ON BEING DANGEROUS A Gentle Provocation for Audiences Yorkshire from Peter Jenkinson
August 2008
Now is the time to be asking fundamental, even dangerous, questions about our collective future because if we don't we'll not only fail to thrive, we will certainly perish. The need to change is urgent, driven by globalisation, technological shift and by the needs, aspirations and behaviours of communities of all kinds. We now surely require courageous, imaginative, transparent and thoughtful leadership at all levels - leadership by everyone, alongside a hunger for stimulating collaboration, for unlikely connections and for warm generosity and the unprecedented sharing and devolution of power? Are you ready to think and act dangerously?
Our world is moving faster than ever before which is both thrilling and terrifying our technological capacity alone doubles every year - and globally we are more educated, more instantaneously connected and more wealthy than at any other time in world history.
It is especially a brilliant time to be young. Young people everywhere have never had access to so many opportunities as they do today.
As one example, if we
consider the acquisition of higher education qualifications to be important, though many are now calling into question the value of this, internationally more young people are set to get degrees in the next 30 years than the total number of degrees gained in the millennia that have just passed. But degrees for what purpose?
In the next few weeks China will, through the idealism-soaked mechanism of the smog-blurred Olympic Games in Beijing, relaunch itself to billions worldwide as a bold and confident superpower. India, Russia and Brazil are not so far behind. As for the so-called Next Eleven - Bangladesh, Egypt, Indonesia, Iran, Mexico, Nigeria, Pakistan, The Philippines, South Korea, Turkey and Vietnam - they now enjoy over double the annual economic growth of Old Europe.
Are we in trouble then?
Certainly we can no longer comfort ourselves with the thought that we'll blithely concentrate on intellectual pursuits in splendid and selfish isolation whilst the Southern Hemisphere undertakes our manufacturing and staffs our call centres. As we know the emerging superpowers are as interested in, and capable of, being leading knowledge economies as we are, as China and India - the Chindia Zone - in particular vividly demonstrate. These are challenging times.
Yet back here in the UK in 2008 we have never been more prosperous, more stable, more integrated or more democratic...nor more creative, inventive and cultural too. Impending recession be damned...deep and lasting wealth is to be seen everywhere across all four home nations of the Kingdom.
To reprise Harold Macmillan's
statement of 51 years ago, made in Bedford in July 1957, most of us have “never had it so good�! But does it feel like that?
Yorkshire is a case in point. Whilst it of necessity joins in the poverty competitions perennially fought by agencies to trigger greater government investment, with local and regional public authorities almost boasting about 'suffering' the highest rates of unemployment, low skills or poor housing, cancer or heart disease, youth crime, family breakdown or teenage pregnancy and so on and so drearily on, as a region, famously with a population greater than many European countries, Yorkshire is also rich and powerful in so many ways, not least economically and, arguably more importantly, in terms of the innate and yet so far largely unrealised potential and creativity of its people. And a people set to grow over the next 20 years, unlike many other regions, to reach a population of 5.5 million by 2030.
Turning directly to culture, Sir Brian McMaster suggested earlier this year, in launching his potentially agenda-shifting report on Excellence, that we are on the verge of a new cultural “renaissance” and a “golden age“, whilst a series of government ministers and opinion formers have proposed the UK to be the most creative nation on earth with London not only the most diverse city in the world but also the world's “Creative Hub.”
It is true that in recent years the British have
fallen in love with the arts, we have more people living as artists and creative practitioners than ever before, the infrastructure of buildings and institutions has seen enormous investment and much of it is indisputably world-class. After almost a decade of near deafening silence our outgoing prime minister Tony Blair finally got round to acknowledging this when he gave his legacy-building speech on the power of culture last October at Tate Modern:
“We have the most innovative
designers and architects, the most popular museums and galleries, the biggest art market, the greatest theatre.” But do we?
When you think of the 'dark days' of even a couple of decades ago, the progress made since can only be seen as remarkable.
In a country where politicians
traditionally would shudder at even the merest whisper of that foreign word 'culture' it is interesting to reflect that it was only just over 10 years ago that we joined the rest of Europe in having a Department of Culture with a seat at the Cabinet table, waving a glad goodbye to the Department of National Heritage with its time-honoured associations with Beefeaters, corgis, slippers and warm beer on the cricket green! Though let's forget that Cool Britannia moment just for now!
But are things really so positive? Or are we rather living in a smug and nationalistic bubble of complacency, ill-informed boosterism and slovenly thinking?
Are our
institutions and agencies readily identifying and embracing the complex challenges of this century or are they languishing still in archaic nineteenth century forms, never mind addressing redundant twentieth century models? And is there really an
appetite to work through the implications of increasing democracy, diversity and social justice or rather a determination blindly and stubbornly to hold on to our contestable authority, come what may?
We must surely reflect hard and fast?
At a time when an increasing proportion of
learning takes place beyond the school gates, especially online and for many teenagers in the wee small hours of the morning, we should speculate on whether school buildings open from breakfast to late afternoon really are the best places for developing the hopes and capacities of young people in this century and consequently ask why we now have the largest rebuilding programme since the years of immediate post-war reconstruction. At a time when the great majority of healthcare takes place in the home or close by, is it right to be spending so high a proportion of state investment in new hospital facilities?
When video content is
available practically everywhere in milliseconds and often for free - You Tube report that 13 hours of video are being uploaded every minute of every day...and calculate for yourself how many hours that is per month or year! - is there a point in building shiny and expensive new multiplex cinemas in and near our urban centres? In our surfing, downloading, e-reading, wikiing society do we really need libraries any longer?
And what of our culture palaces? Do we seriously need them now? What would happen if we closed all cultural buildings in Yorkshire tomorrow morning in a northern English version of anti-bohemian Cromwellian retrenchment or of New York City's renowned AIDS-memorialising 'Day Without Art'? and protest?
Widespread rioting
Or general disinterest?
Of course we'd hope to see protest across the region and would likely be fanning the flames! But can we be confident that this would happen and that it would be truly widespread, across all communities?
There can be no question that buildings and other cultural containers – the hardware of our business - are, and will continue to be, vital to the lives of communities as shared spaces rich with civic and civil possibilities as well as being platforms for art and culture and the generation of and reflection upon the ideas we need for understanding the past, for coping with today and critically for shaping our future.
But now we need swiftly to turn our attention to the software of our business: to the development of radically new understandings of, and relationships with, so-called “audiences.�
our
In this century of increasing co-creation, of mass
collaboration in production and distribution and of multi-platform access to content of all kinds, the orthodox Top-Down models of thinking and doing are no longer useful or effective.
Silent
disco,
guerilla
gardening,
streetcasting,
secret
cinema,
parkour,
flashmobbing, bookclubbing, freecycling, twittering, flickring...people are now sharing, connecting and collaborating in increasingly ingenious ways and ways that often bypass or even subvert traditional authority and political and corporate power.
They are no longer just audience members to be fed products but
increasingly creators, producers, curators, critics, partners, networkers and brokers too, working from the bottom up and from side to side, excitingly fashioning new forms of enterprise, of democracy and of power relations.
In recognition we need to open up more than we ever thought possible, with smart, warm, humorous, contestable, permeable, outward-facing, highly promiscuous institutions ready
and
willing
to develop
interdisciplinary partnerships of all kinds.
a
myriad
of sustainable, noisy,
We should enthusiastically jump the
fences and make friends with strange people, abandoning the ghettoes, bunkers
and cliques we liked to inhabit last century. It's all about making and maintaining good relationships, hard work and long term though that is.
This new relationship with “audiences� in no way implies what used to be patronisingly called dumbing down but rather promises smartening up.
New
connections and conversations between professional and amateur, expert and lay, novice and veteran and crucially between local and global, the margins and the centre will serve only to strengthen our purpose and the excellence of our everyday work.
We do not as yet understand the true power of harnessing all the assets and resources within communities and in people themselves for positive change, but setting out now to discover the possibilities will reap rich rewards not least in embedding the negotiation of culture into the mainstream of individual as well as national life.
We are all capable of doing so much more and hardly any of us achieve our full potential as Ken Robinson points out so wittily in his TED speech (www.ted.com – which has had over a million downloads so far!) and JK Rowling so movingly in her Harvard speech in June (harvardmagazine.com/go/jkrowling.html)
The cultural sector is only at the foothills in its understanding of the potential of collaborating with its audiences but it will be a surprising and rewarding and hopefully dangerous journey!