Heroes Not Zombies

I read an article in the Guardian today entitled “Consuming arts and culture is good for health and wellbeing, research finds” It caught my eye – first because I thought consuming arts and culture ??!! I hate that. I don’t consume arts, I experience/enjoy/participate in…..not consume…. and what is culture anyway? Well, let’s leave that issue for another day. The next thought I had was “I don’t enjoy arts in order to improve my health or wellbeing, and this headline leads me to think these folk are about to try and justify arts on the basis of their utility. But, in fact, the article is even worse than the headline suggests. Here’s how it begins –

Most people are familiar with the buzz that attending a memorable play, film, concert or art exhibition can trigger. But now it is official: consuming culture is good for your health and wellbeing – and generates £8bn a year worth of improvements in people’s quality of life and higher productivity.

Seriously? I might have felt a “buzz” but, “now it is official” – “it generates £8bn a year of improvements in people’s quality of life and higher productivity”. Oh, thank goodness they’ve quantified that. Otherwise I’d have been stuck with my personal delusion that I was just enjoying something, or that it was adding meaning to my life!

Look, I understand what these people are doing, and, at one level, I commend them for it. They are trying to make an economic case for what isn’t measurable. We can’t measure paintings, poems or music. We can’t even really measure “health and wellbeing” (instead we invent questionnaires, the answers to which we allocate scores, then we say we are measuring the invisible – ok, another controversial view I can return to another day) They are claiming that, for example, going to a weekly drawing class at a museum is worth £1310 to each person from “going to see their GP less and feeling better about their lives”. Really? £1310? Not £1315? These apparently definite figures remind me of the old joke that 86.57% of statistics are made up……but, good on them for trying to make the case for arts funding to governments and policy makers who seem to understand only sums and measurements.

But, fundamentally, this makes me hugely uncomfortable. Can’t we make a case for the place of arts “and culture” in our lives without reducing them to arbitrary financial “values”, or so-called “measurements”. I don’t need any of those justifications to play music every day, to write, to read novels, to visit galleries and delight in their works, to feel the connections to their creators……

However, I read, just the other day, that more and more universities in the UK are closing down their Humanities courses, claiming that students don’t want them because they don’t see how they can lead to remunerative employment. Oh goodness, what has happened to our idea of education? What have we reduced that to? Is education only valuable if it lets you get a job managing a McDonalds outlet, or selling people “stuff”?

I hope reports like this one do stimulate debate about the Humanities. I hope they stimulate debate about what makes our lives valuable and meaningful. Meanwhile…..I’m going to continue taking photos, writing, sharing my creativity. I’m going to continue listening to music, reading novels, visiting museums and galleries – because those are some of the activities that bring me joy, that amaze me, that make me think, that help create meaning in my life. If all that contributes positively to my “health and wellbeing”, then so be it. But that’s not the reason I’ll keep filling my daily life with “arts and culture”.