Cultural diversity policy is one of the few things that unites British cultural institutions today
Cultural diversity policy is one of the few things that unites British cultural institutions today. Every museum and gallery, large and small, has made cultural diversity into a key part of its mission. Funding and policy bodies trumpet this new agenda. The Arts Council's Cultural Diversity Action Plan reads: 'There can no longer be any question that responding to cultural diversity is a mainstream and not a marginal issue.' (1)Cultural diversity policy affects institutions' employment, training and promotion strategies; the subject and style of exhibitions; press and PR; opening hours; even the layout of buildings. The Victoria and Albert Museum's South East Asian arts officer, Hajra Shaikh, argues that: '[Cultural] representation must be examined in all its nuances. It is not simply about collections relevant to ethnic minorities, but it is also about the sensitive and appropriate display and interpretation of those collections, it is about inclusive and targeted education programming relating to collections, and it is about a diverse workforce that reflects the ethnic makeup of our society.' (2)The shift towards this new policy has occurred over the past four or five years. Some argue that this shows that a white cultural profession is at last responding to the reality of Britain's multicultural society, revising prejudiced assumptions about the kinds of artists and art it should support. It is thanks to diversity policy, goes the argument, that exhibitions about immigrant histories and performances of Sikh theatre are now supplementing the mainstream diet of British history and Shakespeare.It is certainly true that the old cultural elite had certain assumptions about what qualified as 'proper' culture, and that many of these assumptions have been revised. But it is a mistake to see cultural diversity policy in the arts as a more enlightened kind of cultural policy.Instead, cultural diversity policy represents the end of cultural policy as we have understood it. The pursuit of aesthetic or historical understanding, of attempting to distinguish good paintings from bad or correct interpretations from false ones, is deemed impossible. Instead, all cultural institutions can do is to revel in 'diversity', by promoting different kinds of art and competing judgements.Today's cultural policy rejects the ways of the traditional cultural elite, and presents itself as far more enlightened. However, if we examine the legacy that cultural diversity policy has rejected, we find that some valuable principles have been lost by the wayside. The origins of national cultural policyBritish national cultural policy has its origins in the early nineteenth century - a time when the new bourgeois elite was gaining power from the old aristocracy, and also faced growing working-class unrest. Promoting public cultural institutions was part of the bourgeois project of nation building. While the 1832 Reform Bill consolidated the bourgeoisie's political hold over the country, cutting back some of the 'rotten boroughs' and expanding suffrage, cultural policy was intended to play a more ideological role.The elite believed that aesthetic and intellectual refinement would help to discipline the masses, and bring the nation together. In 1832, the House of Commons contributed funds towards the building of the new National Gallery in London. Tory leader Robert Peel told parliament why: 'In the present times of political excitement, the exacerbation of angry and unsocial feelings might be much softened by the effects which the fine arts had ever produced upon the minds of men.'In 1841, a Commons select committee saw art as a 'means of moral and intellectual improvement for the people'. The view was that 'men cease to become mob when they get a taste' (3). The National Gallery, said Peel, would help by 'cementing those bonds of union between the richer and poorer orders of the state' (4). Indeed, the National Gallery's location in Trafalgar Square, in the official centre of London, was in part so that the rich could come in their carriages from the West End, and the poor could walk from the East End (5).Culture was also looked towards to counter the alienating experience of industrial society, which was marked by impoverishment and anomie. Art, as cultural theorist Raymond Williams put it, functioned as a 'sphere of imaginative truth' that developed in opposition to the sphere of the market, which was mechanical, profit-seeking and individualising (6). Romantic poets such as Blake, Wordsworth and Byron held up wholeness, truth and beauty against poverty and atomisation. Wordsworth saw the role of the poet as 'the rock of defence for human nature; an upholder and preserver, carrying everywhere with him relationship and love' (7). Some of the elite recognised that high art could compensate for the deficits of capitalist society; beautiful paintings could make the grimness of everyday life a little easier to bear.There is no doubt that the bourgeois elite's promotion of culture was partial and self-interested. Part of the aim was to contain worthy claims being made by popular movements, to mollify demands for bread and votes with food for the spirit. The elite's aim was also to use the clothes of high culture to legitimise the state - a state that protected its own property and privilege. And no doubt standards of cultural excellence often left something to be desired.However, there was much that was valuable in this cultural policy, too. It produced some of the best museum collections in the world, which were accessible to everyone. The National Gallery has become one of the finest collections of painting, stretching from the early Renaissance to the early twentieth century. The public was free to interpret these exhibits as it pleased, and was no doubt relatively immune to the intended pacifying effect. Contrary to Peel's belief, a love of Titian and a desire for social revolution are not incompatible.A key point is that the nineteenth-century elite really did admire culture. The more elevated and refined the art, the more they wanted to be associated with it. Matthew Arnold, the poet, critic and inspector of schools, wrote in the 1860s that it was 'men of culture', 'persons who are led…by a general humane spirit, by the love of human perfection', who could lead and unite society (8). He argued that the bourgeois state should seek to embody these ideals: '[the question is] whether the nation may not thus acquire in the state an ideal of high reason and right feeling, representing its best self, commanding general respect, and forming a rallying point for the intelligence and for the worthiest instincts of the community.' (9)This wasn't about cultural parochialism, placing Victorian paintings above the art of other nations and times. There was a curiosity about other cultures, and an attempt to learn from and emulate them. The Victoria and Albert Museum was set up for fiercely nationalistic reasons, aiming to improve standards in design and manufacture at a time that the British were losing advantage to the more cultured French. Yet it is full of the arts of the world, from Gothic Europe to the Ming Dynasty. Better British design
meant mastering Japanese calligraphy and Persian pottery, rather than reproducing some 'British' way of doing things.Nor was it a time of exclusivity in the way that tends to be assumed today. National art galleries were not intended to be the plaything of the middle classes. The aim of these museums was to relate to the public - to bring together rich man and poor man before great works. If anything, the working classes were the target audience, since they were seen as the rowdy ones in need of refinement. This was a backhanded compliment: it implied that everyone was capable ...
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meant mastering Japanese calligraphy and Persian pottery, rather than reproducing some 'British' way of doing things.Nor was it a time of exclusivity in the way that tends to be assumed today. National art galleries were not intended to be the plaything of the middle classes. The aim of these museums was to relate to the public - to bring together rich man and poor man before great works. If anything, the working classes were the target audience, since they were seen as the rowdy ones in need of refinement. This was a backhanded compliment: it implied that everyone was capable of appreciating the highest works of art, whatever their class or ethnic background. In Arnold's idea of the 'pursuit of perfection', there was a glimmer of a genuinely universal culture - a culture in which people could come together freely to develop artistic expression and appreciation. Arnold looked towards a time when 'the whole of society is in the fullest measure permeated by thought, sensible to beauty, intelligent and alive' (10). The increasing reach of diversity policyBritish cultural policy remained based on these founding assumptions until the late twentieth century. Of course, there were changes. There was a stutter between the world wars, when parts of the Modernist movement launched an assault on bourgeois culture and values. Some modernists mocked the refinement of high culture, drawing a moustache on Leonardo's Mona Lisa and revelling in random and absurd scribbles. There is no such thing as cultural value, they shouted, no 'perfection' or 'best self'.Britain's cultural policy survived the challenge, to an extent. After the Second World War, cultural policy re-emerged as part of the welfare state. The Arts Council was established in 1947 with the aim to raise the quality of cultural life and to take it to the broadest audience possible. Under John Maynard Keynes, London's centres of high culture, such as the Royal Opera House, Sadler's Wells Ballet and the Old Vic Theatre, were promoted as beacons for the nation. The approach was more insular than the nineteenth century, however. The Arts Council promoted local cultural activities alongside its fairly set diet of national culture; art was seen as a source of comfort and pleasure to lift the spirits of a war-torn Britain, rather than as the 'pursuit of perfection'.Cultural policy took serious knocks from the 1960s onwards. In the 1960s and 70s, the cultural left derided that which had been known as high culture. There was no way of judging culture, was the argument; no 'better' and no 'worse'. All claims to cultural value were merely the personal opinions of a white middle-class male elite, foisted on to the population in order to maintain power structures. A cultural democracy, by these terms, was a society in which everybody was able to express their opinion and create according to their taste. Only by getting rid of value judgements could culture serve everybody's needs.Another assault came from the right. In the 1980s, then prime minister Margaret Thatcher demanded that cultural institutions justify themselves in market terms, and weigh their value in pounds and pence. Here culture was evaluated in the same way as any consumer product: whatever sells. All that stuff about beauty and truth went out of the window. By 1988, the Arts Council was promoting art as a way of regenerating run-down neighbourhoods (11). The sphere of culture, which had self-consciously opposed itself to the terms of the market, was now called upon to conform. Paintings became products and galleries became businesses.Both the cultural left and the economic right attack the idea of culture as a separate sphere that should be judged in its own terms - instead holding it to account with external political or economic criteria. Both deny the possibility of developing common standards for judging art, and see culture as merely a collection of disparate individual preferences. The difference is that the left saw these preferences as personal identities; the right saw them as market choices.Even during the 1980s, the leftist and rightist criticisms of culture were often intermingled. A 1986 publication by Geoff Mulgan and Ken Worpole, then cultural policy advisers to the Greater London Council, bore the hallmarks of both. 'In an age when we no longer expect to find a single, all-encompassing truth…the best strategies for survival often involve creating alternative, exclusive realms which reject dominant modes', they argue, sounding cultural leftist (12). Yet they also state that 'the real popular pleasures have been provided and defined within the market-place'.However, it was during the 1990s, with the emergence of New Labour, that cultural diversity policy blossomed - and the crisis within cultural institutions came to a head. After coming to power in 1997, New Labour absorbed both the left and right's critiques of culture, and explicitly imposed them on cultural institutions. Diversity policy as cultural crisisThere has been an elision - in policy terms, at least - of all the special qualities that had previously been associated with culture. The concepts of beauty, sensitivity and skill have all but vanished. Flick through a New Labour cultural policy document, and it becomes clear that you could substitute 'museums' and 'art' for 'shops' and 'stereos', and the words would make as much sense. New Labour took on the right's demand that culture should be 'useful'. The government demanded that cultural institutions should roll up their sleeves and get to grips with social problems - by giving visitors useful skills or helping people with mental illnesses - and it demanded that cultural institutions prove their usefulness in facts and figures.This wasn't all about market value: rather, culture was being called upon to play a new role. The aim was for cultural institutions to provide points of contact between an isolated elite and the public. Museums and galleries were asked to become 'accessible', to relate to visitors' needs, and to develop more intimate, personal kinds of engagement. Paintings were either props in this game, or they got in the way. New Labour wanted museums to relate directly to their visitors with no messing around. Many of the projects flagged up in government policy documents don't involve any cultural artefacts at all. There are precedents for this: revolutionary Leon Trotsky relates how in different times an embattled Russian intelligentsia, struggling under Tsarism, 'was ready to sacrifice the "subtleties" of form in its art, in order to give the most direct and spontaneous expression' to the feelings of the people (13). Then as now, the desire to connect overrode cultural considerations.New Labour's use of cultural policy for social inclusion was also shared by the British nineteenth-century elite. The difference is that New Labour's 'access' policy is social inclusion stripped bare, with none of the finery of Peel's cultural policy. There is a desperation and rawness to New Labour's cultural agenda, which is defined above all by a willingness to sacrifice. While Peel wanted to win the public over with great art, New Labour asks us: what do you want?Museums and galleries, already battered and bruised by the 1980s, largely gave into New Labour's agenda. As a result, the notion of cultural value became entirely mystified. The first report of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport's (DCMS's) Quality, Efficiency and Standards Team (QUEST), for example, discovered 'somewhere in the region of 1200 indicators' of quality in the cultural sector (14). The question of how to judge the quality of art, or to make sense of a historical artefact, became obscure. If you value a painting only because it can tackle unemployment or improve self-esteem, then you have no idea what it is really worth. It's all about context, about the way in which you are using the painting, rather than the painting itself. 'Cultural diversity' policy blossomed as an expression of this situation. Uncertain about how to evaluate artefacts, cultural institutions celebrate difference as an end in itself. 'Diversity' here is really a metaphor for cultural disorientation.Of course, there are plenty of individuals working in museums and galleries who have kept their heads. They continue the struggle to learn from and enjoy art and artefacts. But when the public world doesn't hold to the idea of cultural value, their judgements are merely personal opinions. They can't claim that their view is any better than anybody else's, or try to convince others of its veracity, so they often keep it to themselves.In their public pronouncements, heads of cultural institutions tend to celebrate diversity. This is much broader than ethnic diversity - it is about celebrating different pictures, different views, different interpretations, different everything. For example, former head of the National Gallery Neil MacGregor has described the mission of public art galleries as: 'to try to allow our public access to different truths about our pictures - about their pictures - to allow the artists to speak in as many different ways and reach as many different audiences as possible, and to explore the richness of potential meanings implicit in great works of art - meanings both historical and contemporary.' (15)Nobody would claim that a painting had only one eternal meaning, but why actively try to find as many meanings as possible? Surely aesthetic education is about sharpening your eye rather than revelling in all the different ways of seeing. You will see paintings in different ways on different gallery visits, and others will see them in still more different ways, but this is hardly the object of the whole affair.As well as expressing the crisis in cultural judgement, however, cultural diversity policy also provides a new role for cultural institutions. It gives museum directors a new story to tell themselves when they get up in the morning; it gives museums a new way to organise their work; and it gives their artefacts a new kind of value. The two faces of diversity policyThere are two sides to today's cultural diversity policy. In appearance, they are diametrically opposed. One deals in personal emotion, the other in objective statistics. One treats people as individuals, the other as members of a category. Yet they share some common assumptions about culture, and about museum visitors. Cultural recognitionThis new role fits in with the New Labour project of trying to build connections with visitors, at the personal level of self-identity. Scan a list of museum projects today, and you'll be surprised at how many involve asking visitors to donate objects, paintings or testimonies for the museum. These objects are sought after by local museums at a time when their Old Masters may be lying in the basement. The attraction of visitor-donated artefacts is that they are seen as containing the 'story' of the person who made it. Cultural artefacts are seen as vessels for different individuals' identities, rather in the way that relics were seen as invested with the spirits of saints. By collecting, displaying and valuing these artefacts, cultural institutions feel that they are relating to and valuing their visitors.Among the events in the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council's (formerly known as re:source) cultural diversity festival in 2003, for example, was the 'Multicultural plaque' project at a museum in Stoke on Trent, which involved working with the town's 'black minority ethnic groups' in an 'ongoing oral history and documentation project'. The end point of the project was for some of the participants to produce a public mural, which represented their experiences and perspectives. A project at Hereford Museum featured objects, images and oral testimony from the local Jewish and traveller communities. Meanwhile, Harlow Museum created a display about people who had moved to Harlow. Visitors were asked to bring photographs, tell about their home customs, and record their stories of moving to Harlow (16).By collecting testimonies, personal objects and drawings, cultural institutions claim that they are helping to make their visitors feel valued, and giving them a more secure sense of personal identity. Tyne and Wear Museum said that its 'Making History' project, which encouraged visitors to donate objects of personal significance, 'shows that everyday objects today are valued and their owners are valued too' (17). The museum also claimed that the project helped to bring people together as part of a community - showing them that they are 'a valued part of a whole'. Another coordinator of a cultural diversity project said it had helped to foster a 'realisation, understanding and sense of self'.Existing collections are employed to similar ends. In this case, artefacts are treated as a kind of mirror into which visitors gaze in order to see themselves. Rajiv Anand, cultural diversity development officer for the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council, ran a project in West Yorkshire with 16- to 25-year-olds, working with the museum's South Asian collection. The aim was not to appreciate South Asian art. Instead, the project was called 'Who am I?', and it aimed to use the collections to explore the young people's sense of identity. The group produced a video talking about how they bridged the cultural differences between school and home life, and whether they felt British or Asian. The aim, said Anand, was for the group to 'see themselves reflected in various artefacts' (18).Although many of these projects target ethnic minorities, the issue is not really about ethnicity. Instead, the focus is on people's private sense of self. The same kinds of project could apply for visitors from all backgrounds. So why the focus on minorities? One reason is opportunism. Minority groups are seen as the most vulnerable and 'excluded', and in most need of public recognition. Another reason is guilt. Because cultural institutions no longer believe in cultural value, their collections of Rembrandt and Constable look shamefully narrow and exclusive. By collecting the most everyday things from the most marginalised in society, museums are engaging in self-admonishment, castigating themselves for once being so high and mighty.Because this policy sees every object in terms of personal identity, it is blind to imaginative or well-crafted paintings, interesting or rare historical artefacts. It is indifferent to form, colour or pattern. Cultural diversity officers must barely glance at the paintings they are putting on their walls, or the Asian art they use in their discussions about identity. Everything is judged by the amount of personal meaning invested in it.The illumination that art can bring is lost. In actual fact, it is the painting, not the artist's emotion, that is the valuable thing. As the New York art critic Jed Perl has written: 'What counts is that whatever the artist is thinking or feeling is absorbed into the look, the character, the intricacies of the work. The painting, the sculpture…makes its own terms, and we judge what we see.' (19) Strong private emotions are no guarantee of art that can be understood and appreciated by others. Similarly, self-obsession can limit our enjoyment of art: we can gain satisfaction by examining the painting's texture, colour and form, rather than by glorying in our reflection in the glass. One museum director described the process of entering into the world of the painting as 'unselfing', giving up self-centred defences and concerns (20). Moreover, it is only by examining art as an object, as something that exists outside of us, that we might hope to judge it by cultural standards of value. As the critic Lionel Trilling put it: 'Objectivity, we might say, is the respect we give to the object as object, as it exists apart from us.' (21)Cultural diversity policy makes historical artefacts similarly dumb. Chinese paintings, Greek brooches, and Egyptian mummies provide a glimpse into another time and place. They can take us out of our own lives, and give us an insight into other societies' worldview and way of life. Fragments of pot can speak of a long-dead civilisation's myths, social structure, economy and diet. Study of these artefacts in turn helps us to put our own society in perspective: seeing it as the latest step in the march of human history, rather than as the only possible way of living. If historical artefacts are viewed in personal terms, they stop telling us anything. Instead of learning about human 'diversity', then, we end up stuck in our present-day lives.This policy also has a low view of its visitors. The assumption is that visitors are uninterested in or unable to learn about the world. Each person is seen as trapped within his or her own private bubble, in constant need of affirmation and recognition. The idea seems to be that if people fail to see their reflection in exhibitions they will feel worthless and excluded. Disability consultant Annie Delin told a conference of museum professionals: 'Disabled people should be brought into the museum and supported in understanding where they existed in the past, to reinforce their right to belong in the present.' (22) The image is of people wandering around aimlessly, unsure of their right to exist until their family photographs are valued by the museum. With this view of their visitors, it's no surprise that museums have put the Great Masters in the backroom.The other side to cultural diversity policy is very different - but has the very same indifference towards culture, and contempt for the visitor. Targeting diversityThis is the business of measuring and setting targets for numbers of ethnic minorities and marginalised groups. While cultural recognition is emotional, relating to visitors on a subjective level, diversity targets are objective and rational. This is a policy that can work on a large scale. Unlike cultural recognition, diversity targets can guide a large institution or funding body, enabling it to establish benchmarks and measure progress. In the past, an institution's sense of cultural mission allowed it to steer its path through choices of exhibitions and artists. It was the measure of cultural value that gave its work logic and objectivity. When that wanes, cultural institutions require a new organising principle. Cultural standards are replaced by the tallying of visitor figures.Again, this is not really about ethnicity. The targets applied to ethnic minorities are also applied to other groups perceived as 'excluded'. It is about museums proving - to themselves and their funders - that they are leaving their old elitist past behind. Increasing the numbers of ethnic minority visitors, staff and artists shows that they have moved away from their much-derided white, middle-class role. It is also about showing that they are above all concerned with the characteristics of their visitors, rather than focusing on the qualities of their art.A number of cultural institutions have special policies encouraging culturally diverse art and exhibitions. In Black History Month in October, museums, galleries, archives and libraries across the country put on exhibitions on diversity-related themes. The Museums, Libraries and Archives Council's cultural diversity festival, which continued on from Black History Month in 2003, aimed to send the message that 'Black History Month should not be a tokenistic one-month celebration and representation of cultural diversity but a more integral part of the sector's activities' (23). The Arts Council England project decibel aims to promote culturally diverse arts in Britain (defined as work by black, Asian and Chinese artists). This includes funding and showcasing diverse artists, raising awareness about the issue of diversity, and improving diverse arts networks.Cultural institutions have set targets for increasing their numbers of ethnic minority staff. The UK Museums Association set up its 'Diversify project' in 1998, offering bursaries and traineeships to prepare ethnic minority individuals for a career in museums. It reports that 'by the start of 2003, 15 minority-ethnic individuals had been assisted in their museum career by the Diversify project' (24). The British Film Institute (bfi), meanwhile, promises 'a series of internships and training courses, mentoring and a minority staff focus-group' to help tackle 'the under-representation of prioritised communities within the workforce'.This target approach is indifferent to the content of culture - and this applies for 'diverse' exhibitions just as much as it does for Western fine art. Islamic art is not valued for its intricate, proportioned design, or because it provides us with an insight into one of the great historic civilisations; it is valued because it gets the right kind of punters through the door. The artefacts of different cultures are judged in terms of the colour of the faces that they bring in. Meanwhile, some of humanity's greatest artistic achievements, in European art from the Renaissance onwards, are sidelined for attracting the wrong kinds of people - which is a loss for everyone, regardless of ethnic background.Diversity targets view ethnic minorities as uniform members of a group, rather than as intelligent and curious individuals with a range of interests. They are often assumed to be only interested in art relating to 'their' particular culture, which is why cultural institutions try to attract the Chinese community with exhibitions about Chinese culture or the Afro-Caribbean community with exhibitions about slavery. The effect of this approach is to institutionalise cultural divisions. A 'black artist' is marked out as different from other artists, a 'minority-ethnic individual' as different to other museum workers, and a British-Chinese museum-goer different to other museum-goers. The possibility of an open and universal public culture, in which each person can develop their own capabilities and learn from others, is placed yet further away.Measuring up to the pastCultural diversity policy is founded upon the collapse of traditional cultural policy. The celebration of 'diversity' for its own sake expresses the disorientation of the cultural elite, once belief in standards of cultural value had waned. But the same policy is also a response to this disorientation, providing a new logic and role for cultural institutions.Today's cultural policy justifies itself through a critique of the past. According to contemporary wisdom, traditional cultural policy was merely an extension of the worldview of particular individuals. People such as Matthew Arnold and John Maynard Keynes were trying to foist their taste and values upon everyone. All that talk about sweetness and light was just sugar for the pill. Given that cultural values are merely cover for individual identity, goes the argument, how much better to allow as many different people to express their preferences as possible. Why should Turner be given so much room to represent his sea voyages in the National Gallery - why not allow more people to portray their travelling experiences?In fact, today's diversity officers are foisting their cultural assumptions upon the past. The past is judged by the limited horizons of the present, and the present gets to pat itself on the back.The traditional British elite's cultural policy was, to some degree at least, true to its rhetoric. Although cultural institutions were set up for ideological reasons, they were much more than ideology. Museums and galleries really were a separate sphere, where art and history could be studied for their own sake. These institutions' aesthetic and intellectual judgements cannot be reduced to cultural, political or personal identity. After all, we must remember that it was culture's lofty aspirations that attracted the nineteenth-century bourgeoisie in the first place. Those lofty aspirations should be defended.Today's cultural policy actually has much in common with the nineteenth century brand of bourgeois philistinism that the 'men of culture' were rebelling against. According to the philistines, the only standard of cultural value was the amount of pleasure it gave to the individual. On this basis, English philosopher Jeremy Bentham decided that: 'Prejudice apart, the game of push-pin is of equal value with the arts and sciences of music and poetry.' (25) Another trademark of the philistines was the celebration of everyone having their own opinion. Matthew Arnold satirised this 'doing as one likes', as he called it: 'the aspirations of culture', he said, 'are not satisfied, unless what men say, when they may say what they like, is worth saying…' (26). In Bentham's pleasure principle, we can see something of cultural diversity policy's emphasis on making visitors feel 'valued'; in 'doing as one likes', we can see the celebration of diversity. The common assumption is that culture is merely about individual preferences and pleasure.This is not a question of whether ethnic minorities should go to museums, or whether museums should show exhibitions about immigrant history or Islamic art. Of course they should - on both counts. But minorities should go to a museum exhibition because they are drawn by its subject matter, not because the museum is counting their heads. And museums should show exhibitions about Islamic art because this is of general relevance and interest, not as a way of attracting the 'right' kinds of visitors.Cultural diversity policy represents the work of cultural institutions after culture. Museums and galleries were founded in the nineteenth century for the study and enjoyment of the artefacts of art and history. The waning of belief in cultural value left them washed up. They were big buildings full of collections with nothing to do. Today, many of these institutions have adopted an anti-cultural policy. They trumpet the message that a family photograph is as valuable as a masterpiece, that judgement is just opinion. They preoccupy themselves with collecting personal testimonies and counting visitor figures. The new role that they have chosen is really about tearing up their foundations - stamping on the statues and drawing moustaches on their own Mona Lisas.Whatever the shortfalls of nineteenth-century cultural policy, at least people got decent paintings out of it. At least there was an aim to broaden everybody's horizons and refine their appreciation. Today's elite, by contrast, seeks to showcase mundane artefacts, and propagate the most trivial and divisive instincts. If cultural institutions no longer want to 'do' culture, it might be preferable that they do nothing at all. 1) Cultural Diversity Action Plan, Arts Council of England, May 1998 (2) In Including Museums, (eds) Jocelyn Dodd and Richard Sandell, University of Leceister, 2001(3) The Nationalisation of Culture, Janet Minihan, Hamilton, 1977, p87; p89(4) The Nationalisation of Culture, Janet Minihan, Hamilton, 1977, p56(5) 'A Pentecost in Trafalgar Square', in Whose Muse?: Art Museums and the Public Trust, (ed) James Cuno, Princeton University Press, 2003, p30(6) Culture and Society: 1780-1850, Raymond Williams, Chatto and Windus, 1958(7) Culture and Society: 1780-1850, Raymond Williams, Chatto and Windus, p57(8) 'Culture and Anarchy', in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, Matthew Arnold, CUP 2001, p110(9) 'Democracy', in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, Mathew Arnold, CUP 2001, p15(10) 'Culture and Anarchy', in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, Mathew Arnold, CUP 2001, p79(11) 'An urban renaissance', Arts Council, 1988, quoted in The Benefits of Public Art, Sara Selwood, PSI 1995, p38(12) Saturday Night or Sunday Morning? From Arts to Industry - New Forms of Cultural Policy, Geoff Mulgan and Ken Worpole, Comedia, London, 1986(13) Art and Revolution, Leon Trotsky, Pathfinder, 1970, p32(14) 'The economy of the imagination', a speech by Lord Evans, New Statesman Arts Lecture, 27 June 2001(15) 'A Pentecost in Trafalgar Square', in Whose Muse?: Art Museums and the Public Trust, (ed) James Cuno, Princeton University Press, 2003, p30(16) See re:srouce's Cultural Diversity Festival(17) Museums and Social Inclusion: The GLLAM Report, Group for Large Local Authority Museums, October 2000, p32(18) Rajiv Anand, at Connections and Disconnections: museums, cultural heritage and diverse communities, V and A, 22 June 2002(19) Eyewitness: Reports From an Art World in Crisis, Jed Perl, p6(20) Whose Muse?: Art Museums and the Public Trust, (ed) James Cuno, Princeton University Press, 2003, p49(21) Quoted in Whose Muse?: Art Museums and the Public Trust, (ed) James Cuno, Princeton University Press, 2003, p50(22) Quoted in Including Museums: perspectives on museums, galleries and social inclusion, Jocelyn Dodd and Richard Sandell, RCMG 2001(23) Cultural Diversity Festival 2003, re:source, Thursday 6 November 2003(24) re:source, Diversify Project(25) Quoted in The Nationalisation of Culture, Janet Minihan, Hamilton, 1977, p37(26) 'Culture and Anarchy', in Culture and Anarchy and Other Writings, Mathew Arnold, CUP 2001, p64