Culture puts food on the table, but London needs to set the table all over again

Culture has a curious characteristic: it rarely features in election campaigns, yet invariably comes to the fore when a new government faces its first challenges. This is also the case today in the United Kingdom, where the new government has inherited an arts system that is among the most influential in the world, yet also one of the most exposed to the contradictions of the present day. London remains a global cultural capital; its magnificent museums continue to be international landmarks; its universities attract talent from every continent; and the creative industries represent one of the country’s greatest assets. Yet the system is showing signs of strain, revealing a structural crisis that has not been resolved following the end of the pandemic. Indeed, matters have worsened. With Andy Burnham’s arrival at Downing Street and the formation of a new Labour government, the new Department for Culture will have to tackle a number of crucial issues that will shape the future of the arts.

The first concerns the future of the Arts Council, the body responsible for distributing public funding. Despite the substantial funds it has allocated, the organisation has been at the centre of controversy for years. Too bureaucratic for some, too centralised for others, and therefore unable to strike a convincing balance between London and the regions of the United Kingdom. Reforming it means redefining the relationship between the state and cultural production and, more generally, resolving the now outdated dichotomy between culture as an educational tool and culture as an economic opportunity. The second issue is, in fact, economic in nature. After more than a decade of tight budgets, museums, theatres and libraries are being called upon to do more and more with less and less. Audience, audience, audience, blockbuster exhibitions! This short-sighted approach, presented as a solution to the post-Covid slump in visitor numbers, has remained just that: popularising culture by lowering the public’s expectations and diluting the content. Culture continues to be celebrated as a driver of development but is rarely treated as a strategic infrastructure. It seems to be addressed only as an afterthought – as a form of additional support or a way of sugar-coating the whole picture – but never at the structural level. We must not forget that preserving a collection, producing an exhibition or training an artist requires a long time, constant investment and a vision that is unlikely to coincide with that of the electoral cycle. And Italy, alas, knows this all too well. There is also a quieter, but perhaps even more decisive, problem: education, which everyone claims to care about but which is itself too far removed from short-term electoral needs. In recent years, the arts have gradually lost ground in British schools, amid fears of ‘training future unemployed people’, as if painting were merely a Sunday pastime. Every cultural system, in fact, thrives on a constant renewal of artists, curators, conservators, architects, technicians and scholars. Reducing investment in education means jeopardising the future of culture even before its economy.

Finally, there is Brexit, which continues to have consequences that are less obvious but far-reaching. Artists’ mobility has become more complex, institutional exchanges less fluid, and the circulation of artworks more costly. In an art world that thrives – or should thrive – on international relations, every administrative barrier inevitably translates into a cultural barrier. Added to all this is the issue that is likely to define the coming decade: artificial intelligence. The debate on copyright concerns not only the economic protection of creators but the very idea of creativity itself. If works of art become raw material for training algorithms without shared rules, the risk is that innovation will be built at the expense of precisely those who make it possible. A few days ago, Anish Kapoor, interviewed by The Observer on the occasion of his major retrospective at the Hayward Gallery, candidly expressed his point of view. After dismissing the ArcelorMittal Orbit (the tower-sculpture built for the 2012 London Olympics) with detached British irony as ‘not my best work’, because ‘engineering takes precedence over the artwork’ (music to our ears and a relief to our souls, at last), he appealed to the new Prime Minister: to restore the creative industries to their rightful place at the heart of the economy, once the second-largest driver of the British economy after finance. “They speak to young people, to their sense of adventure and to a nation’s inventiveness,” he said. Because without an ambitious cultural policy, the risk is that we will end up in a world where everything ends up looking “like a huge golf course”.

The questions facing the new government, therefore, do not simply concern increasing funding, but rather deciding what role to assign to culture in British society. Whether to regard it as an item of expenditure to be curbed, or as a strategic investment capable of generating research, innovation, diplomacy and economic growth. Great nations are rarely defined solely by their GDP, but by the quality of their cultural institutions and the trust placed in them. This is a lesson that applies to the United Kingdom, but one that should be of interest to the whole of Europe.