...argues Germaine Greer. And of course I agree with her on this point. I have reproduced the whole article, originally published in the Guardian, below. (The image above is by Leyendecker, with credit to Mamluke).Football counts as culture just as much as opera...
After the brouhaha occasioned by the remarks of one of the ministers for Culture, Media and Sport about the unrepresentative nature of the Proms, and the PM's defence of them as a great British institution, a Martian social anthropologist would be excused for wondering if the British, or at any rate their elected representatives, have any idea what culture is. If they did, Margaret Hodge's portfolio would have been called Culture (Media and Sport). To list media and sport as co-equal with culture is like referring to food, eggs and chips as separate categories. The government's category mistake leads us all into conceptual quagmiresout of which dangerous speculations and asinine pretensions arise like poisonous mists.One of the most appealing aspects of British society is that it is cosmopolitan, or, if you prefer a newer word, multicultural. The British have always rifled the culture of cleverer countries; they learned even such quintessentially British skills as gardening and boat-building from the Dutch, got the best part of their religion and music from the Germans, new age mumbo-jumbo from Tibet and Bali, and their cuisine from everywhere. Children in London and Birmingham are more likely to speak versions of Yardie patois than they are to speak the Queen's English. All this is as it should be. One would hope that, as an Ashkenazi Jew born in Egypt, Hodge would cherish the non-British part of her inheritance. It is one of the best things about Britishness that it allows and even encourages her to do so.
Every human builds an individual culture over a lifetime. It will consist of everything she has ever learned, every book, newspaper or magazine she has ever read, every piece of music she has heard or made, every object she has studied, valued or made, every sport she has played or watched. As such, it is distinct from the culture of her neighbours, though not necessarily very different. Some elements of this culture may be international; she will have seen the same movies as cinema-goers all over the world, for example, but what she will have made of them will be hers. If she found herself on a cruise with people from other nationalities, she could find things to talk about with them, elements of a shared culture. If she travels to the ends of the earth, she will see advertising for products with which she is very familiar, as the multinationals continue to deepen their penetration into every country on earth, and she will also observe the struggles of other cultures to resist such imperialism. Culture is organic and dynamic; it is not, pace Brown, an institution.
"Media" is our way of referring to the multiplicity of means of conveying information. If, out of this never-ending cacophony, we select what the British call grand opera, and listen to it on our iPods on the way to work, we are not suddenly tuning into culture, but choosing to concentrate on a single strand. The same applies if we are listening to rap, or reading Wuthering Heights, or Das Kapital in German, or watching World Series baseball. This is all culture; what Hodge is suggesting is more like "Kultur". Culture does not exist to draw us together or to keep us apart; to assign to culture the kind of ulterior purpose that Hodge proposes is profoundly philistine.
There are so few black people at the Proms because they would rather be somewhere else. This is, after all, a matter of taste. Will Hodge also object that there are too few old people at Glastonbury? (Most young people would opine that there are too many.)
Sport is perhaps the best way to demonstrate how culture works to enliven and leaven daily experience. We know that the Aztecs played ball games, and that the annual ceremonial games were of crucial importance in the cultural life of Mesoamerican peoples. Our reasons for risking bankruptcy in staging the Olympic Games are cultural. But sport does not simply bring people together; it also divides them, sometimes with murderous effect. What is perhaps more important is that, when well-managed, the battle on the pitch is a stereotyped outlet for aggression and conflict; this symbolic warfare inspires acres of newsprint, much of it better written than anything on the comment pages.
Football unites all those people who love the game, whether in agreement or disagreement, at the same time as it divides the supporters of the different clubs. The more you know about the game, the deeper the enjoyment; the more passionately you support your club, the deeper your involvement. The amount of intellectual energy generated by football is unimaginably massive; the effect of such passion is to dramatise the lives of people who might otherwise be snared in disadvantage, poverty and disability, with very little to look forward to if not their club's promotion. This cultural activity receives no support whatever from government because it needs none.
Instead, the football supporter willing to beggar himself to pay for his season ticket is forced also to support a bloated opera house that generates second-rate product in return for massive government subsidy as well as huge amounts of corporate support. When it comes to arts subsidies, Hodge would do well to consider that London gluttonises at the expense of provincial Britain. (The same is not true of football.) If what the government wants is to bring people together, a usable and affordable rail system would be more effective than Hodge's ill-considered attempt to guilt-trip the BBC into buggering up the Proms.
by Germaine Greer, Monday 24th March, 2008
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