Robert Hewison > Quotes

“Jowell fell back on the same justification for funding the arts that the first chairman of the Arts Council, John Maynard Keynes, had deployed in 1945. Art was something produced by people with special skills, who set their own standards of excellence; they needed to be supported to do this, and the audience needed to be encouraged to appreciate this excellence, by being given subsidised access to it. And for all of Jowell’s attempts to transcend instrumentalism, the purpose of culture continued to be to help the government ‘to transform our society into a place of justice, talent and ambition where individuals can fulfil their true potential’.22”
― Robert Hewison, Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain

“After leaving the Arts Council in 2009, he pointed out that, in the official portraits of past Council chairmen, John Maynard Keynes was the only one smiling. That was because Keynes died before ever having to chair a Council meeting.25”
― Robert Hewison, Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain

“Cultural capital is a form of wealth that is determined by its value in use, not its value in exchange. Its value increases in proportion to its abundance, not its scarcity. It is enjoyed by individuals, but it is a mutual creation that uses the resources of shared traditions and the collective imagination to generate a public, not a private, good. Cultural capitalism seeks to privatize this shared wealth, absorbing it into the circulation of commodities, and putting it to instrumental use. Contemporary”
― Robert Hewison, Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain

“When the conductor Simon Rattle left the City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra to take over the Berlin Philharmonic in 2001, he was released from the usual circumspection incumbent upon those in receipt of Arts Council funds: ‘Shame on the Arts Council for knowing so little, for being such amateurs, for simply turning up with a different group of people every few years with no expertise, no knowledge of history, to whom you have to explain everything, where it came from and why it is there, who don’t listen and who don’t care. Shame on them!’35”
― Robert Hewison, Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain