Rising East Online

Editor’s Letter

Creative London

If not that, then what?

I don’t get it. That is, I don’t get the feeling, as I did 10 or 12 years ago, that London is breaking out all over.

Then there was art (Goldsmith’s posse), music (Goldie as much as Blur vs Oasis), and media (independent TV production; ill-fated Web1.0). Of course, there was something to break out against: those men in grey suits (barely credible even to themselves, I reckon) pressed a knife-edge into Jarvis, Damon and Damien, and everyone else sharpened up accordingly.

It could be me. That is, perhaps I feel differently about what is now called Creative London not because it is different, or any less creative than before, but because I am in a different position and another frame of mind.

Then, in Soho Square as commissioning editor for one of the first online magazines; enjoying the life of the Soho-Boho. Now, a middle-aged ‘hackademic’ in UEL Docklands, which everyone knows is really Beckton.

But I was already middle-aged (42) in 1997, so the emerging Soho-Shoreditch axis was not the work of my generation; it didn’t belong to me, neither did I belong in it, particularly. But, as people used to say at the time, ‘I could smell the coffee’, and even though others were roasting it, I couldn’t wait to investigate.

What I found (and wrote up a couple of years later in BritCult: an A-Z of British pop culture) was the exhaustion of politics, a cash-rich City without the status it had in the 1980s, and the culture show enjoying the kudos of being the only one in town. Not that this meant all London town was turning into a culture city – then, as now, it’s the City acting as the bureaucracy for international capital flows which keeps Creative London afloat, more that without the negative connotations of the Westminster Village or the Square Mile, culture was assimilating a whole lot of energy and expressing it in a riot of colour – in joyful contrast to the tired-looking cohort of retirees who made up the Major government and its bevy of ‘bastards’.

A dozen years on, the capital as a whole is still not being re-configured by the creativity of capital operating in new and creative configurations.The tautology is now as it was then. Then and now, as James Heartfield (also featured in this issue) has pointed out (then and now), the liquidity of the London arts scene really depends on the lack of productive investment, locally, regionally and nationally, leading to the growth of a ‘Pig Economy’ in which splendidly filthy lucre inflates the prices of fine houses and fashionable art (fine or not).

The Pig percolates down to areas of ‘applied art’, from cultural policy to branding (corporate cultural policy), which then takes on an expanded role as social sealant (as I seek to show in my article on ‘Culture and Anomie’). Apply to the cracks in society and watch it bond tight! In this respect Creative London is where social policy meets TV makeover programmes.

It’s important to be sceptical, to point out that making over is not the same as making anew. But not all makeovers need be as calculating as Property Ladder, or as narrowly oriented towards gentrification.There is scope for Grand Designs, especially in this corner of London in the run-up to 2012.

Of course there are designs on the Olympics which are anything other than aesthetic. If life’s a pitch, then 2012 is a matter of life and death for East London and the prospect of inward capital investment into the region (without which the Thames Gateway is a road to nowhere); and as I’ve already suggested, the expanded social policy role of culture is a defensive strategy designed to prevent the construction of a Nightmare Alley in which everyone is Bowling Alone and only the hostility is mutual.

However, although much more is riding on culture nowadays, largely because party politics no longer seems worth the ballot paper it was written on, the instrumental use of culture is also something of a man-bites-dog story. For as long as there has been a distinction between them, economics and politics have been making continuous attempts on the life of art and sport.

It’s a familiar story but with different outcomes. Each episode hangs on whether there is enough independent life in art and culture to resist the extraneous agendas which would smother them otherwise. Which is to say that at some point art and culture –whether painting or pole vault – have to be for their own sake, or other interests will invoke, inhale and exhaust the unique spirit which made them an attractive proposition in the first place.

But where is the aesthetically grand design for London in the second decade of the twentieth century? Will there be a London Look which is not derivative of the 1960s via the 1990s, as in the Kate Moss advert for Rimmel and the recent ‘London Look’ issue of GQ Style magazine. The 1960s were self-consciously comical to start with (all that pranksterism etc); reliving them in the 1990s was both tragedy and farce; but to rely on further repetition 15 years later is more derivative than the financial markets, and even more likely to crash.

Neither ‘Creative London’ nor the Olympics are what some people have cracked them up to be. Taking a crack at the managed impression of them, is important; but it is equally important not to let that criticism stand as a final statement. We should also understand that ‘Creative London’ and London 2012 really represent the turn to culture as the main means of holding society together, and even though some of us may criticise this as a limited and limiting form of social policy, there is still an opportunity in which to make good use of this usage of culture.

London can be an inspiration to creative people everywhere, if only we dare to move on from the fading relics of the cultural empire of the latter half of the twentieth century.

That was then; what is now?

Andrew Calcutt

Editor, www.risingeast.org

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