Owen Hatherley's 'High Standards': A Critical Look

At least until the invasion of Iraq – and to an extent, even afterwards – New Labour could count on the support of the British culture industry. Of course there were exceptions: the odd band, like Primal Scream or Asian Dub Foundation; the occasional prominent filmmaker, such as Mike Leigh or Ken Loach; a handful of artists, notably pop art pioneer Richard Hamilton. But, by and large, cultural workers were enthusiastic for the Labour governments of 1997 to 2010, or at least not actively against them. The stick of marketisation was politely ignored in favour of the carrot of increased funding for universities, art galleries and the proliferating arts-based NGOs across the country. In 2007, Tony Blair proudly claimed to have doubled arts funding over the previous decade, and lavish, star architect-designed museums of modern art, often with publicly funded publishing and research endeavours attached, emerged from Bankside to Middlesbrough. The catch was the way in which Blair and Brown’s governments yoked the arts to urban development, rising property prices and the sort of grinningly philistine pseudo-populism attacked so powerfully in Mark Fisher’s Capitalist Realism. But it nonetheless paid the wages of a lot of artists, musicians, filmmakers and cultural administrators. New Labour redux has made no such commitment. Indeed, one manifestation of the peculiar empty-headedness of the Starmer government is its neglect of higher education and the arts, once a core constituency of Labour ‘modernisers’. Whereas Blair and Brown hugely expanded universities – at the price of transforming them into competing, fee-charging businesses – Starmer has disregarded them, despite their outsized international clout. In the arts, the sadistic funding squeeze of the 2010–24 Conservative governments has been maintained, as has the culture war against folk devils such as transgender women and urban Muslims. The culture minister, Lisa Nandy, once identified with the soft left, has revealed herself to be a cynical opportunist, lying low until a leadership bid where she will likely stand as a ‘Blue Labour’ conservative, a role for which any visible support for weird, ‘woke’ art would surely count against her. The hoped-for rescue from cultural austerity has not taken place. This has not passed unnoticed in some more politically engaged corners. A mini-manifesto titled ‘Notes on Culture-Making as the Roof Falls In’ was handed out at a concert last autumn at London’s Vortex Jazz Club (a tiny venue which is part of a New Labour-era development, the Dalston Culture House). The text mainly comprised curt slogans criticizing government-funded culture: ‘State funding has not emancipated radical art’, ‘Salaried Arts people have Arts Council inertia’. The concert, Pierrot, performed by a small ensemble, presented a series of short pieces of avant-garde twentieth-century classical music. It was mounted by a collective called the Commission for New and Old Art, which has been putting on concerts for the last three or four years, mainly in Manchester, having partly grown out of the city’s old branch of the Corbynite pressure group Momentum. Pierrot, both in theory and practice, was an attempt not only to fill the gap left by the state’s continued disinterest in funding art (radical or otherwise), but also to celebrate its absence as a clearing of the decks, creating a sense of possibility and freedom necessarily foreclosed by the impact assessments and box-ticking form-filling typical of funding applications. The Commission’s favouring of modernist music may help explain the name. This music is old, to be sure, with most of the repertoire dating to between the 1900s and 1960s. Pierrot featured performances of work by Schoenberg’s pupil and Brecht’s main musical collaborator Hanns Eisler and socialist-inclined modernist composers like Luciano Berio and Charles Seeger, culminating in a brutally powerful rendition of Schoenberg’s song-cycle ‘Pierrot Lunaire’, sung by the American soprano Lucy Shelton. Its distance from bureaucratic emphases on accessibility and inclusivity has enabled the Commission to go back to modernist first principles, preferring work that is experimental and polished as opposed to friendly and amateurish. It is rare to see astringent modernist music like this played in the Vortex, the sort of casual, intimate venue where you’d expect to see a rock band or a jazz quartet. The work’s intensity was magnified in the small space – Schoenberg bracingly yanked out of the large publicly funded auditoriums, the Bridgewater Halls and South Bank Centres. Although there was an older contingent clearly delighted to find Schoenberg performed on the cheap, the Vortex audience was largely young. This old music would sound ‘new’ to many of them, largely because modernist composition has never had the same foothold among non-specialists as have rock, jazz or electronic music. Many Commission audiences will be hearing this music – jarring, unpredictable, fierce, yet highly planned and controlled – for the first time. Earlier Commission concerts in Manchester collaged together an unusual collection of twentieth-century compositions into a statement of unashamed if somewhat historicist modernism. Frequent points of reference are Eisler and Brecht, Communist composers of the 1930s–50s such as Alan Bush and the German émigré Ernst Hermann Meyer, and, especially, the mid-century ‘Manchester School’ of experimental composers: Alexander Goehr, Harrison Birtwistle and Peter Maxwell Davies, all of whom the Commission attempts to rescue from BBC Radio 3 respectable marginality. Alongside this is less rarefied fare – quintessentially northern and industrial brass bands, for instance (a concert titled Valves, held in 2024 at The White Hotel in Manchester, included the Hebden Bridge Brass Band playing old work by Maxwell Davies and new compositions by Oliver Vibrans, accompanied by homemade analogue synthesisers). The Commission also made appearances at the 2025 return of the political festival The World Transformed (another legacy of the Corbyn period, established in 2016 by Momentum), which was held in inner Manchester, in amongst the council housing of Hulme, and included a moving festival-closing performance of ‘The Internationale’. The mini-manifesto given out to the audience at Pierrot is one of several. The Commission recently reprinted earlier notes in a bound zine, whose texts are both oblique and programmatic, often featuring peculiar little stories. At Pierrot we were also given a list of who was ‘presenting’ each musician in the Commission’s ensemble, which included a couple of private foundations. If this was making a virtue of necessity, there was also a discernibly punkish intent behind the blunt demystifying – this is where the money came from, this is how we did it – and a reminder that the state is nowhere near the project (this is not always the case; Valves, for instance, was partly supported by the dreaded Arts Council). The Commission does try to combine its love for abstraction with participation – Manchester’s Momentum branch had been bent on reviving labour movement traditions of community theatre and workers’ choirs, and this feeds into some of the Commission’s work. In the short manifesto on their website, the collective insists that ‘new political methods of organisation, production and dissemination of art for mass access can be found’ outside of publicly funded institutions, and asks people to ‘write to us, attend our concerts, send us your concerns; chat, if you think the staid, bourgeois mess of most consumer art is boring you, or worse stifling what you want to do, listen to, say, move, stage, shout, demonstrate or build’. But what is unusual about the initiative, aside from the humour and imagination, is not the participatory rhetoric but the emphasis on something much more unexpected and unquantifiable: quality. This has often been unfashionable on the left, on the basis that it implies elitist value judgements and unattainable skills – impenetrable art for select initiates. The Commission is alert to this charge: their online statement asserts ‘that for too long certain developments of the past 150 years have been made too expensive, rarefied or fossilised’, and their bringing the politics, collectivity and perversity back into modern music is obviously meant to redress this. But the ‘Notes on Culture-Making’ handed out at Pierrot also recommends: ‘Consider keeping standards as high as possible’. Today, so many residually government-funded arts spaces feel like theme parks or creches, particularly in the halls of New Labour megaprojects like Tate Modern in London or the Baltic in Gateshead. Here, everything has to be explained, everything is signposted, everything is obliged to be ‘accessible’ to everyone at all times, including (or apparently, especially) infants. In this cutesy, patronising atmosphere, the Commission’s insistence on standards feels genuinely radical. Though, much like the music it programmes, if such an emphasis feels new, it is also old: exactly the sort of sentiment that motivated the institutions of post-war public culture – the BBC, the plateglass and redbrick universities, Penguin Books – and once sustained the likes of Alan Bush or Alexander Goehr: gave them teaching positions, published their work, put on their concerts. If that public cultural infrastructure isn’t destined to return – and there are no signs at all that it will, under Labour, Conservative, let alone Reform governments – why not do the show right here?