ARTS

Bring back ideas and argument

Tom Sutcliffe on the malign influence of consumerism on arts journalism

omething deep down inside me revolt- ed when I first heard employees of British Rail referring to passengers as 'customers'. It wasn't just conservatism about language. I felt, without knowing quite why, very sus- picious of the im licit change in relation- no longer citizen ho hadgained access to tiv relation- ship. Hencefor , travellers on trains were a familiar system of travel, a distinct world and culture (with its own gritty slightly anti- quated romance) which was a communally owned and conveniently extensive public service. Instead, we were consumers of a travel facility, soon-to-be-provided-for cus- tomers by a heavily subsidised private firm at a phoney market price. Consumerism is a term of abuse. But the change of attitude, represented by the transformation of the travelling public from passengers to customers, is not just a factor of a new (no doubt more efficient and in that sense healthier) business ethos within the railway system. It runs through every- thing, and has affected fundamentally the area of journalism in which I have worked since the age of 25: arts journalism. And along with the consumerisation of arts journalism has gone growing editorial unin- terest in (if not contempt for) the perform- ing arts. And that has been matched by an ever-increasing precariousness of existence for performers, for companies engaged in the performing arts, for the whole extrava- gant culture associated with the entertain- ment of 'it'll be all right on the night'. But aren't the arts in Britain a great national success story with everything blooming in the garden? Isn't Lord Lloyd- Webber the King of Broadway? Journalism may be in decline — newspapers have changed for the worse. But, in fact, there are more pages about the arts and culture in newspapers now and bigger pictures which are a sort of culture in themselves. Who wants to read dreary so-called author- ities banging on about what we ought to think? And anyway you can't exactly com- plain when the poor bloody taxpayer has voluntarily forked out £78 million for the new Royal Opera House to provide for wealthy patrons, most of whom will never buy a Lottery ticket as long as they live. i . Let me start at the beginning. I got into Journalism because I was asked to write a promotional piece about a concert of Mon- teverdi etc. that I was organising for a group called Musica Reservata at the Queen Elizabeth Hall. It was 30 years ago, and I had gone to the editors of Music and Musicians magazine to see if they could carry something about what Musica Reser- vata was trying to do. Those were pioneer- ing days in the early music business. As a countertenor I was pretty pioneering myself. They said, if you write it, we'll print it. So I did. And they did. It was a puff dis- guised as information. We sold out the QEH after I'd done a lot of legwork, plac- ing posters in shop windows in South Kens- ington and so on.

Well, not many people read Music and Musicians, but I was leaving no stone unturned in my publicity campaign. A year or so later I was selling space for M&M, one of the Seven Arts group which disap- peared 15 years ago when its bankrupt pub- lisher committed suicide. When I became editor in 1970, I found out that the 15,000 circulation figure I had been quoting was really about 7,000.

Fast forward 30 years, and where are the little arts magazines on which tomorrow's critics can sharpen their teeth? No Scrutiny. No Score. No Criterion. No reviewing in the New Statesman of performing arts. Laura Cumming, the arts editor, decided that there might be articles about concerts and opera performances in advance of the event but there wouldn't be any reviews to let the reader know whether it had been worth paying any attention to the intelli- gent puffery to which the magazine had lent its authority. Who, indeed, are today's critics? The Observer, the paper for which William Glock wrote with distinction in the 1940s, found that it simply couldn't accom- modate Andrew Porter, who in his days on the New Yorker was regularly referred to

`These boots are made for Dworkin.' (with Anglo-Saxon blinkered hyperbole) as the best music critic in the world. Porter returned to England to escape Tina Brown, only to find her male equivalent, Jocelyn Targett, having his excitable way with the oldest British Sunday newspaper, which he has turned into an inflated tabloid. Critics need editors who will back their ideas, their style, their judgment.

The Sunday Times, which at least pub- lishes substantial review columns, similarly allowed the Berlioz expert and conductor David Cairns (once music critic of the New Statesman) to fade out of the paper like the Cheshire Cat's smile. His successor (inspired with the spirit of Andrew Neil) takes a straightforwardly consumerist approach and no fiddle-faddling. He will purr with pleasure about the product, or explode with gung-ho abuse, and certainly doesn't waste readers' time on airy-fairy ideas. The Guardian may still value the cricket sketches of Frank Keating, continu- ing the Cardus tradition of relaxed exper- tise, but the kind of musical leadership and reportage once also provided by Cardus is not given space. Although the Guardian editor-in-chief, Alan Rusbridger, is suppos- edly musical (he owes me his first byline in the paper and once accompanied me at the piano in a suitably adapted public rendition of the Nightmare Song), he has in fact presided over the destruction of his paper's reputation for arts coverage. What readers get instead these days is lots of consumer guidance to stimulate the purchase of cine- ma tickets, videos and recordings, a books section that sticks closely to successful pop- ular authors, and a modestly attentive amount of live theatre reviewing (since the arts editor was once a theatre critic).

But the Guardian is in step with the trends. Though both the Times and the Telegraph continue to print classical music reviews in their substantial reviews-led cov- erage of the arts, consumerism is the touchstone. The idea that (as with political reporting) arts performances well described in reviews can give readers a valuable vicarious impression, and that cul- ture needs informed comment, has largely died. Programmes such as Kaleidoscope on Radio Four and Mark Lawson's Late Review on BBC 2 devote scant attention to the performing arts. What user-friendly radio pundits like Paul Gambaccini prefer to do is discuss the obvious story-line of the latest famous or would-be famous film or book. Comments about what happens in the story (whether it's likeable or believ- able to the anchorman) blur into interviews with directors, writers and stars. In televi- sion programmes, viewers are assisted with filmed dramatised extracts from books. Reading is not enough. On radio arts pro- grammes you get copious quotations from film soundtracks. Of course, narrative is like life, and we can all identify with that, whereas music is something you like to have around you, but not have to think about. And, gosh, the old way of writing about music did seem to demand intelli- gent thought. Gosh, wasn't it elitist?

Political commentators needn't always go back to square one for fear new readers may not know who or what they are talking about. But for some time now, music critics in supposedly classy upmarket broadsheets and magazines have been lambasted for anything suspected of being jargon that readers may not be imaginative or tolerant enough to get the hang of. I remember once trying unsuccessfully to explain to an unsympathetic and fairly philistine features editor (when I was editing the Guardian arts pages) that reviews were the equiva- lent of the results in a sports event. The judges are needed to define what hap- pened. Who knows what it all meant other- wise? But, with the arts these days, who cares?

You can argue that film is the 20th-cen- tury art form. Hasn't it enabled, in the cin- ema and more recently on television, drama to be more widely experienced than ever before in history? Doesn't that repre- sent a flood of profound, universally dis- seminated learning experiences, Ancient Greek religious festivals gone global? Why worry about the live performing arts? All you have to do is perform with subtlety and precision before a camera or a microphone and your performance is enshrined in his- tory. And if your performance or the art- work of which it is part appeals to the market, you can earn in a way that your humble forerunners could not have dreamt of. Is there anything more wrong with con- venience art than with convenience food? Is there any deleterious cultural conse- quence from the mechanisation of memo- ry? People need mechanisation when there is so much more to remember (not to men- tion so much more to forget).

Film, video and recording are accessible, easily absorbed and available at the press of a button when the isolated individual chooses. There is a difference between that and furnishing your fallible memory with an unrepeatable experience of a drama or opera or symphony, in the company of oth- ers reacting to what is happening. That dif- ference most significantly is in the kind of digestion and communication the art form receives, how the imagination works, how quick on one's feet one will be when one is witnessing a physical performance in a the- atre or concert-hall. In the performing arts what matters to the audience is their impression. In the recorded and printed arts there is a different relationship between what the consumer makes of it and what it is: the film, the book, the recording is in a sense definitive in its quid- dity, though books happily are a trouble to read, and that trouble invites and validates the reader's impression.

Perhaps the robuster more primitive cir- cumstances of the performing arts are a vital resource and training ground for per- formers who will make their money and careers in recorded media. But will per- forming arts exist at all in a hundred years if people do not acquire from the descrip- tions and reactions of critics how to use them? Will performing arts all have to migrate into a sort of semi-sports format, with competitive singing and instrumental playing, and comedy olympics? Who made us cry most? Keep those tears. Who made us laugh and cry? Watch our panel rigged up with electro-encepholographic detail.

But the big trouble with performing arts (from the point of view of today's philistine editors) is that performances are finite. If you missed them, you can't summon them up again. And you have to trust the critic (for whom you have very little respect, because they're all inter-changeable and it doesn't matter anyway) that some newcom- er performer whom you've never heard about, and who has had no coronation on television or in some competition, is worth taking seriously. Recorded artists and film- stars have acquired permanent status and have the capital backing of whole indus- tries. Performing artists, the vast ranks of also-ran actors, singers, pianists, conduc- tors, may be as good in many cases as their famous successful cousins who got the chances and hog all the columns of newsprint. But most critics feel safer endorsing what the industry in its wisdom has thrown up. Enjoying what performers do is not just passive worship; it is experi- encing them and seeing the essence and spirit of the work which their performance is serving and which exists, as all culture in fact does, in the realm of the audience's imagination.

Performing arts are closer to the real world of everyday communication, to the normal standards of verbal, visual and aural ability that we all share. In recorded art forms, somebody has edited out error, the problem aspects of communication. The result is an idealised and fantasy phe- nomenon, pursuing a line of definitive and `There are certain disadvantages to living in here.' deterministic coherence. Only the perform- ing arts require people to tolerate the imperfect, to be on the ball with their observation. It is precisely because per- forming arts are so demanding (and opera most demanding of all, and least satisfacto- rily squashed into video format) that they are going to have a hard time from now on and need protection and special subsidies.

When television killed the repertory the- atres up and down Britain in the 1950s, nobody recognised what was happening. National and local government allowed a habit of interest in and support for live entertainment to die. The training ground for actors, the employment base of the the- atre industry, has vanished In 1945 there were a hundred reps, now there are five. No doubt some of them were pretty ropey, as are some of the 80 operas with attached theatre companies that Germany still boasts, like Neustrelitz with its professional operatic chorus of 19. When will the Ger- man taxpayer wake up and stop the flow of subsidy?

Actors today cannot live on what they earn from performing. In many London fringe theatres they are barely paid at all. In the West End a supporting role will earn £300 a week, the sum a paid adviser on the Arts Council Lottery board will earn in one day, The financial lifeline for actors is film, radio and television. The Arts Council still does not recognise that, when performing artists are not working, the capital repre- sented by their experience, their ability to work their imaginations, their traditions of instant communication, runs into the sand. People are the capital of the performing arts far more than buildings. Performing artists and their auxiliary backstage col- leagues (directors, designers, musicians, stagehands) need to be constantly reinvest- ed. Stephen Daldry's staging of An Inspec- tor Calls, which has made him and his designer Ian MacNeil a fortune by being cloned (like a Lloyd Webber musical) in the capital cities of the global village, is a total exception to the rule. It is the only play production (apart from The Mousetrap, which never travelled away from London) to have been successful that way, with a concept strong enough to sur- vive endless cast changes. But the economy of scale achieved in this sort of theatrical cloning depends on marketing long-run- ning theatrical performances in the West End to bus-loads of visitors from the provinces and squads of tourists from abroad. Musicals aiming for that degree of success now largely dominate the West End and have killed the market for a regu- larly changing menu of boulevard spoken- theatre. The life cycle of the new Lloyd Webber and Schonberg shows is the near- est that live performance can approximate to the economies of scale possible with film and video.

The focus of newspapers' attention goes in cycles. No doubt the classical music review will stage a universal come-back one day. Arts editors will stop giving space only to the famous or nearly famous, and inter- view candidates will not all be the same cir- cle of over-exposed stars. The dark ages will end.

Performing arts companies will be fos- tered properly and no longer feel them- selves to be in terminal stress. Actors will be employed and paid enough to raise fam- ilies. Editors will be brave enough to be sensibly different in their choice of topics and personalities, and will learn to trust their critics' judgment again. Argument and ideas will once again be in. Jerusalem, next year, maybe.