What will the cultural landscape look like in 2019?
Although overnight sensations, nine-day wonders, and passing fads and fashions may seem to be the stuff of life in the arts; slower, deeper forces are also at work, shifting the ground like tectonic plates and moving creative trends in inexorable directions. Some of these reflect broader changes in social attitudes; others are driven by changes in government policy – for example, changes in the tax structure or instructions passed to the Arts Council from the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). Here are three such phenomena that have been shaping 2018 and will doubtless continue to resonate in the year ahead.
Top-down diversity
Diversity and inclusion are concepts that have recently been so prolifically bandied about by politicians and pundits that we are starting to ignore them – at our peril. Perhaps the habit of parachuting a couple of Black and Minority Ethnic (BAME) actors into productions of classic European plays and proclaiming them thereby free of any racist taint has come to look merely silly. But there is also a broader determination to extend the reach of state-subsidised high culture beyond the white middle class that seems only a necessary correction to decades during which the question was largely ignored.
What is genuinely encouraging – exciting, in fact – is that this effort is no longer being dictated in a benignly patronising way by committees of those who don’t belong to the excluded communities: at last, we are seeing the reins being handed over to those who can themselves bring fresh perspectives and experiences to our cultural institutions, examples being three new artistic directors in London, all of BAME heritage: Kwame KweiArmah at the Young Vic, Madani Younis at the Southbank Centre and Tarek Iskander at the Battersea Arts Centre.
So now it’s over to them – and up to us to judge them fairly and squarely, without making allowances.
Macho building projects
It’s striking, at a time when the economy is so flat and the future so uncertain, that arts organisations with fragile balance sheets continue to expand so boldly.
This past year has seen big new projects open at the V&A, the Royal Academy, the Royal Opera House and Tate, among others. All of them look splendid, of course, but how many of them are strictly necessary or economically viable?
The Royal Academy appears to have landed itself with a vast increase in the gallery space it has to fill, and so far evinces no clear ideas of how to do so; the Royal Opera House has a super new studio theatre, but as yet has shown precisely nothing in it; while Tate’s Herzog & de Meuron tower (dating from 2016) looks increasingly like a mere folly. Forthcoming are more premises for the V&A and Sadler’s Wells in Stratford East, as well as a centre for English National Ballet, a £111million arts venue in Manchester and a shop front for Opera North in Leeds. The list could be prolonged.
The theory is often that such projects can provide incomegenerating space for new shops and cafés, plus improved access for the disabled and so forth. All too often, however, this involves distraction from the main business of presenting
Original: Tim Blake Nelson in The Ballad of Buster Scruggs, a film distributed by Netflix
or producing art and causes increases in the staffing and maintenance costs that cancel out any rise in revenue. There’s also a whiff of institutional macho hereabout: if you don’t have a new building on the go, with all the fundraising headache implied, then you will be regarded as a bit wimpish. It may be time to draw a halt.
The end of cinemas?
A century in which going out to the cinema ranked as the nation’s most popular cultural treat has long been drawing to an end, as the last fleapits have been demolished and the number of giant screen venues declines. Instead, we have entered an era dominated by “boutique” venues charging premium prices for plush seats and ever more sophisticated options for munching and slurping.
But even this is increasingly a minority urban taste, and thanks to the magic of flat screens and the ondemand menu, the great bulk of our film-watching is now an isolated at-home experience rather than a communal one. This trend will intensify over the next few years as Netflix, originally merely a prime vehicle for renting other organisations’ movies, has now become such an aggressive film producer itself.
Investing in the region of £6.3billion annually, it is currently involved in more than 200 projects – more than 40 of them based in the UK – spanning one-off dramas and long-form television series (such as The Crown). It is also now reported to be on the verge of taking over the legendary Pinewood Studios.
The longer-term implication of this could be a profound restructuring of the entire industry, with even the biggest blockbusters made instantly available to home subscribers. This could spell the doom not only of increasingly impoverished terrestrial television channels but also the delightful habit of going to the cinema – not a prospect that many of us will regard with equanimity.
Institutions seem worried that if they don’t have a building project on the go they will be seen as wimpish