You’ve got to feel sorry for the arts world. Decades of self-imposed diversity drives and community outreach schemes and still – still! – they’re told they’re not being inclusive enough.
‘Even from the cheapest seats in the [Royal Opera] house,’ Harriet Harman said yesterday, ‘I couldn’t see in the audience anyone who wasn’t like myself: white, metropolitan and middle class.’
Tory culture minister Sajid Javid had the same message last week, noting how few people from black and ethnic backgrounds are given grants from the Arts Council. Before this Jeremy Paxman was banging on about how poetry needed to engage with ordinary people.
It reminds me of another age. ‘The ability of good music to enthral the masses,’ wrote Joseph Stalin in a 1936 Pravda article, ‘has been sacrificed on the altar of petit-bourgeois formalism.’ That’s basically still the message: stop the wanky formalist crap and start making proper art that people like.
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