The Big Smoke

Yinka Shonibare MBE (image © Sal Idriss)

Yinka Shonibare MBE
Artist
‘It’s important to look at this issue as one that affects society as a whole. There are successful black people who are role models but they can’t do much to affect the situation from the outside. You have to change attitudes generally. It would help if there were more black people in power within the arts organisations, but it’s a Catch 22 situation; how do these people get into those positions? They won’t until they can have opportunities in education. It’s something that should be addressed to people who currently have cultural control because attitude starts at a very early age. ‘There are some projects that are working. The Inspire project is an Arts Council initiative and the Arts Council is full of white people who have seen that there is a problem and tried to do something about it. It’s only right that the Arts Council represents the society that it serves – a multicultural society. The staff within the organisation should reflect the society, that’s only fair. After all, when taxes are paid, black people’s taxes are not removed and separated.
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‘We have to get away from the old idea of empowerment through segregation, though. It’s not possible. Black people don’t have their own society: we all share society, government policies and social attitudes, whether that’s working-class people, women or asylum seekers. How we think about each other will affect all kinds of opportunity and all kinds of economic advancement. It’s not as if black people have a choice to create their own little utopia in which they can give each other great opportunities.

‘You also have to remember when you talk about the arts that you have to think really clearly about the issue of class. The arts are for enjoyment and education but if people don’t have the basics like good housing and good health, they don’t then think about their children taking jobs in the arts. We keep talking about an egalitarian society but people will only have such opportunities in a really egalitarian society if people can have the same educational opportunities. Then they will consider working in the arts. It’s certainly no coincidence that when I was at art school the majority of the kids there were middle-class.

‘For the future, we need to encourage more influential black people to become patrons of the arts. At the moment, the majority of collectors are white people and therefore they are the patrons: the people who make the art happen. Richer black people are now interested in becoming patrons and therefore funding the arts and helping other black people. I’d like to bring more people on board to make that happen – it moves away from the whole victimisation debate.’

Tony Panayiotou

Tony Panayiotou
Arts Council director of diversity
‘I would interpret this question slightly differently and say, “Are the arts inclusive?” Then my answer would be that they’re not fully inclusive at the moment whether we’re talking about race, gender, disability, art from refugees, new communities or the working class. But the Arts Council over the last ten years or so has been supporting that part of the arts sector very strongly and very well. ‘Now and in the near future there’s going to be a proliferation of new young artists coming through, making their mark within their communities but, more importantly, those artists will become part of the mainstream. This is not a cultural apartheid. Our ideal destination is to reach a point where we don’t say, “This is a black artist or an Asian artist.” The point we’re trying to reach is when we say, “This is an artist.” And if they choose to describe themselves or their work as defined by their ethnicity or their racial origin, that’s purely a personal thing. Also there is a very strong demand that we’re aware of at the Arts Council that many people – not just black audiences – want to go and see black work.

‘We have 1,100 regularly funded organisations [RFOs] clients who take up the majority of our funding and they represent a broad spectrum of arts from the Royal Shakespeare Company to a puppet theatre in Norwich. We have a race equality scheme which we submit to them: they need to think about expanding their audiences and they need to think about providing opportunities for black and ethnic minorities. It’s about relevance, community and artistic responsibility. If you take public money, you have to behave in a way that allows the maximum number of people from all sectors of society to be able to enter these places. There are some people who have never been to the opera because the building is imposing or they don’t know what to wear, so we need to think about different ways of bringing opera to the people. Art has to respond to the communities.

‘These RFOs have to provide the kind of art that people want to see. There’s a legal imperative and there’s obviously an ethical one but there’s also a very strong business case. If the managing director of a leading retailer were to neglect 10 per cent of his customers, he’d be sacked. So we’re saying to galleries and theatres: “Think about your box office as well. By expanding and diversifying your audiences you’re actually going to see more money in your tills.” Which again is good for the arts. And we’re doing similar programmes on disability issues and shortly on gender issues as well.

‘One of the things we’re trying to do is to use art to re-empower people, especially young people. And to help them define themselves in the way they want to. So in an inner-city school, kids may not be so interested in Mozart, but give them a set of decks and you’ve got young people who are automatically wanting to create their own music. The pop charts are totally dominated by black music. It’s a wonderful thing to see ordinary kids dabbling in this sort of thing and having a really good time. The alternative to that is that they go out and get involved in the stupid things that everyone has seen on television. We would like to replace the bullets with poems.

Ekow Eshun
Artistic director of the ICA
‘The cultural life of a city like London is fantastically rich and dynamic and it owes its excitement to the openness of its borders and the fact that the worlds of music, fashion, club culture and so on tend to be racially integrated and open to all sorts of different cultural influences. You get much less sense of that openness in the traditional arts world of galleries, museums, theatre etc. There’s not an active exclusion of non-white faces at work here – more like a collective shrug at the lack of social mobility into that environment. Deep down, there’s a failure to understand that the arts world would be a richer and more necessary place if it found ways to look beyond its own zone of comfort and grappled with some of the complexity and possibility of contemporary culture in its broadest forms.’www.ica.org.uk

Baroness Young OBE

Baroness Young OBE
Arts and heritage consultant
‘The arts are still seen to be the preserve of a particular group of people and there is still a very limited perception of what black and ethnic minority people can do; that is why we tend to end up performing in the same areas. It’s a natural consequence: when people define you in a particular way and when people do well in a particular area, like in hip hop for example, then they tend to keep doing it. Fairly recently, a couple of male friends of mine approached the BBC with a programme idea and were told that they didn’t fit the cultural profile because they were too well educated. They went back a second time only to be asked if they could make a rap version of it.

‘Not enough is done to encourage people at a young age into the arts. There’s a perception that black and ethnic minority [BEM] people don’t go into the arts because it’s not well paid, but that’s not really true. There are a lot of black and Asian people in the social sector, for example – another line of work which is also not very well paid – but they have found a workplace there without money being an issue. It’s hard to imagine a career advisor saying, “Aspire to being curator of the Tate” at a school in Tottenham but you have to ask yourself: Why not?

‘There are some positive initiatives. The Inspire project that encourages BEM people to become curators has produced some very interesting work. Positive action schemes can stir up a lot of resentment with people who think: Why are this group getting all the advantages? When really, of course, it’s just readdressing an age-old imbalance.‘An important part of this is that there’s not a lot of movement and flow among the critics of visual arts. It’s still the same small group of people in control. I’m not saying you have to be black to understand black art but other voices within the critics’ group would understand the roots of some of the pieces or at least do some research. When Chris Offili’s work first became popular there was a lot a talk about elephant dung but very little understanding of what elephant faeces actually represents within that culture. And often themes in black arts are only ever interpreted to refer to conditions unique to black people like the slave trade. Perception is very important.’

Dominic Cooke
Artistic director of the Royal Court
‘In terms of artists, things are looking good for the future. We’ve done three Critical Mass projects, which have been about finding black minority ethnic writers and are having great results. And there’s a great generation of black actors coming through. The reality, though, in terms of people in other areas of the industry, is that there are far fewer black minority ethnic people working in those fields. And a lot of it is to do with the appalling pay. It’s as much a class issue as it is an issue of ethnicity because a lot of the people who come to work in the arts, for example in the finance, fundraising or marketing departments, are going to be people who are passionately committed – given that they could earn so much more in another field – or they’re people who have the confidence that comes from a financially secure background, or they are being supported by a partner. I think for second- or third-generation Afro-Caribbean or Asian families it’s a very, very different prerogative. There the push is often to go out and make money. The pressure comes from the government and the Arts Council to do something about ethnic diversity in the workforce but the question of pay is never addressed, because the same people who are funding us to the level where we can’t afford to pay people a decent wage are the same people who are saying that you’ve got to do something about cultural diversity. But the two things are linked.

‘Having said that, I do think that any initiative to redress the balance is a crucial one and the arts have to do more about employing black people, searching out people and offering them the jobs. A lot of it’s about people feeling that a theatre or arts organisation is for them and that they can be part of it.’

Kwame Kwei-Armah
Playwright
‘The issue for me is not: “Why are the arts so white?”, but: “Is there indeed a silent mandate for this, stemming from a desire or necessity to maintain a quintessentially monocultural vision of Britain?” Arts practitioners are, in my opinion, among the most, if not the most, enlightened progressive members of our society. But are they being handcuffed by either the perception (or fact) that the overwhelming majority of our country is tribal in the most monocultural terms? If so, how can they be free to allow our arts to be truly meritocratic if audiences are not supporting those choices with bums on seats?’

Sir Willard White (image courtesy of BBC)

Sir Willard White
Opera Singer
‘You should talk to white people about this, because I think that they would have the answers. Only they can tell you why they might be discriminating against black people. I think that there is a sense in which people look to their own kind to socialise with and for cultural experience. I do know that there are a lot of black people who would want get into the arts but feel unable to because of their colour. I decided quite early on that I wouldn’t jump on that bandwagon of “I’m black so they won’t employ me”. I think that there are problems within organisations but beyond that the most important thing is for people to have the self-confidence and self-respect to put themselves forward as individuals. That goes for the white community too. If some [white] people had more self-respect they wouldn’t have such an issue with black people. I was performing at the opera in the Bastille the other day and a friend of mine who was in the audience heard two women talking, saying that I should stick to spiritual songs and calling me a gorilla. I just concentrate on what I am doing well and then I don’t get angry. I have given a few talks in schools and think that there are a lot of young people who are worried that a profession in the arts won’t make them enough money to support themselves, so that is also an issue. I hope that the future will see more black people having the confidence to pursue their dreams.’

Professor Stuart Hall

Professor Stuart Hall
Emeritus professor at Open University and vice-chair of Rivington Place
‘In a country like the United Kingdom, of course the arts would be predominantly white. It’s what you’d expect; not just because the population is predominantly white, but also because different kinds of power – social and cultural power – go along with that. The predominant Western ideas of art and culture and the Western traditions in artistic production have all developed in an established political space. They define what art is and everybody else is left struggling to get in. “Whiteness” is not just a product of colour questions, but the product of cultural difference and different hierarchies in culture which can grade the people who are central to it, who are moderate to it, who are on the way to it, because they are becoming civilised.

‘For example, very few people understand the degree to which African art was an inspiration to modernism. It was an inspiration because people felt that European conceptions of art had lost their soul and their connection to the body. I don’t want to sound conspiratorial; I don’t think there’s a committee deciding on this somewhere. However, it’s the way the knowledge works: it becomes institutionalised in arts schools, it decides the predominant shows in museums. If a museum has representatives of a particular kind of art, then it’s considered a great museum; if it doesn’t, it isn’t.

‘There has been significant change over the past 25 years. At the end of the 1970s and in the ‘80s, there was an enormous creative explosion of [visual art] from black and Asian artists. But they struggled for visibility; they were not shown in the main galleries. If you go to Tate or the National Gallery, they have very few instances of work from that period. The sites that they struggled to establish kept running out of funds and going out of existence. A whole wave of creative work never got recognised in that period. Before that, there were outstanding artists – before and after World War II – who were part of the modern art movement in London; but that movement has just written them out. The process of forgetting or invisibility keeps coming up to the surface.

‘In the past 20 years the art world has become much more internationalised. The cause is the migrations since WWII into Britain. One wave after another of people with different cultural backgrounds, experiences of history and relations to English culture are speaking out about their experiences. And that work has become more and more insistent as far as the mainstream art institutions are concerned. They just can’t ignore it any longer.

‘The international world has become sensitised to this flood of artistic work surrounding it. Since this pressure has been on the art institutions they have begun to formulate policies that require them to attend to questions of access and diversity. So the question of access relates to opening up the arts to a much wider public.

‘I think there are many things that we have to do in the future. The institutions are critical because people go to the Tate and the National Gallery to see what art has been over the centuries. We need to set up more organisations like Rivington Place to show the kind of work that you would not see normally in the other galleries. We have to show artists before they’ve crossed over into the international art market. The schools are important; if they can teach people a much more open, pluralistic conception of art and culture that would help. These kids are going to speak out of a different set of traditions. They don’t want to be sent back to doing only their masks or tribal dances. They want to participate in the modern conceptions of art and photography out of a different experience. Out of a different history.’

Claire Whitaker
Director of Serious independent music producers
‘Within arts funding, the big money still goes to the big institutions and organisations. The music money in London still goes to classical music. By the time you’ve funded the orchestras and opera houses there are only crumbs left for everybody else. It’s a huge problem. It’s certainly not a problem of talent or creativity but there has been real underinvestment. Being more positive, the Arts Council, with the Passage of Music project, have made a commitment to fund the marking of the anniversary of the bicentenary of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act. The way that has been structured is that people who are normally below the line when it comes to having a relationship with the public funding system have been brought into the project. But if it’s to continue after that I don’t know where the money is going to come from unless the pot gets bigger for music. There are so many big clients that take a substantial amount of that money. That’s the problem and what I think happens is that black artists have a number of choices to make and many of them follow a different path, toward urban music, rather than more artistically based side of London life because you have to do a lot of scrabbling to be able to perform your work in the way that it deserves to be presented.

'Why are the arts in London so white? If you mean, is there not enough talent, the answer’s certainly not. Look at people like Jason Yarde and how he’s developed as a musician and a composer. If, however, you’re looking at where the money goes, and the big institutions? Then the answer’s yes, it’s too white.’The Passage of Music programme, curated by Serious, is part of Black History Month (www.passageofmusic.co.uk)

Sal Idriss
Photographer
‘Many ethnic artists will find themselves asking this question at some point, and also the existence of a ‘glass ceiling’. We could furthermore ask whether white artists get more publicity and opportunity than their ethnic counterparts, when the art produced is perhaps of similar standing? And, why ethnic minorities in Britain are so rarely shown on the front page of magazines? The positive side is that the things are changing from the top. For example, bicentenary celebrations of the Abolition of the Slave Trade Act, and in the art world, the arrival of the African Pavilion specifically for African exhibits at the Venice Biennale, for the first time in the Biennale’s 112-year history.

'In 2005 Cambridge University participated in Black History Month for the first time, and within it I was proud to exhibit my f2.8 at 15th photographic portfolio. I am the first black person to have such an extensive collection at the National Portrait Gallery, London, with presently 20 images in the permanent collection from my continuing portfolio. As such, I would happily say that things are changing for the better, and the art world is becoming more colour-blind to artists!’
Sal Idriss ‘f2.8 at 15th – Black Role Models’ is at City Hall as part of Black History Month

Gary Crosby
Artistic director of Tomorrow’s Warriors, Nu-Troop and Jazz Jamaica All Stars
‘Art in London is as mixed as anywhere else in Europe. The problem is that the black youth are kidnapped by MTV. We lose a lot of talent to more popular art forms because they’re presented with a very low ceiling or standard to reach. There are companies like LSO and some of the old classical companies that are trying and they have outreach projects. But I think the problem is that smaller companies like ourselves, who are not doing it as a box-ticking exercise, are not being supported. The past ten years have seen some really good initiatives to make art more inclusive, like Youth Music and the Roundhouse. But I’m disappointed with the type of music education that they give to working-class kids and mainly black kids. Kids aren’t given the opportunity to learn because people are scared of teaching them, they give them what they want. It’s like, “oh, they don’t want to listen to Stravinsky, they’ll just shout at me. Give them some G Man or whatever".'