The battle for culture

The Culture Wars. Capital C, capital W. A story whipped up by those who don’t like the idea that traditional culture might be challenged. That culture is leftie and needs to be held in check. That liberal values risk some peoples’ sense of identity. That the ‘woke’ might somehow destroy our notion of national identity. 

And there’s a spin-off war too. Lower case w. One that’s been happening in our cultural sector for some time. One that pits each of us against each other, that divides an already fragile sector, that leaves people and careers and reputations in its wake. 

And all of this stoked by a media – both traditional and social – desperate for your attention. Your attention, my attention, their attention. Another binary to divide, to pitch us against each other. Not just the left vs the right, or the woke vs the traditionalists, but us against each other. Artists and arts professionals in a battle.

The Culture Wars are not new

Perhaps, the thinking goes, if ‘they’ (or us) – those working in culture – are made to fight each other, they’ll destroy themselves? Or maybe, if the flames of the Culture Wars are sufficiently fanned, the bits of culture we don’t like will fall away? The risk-taking, the experimental, the transgressive – all those uncomfortable parts of culture, the things that make us think and question and reflect – perhaps they will die and never come back? Maybe that’s what ‘they’ think?

The Culture Wars are well documented. Attacks on the BBC, on Channel 4, the cancellation of Jerry Sadowitz’s Edinburgh show, of Terry Gilliam’s Into The Woods at the Old Vic, of JK Rowling. And further back, other high-profile cancellations. The furore around the cancellation of Brett Bailey’s Exhibit B at The Barbican in 2014 or, a decade before, Gurpreet Kaur Bhatti’s play Behtzi at Birmingham Rep.

The Culture Wars are not new. Nor the war amongst ourselves. But this one – the one that pitches arts professionals against each other – is now being fought viciously and on open ground. Fuelled by social media and a default to binaries that dominate our culture today. 

So why write about this now?

I write because people are too afraid to talk about it. Too afraid of causing upset where none was intended. Too afraid of offending, of being caught out, of being cancelled themselves. 

And I write it now because I worry that risk-taking – the engine room of creativity and new work, right across the arts – is increasingly feared. Cancel culture denies free speech, and free speech sits at the heart of the artist’s practice. In an open letter in 2020 denouncing cancel culture, 150 writers including Martin Amis, Noam Chomsky and Salman Rushdie wrote that “the free exchange of information and ideas, the lifeblood of a liberal society, is daily becoming more constricted”.

I worry that with all the other crises facing our culture – the climate emergency, the cost-of-living and energy crises, the slow pandemic recovery, the underfunding of public services, the levelling-down of our capital city, the list goes on and on – the Culture Wars become the straw that breaks the camel’s back of risk-taking. That they might completely extinguish our ability to take risks. Artistic, creative, financial risks. 

Of course, we need protections. From hate crime and other abuses. We need better safeguarding for everyone, especially those involved in radical practices. And we also need to protect freedom of expression. But these are not binaries and I worry that in the erasing of subtleties we lose nuance and an ability to make and experience ‘risky’ work in safe spaces. 

A drip-feed of anxiety

I work across the performing arts and I see worrying signs that ‘risky’ work isn’t getting an audience. Because artists are afraid, or because they can’t get funding, or because programmers are concerned about audiences or negative media attention or lawsuits. That venues that might have programmed ‘difficult’ work can no longer afford to take a risk on these kinds of radical practice. 

I’m talking here about England, mainly. In Scotland, perhaps, things are different. And across the EU (remember that?) definitely. But here, in England, I feel an arts and cultural sector beginning to turn its back on anything that might be deemed too risky. The wider Culture War has drip-fed a deep anxiety amongst those of us interested in radical practices.

Culture is many things, to many people. It can be a balm, an entertainment, a distraction. And it can be place for radical ideas, for confrontation, for discomfort, enquiry. I’m concerned that as the Culture Wars continue to rage, the sharp edges of this culture get rounded off. That the artists and companies attempting something genuinely different lose their nerve, or their support, or their audience. 

Or that in a world of binaries – of free speech vs cancel culture, left vs right, the woke vs the traditionalists – we spend so much energy fighting each other, that we lose our confidence to take a risk. As artists, producers, programmers, curators, participants, audiences even, we become risk averse. 

That we turn our attention on each other and in doing so we lose our focus on the very thing that should be at the heart of our culture. Safe spaces – real and virtual – in which we can explore, and debate, and argue together about risk, and experimentation, and the future. 

The very soul of our culture is at risk

I can think of artists making transgressive work who used to enjoy an extensive network of venues in England for their practice, and who now struggle to find a single space to take their work outside the capital. And I know of programmers who, given all the other pressures to find and maintain an audience, are turning their back on work that might be deemed risky. 

I’m sure there is transgressive, risky work being made and presented across England. But my instinct is that this work, once a healthy contributor to our mainstream culture, has now retreated into the shadows, specific communities, both IRL and online. 

I hope I’m wrong. That there is a vibrant culture of risk-taking, unafraid of the political pressures that the Culture Wars stoke daily. That there are safe spaces across the country where artists are challenging the established norms of creative practice. I hope artists and arts professionals don’t lose their nerve when it comes to pushing the boundaries of what’s acceptable on a stage or in a gallery. 

And I hope we can unite as a wider sector and turn our attention to the more important fight. One for the soul of our culture which is about differences and healthy disagreements and provocations and risk. Let’s turn away from the Culture Wars and create safe spaces for challenging, risk-taking work that celebrates differences and diversity, and overcomes the fear that unless everything that’s made conforms, it’s bound to offend. We’re better than this. 
David Micklem is a writer and arts consultant. 
@davidmicklem