PC? Cultural Diversity

It’s a disorganised apartheid which claims to be about equality but which has separatist consequences.’

Richard Hylton is a curator and art critic, and author of the punchy new book The Nature of the Beast: Cultural Diversity and the Visual Arts Sector. A study of diversity policies between 1976 and 2006, it is a thoughtful, thorough and searing critique of the introduction of divisiveness into the visual arts in England.

Hylton charts the various incarnations of diversity initiatives, and their various protagonists. From ‘ethnic arts’ in the late 1970s and Naseem Kahn’s formative report, The Art Britain Ignores, to the invention of ‘black arts’ in the 1980s and the activities of the Greater London Council; from the ‘new internationalism’ in the 1990s to the ‘culturally diverse arts’ of the twenty-first century, as propagated by Arts Council England and other funding bodies, Hylton explores the growth of ideas about diversity and their damaging impact. He draws out what was specific to each of the policies, and how they related to the political climates in which they were forged, drawing out their problematic content as he goes along.
“Cultural diversity initiatives have compounded tokenism and racial separation”
After taking a detailed look at the plethora of policies, Hylton concludes that they have furthered ideas of division and have been detrimental to the very artists they were set up to help. ‘Since the 1970s, cultural diversity initiatives within the visual arts sector have arguably exacerbated, rather than confronted, exclusionary pathologies of the art world. They have compounded the problems of tokenism and racial separation within the arts sector’, he writes.
This is a serious charge. Cultural diversity policies are a major priority across the arts world today; the ability to ‘demonstrate diversity’ is central to all arts funding bodies and organisations. Diversity policies are also a favourite hot topic of the current UK minister for culture, David Lammy.
Hylton’s interest in documenting and evaluating the 30 years worth of diversity policies was stimulated, he tells me, ‘by the flurry of activity around the initiative ‘decibel: raising the voice of culturally diverse arts in Britain’. That initiative was launched in 2003 ‘to great fanfare, but it seemed to go nowhere…all this stuff was coming out – official notifications, press releases, statements, plans, and word of mouth. But it never seemed to come together’, he says.
Initiatives such as the decibel project, which was initiated by Arts Council England (ACE), are typically heavily talked up and publicised – yet after they are implemented, it is rarely clear what actually comes out of them, bar lots of nice leaflets.
decibel is the focus of the opening chapter of Hylton’s book. In early 2000, ACE indicated that cultural diversity - with specific reference to ethnicity – had become its major priority, partly in response to the 1999 Macpherson report, the outcome of an inquiry into the murder of black British teenager Stephen Lawrence. ACE’s Cultural Diversity Action Plan noted that the Macpherson report ‘marked a sea change in the understanding of the significance of institutional racism’.
The prioritising of cultural diversity gave birth to scheme after scheme, including decibel. It was the ‘restless creation of new policies around this period’ that intrigued Hylton. He recalls that ‘there was a real lack of coherence at the same time as a relentless flurry of activity’. As he notes in his book, in the run-up to the launch of decibel, ‘ACE earmarked 2001 as the Year of Cultural Diversity, a nationwide festival for profiling artistic practices across all art forms’. Then, ‘for reasons that have never been made public, the Year of Cultural Diversity was postponed until 2002. Re-branded as The Big Idea, this new diversity project was to be expanded to last 18 months from September 2002 to March 2004, and was to include numerous activities: collaborations, commissions, internet what’s on guides, and a national media campaign.’ And then, ‘despite numerous updates included in Arts Council bulletins and the steady flow of job appointments, like its predecessor, The Big Idea was also scrapped’.