Permeability and Promiscuity in Twenty-First Century Cultural Institution

Permeability and Promiscuity in Twenty-First Century Cultural Institution

There are many people today asking why it is that when over 90% of healthcare takes place in the home we continue to dedicate most of our finite funding to building hospitals, or why it is, when so much learning now takes place outside the classroom, due not least to the increasing availability of digital resources, we continue to build new schools, or why, when so much of our art, culture and creativity is now out on the streets, in public space, both real and virtual, and often made by people who do not consider themselves to be artists, we continue to concentrate on creating exclusive shiny culture palaces as containers for art. These are important questions for this century of course and challenge the very existence of some of our most revered institutions. But is this right? Do we still need art centres, theatres and opera and concert halls? In this paper I’d like to argue for the re-engineering - but not abolition - of the art institutions in our burgeoning cities, requiring new philosophies, values and behaviours, from both institutions and publics. At their best, art centres can be powerful catalysts for the generation and sharing of new and unexpected ideas about our present and our future, platforms for celebrating creativity drawn from across cities and from across the world, crucibles for civic engagement and sources of deep and lasting pride and affection and of course places of pleasure too. But to be so successfully today, they need to be more open and transparent than ever before, ready for unexpected conversations and partnerships and prepared to see their relationships with their publics being at minimum two-way journeys and not the all too often patronising one-way traffic of the past. In the UK today culture is more popular than ever before. More people go to museums and galleries than go to football matches each year and the figures just announced for 2007 show record attendances for many. Peter suggests that this popularity is just the start of a new adventure aiming to make art truly part of everyday life for all and will illustrate his argument with recent examples of innovation from across the UK.