ALTHOUGH the grim-faced individual you see above can scarcely recall his own these days, this weekend I am delighted to have been invited to two 50th birthday parties, celebrating the anniversaries of women whom you would take for half that age.
Grim-faced, but silver-tongued, eh?
1965 was an auspicious cultural year in which to be born. Rock'n'roll luddites will tell you that it was the year the music peaked, before succumbing to the lure of compositional pretension, psychedelic drugs and fanciful lyricism. More significantly, and probably less controversially, it was the year that the Harold Wilson's Labour government published famous culture minister Jennie Lee's white paper A Policy for the Arts: First Steps. To say that this was a milestone in UK cultural policy is an enormous understatement. It remains the only UK government white paper on the arts and when recent Tory holders of the cultural portfolio have tried to contradict its central tenets of the importance of access for all, and the value of the cultural industries, they have (rightly) been shot down in flames. The devolved Scottish administration has regularly tried on Jenny Lee's suit of lights, from Rhona Brankin's National Cultural Strategy and Jack McConnell's St Andrew's Day speech through to the current cultural secretary Fiona Hyslop's policy-making address at the Edinburgh University's Talbot Rice Gallery a couple of years ago.
Led by the campaigning arts activity organisation Fun Palaces, which takes it name and ethos from the work of theatre-maker Joan Littlewood in the same era as Lee, the anniversary of the white paper's publication was marked, but the celebrations were a little below the radar. It is a paradox that while there is undoubtedly a great deal more arts activity in these islands than there was in 1965, and probably more widespread agreement that Lee's then-radical analysis and strategy, is the correct one, the standing of the arts, in education, in participation, and in terms of access for all and the allocation of resources, has not advanced proportionately, and by some measures is diminishing.
It would be nice to believe that this might be an issue in the Westminster election campaign, but naive. It seems reasonable to ask if what we are missing is the voice of a generation of women like those represented by Littlewood and Lee.
In the coming weeks The Herald's arts pages will be featuring, as we do every year at this time, the launches of the new seasons by our orchestras and the unveiling of the programme for the Edinburgh International Festival. At the former we will be talking about new leadership, with the RSNO in search of a chief exec and, in a year or so's time, a new music director, and the BBC SSO poised to announce a successor to chief conductor Donald Runnicles. At the latter we have a new broom in the shape of Fergus Linehan. It is, you might note, a sea of suits, which may be significant. But, leaving the question of gender on one side, none of these terribly pleasant chaps is exactly what you might call a campaigner. In fact I can scarcely recall the last time I heard someone in a senior position in Scotland's arts community say something truly bold, visionary and horse-frightening. And, as we have noted, I have been listening a while.
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