When a campaign takes off as Fun Palaces has, people start asking ‘What Next?’. It’s the wrong question – or at least, to ask it is to misunderstand what’s important about Fun Palaces and why.
Cultural policy in post-war Europe (how long will we keep calling it that?) has been divided between two big ideas: cultural democratisation and cultural democracy. Cultural democratisation got out of the blocks first and it retains the head start it established in the 1950s, partly because it holds the big assets. A product of the Welfare State it sees culture as a social good, like education, work and healthcare, which the state should help citizens to access. Public libraries had been seen like that for decades, partly because they are more obviously educational. Building new theatres, galleries and arts centre, together with pricing, marketing and outreach policies designed to make them attractive, has been a key part of cultural democratisation. Culture is good and in a democracy, everyone should have their fair share.
You could say that this democratisation was a victim of its own success, because it was the very children who had benefited from better education and public services after 1945 who challenged that provision as paternalistic. Artists were at the forefront of that charge, especially those who began to call themselves ‘community artists’ in the late 1960s and – like Amber – celebrate the working class culture from which they often came. They saw cultural democratisation as the elite’s way of maintaining its power by teaching others to admire its culture and the social values they represented. What we want, they said, is cultural democracy – access to the means of cultural production so that we can remake a culture in our own image.
During the past 50 years, cultural policy in Britain – and most Western European countries – has been a struggle between the advocates of democratisation and the champions of democracy. The first have institutional resources and authority on their side. The second have imagination and applied creativity…
What does this have to do with asking what next for Fun Palaces? It’s all about who’s asking the question.
Cultural democratisation, like all faiths, is rooted in the idea of self-improvement. People who are introduced to art at an early age, the idea goes, will begin a lifetime of personal development that enables them to appreciate more fully the transcendental power of great art. It is the education of a sensibility. Its great trap is the assumption that where you are, what you like or do now, is not of value in itself – it’s just another step on the long stairway to heaven.
In practical terms, that translates into ideas like engagement and audience development (how, incidentally, do you develop an audience, except in marketing terms?). It’s why funding bodies, such as the Arts Council, require that every application demonstrates a development on the last one. The idea of simply funding an artist to continue doing what they do is unthinkable, unless – perhaps like the Royal Opera House – what they do is believed to have achieved a state of perfection. In this logic, cultural participation is always and only a journey of self-improvement. That is why those who see themselves as managing it feel the need to ask of others – ‘What next?’.
If the question arises in a context of cultural democracy – and it does constantly – it is because people are asking themselves what comes next. The table tops were still being wiped clean while social media was fizzing with Fun Palace makers sharing questions and ideas about how to do things better next time. Brockwell Lido Fun Palace asked for advice on how to help parents see that activities were for them and not only for their children, and responses soon poured in from other makers on Twitter and Facebook as people shared their own experience.
And that’s the point – everyone’s own experience was valid. Everyone’s suggestion was worth hearing. There was no answer – such questions don’t have an answer –there was discussion and reflection. That will lead to experiments, more discussion and learning. There is no single path. There is an unending landscape of possibilities to discover and the right – and obligation – to decide for yourself which you want, if any. There is no progress, except perhaps that which you recognise for yourself in your own life.
If cultural democracy has an ideal, it is not some distant heaven towards which we are guided by a priesthood, but the quality of what we are doing, sharing, living now. It is about making sense of where we are, through creative and artistic interacting with others. It’s about working out for ourselves what we think is good and why, always remembering that others think differently for equally valid reasons.
What is next for Fun Palaces? I’ve no idea. But I know that – because this movement is (mostly) an expression of cultural democracy – the thousands of people involved will work that out for themselves. And there will not be one next step: there will be at least 290 different ones
François Matarasso 