You don’t get to work in the arts and support the monarchy

In November 2023, following violent scenes in Dublin city centre, Irish singer-songwriter Imelda May penned a poem – You Don’t Get To Be Racist And Irish – in which she reflects on the historical oppression suffered by the Irish and highlights a shared history of "Land stolen/Spirits broken/Bodies crushed and swollen" and a sense of global solidarity with Black communities in the wake of #blacklivesmatter.

The sense of cognitive dissonance which May articulated raises a question which seems pertinent for the UK arts sector today. It is one that transcends the arena of squabbles over funding, creativity, excellence and access. Should we assume the subsidised arts sector has a progressive politics? And if so, why? 

The cultural politics of the cultural sector

We can think of ‘cultural politics’ as a way of seeing politics in society that recognises the cultural as an important site for political struggles over meaning. From Woody Guthrie to Pablo Picasso to Alfredo Jaar, a global history shows artists engaging in political struggle, and using culture as a vehicle/weapon/tool to highlight and contest injustice and inequality. 

Yet what Justin O’Connor describes as the absorption of the cultural sector into neoliberal policymaking suggests the sector has increasingly come to ‘perform’ equality while at the same time lending itself to the support of inequality. 

In his 2016 book, Goldsmiths University Professor Will Davies called neoliberalism “the disenchantment of politics by economics”. Yet while the cultural sector continues to argue against the dominance of econometric framings of cultural value, the style of technocracy that neoliberalism promotes is perfectly adept at incorporating and assimilating what might have previously been considered political voices – like those of artists.

One of the key issues the arts sector faces is the way inequality increases, and becomes reproduced by, intergenerational mechanisms. As recent research from the Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre has shown, only 8% of creatives in TV and film are from working class backgrounds, whereas 60% are from middle- and upper-class backgrounds. Of course, if one were looking for an intergenerational mechanism that effectively reproduced inherited wealth, privilege and power, the Royal Family would be an excellent example.

Royal Families in the UK and Saudi Arabia

The recent special garden party to celebrate the UK’s creative industries, hosted by King Charles and Queen Camilla, is a case in point. The UK’s creative industries (whatever one thinks of that beleaguered concept) should, of course, be celebrated.

Yet as Anna Arabindan-Kesson, a Professor of Black diasporic art at Princeton University, argued in a 2022 article in Time magazine, the UK Royal Family represent “an empire built on genocide, slavery, violence, extraction and brutality, the legacies of which continue in our present day”. The Royal Family are not only a symbol of this empire, Arabindan-Kesson argues, they are complicit in it. This, of course, should not be news to anyone working in the cultural sector given what we know about their levels of education and privilege.

When John Lennon returned his MBE in 1969, he did so in protest at what he saw as British involvement in unjust, colonial wars and as part of what he felt to be his responsibility as an artist. To suggest that attending an event at Buckingham Palace – and promoting it on social media – does not lend legitimacy to the Royal Family is at best disingenuous and at worst naïve. 

The sense of unease – frequently expressed via the term ‘art washing’ – when British cultural institutions were involved in the recent Great Futures conference in Saudi Arabia provides another useful example. The programme included a session on 'Theatre, festivals and performing arts' featuring Alex Beard, Chief Executive of the Royal Opera House; Kate Varah, Executive Director of the National Theatre; Francesca Hegyi, Chief Executive of the Edinburgh International Festival; and Elaine Bedell, Chief Executive of the Southbank Centre. 

Saudi Arabia has a long and well-documented history of human rights abuses. Reprieve's Jeed Basyouni, has argued that such events only lend legitimacy to a regime which executes child defendants based on torture-extracted confessions. 

How then should we read the cultural sector’s active engagement in such events, alongside either a lack of awareness of, or an unwillingness to consider, the implications? 

Working in the arts and supporting the monarchy

Pragmatists may respond that one needs to engage with government on its terms, that change takes time, and that impacting policy requires the slow and careful accumulation of evidence and argumentation. Yet such arguments surely speak of O’Connor’s absorption of the cultural sector into neoliberal policymaking. 

To paraphrase Audre Lorde’s oft-cited Master's Tools, what does it mean when the tools of neoliberal policy are used to examine the fruits of that same policy? “It means that only the most narrow perimeters of change are possible and allowable.”

You do, of course, get to work in the arts sector and support the monarchy. You get to work in the arts sector and publicly engage with regimes and institutions of repression and violence while wearing a fancy hat. The entire discourse of free speech, diversity and inclusion would be meaningless if it only involved a specific set of values and beliefs that aligned with a narrow, left-leaning republican disposition.

And yet the sense of cognitive dissonance remains. The leaders of some of London’s national cultural institutions promote a country where homosexuality is illegal and days later the Mayor of London’s Culture Team are celebrating International Day Against Homophobia, Biphobia and Transphobia. 

It is noteworthy the individuals highlighted in the examples above are not artists. The arts sector is now almost exclusively represented by a professional-executive class steeped in the managerial language of neoliberalism, soft power, cultural diplomacy and economic policy.

The question perhaps becomes not whether the arts and cultural sector can be an effective vehicle for social change, but whether it even wants to. Amid the ongoing national debate about cultural value, where are the cultural sector’s values?

Steven Hadley is Irish Research Council Fellow at Trinity College Dublin.
He is the author of Audience Development and Cultural Policy and Cultural Leadership in Practice.
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