This is an extract from Susanna’s keynote speech at the Helsinki-Uusimaa Culture Forum 24 September 2024. Susanna Eastburn MBE was invited to speak to bring external perspectives into a challenging context for Finnish arts and culture where state support is facing major cuts with a reduction of 17.4m euros (17% of the budget) – in a historically well-supported cultural environment. Susanna is a well-respected Partner at Counterculture, with extensive leadership experience including as Chief Executive of Sound and Music, as well as Director of Music at Arts Council England. Here she talks about the polarisation of culture, and the corresponding need and opportunity for the cultural sector to work together to create a new narrative.
I have many warm memories of coming to Helsinki over the years. What always struck me about my visits – apart from the late nights – was the great collegiality I witnessed amongst people who had basically discovered who they were together. Also the unquestioned regard that culture seemed to be held in. Very unlike the UK at the time (this would be in the 1990s), there seemed to be a widespread acceptance that culture, the right to cultural education and the support of artists was part of the fabric of society, and part of what defined Finland as a nation.
I know that things are different now, and that must be hard for you all. They’re very different everywhere. I read in the news recently the UK being described as “the sick man of Europe” – this was actually about the amount of time taken off work sick, which apparently we’re best at – but it made me think about all the challenges that the UK cultural sector has faced, including many brought on by our own society through how we choose to vote (for example Brexit with the subsequent bureaucratic and expensive complexities arising around international working) but also Covid, rising costs and huge geo-political uncertainty. All of which will be all too familiar to all of you in this room today. At times it has felt that our cultural sector is on its knees.
It’s easy in these times to feel disempowered, frustrated, angry at what we feel we’ve lost.
And culture isn’t alone in these feelings. A few months ago, I was talking to my local greengrocer who was angry at how things have changed. (As an aside, I happen to know he was a Brexit voter.) He came out with a phrase which has really stuck with me – “Nothing is as good as it used to be”.
“Nothing is as good as it used to be.”
For our cultural sector, is that true? Take a moment to ask yourself – do you think that’s true? And is that the story we want to tell about ourselves?
A recent blog from the Paul Hamlyn Foundation (September 2024) posed a similar choice:
“The story of the financial shape of the sector has a choice of possible endings: One is a story of retrenchment, cuts, a focus on the commercial, and acceleration of competition for scarce resources.
Another is about setting a clear, shared ambition for an inclusive and regenerative approach which works for artists and workers, as well as people and planet, and focuses on shared solutions, innovation and care.”
So what might our future story be, and who gets to decide?
In the UK at the moment, as well as the very real challenges of funding and rising costs, the battle for control of our cultural sector’s future story has never felt more contested.
Firstly, organisations are having to welcome and listen to a younger generation who have different expectations of the arts and culture, of what a working life looks like, and they have huge concerns for the future of the planet.
Secondly, the ethics of arts sponsorship have become much more sharp-edged, with organisations under pressure, including being on the receiving end of headline-grabbing acts of protest, to withdraw from fossil fuel and other controversial sponsorship.
And thirdly, a growing engagement with the need to decolonise our culture and become more inclusive is being vigorously contested by the right wing press with their accusations of ‘wokeness’.
These three things are connected of course, because they all deal with the question “whose culture is this and does it need to change?” Such debates about change all too often become polarised between a narrative about protecting the value of what institutions have built up over many years, and a narrative about the urgent need for our sector and its institutions to change so that the way forward is different from what has gone before.
The problem is that both these narratives are right. The work of culture and cultural institutions IS important and deserves support to continue to work in the future. And our sector DOES need to change.
But the problem is also that both these narratives are wrong. The first can become a story of entitlement; the second can become a story of destruction.
In creating the future story of our sector, the trap of polarisation is acute, since this is territory that is weaponised by those in politics and in the media who hate what the arts stand for and are never happier than when we are fighting each other.
So we need better stories, we need to work together to make them inspiring and compelling to as many people possible, we need to both put aside our differences AND at the same time confront our differences with courage and care. We need to do two – contradictory – things at the same time.
Because we need as many people as possible on our side and to feel a part of what we do. If more people feel that our story is part of their story; that culture in all its forms is part of their lives as their lives are; that institutions will welcome them and be friendly and respectful, and not put barriers in their way; then the value of our work in culture, and the power of the arts themselves, will connect with many more people with all the benefits that we know it brings. More people will be on our side and this is what will get us through the tough times.
This work to create a new narrative for culture requires us to put ourselves in the shoes of others. It requires me to put myself in the shoes of my greengrocer, who is a voter, and a taxpayer – and ask myself, why should he care about what I do, about culture, given everything else he’s dealing with?
And the answer of course is that culture, and the stories it can tell, can give us hope and it can bring us together. But only if we create these stories with generosity, curiosity and a genuine willingness to collaborate.
I want to end with a quote from Björk:
“After tragedies, one has to invent a new world, knit it or embroider, make it up. It’s not gonna be given to you because you deserve it; it doesn’t work that way. You have to imagine something that doesn’t exist and dig a cave into the future and demand space. It’s a territorial hope affair. At the time, that digging is utopian, but in the future, it will become your reality.”
So we have to dig our caves. Perhaps for Björk – because she’s Björk – it’s actually a real cave! For us mere mortals, it’s scary because the future doesn’t yet exist. But it’s a territorial hope affair for all of us to knit a new narrative, stitch by stitch, conversation by conversation.