enjoying for some years. European orchestras will continue to visit the Proms and Jude Kelly’s base of the Royal Festival Hall.
It is depressing, too, that the arts world thinks and speaks so largely with one voice. Where is the joy of debate, of differing views that one should expect to encounter in the arts? It is not as though it has a shortage of provocative, left-field and counter-intuitive individuals.
Are they afraid to speak out? Or has the cultural sector become the one sector in Britain which does not permit or forgive deviation from the consensus? Certainly one only has to go to a First Night in the performing arts at the moment to encounter a wall of gloom among the glitzy audience and not-so-sotto-voce denunciations of the intellectual capacity of the 17 million who voted to exit the EU.
For me the most disturbing aspect of the reaction from the arts world is the almost total lack of any stated desire to think about why the 52% of the country who voted did so, and the lack of any stated desire to engage with them and create artistic works exploring their views, resentments, frustrations and aspirations for change.
This is the arts, for goodness sake. Nothing should excite its practitioners more than engaging with a contrary view and exploring it. The National Theatre with commendable alacrity staged a version of David Hare’s play Stuff Happens, about the lead-up to the Iraq war the very day that the Chilcot inquiry reported.
Let’s hope it is commissioning a play about Brexit – and not one from the London arts world perspective painting all Brexiteers as racists, but one that truly explores why 17 million people took the decision they did.
This, rather than apocalyptic visions of doom, is what the arts should be doing. We look to those with power in the cultural sector not to denounce and despair of their fellow Britons, nor with little evidence to prophesy the decline of British culture and any engagement with Europe, but to use the arts to shine a light on the British psyche at this historic moment, and help all of us to have a more sophisticated understanding.
David Lister is the former arts editor of The Independent and i newspapers