Secretary of State for culture James Purnell will deliver a speech laying out his agenda at the National Portrait Gallery today. The Guardian arts section has published an interview with him. Note his comments in the interview about the need to move away from a ‘top-down, targets-led approach’ and to empower people to take creative risks:
Overthrow the tyranny of targets: minister’s message for the arts
James Purnell’s agenda will delight many, but he says he has no magic wand to loosen the purse strings
Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Friday July 6, 2007
The Guardian
The great and the good of the arts world are notoriously difficult to please.
But for once a secretary of state for culture, media and sport is going to tell them what they want to hear. When James Purnell makes his first speech to cultural leaders at the National Portrait Gallery today he will tell them he is planning to free them from the tyranny of targets, that excellence is to become the top priority for the arts and that there should be a deeper understanding of what “access”, a contentious buzzword for the past decade, can really mean.
The point about targets – the notion that the arts should justify their existence by meeting quotas relating to “priority groups” such as ethnic minorities – is that the battle has been won, Mr Purnell said, speaking in his first interview.
“When I was cultural adviser at No 10 a decade ago people talked about access and excellence. Some people thought that access was dumbing down, that the government wanted all orchestras to be playing symphonic versions of REM, and there was a genuine debate.
“Coming back 10 years on, people are saying to me we can take all that for granted now, it’s in the bloodstream of British arts. I think that’s true.”
He said it had become clear that “access and excellence are not enemies” citing, as an example, the way Punchdrunk’s production of Faust, staged earlier this year by the National Theatre in an east London warehouse, took a canonical subject, “completely reinvented the genre”, and attracted an “audience of every single age and background”.
“The fact that it’s in the bloodstream allows us to move away from what could risk becoming a sort of top-down, targets-led approach which I’m calling targetolatry: this idea that you turn targets into something you actually fetishise,” he said.
He added: “We want an approach that empowers people to take risks and take a much richer view of creative development, and the question is what is the right structure for this to happen?
“What’s the trellis on which the plant can grow? We create the trellis, and the artists do the flowers, but we need to make sure that the trellis is not getting in the way of people being excellent.”
The person who is going to help him answer the trellis question is Sir Brian McMaster, whom he has appointed as an adviser working with the DCMS and Arts Council. Sir Brian is one of the most serious members of the British “artserati” and, until last year, was director of the Edinburgh international festival. Access should not just be about getting bums on seats; it should be richer, about deepening people’s experience of art, allowing people to develop creatively whether as punters or professionals, Mr Purnell said.
“I was in the National Gallery recently,” he said, “and a curator came in and said ‘I’m going to talk about Manet for half an hour to anyone who wants to listen’. And then everyone from teenagers to Japanese tourists were finding out from one of the best people in the world why she loved that picture.”
That sort of talk will delight many in the arts world. As will the fact that Mr Purnell, whose brief covers everything from sport to gambling and broadcasting, chose culture as his first focus.
His appointment has been widely welcomed: before his last job in pensions reform he was, in 2005, a well-liked minister for creative industries, and is seen as someone who personally gets the arts.
He rattled off his most recent cultural forays: Death in Venice at English National Opera, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s 21st birthday celebrations at the South Bank on Saturday, Kneehigh’s Caucasian Chalk Circle at the National Theatre, and Requiem for a Dream on DVD.
Until becoming a minister he was a board member of the Young Vic Theatre in south London.
Nonetheless, what everyone really wants to hear from the 37-year-old is reassurance that the arts will not suffer cutbacks in the next spending round, as a result of what looks to be a tough comprehensive spending review this autumn. There is particular gloom after Tessa Jowell, the outgoing secretary of state, “raided” the arts and heritage lotteries to make good the Olympics budgetary shortfall.
But he gave no comfort. “I don’t have a magic wand. It’s going to be a tough spending round. The only magic that is there is the magic of the sectors themselves,” he said. The case for funding, he added, would be strongly made, tapping into Gordon Brown’s rhetoric about national identity. “This is a government about aspiration and about championing Britishness, and the arts are part of what makes Britain what it is. If you asked anyone around the world to name things about Britain it would be: in Germany, Simon Rattle; in Thailand, Man United; in America Harry Potter.”
What about the Olympics which, in 2003, Mr Purnell argued should not be a priority for Britain? He said he was a big supporter, and the Barcelona games were “as good for Gaudi as they were for Barcelona Football Club”.
The division between his responsibilities and Ms Jowell’s are clear, he said. “Tessa is in charge of the Olympics, in charge of the opening and closing ceremonies, and she reports to Gordon on that.” Mr Purnell will be responsible for the “cultural Olympiad” – the as-yet rather fuzzy collection of events in which Britain’s culture will be, we are promised, showcased to the world.
Mr Purnell was adamant that Britain’s arts are “world class” and that “Britain has a good claim to be the cultural capital of the world”.
What the arts community will want to tell him is that if the money tails off, so will Britain’s extraordinary cultural reputation.
To read the article online, click here:
Overthrow the tyranny of targets: minister’s message for the arts
James Purnell’s agenda will delight many, but he says he has no magic wand to loosen the purse strings
Charlotte Higgins, arts correspondent
Friday July 6, 2007
The Guardian
The great and the good of the arts world are notoriously difficult to please.
But for once a secretary of state for culture, media and sport is going to tell them what they want to hear. When James Purnell makes his first speech to cultural leaders at the National Portrait Gallery today he will tell them he is planning to free them from the tyranny of targets, that excellence is to become the top priority for the arts and that there should be a deeper understanding of what “access”, a contentious buzzword for the past decade, can really mean.
The point about targets – the notion that the arts should justify their existence by meeting quotas relating to “priority groups” such as ethnic minorities – is that the battle has been won, Mr Purnell said, speaking in his first interview.
“When I was cultural adviser at No 10 a decade ago people talked about access and excellence. Some people thought that access was dumbing down, that the government wanted all orchestras to be playing symphonic versions of REM, and there was a genuine debate.
“Coming back 10 years on, people are saying to me we can take all that for granted now, it’s in the bloodstream of British arts. I think that’s true.”
He said it had become clear that “access and excellence are not enemies” citing, as an example, the way Punchdrunk’s production of Faust, staged earlier this year by the National Theatre in an east London warehouse, took a canonical subject, “completely reinvented the genre”, and attracted an “audience of every single age and background”.
“The fact that it’s in the bloodstream allows us to move away from what could risk becoming a sort of top-down, targets-led approach which I’m calling targetolatry: this idea that you turn targets into something you actually fetishise,” he said.
He added: “We want an approach that empowers people to take risks and take a much richer view of creative development, and the question is what is the right structure for this to happen?
“What’s the trellis on which the plant can grow? We create the trellis, and the artists do the flowers, but we need to make sure that the trellis is not getting in the way of people being excellent.”
The person who is going to help him answer the trellis question is Sir Brian McMaster, whom he has appointed as an adviser working with the DCMS and Arts Council. Sir Brian is one of the most serious members of the British “artserati” and, until last year, was director of the Edinburgh international festival. Access should not just be about getting bums on seats; it should be richer, about deepening people’s experience of art, allowing people to develop creatively whether as punters or professionals, Mr Purnell said.
“I was in the National Gallery recently,” he said, “and a curator came in and said ‘I’m going to talk about Manet for half an hour to anyone who wants to listen’. And then everyone from teenagers to Japanese tourists were finding out from one of the best people in the world why she loved that picture.”
That sort of talk will delight many in the arts world. As will the fact that Mr Purnell, whose brief covers everything from sport to gambling and broadcasting, chose culture as his first focus.
His appointment has been widely welcomed: before his last job in pensions reform he was, in 2005, a well-liked minister for creative industries, and is seen as someone who personally gets the arts.
He rattled off his most recent cultural forays: Death in Venice at English National Opera, the Orchestra of the Age of Enlightenment’s 21st birthday celebrations at the South Bank on Saturday, Kneehigh’s Caucasian Chalk Circle at the National Theatre, and Requiem for a Dream on DVD.
Until becoming a minister he was a board member of the Young Vic Theatre in south London.
Nonetheless, what everyone really wants to hear from the 37-year-old is reassurance that the arts will not suffer cutbacks in the next spending round, as a result of what looks to be a tough comprehensive spending review this autumn. There is particular gloom after Tessa Jowell, the outgoing secretary of state, “raided” the arts and heritage lotteries to make good the Olympics budgetary shortfall.
But he gave no comfort. “I don’t have a magic wand. It’s going to be a tough spending round. The only magic that is there is the magic of the sectors themselves,” he said. The case for funding, he added, would be strongly made, tapping into Gordon Brown’s rhetoric about national identity. “This is a government about aspiration and about championing Britishness, and the arts are part of what makes Britain what it is. If you asked anyone around the world to name things about Britain it would be: in Germany, Simon Rattle; in Thailand, Man United; in America Harry Potter.”
What about the Olympics which, in 2003, Mr Purnell argued should not be a priority for Britain? He said he was a big supporter, and the Barcelona games were “as good for Gaudi as they were for Barcelona Football Club”.
The division between his responsibilities and Ms Jowell’s are clear, he said. “Tessa is in charge of the Olympics, in charge of the opening and closing ceremonies, and she reports to Gordon on that.” Mr Purnell will be responsible for the “cultural Olympiad” – the as-yet rather fuzzy collection of events in which Britain’s culture will be, we are promised, showcased to the world.
Mr Purnell was adamant that Britain’s arts are “world class” and that “Britain has a good claim to be the cultural capital of the world”.
What the arts community will want to tell him is that if the money tails off, so will Britain’s extraordinary cultural reputation.
To read the article online, click here:
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