Opinion: URBIS Chief Executive Vaughan Allen gives his views on the tough approach museums and galleries need to take in changing times in the UK
Remember the turn of the millennium? An era associated with shiny new buildings, the launch of major new gallery projects across the country, culture used as a stormtrooper for regeneration.
Alongside the capital projects, there was a demand from government and funders that cultural institutions demonstrate a real impact on "real people". No longer could high art be ghettoised when it was financed through the lottery.
Culture should provide lessons in how to be good citizens, adding to the ability of people to live together in society. Diversity and accessibility issues became all the rage, and culture nodded its collective head and took to filling in byzantine funding applications around the benefit to society of the arts; launching project after project with only passing connection to collections or core business.
The vogue for citizenship appears to have passed. How committed most institutions were, in any case, to working with communities, is somewhat questionable.
Community work became just one of those pre-McMaster exercises in ticking boxes, when we had to take on board that not everyone believed in the intrinsic value of the arts, and massive levels of funding were dependent on our ability to demonstrate instrumental value.
The great search for funding that was the first wave of Citizenship work came broadly in two forms. Firstly, there was a swathe of work connected with cultural entitlement. At its core was the intrinsic value argument that mere association with great art could embiggen the smallest mind.
A former Big Issue writer, Allen took charge of Manchester's URBIS centre in 2005
Wheel in a group of young people from disadvantaged backgrounds and sit them in front of the right painting or in the right performance space, and their lives would be enhanced.
Never mind the irrelevance to their lives, never mind that they doubtless had a number of cultures in which they already participated – this was all about ticking the boxes while doing not very much differently at all.
Secondly, there were the press-worthy projects, usually launched from the marketing department, all broad social impacts built on (often literally) flashy websites, petitions and campaigns.
After the money was thrown against the wall and disappeared into the wallets of web developers, they failed to have any impact on anyone at all. But they looked good in the annual report. A new measure of success was generated—the number of campaign slogan wristbands handed out.
The changing atmosphere seems to have been met with a tremendous sense of relief, an exhalation of breath that allows us to go back to doing what we’ve always done. And yet, in the world outside, the recession is biting hard.
Over and above the debate over instrumental value, galleries and museums do have a contribution, and a duty, to help improve the lives of their neighbours, their funders (through taxation and lottery ticket), their future, potential and never-will-be audiences.
This is especially true in times of recession. The impact on jobs, and on the future levels of self-esteem and aspiration amongst young people, has barely begun to register.
The recession's impact on the real economy – and by implication on the health and wellbeing of the average man, woman and child – has barely begun to take effect.
Recessions are not about Robert Peston's access to secure financial sources of information, but about illness, depression and often death. They’re also about the ending of hopes for generations, the destruction of aspiration and the strangulation of dreams.
Museums and galleries have a duty in all this. Publicly-funded, neutral spaces, guardians of the long-term souls of their communities – there are no better institutions to tackle the loss of hope implied by recession and depression, not just by providing grudging access to the treasures of a collection (while making barbed comments behind the scenes).
Projects which can make a real difference need to learn from the mistakes of the era of ticking boxes. There needs to be real, long-term engagement. They can't be one-week, one-month, or six-month long projects, where the participants are waved goodbye at the door and never thought of again.
They need to be more than "wham, bam, thank-you for the improvement in our demographics". They need to be co-created with the people involved, rather than created in a marketing office and thrown out in the general direction of a specific target "problem".
They need to be entered into with honesty, commitment and passion. The worst thing that culture could do now would be to withdraw into its shell, worry about its future funding, and ignore the wider issues affecting society.
That would achieve nothing. Worse, it would reinforce the arguments of those who see the sector as first in line when cuts to public expenditure are mooted.
And, no, none of this is necessarily core business. But it's about ensuring that an audience for galleries, for museums, survives. More than that, it's about ensuring that our cities, our economy and our cultures survive.
