Cultural Capital: The Rise and Fall of Creative Britain

Abstract

Hewison's book is a stinging indictment of the upsurge and the plummet of what he deems the ‘creative industry’ – the former under the imprudent tutelage of Tony Blair's New Labour, and the latter, the result of a calculated dismissal and withdrawal by the Conservatives. The author takes to task the reduction of art and culture to little more than a wealth machine, an act of social engineering, artistic individualism that serves as a weapon for global and community economic enterprise, supported through a socio-capitalist ideal that has created boom and bust at the heart of the visual and performing arts, museums and art galleries. I write this review shortly after participating in an event on museums and public engagement in London. Since the 1990s, the arts and cultural sector has found itself crushed between competing discourses, and these emerged in the various discussions around engagement and ran hauntingly parallel to Hewison's own narratives. On the one side, neoliberal government demands for wealth creation, national identity shaping and market discourses such as meeting customer needs. On the other side, museum scholars and professionals who believe in the power of the human aesthetic dimension, and the engagement of creativity and community, through diverse encounters with art and culture, as vital to social fulfillment, justice, sustainability and change (e.g. Janes, 2009; Nightingale and Sandell, 2012; Steedman, 2012). For Hewison, ‘the role of government is not to occupy or dominate the public realm … but to act as a guarantor of its integrity’ (p. 226). What this book illustrates could not be further from this appeal.