The arts should be recognised as a key part of what it means to be human, argues a new publication

As the UK waits to learn what its newly elected Labour government plans to do about the crisis and decline in the country’s arts, Justin O’Connor (professor of cultural economy at the University of South Australia) has issued a powerful challenge to the neoliberal orthodoxy established by the last [“New”] Labour government, led by Tony Blair, in 1997.
Culture, he argues persuasively, is not an industry. “Cool Britannia” has encouraged a world view, internationally promoted by Unesco, that, for the arts, and culture generally, the bottom line is the only line to take. But it has not worked for the arts, or the people who work in them, while real power lies with international corporations. Since the 1980s the arts have become a private commodity, not a public good. O’Connor shows how this has happened and argues that culture—for the arts shape that broader idea—should be returned to the public sphere, and take its place alongside health, education and welfare.
The invention of the creative industries, which attached the arts to a bigger phenomenon made possible by digitisation, appeared to give them a larger role in the national economy. But since 2010 the arts have experienced a long period of decay, while even the creative industries have recently ceased to grow. The present Labour government must find a solution to what O’Connor describes as an “interregnum”, as neoliberalism decays. Culture has become part of the consumer economy while the public sphere, to which the arts supply the means of thinking about society, has been shattered. Postmodernism has dissolved any idea of cultural authority. Value is only expressed through the cash nexus. Art has no critical edge.
New Labour’s utopian invention of the creative industries, O’Connor argues, transformed our language, but “creativity” has no clear meaning. It is there in science as much as the arts. The cultural economy has been taken over by corporations and “platform capitalists”, and the arts are as badly off as they were in the 1980s. The claim that culture was an industry was unsupported by a corresponding industrial strategy, while the “New Public Management” (a term describing a process developed during the 1980s of making culture more “businesslike”) privatised the public service the arts supplied. The new definition of the arts appeared more democratic—but it was the pseudo-democracy of the market.
Since the Covid-19 pandemic, O’Connor continues, the claims that the arts would benefit if seen as a creative industry have proved false. We have a new precariat of middle-class start-ups; individual artists are worse off. Creative autonomy has declined, and the sense of a common public culture has disappeared. That needs to be rediscovered as a social necessity and the site of freedom, giving real control over our lives. Culture must be promoted not as a personal gratification for those in the know, but as a fundamental part of citizenship and a human right.
But how to achieve this? O’Connor draws on the ideas of the Foundational Economy Collective, a loose group of international researchers, who argue that as much as 70% of a national economy is local, as opposed to the international economy that obsesses capitalism and national governments. Culture must reassert its role alongside health and education as a means to liveability, not GDP. This is a radical transition, but once culture is seen as essential to life, not just as a pleasurable personal compensation for its pains, it is possible.
O’Connor outlines how this can be delivered, beginning with the household and leading to a reconstruction of the public sphere and recognition of the public value of culture. But that value must be re-formed as a democratisation and localisation that rediscovers its social, not its economic, roots. Market failure will no longer be the only justification for subsidy. This does not mean a greater economic role for government—where in any case UK cultural spend is 0.5% of its total—but a rethink that builds from the local, and includes the commercial.
We have a new Labour government, but the signs are not good. The prime minister, Keir Starmer, may speak of the pleasure of learning the flute, but institutional arrangements militate against change. The secretary of state for culture, Lisa Nandy, has no experience in the field. The arts have been given to Chris Bryant as part of the creative industries. The neoliberal thinking remains. Yet the new government has faltered with its emphasis on the glum times ahead. Surely a rethink of the field of the arts would show the government on the front foot. The arts are struggling, the broader culture, of which they are a part, is in the hands of international corporations. We need a new ode to joy.
• Robert Hewison is a cultural historian and commentator
• Justin O’Connor, Culture is Not an Industry: Reclaiming Art and Culture for the Common Good, Manchester University Press, 294pp, £14.99 (pb), published 27 February 2024

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