Millions of pounds have been set aside for a festival that no one needs and fewer people want, argues Rupert Christiansen

Last Updated: 12:01am BST 11/06/2008
Telegraph


With budgets soaring, factions quarrelling and deadlines approaching, there's quite enough to worry about in the run-up to the London Olympics without the question of "culture" raising its pretty little head. Yet there it is, demanding to be addressed.


From the end of August until 2012, Britain will host (and pay for) a "Cultural Olympiad", programmed by order of the International Olympic Committee as an essential ancillary to the sporting events.

I'd like to ask bluntly: who wants it, who needs it?

As yet, the plans for this rolling four-year jamboree have only been announced in outline -­ more detail will emerge over the summer - but the thinking behind them so far seems drearily predictable and uninspired.

Any number of people can be held responsible ­ Minister for London Tessa Jowell has the Olympics as part of her brief, but Andy Burnham's Department for Culture Media and Sport also supervises a cultural advisory forum of the great and the good, while the ubiquitous Jude Kelly chairs two programming committees at Locog, the Olympics delivery authority, where culture is under the executive management of Bill Morris.
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The budget cannot be simply computed, as it will be up to participating arts organisations to fund their events, but £40?million filched from the National Lottery is available from central government. Basically, a lot of money will be doled out to anyone who can tick the access/disability/ethnic diversity boxes.

While there is still time to reconsider and change, I would like to draw attention to the vacuous blah-blah which constitutes the Cultural Olympics' mission statements. They aim "to inspire and involve young people", "to generate sustainable long-term benefits", "to promote contemporary London" and "to promote culture and sport".

There will be a "world festival of youth culture", a world festival of Shakespeare (didn't the RSC stage that last year?), and museums and galleries will reinterpret their collections to tell "stories of the world".

Guess what, musicians will also compose, new art works will be erected, videos will record things, and in 2012, to cap it all, there will be "a world cultural festival".

To be fair, we don't have specific names and dates yet, and I live in hopes of some lovely surprises being sprung, but these sorts of clichés commit nobody to anything and, to date, not one glimmer of originality or urgency has emerged in the planning.

Has anyone paused to ask what the Cultural Olympics are actually for, what relation cultural exhibition has to sporting competition, and why precisely a "world cultural festival" is required when everyone will be glued to the running and jumping?

Go back to 1912, and there was an actual Olympic arts contest -­ artists competed for medals in five fine arts categories. But this proved unsatisfactory and petered out, and it was only in 1992 that the arts made their way back into the programme when the Barcelona games promoted Catalan culture.

Atlanta followed with a celebration of the Deep South, while Sydney highlighted the creativity of its Aborigines. In Beijing, China has used the Cultural Olympiad to score propaganda points by showing the freedom its artists are allowed.

But here in Britain, there is nothing to home in on. Read the arts pages of this newspaper and you will see that we are blessed with one long "world cultural festival" of wonderful richness and diversity.

At the same time there are lean economic times ahead, with sponsorship harder to find and the Arts Council hard-pressed.

To pay for the Cultural Olympiad, Peter is being robbed to pay Paul, with money diverted from the National Lottery, and arts organisations in Greenwich are already complaining that the local authority has cut their regular funding to create a cash pot for 2012. Why the famine, why the feast, when you could be sustaining a healthy regular diet?

"Legacy" is another buzzword. There's an idea that the Cultural Olympics will create "a buzz around the UK that will last long after the Flame is extinguished" and "a new awareness of cultural activity". More wishful-washful thinking here, and one is not reassured by Craig Hassall, manager of the Sydney Cultural Olympics, who admitted in a recent article that "the legacy elements withered on the vine".

What is much more important - if we are talking about arts and culture in relation to the Olympics - is that the 2012 games are beautiful.

By that, I mean that they should not be blighted by any more horrors like the hideous and illegible logo; that the opening and closing ceremonies are fun and fabulous in the noblest British tradition of parades and processions, and not a Millennium Dome-style mishmash of steel bands and spluttering fireworks; that the best of British architecture, design and craftsmanship is evident in the stadia and the village, finished without the usual pennypinching tattiness which has become a national disease; that any music accompanying the games is a well-composed, dignified tune rather than some ghastly nul-points banality warbled by Katherine Jenkins and aimed at the lowest common denominator of juvenile taste; that the competitors wear a uniform that doesn't make them look like they're employees of a budget airline; and in sum, that elegance rather than a quick buck should be the watchword.

To get all of this right this will take a great deal of time, taste, trouble and creative energy and, so far, this Cultural Olympics seems to promise nothing but an unnecessary distraction from the central business of the sporting competition. I suppose it's too late to cancel the sideshow, but I wouldn't be at all sorry if they did.


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