{"id":6659,"date":"2024-08-05T13:17:00","date_gmt":"2024-08-05T09:47:00","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/?p=6659"},"modified":"2025-06-01T13:19:46","modified_gmt":"2025-06-01T09:49:46","slug":"arts-can-help-foster-social-cohesion-but-only-if-its-class-problem-is-dealt-with-first","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/?p=6659","title":{"rendered":"Arts can help foster social cohesion \u2013 but only if its class problem is dealt with\u00a0first"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

On the morning of July 5, Keir Starmer and his supporters celebrated Labour\u2019s election victory in the Turbine Hall of London\u2019s Tate Modern, bathed in the glow of a huge red wall behind. Hard on the heels of the culture wars of the Conservative election campaign and its \u201crip-off degrees\u201d rhetoric<\/a>, this iconic start felt like stepping into a parallel universe.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Industry media such as the Art Newspaper<\/a> and Artnet.com<\/a> wasted no time in expressing their enthusiasm about what \u201cChange begins now\u201d could mean for the arts in Britain.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

For me, watching Starmer making this speech in Sir Giles Gilbert Scott\u2019s power station turned iconic international art gallery, prompted a somewhat different question. Using this backdrop of the Turbine Hall\u2019s industrial heritage seemed to ask: what will the arts do for everyday working people?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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This article is part of our State of the Arts<\/a> series. These articles tackle the challenges of the arts and heritage industry \u2013 and celebrate the wins, too.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Tate Modern generates \u00a3100 million annually for London\u2019s economy. The transformation of the Bankside power station signals there\u2019s life in the old dog Britain yet \u2013 that the arts can play a role in the creative renewal of the country by offering everyone more opportunities to appreciate great art.<\/p>\n\n\n

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The Turbine Hall when it housed the machinery for Bankside power station. Marcus Leith \/ Tate<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n<\/div>\n\n\n

In his book Culture Is Not An Industry<\/a>, academic Justin O’Connor argues that art needs to be reclaimed for the common good, explaining how it is often presented in economic terms, focusing on its monetary value \u2013 rather than as an experience that enriches people\u2019s lives. This narrow, economic definition of culture as consumption runs counter<\/a> to Starmer\u2019s \u201cpolitics of service<\/a>\u201d.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

My work draws on insights born of teaching young people from poor and working-class communities on creative degree courses, helping them to grasp the complex relationship between art and politics.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

To put it briefly, the history of Europe is littered with revolutionary moments when politics had to reckon with art as a symbol of power and indifference to the needs of everyday people. The Louvre Museum in Paris and the National Gallery in London were both created to divorce the status of art from the aristocracy and the monarchy and transfer its power to the people<\/a>. This history paints the Turbine Hall\u2019s red wall in a more troubling light.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

A party supporting arts for everyone?<\/h2>\n\n\n\n

The Labour party election campaign consistently stressed the working-class roots of its leader and many of its candidates. Arts Council England includes socio-economic background in its equality, diversity and inclusion (EDI) metrics, but they are the exception rather than the rule among arts organisations.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In 2023, a team of academics from the Universities of Edinburgh, Manchester and Sheffield published an analysis of 50 years of data<\/a> on jobs within the arts from the Office of National Statistics. This revealed that the opportunity for creative work is, and always has been, \u201cprofoundly unequal in class terms\u201d and that \u201cgender and ethnicity compound inequalities of access\u201d to the arts.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Most startling of all was their finding that, compared to people who were working-class, from ethnic minorities or women, a person is still three times more likely to have a job in the creative industries if they are male, from an affluent background, live in London, yet don\u2019t have a degree. It seems that the choice of a young, working-class Keir Starmer to become a lawyer was a more direct route to speaking at Tate Modern than art school.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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Experiencing and appreciating art can be profound for a child. NurPhoto SRL \/ Alamy<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Social-policy academic Teresa Crew has argued<\/a> that to be working-class is to be seen as just not good enough. To fit in, working-class people must become what others deem to be \u201ccultivated\u201d, and that means abandoning heritage, behaviours and interests that do not fit with accepted, \u201chigher\u201d forms of culture.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Art appreciation is deeply biased because it always demands that people absorb culture that is situated elsewhere \u2013 meaning, on a global, not local level. In 2010, the Conservative party cemented the role of art appreciation in its knowledge-based national curriculum by placing particular emphasis on learning about the history of great artists and designers. Five years later, their election manifesto weaponised it, claiming the \u201cirrelevance\u201d of this focus on high art to the lives of normal people.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In effect, the Tories vociferously rejected their own curriculum to appeal to red wall voters<\/a>. The strengthened eBaccalaureate pledged to \u201ctake back\u201d education for \u201cordinary\u201d working people by removing the arts from \u201cyour child\u2019s statutory KS4 curriculum\u201d, just as curbs on immigration would take back \u201cyour\u201d country.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Populism has capitalised on years of deprivation and lack of opportunities in Britain\u2019s coastal, post-industrial and rural communities, persuading people that their hardships are separate from issues of gender, sexuality and race.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

But populism is wrong: low socio-economic status increases the impact of all forms of discrimination. The poverty that blights local communities across continents aren\u2019t provincial problems but perpetuated by the drive for global profit<\/a>.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In Barnsley, my home town, 30% of voters chose Reform in the election. In his novel Pity (2024), Andrew McMillan writes of this former mining area being home to numerous multinational call centres, attracted by the chance to offer low wages in an area ranked as the country\u2019s lowest-paid district.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

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The positive effects of discovering art and creativity in childhood can last a lifetime. Ukrinform \/ Alamy<\/a><\/figcaption><\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Art has the capacity to mine common ground between peoples and experiences<\/a> and to reveal populism\u2019s lies. But the arts can only foster greater social cohesion if the new government can help fix the discrimination built into creative education and the creative sector.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Without that change, any government support for the arts will undermine the government\u2019s bid for political stability, and populism will mobilise the sector\u2019s prejudice to chip away at the red wall that Labour has fought so hard to reclaim.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

On the morning of July 5, Keir Starmer and his supporters celebrated Labour\u2019s election victory in the Turbine Hall of … <\/i>\u0627\u062f\u0627\u0645\u0647 \u0645\u0637\u0644\u0628<\/span><\/a><\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":2,"featured_media":6660,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[644],"tags":[691,692,690],"class_list":["post-6659","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-international-news","tag-art-education","tag-cultural-capital","tag-gis"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6659","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/users\/2"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcomments&post=6659"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6659\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":6661,"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/posts\/6659\/revisions\/6661"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=\/wp\/v2\/media\/6660"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fmedia&parent=6659"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Fcategories&post=6659"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/iccip.ir\/en\/index.php?rest_route=%2Fwp%2Fv2%2Ftags&post=6659"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}