The Cultural World Has Fundamentally Changed

The question hangs on the meaning of the word ‘lead’. There are many styles of leadership: at one end the Scottish model, where the chieftain runs in front of his clan as they charge into battle; at the other the English, where an aristocrat sits on a horse and attempts to direct the fighting from a safe distance. Not that long ago, leaders in the arts world adopted one or other of those positions: the avant-garde charged ahead, leaving the rest of us struggling to keep up, while Lord Clark made lofty and mystical pronouncements about what the hoi polloi should do and think: “What is civilization? I don’t know…But I think I can recognize it when I see it.”

The leaders of the avant-garde and the scholarly tradition often argued, but it was a false battle, because they shared one thing in common: they both wanted to use their exclusive cultural knowledge to affirm their social status and distinguish themselves from the mainstream. In turn, their ability to do that depended on the assumed existence of a benighted and ignorant mass of people who they could place themselves above. Both positions were, and are, anti-democratic. As Schoenberg put it: ‘If it is art, it is not for all. If it is for all, it is not art.”

Although not everyone working in the field of culture has realized it yet, the cultural world has fundamentally changed, over a very short space of time, and we need new models of leadership to operate in new circumstances. The first big cultural change that has happened is that millions of people now have in their hands the things they need (such as cheap but good quality instruments, cameras, editing software and so on) to achieve high technical standards when expressing themselves in meaningful and enjoyable ways. People have always made their own culture through music, dance, poetry and craftwork, but the relative passivity of the twentieth century – encouraged by TV and radio – is now giving way to mass cultural expression: do you know anyone under the age of 25 who isn’t in a band, or writing poetry or dancing or making films?

The second, and even more radical, change is that, because of the internet, people can communicate, collaborate with others, and monetise what they produce. This has led to, among other things, the destruction of business models in the commercial cultural world and an explosion in cultural activity that is reflected in the growing economic importance of the arts, and in an increasing tendency for people to define their identity less through work and more through what they watch, read, and listen to.

The democratization of culture has happened not because power has been given away by the avant-garde or the cultural aristocrats; instead it has come about – as democracies always do – through people taking power for themselves. In this cultural democracy, artists – and all of us can be artists – are free to do what they want. But the role of arts organizations is to assist the democratic process. The question is, how?

Part of the answer lies in recognizing realities. It is obvious that no part of the cultural world can any longer lay claim to being of intrinsically superior quality to any other: it is no longer possible to say that theatre must be better than TV, or that an object in a museum has of necessity to be ranked higher than a piece of mass-produced design. In other words, there is good and bad theatre, good and bad TV, good and bad opera, and the arts organization has to strive for quality rather than simply affirming that they must be good simply because of what they do.

Another reality is that the official voices of culture – newspaper critics, curators, cultural funders, the leaders of arts organizations – are no longer the only legitimate arbiters of quality: there are many ‘amateurs’ in the ‘audience’ who have astonishing expertise (as they do in the sciences as well) – not to mention the fact that everyone in the ‘audience’ has a right to an opinion. The old boundaries between professional and amateur, lay person and expert, producer and consumer, have therefore become fuzzier.

In this new reality, arts organizations have to abandon the idea that they are ‘delivering’ culture to audiences; instead culture is something that happens when and where audiences and the arts organization meet – each brings something to the party. We need to think of the space between the stage and the seats not as a boundary but as an interface, or a space for conversation.

All of this demands a new relationship between arts organizations and their public(s): one where the arts leader is guide, collaborator, interlocutor, listener, partner – and sometimes follower. The role of the expert is to place their expertise at the service of their community – not to use their expertise to impose their own views on others. Paradoxically, this means that in order to lead better, arts organizations need to follow more.