John Tusa, an ex-DG of the BBC World Service, now manages the Barbican Centre in London, and has strong views on the way the arts are treated in Britain's modern market economy. He is trenchantly critical of New Labour's neglect of the cultural sector, its philistine indifference to the past, its obsession with populism, accountability and control. This patronising, lowest-common-denominator approach has resulted, he points out, in the debacle of the Millennium Dome. While he is all for sensible management in the arts, they are, he argues, more than a numbers game and need a space free from the dictates of the balance sheet.
In expressing these views he has incurred the wrath of Melvyn Bragg who brackets him, with George Walden and John Drummond, as another ageing white European male, interpreting cultural dynamism as dumbing down. This book marshals a number of Tusa's lectures and articles, so it is repetitious and rhetorical, but still a useful contribution to a necessary debate on arts funding and management, and high art versus low. What it lacks is the wider analytical perspective of a theorist like Fredric Jameson, who places cultural developments in the context of the rampant commodification engendered by global capitalism, which makes customers and consumers, rather than citizens, of us all.
