Culture is bad for you, first published in 2020, has lost none of its bite in this revised edition.
Conditions for the arts in the UK have got worse. There has been Covid-19 and the effects of Brexit, austerity and inflation. There has been a change of government, but early hopes of institutional change have been disappointed. Government reviews of arts education and the decaying Arts Council are taking for ever, and the signs are not good. “Culture is still bad for you.”
Very strange people indeed
The three authors of this claim are sociologists. They write in the plainest of prose, but every remark is supported by impressively dense footnotes. The only relief from this almost metallic material comes in citations from 237 interviews with their “dataset”—to you and me, these are cultural and creative workers with natural voices and forms of self-expression. It becomes apparent that the authors regard people in the arts as very strange people indeed, different from the rest of those in whatever class they come from, and following a peculiar trade, whether it is broadcasting, film and television, theatre, publishing or the visual arts. Craftspeople they cannot make out at all.
Worse, the dataset is beholden to a “somatic norm”. This norm is to be white, male and middle-class. They discover there has been a dramatic change in the social origins of cultural workers: the proportion from higher managerial and professional families has almost doubled, while the proportion from working-class families has almost halved. This reflects social and economic change, yet, whatever may be recalled from the 1960s, the middle classes have always prevailed.
Women, whatever their social origin, have it worse than men because of “social reproduction”—to you and me, babies. This explains why so many women leave the arts in their 30s, but the reason why so few rise to senior positions is sexism. People of colour must also face racism. The people who have it worst are women of colour with working-class backgrounds.
Challenge-reluctant
According to our sociologists, those who conform to the somatic norm are reluctant to confront the inequalities in their professions. For all that “cultural occupations are the most liberal, left-wing, and pro-welfare of any set of occupations”, these do not recognise the structural reasons for their success, putting it down to talent, hard work and “luck”. When you learn that only a third of each cohort entering the cultural professions lasts more than a decade, you may have some sympathy.
This is a situation the sociologists want to change, since they see the errors that cultural workers do not. Current schemes try to “privilege” people by employing them, rather than challenge the privilege they are being offered. They even suggest that employing people of colour is a form of exploitation, by using their race without any prospect of structural change. The liberal, multicultural language of the arts conceals actual discrimination—“the lucky gentlemen producing culture” do not recognise how they, personally, have been advantaged since childhood. At times the authors appear sceptical of talent, and the worth of cultural work. Sociologists are not trained to believe in luck.
The veil of meritocracy
So why is culture bad for you? The answer is that culture is bad for you because it reflects and reinforces the inequalities of class, sex and race in society. Because culture is believed to be good for you as an individual, you can ignore the inequalities that the structure of culture enforces. Recognition of the inequalities in society is pointless if nothing is done about them. The idea that the arts are a meritocracy—much favoured by senior white males—conceals the privileges afforded by social origins.
The authors are most persuasive and subtle when they argue that the objections to culture derive from the way that structural and social problems are obscured by the personal interpretations that cultural workers place on their positions and careers. But there is no recognition that culture is the medium through which criticism is most effectively made of those same social structures. This is true even of the Royal Opera House, and the National Theatre, where, as it happens, a woman of colour has just taken charge. It is even more true of new writing, of fringe theatre and visual art.
Culture is framed by the society in which it lives. At the same time, it shapes and alters what is going on in society. This is a serious book, with a serious title. I conform to the somatic norm, and I still believe that culture is good for you.
• Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor, Culture is bad for you: Inequality in the cultural and creative industries, published 25 March by Manchester University Press, 408pp, 27 b/w illustrations, £10.99 (pb) revised edition
