A dictionary editor tracking the meaning of the phrase “vibe shift” may be forgiven for feeling confused. The number of times in the past year alone that these words have been deployed to indicate that a previously dominant paradigm, such as “woke”, was over, only to be rolled out tentatively again weeks later, has put the very idea that culture changes anything to the test.
The state of British culture is, indeed, baffling. The once overtly political narratives put forward by cultural institutions have become increasingly illegible. The vocal protests and solidarity campaigns of the creative workforce that, until recently, were the fodder for the culture wars, have all but ossified. It has become difficult even for ardent critics of state culture to understand what is going on and where any “shift” may lead.
It may be more honest to say that culture is in “suspended animation”. Whatever is going on in the institutions is happening quietly. One reason for this is that the estate is slowly crumbling, with one report suggesting the shortfall in the country’s cultural maintenance budget has exceeded £7bm. Some galleries, such as Camden Art Centre, have thinned out their programmes, with insubstantial exhibitions stretching for months. Museums, which were until recently exercised by public arguments about the restitution of their collections, have turned to administrative processes and private legal lobbying.
That there is no loud “save the arts” outcry to accompany these developments is surprising, given the cultural industry’s vocal, if not obnoxious opposition to earlier governments’ similar neglect of Britain’s cultural assets. Institutional leaders, it seems, have decided to just suck it up and redirect their energies from ideological outreach to merely keeping on the lights and their jobs. Even those who, like the National Gallery, are facing cuts make little mark in the cultural policy vacuum.
One depressing explanation for this apparent political retreat may be that the non-cultural policy agenda espoused by cultural leaders now matches sufficiently with that of the Labour government. While begging DCMS for more arts funds has become futile, the cultural elites seem perfectly content with the direction of the changes to Britain’s wider social and legal fabric. Galleries, which were once eagerly programmed urgent exhibitions opposing the ostensible rise of fascism or promoting the climate change agenda, have had nothing to say about assisted dying, the introduction of digital ID, or the scrapping of jury trials. This is doubly striking, because transhumanism, mass surveillance, or the nature of justice are part of contemporary art’s self-declared purview and it would be easy to assemble activist shows on any of these topics.
At first glance, this silent accord between the institutions and the state is antithetical to organised culture’s professed mission as the challenger of established norms. Doesn’t art speak truth to power? Protests led by arts workers, such as the disagreement about what it may mean for a visual arts institution to “oppose genocide” that led to the closing of Glasgow’s Centre for Contemporary Art, obscured the reality for only so long. The ostensible programmatic dissent of state-supported culture is a thin veil for institutionalised conformity.
The result is a degenerate version of what Lola Salem termed “the post-cultural state”, one in which the institutions still exist, but neither those who run them nor those who pay for them can articulate their purpose. In the post-cultural state, state culture runs on inertia. The Culture Secretary Lisa Nandy, for example, was recently revealed to have encouraged Arts Council England to extend its latest funding round for organisations, thus placating discontents. The Government’s latest response to the Hodge review into the funder makes a raft of administrative promises which together ensure that nothing of substance changes too soon.
This does not mean, despite appearances, that the cultural elites and the state are in accord. It is possible to maintain a semblance of cultural cohesion even if the missions of the actors involved are misaligned. A set of debates from Germany illustrates the contradiction of this settlement: during the Covid pandemic, both artists and politicians insisted that culture was systemrelevant, or mission-critical. These calls were partly motivated, like their English counterparts (remember “culture is essential”?) the desire to shield cultural workers from the economic shock of lockdowns. But when they came from the mouths of German parliamentarians, they revealed that the state also relied on cultural institutions to manage the populace.
This embrace of the cultural apparatus by the German state does not profess any care for the culture it promotes. On the contrary, the accord was visibly disrupted when Germany’s restrictions on pro-Palestinian protest — stifling by contrast to those in the UK — deeply antagonised the cultural scene. The accord, however, allows the parties to pay lip service to the fundamental importance of the cultural infrastructure, one predicated on neither side making substantive calls on it.
This really works both ways. In the US, the state-supported and GOP-aligned International Republican Institute, an outfit which one might expect to promote conservative values, was revealed to be funding… dance performances by transgender Bangladeshis. The point is that this is not a contradiction. Culture is not made of artefacts and ideas, it is a system. The parties which make it up lie to each other, and their outputs are flaccid by design.
Britain would be lucky to have understood this. Our institutions are no more able to initiate a vibe shift than they are able to resist it. They have, at least, finally become decoupled from the flaccid #resistance that now barely animates official American culture. Our culture, alas, lacks the Yanks’ fallback of mass commercialism. While some overtly woke organisations, such as London’s King’s Head Theatre, whose board has recently seen significant changes, have mooted a turn to popular programming, what that means in commercial practice is far from obvious.
What if popular (or even populist) culture means no culture at all? The recent auction of the Reform-led Kent County Council’s underused lending art collection of mostly local landscapes raised a trifling £40,000. The move, which was rooted in no discernible cultural policy, may seem short-sighted. It does, however, depressingly confirm the Council’s stipulation that many artefacts of state culture do not “represent any official historic value”.
If it seemed pertinent to ask whether the arts needed the state when Labour took power, the positions are now reversing. The mutating state control apparatus — whether in the hands of Labour or its opponents — may decide that it does not need culture at all. It will, however, still need to produce “content”, a form of non-specific culture that comes from non-attributable sources.
The legacy cultural estate will oblige. In a recent lecture, the Turner Prize-winner Grayson Perry declared his dislike for the Western civilisation, accusing Greek and Roman cultures of giving rise to allergy-triggering cliches. Given that a numbing cache of AI-generated Brit nostalgia content is being used to both rile up and appease proponents of the nation’s cultural restoration, he does have a point.
Perry expressed a preference for “global traditions”, which many cultural institutions have already embraced. What those stories might be specifically is anyone’s guess. Yet Britain’s demographic shifts in the past years have been so profound that it is no surprise that even the vast “Global South” is already also producing platitudes.
Culture’s role in any future project of nation-building thus remains uncharted. Some political theorists, such as the author of The National Interest, Philip Cunliffe, remain unconvinced that politics will stay “downstream from culture”, as Andrew Breitbart had it, in any retreat from a pluralist, globalised society.
If a vibe shift were an opportunity for reversing the decline of Britain’s cultural estate, it may lie not in a dramatic overhaul of the narrative, but a more earnest, confident rephrasing of its meaning. A recent UCL student production of Iphigenia — a play that focuses on Agamemnon’s sacrifice of his daughter at the outset of the Trojan war — serves as an example of the strategy’s potential.
The project of nation-building will take decades; so might the cultural turn
The adaptation was striking for its unexpurgated blood and soil speeches. Iphigenia faced her fate willingly, in this version accepting that her country was a supreme good and that the rape of Greek women must be avenged. Holst’s patriotic anthem I Vow to Thee, My Country accompanied the curtain call. By contrast, a forthcoming production of Iphigenia at the ideologically captured Arcola Theatre foregrounds migrant suffering and casts the heroine in drably generic AI tones.
Something may be changing, then. The UCL version, staged in a mainstream educational institution to a house filled with secondary school students, would have been unthinkable two years ago. The very possibility of such an event hinges on the reanimation of the pockets of seriousness and expertise which have survived years of neglect and faddish contortion. It will take significant and sustained investment in such ideas before they amount to a lasting vibe shift. The project of nation-building will take decades; so might the cultural turn.
