Who gets to curate culture?
Curation is everywhere. Instagram feeds, window displays, hair styles, salads – apparently all of these things can be, and are, curated these days. Curating has become a fashionable buzzword, appealing to an internet zeitgeist that clamours for authorship and a unique aesthetic, for the reassurance that something has thought and meaning behind it. And it absolutely is reassuring – to be told that something has been sculpted, edited, refined, just for you.
Its current ubiquity aside, curation has its origins in the arts sector: to curate means literally to take care of, like museum curators would traditionally take care of objects tied to heritage and culture. Its meaning has evolved from these institutional beginnings, assisted by vast possibilities for creative application on the internet, to demand more agency and independence. This evolution is unsurprising. Ultimately, curation involves a process of selection, organisation, and presentation, and this process is quite applicable anywhere. It is at the crux of so many things. Even, in fairness, making a salad: select, organize, and present.
Lord Mayor’s Show, City of London, 2013. © Martin Parr / Magnum Photos
Salad assembling aside, curation is still a process firmly rooted in culture. Its entrance into the mainstream begs the question of who can claim to curate and what can claim to be curated. This is interesting to think about, but difficult to answer. It is also interesting and difficult to turn this lens back to the institutional roots of curation, and ask: who gets to curate culture? An impossible question, really. But looking at the UK now, 9 months COVID deep, pre economic standstill, post £1.57 billion culture recovery fund, a disturbing candidate for possible answer emerges.
Occurences in Parliamentary Houses (National Disgrace) by Craig Coulthard
Acrylic on canvas, 2020
Essentially, the government’s ‘here for culture’ package was introduced only after a period of neglect for the arts and it has come far too late for far too many people: the scheme leaves millions of freelancers unable to claim support. Speaking about the money’s distribution, Culture Secretary Oliver Dowden has emphasized that the country’s ‘crown jewel institutions’ will be prioritised – those that are ‘nationally and internationally renowned’, and ‘define us as a nation’. Put simply, distribution will be sculpted to protect what the Tories define as culture; institutions that likely already have established reputations and beneficiaries. Dowden’s own rhetoric is steeped in associations that heed the roots of this country’s cultural inequalities: the crown jewels are royal ceremonial objects, cultural icons of the most exclusive stature. They house the largest clear cut diamond in the world, and the Koh-i-Noor diamond, which is set in the front cross of Queen Mary’s crown, carries a particularly disturbing colonial legacy.
This year has laid bare the ethical shortfalls at the core of some of our crown jewel cultural institutions, exposing infrastructure that is designed to protect profits and whiteness – the very things that the troubling history of the actual crown jewels embodies. And yet, this infrastructure weathers a stormy pandemic, whilst those on its margins, and those on the margins of the arts sector in general, suffer. Research from the University of Sheffield highlights the significant risk that freelance workers face: to be self-employed in the cultural sector is to be ‘both over-exposed to the pandemic and at risk of irredeemable collapse.’ In addition, Susan Jones, a long-term advocate for fair pay in the arts, has written about the fault lines in England’s arts funding model. Freelancers have been ‘allowed to fall through the net,’ whilst Arts Council’s London bias and concentration on National Portfolio organisations fails to support diverse voices and community-based ventures. The damage of ill-timed and insufficient funding strikes a place where the arts enjoy more freedom from the strictures of elitist legacy; truly the most exciting and progressive work is happening on the peripheries. Crown jewel and National Portfolio institutions will mimic the government’s and Arts Council England’s approach: in protecting their most prized, and the monarchs at the top of their hierarchies, they will witness their own diverse and vulnerable margins begin to crumble.
The people in these margins should be closer to the centre. Talking about the survival of arts and culture, we’d assume that people would be central: the careers, livelihoods and wellbeing of creative practitioners are at stake. But, bafflingly, the government’s 'Here for Culture' campaign video doesn’t actually contain many people – it depicts cathedrals, stately homes, a couple of steam trains, a stained glass window. There’s even a concrete dinosaur.
Dowden’s crown jewel prioritisation strategy is a kind of curation in itself. The government is selecting, organizing, presenting: funding is a lifeline at this point, and will determine who and what from arts and culture will survive. The crown jewels alone do not define us as a nation: they symbolise the atrocities of empire; inequalities that the cultural (and every other) sector is yet to overcome; a nauseating elitism that the Tories are famous for upholding. Organisations who do receive funding are required to welcome it on social media using #HereForCulture, and arts groups were told to mention the grant on their websites using the Here For Culture logo, which is branded ‘HM Government’. Any kind of cultural recovery will literally be branded – a sinister indication of what Tory government-curated cultural survival will look like.
As usual, and in the spirit of old school curation, the Tories will take care of their own - in this case, their own ideas of what defines British culture. This authorship is frightening, the thought and meaning behind it sinister: cultural survival is being defined far too exclusively. Being told what defines us as a nation, by a government that has routinely defunded the arts in state schools, and is systematically devaluing creative arts, design and humanities courses in higher education, is the opposite of reassuring. The conservative party definition of culture has been selected, organised, and presented from a restricted portfolio: one that may or may not include a concrete dinosaur, but doesn’t concern itself with the organisations, practitioners and communities contributing to and engaging with creative arts on the margins. Like always, creatives will adapt and innovate in the face of adversity, but a Tory-curated cultural salad is certainly on the menu.
If you have the means, you can donate to the following organisations to support freelancers and creatives on the margins in the UK:
Words: Alice Keeling