Preparing for a Cultural Nuclear Winter

…As Noel Dunne put it.  We were discussing our Cultural Leadership Programme, in partnership with Creative Alliance. A bunch of us are getting together over the next 18 months to look at how the cultural leadership in the city can be influenced, and we were taking a look at the bigger picture – what will culture look like in 18 months time?  By then the effects of the economic difficulties will have filtered further into society, there’ll be a very different-looking government, and no doubt the cultural landscape will have changed.  The general feeling was that things would likely be much more difficult for those of us working in the cultural sector.  As well as being the first thing to get cut when times are tough, there’s a whole new policy being touted by the Conservative Party, based on the American model for funding the arts.  Having worked in the US, and having many colleagues out there, I can tell you that they regard us as incredibly well-resourced, there is sooo little funding available for them  – and that scares me.  The arts are left at the mercy of philanthropists and corporate sponsorship, with a much smaller amount of public funding supporting it.  So sponsorship and donation are the main funding sources for the arts.  This means that a lot of non-commercial or risk-taking work is less likely to be supported, leading to a more anodyne output.  It also means that a lot more artists rely on product-based work, selling craft, rather than art (many ‘artists’ you meet in the US are actually craftspeople) – this is not what I would like to see happening here.  The UK  is often seen as a world-leader in producing cutting-edge work in the arts and part of this has been due to having ( admittedly imperfect)  public funding systems to support cultural endeavour.

So, what are we going to do?  Well, we can vote tactically for a start (tough for me, as an inveterate ‘none of the above’ voter), and try and keep the political damage to a minimum.  But I think we also need to be a bit  clever in riding out the coming storm.  We should work together more, pooling our resources and giving each other a helping hand – co-operate, rather than compete.  If we share our resources, our strengths, we can achieve much more, with a lot less.  We’re going to need to be more strategic with our energy, more resilient and more open to going out of our comfort zones, to find new ways to get the resources we need to make the culture we want. And we need to remember what is important and to focus our energies there.

Together we can weather the storm – let’s huddle!