Speech by Tessa Jowell - Culture and the Olympic Ideal
15 May 2007
St George's Hall, Liverpool, on Culture and the Olympic Ideal
Thank you Warren for your kind and generous welcome.
It is important that all of you here in Liverpool understand the importance of being Capital of Culture.
I remember coming to Liverpool the day after the announcement in June 2003.
And thinking then, as I do now, that your success was a direct tribute to the people of Liverpool.
A statement of optimism and a chance for the city to be brought back to its former glory.
St George’s Hall, where we’re gathered here today, is a good example of this.
So, in just 231 days, Liverpool becomes the focus of Europe.
It will represent to the whole of Europe what Culture can do for a City, what it has done to regenerate Liverpool.
And just 236 days later, the Olympic flame passes from Beijing to London.
Once again, a single city will become centre stage.
Once again, it will show the world the best it can be.
And once again, the world will see Britain through the prism of its culture.
And in both cases, there is a rare chance and a real opportunity: to deepen and widen engagement with culture in all its forms.
To celebrate energy, creativity and innovation.
To allow the culture sector, in the period running up to the London Games and beyond, to realise its ambitions and achieve the things it has always wanted to do – and continue to do so long after the last medal has been won.
We’ve got five years to plan something that will last, that will integrate culture into the Olympic ideal in a way that has not been realised in modern times.
We will take the torch from Liverpool to pursue the Olympic ideal – knowledge, excellence, building a better and more peaceful world.
We’ll learn from what you are doing here in Liverpool.
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What you have planned for next year will enhance the treasures you have – a resurgent Royal Liverpool Philharmonic under the extraordinary leadership of Vasely Petrenko – an Olympic standard swimmer, the great work at the Everyman , the Playhouse, the Foundation of Art and Creative Technology, the fine contribution of the Great National Museums of Liverpool and the Tate, the Liverpool Biennial.
There will be novelty, but also depth and roots.
Vitally, what happens will be driven by the cultural sector here and its national and international links and world-class reputation.
At its heart will be a serious celebration of world class excellence.
Back in 2003, Liverpool was part of something extraordinarily important.
We were so impressed by the ambition of the other Capital of Culture bids that we established the Urban Cultural Programme.
In 2004, the Millennium Commission and the Arts Council awarded nearly £20 million to support cultural programmes across 19 areas of the UK - from Birmingham to Bradford, from Inverness to Swansea, and Newcastle to Nottingham, and including Liverpool.
The Urban Cultural Programme shows the dynamic and catalytic effect which funding for cultural endeavour in our cities can have.
A report into this programme is being published today, highlighting the incredible success of the events developed by cultural organisations across the UK.
It shows how the funding produced disproportionate results.
Just to give you the headlines….
More people experienced culture through the UCP than visited West End theatres.
Every £1 of UCP funding levered in a further £2 from other sources – this clearly demonstrates that the leverage power of Culture should never be underestimated.
Real engagement with culture was achieved: an estimated 46,000 artists took part in some 17,000 performances and exhibitions with well over 5,000 new works commissioned.
These cities have also developed ‘Portrait of a Nation’ in partnership with the Heritage Lottery Fund which is due to culminate in the final piece of artistic collaboration for Liverpool’s 2008 celebrations.
And after 2008, the road leads to 2012.
London was chosen for the Olympics because of the place it is – like Liverpool itself - cosmopolitan, open to the world and truly diverse.
Both cities are a showcase of how Britain has changed.
London as a place, the UK as a country, is heavily defined by its international strength in cultural and creative activity.
And that activity feeds economic growth.
Mayor Bloomberg has commissioned a report which concluded that London has overtaken New York in terms of its attractiveness as a place for business to be, but also as a cultural capital.
That, if you like, lies at the heart of the economic justification of culture – it’s one of a mix of factors - and if handled right it can be a pretty decisive factor – that drives economic regeneration.
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You have shown this here in Liverpool, and you are ahead of the game.
Towns like Brighton have shown it too.
I was lucky enough to visit the Brighton Festival at the weekend, which contributes £20 million to the local economy.
But that’s not solely why we invest in culture.
Governments are sometimes accused by cultural commentators of being overly-obsessed with what culture can achieve – for instance, helping health and education, cutting crime, combating social exclusion.
Well it does all those things.
But it does them because of the impact it has on the individual.
Because it can challenge, support, nurture and shock.
We fund artists to do what they do best – to create work that is the best they can make it; that engages in new ways; that challenges assumptions we take for granted; that helps us see the world differently.
We support its creation through a dynamic mixed economy, and then as politicians we support artists’ rights to say what they say.
People do engage with complex challenging work, if given the chance.
If barriers of cost are overcome.
If barriers of confidence are overcome.
Beveridge, if he’d had an extra year, might have referred to the sixth giant – poverty of aspiration – that remains for us to conquer as we transform society.
It’s not by accident that the Arts Council was formed two years before the NHS – the importance of Culture to our Nation’s soul was appreciated then as it is now.
But to turn to the Olympics….
The Olympics is that once in a lifetime opportunity for hundreds of thousands of people to discover new, thrilling and unexpected ways of fulfilling their creative potential in all its forms.
When, in 467 days, the Olympic flame is passed to London from Beijing, a cultural flame will be ignited.
We’ll take Liverpool’s example and spread it throughout the country.
But this has to be so much more than what David Lan termed a “confection”.
It’s serious, and should be led by the cultural sector and be driven by their own desire for cultural authenticity and integrity.
The core of our investment in culture is just about this.
It provides space for risk, provides a platform from which artists can say what they need to say.
And that’s why we place such importance on public investment in culture and additional funding from the Lottery.
I’m pleased that Bill Morris and Keith Khan from the London Organising Committee for the Olympic Games are here today.
They have consulted widely around the cultural sector all over the UK.
A strong consensus has emerged about the core values that must apply to every part of the Cultural Olympiad from the smallest community project to the opening ceremony.
Bill and his team are now building a clear delivery structure which will enable every level and every area of the cultural community to play its part.
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LOCOG will lead on opening and closing ceremonies, and, supported by my team, will coordinate the whole project.
In particular they will help organise large projects of the kind that were set out in the bid document, which inspired the IOC, and were championed so convincingly by Jude Kelly.
We still have five years to go and our plans are still in development.
But some examples include major national projects such as the International Shakespeare Festival, which will reflect contemporary creativity and culture through the lens of Shakespeare, and a massive project to reinterpret our world class museum and gallery collections through the Great Exhibition programme.
This partnership will bring together national, regional and world collections.
Live Sites – big screens and live performance spaces – in towns and cities will allow the whole country to showcase their excellence.
These are three serious projects that LOCOG are already engaged with.
We have room for more ideas and we are looking to you for these.
The cultural sector is already rising to the challenge.
Ideas are brewing, creative groups are forming, new consortia are planning and in just about every cultural community creative minds are applied to the opportunity that London 2012 offers.
The same approach applies to the Olympic Park itself.
Art, cultural expression and good design are foundation stones of our strategy for the design of Olympic venues.
The Park and the facilities that will be provided in both Olympic and Legacy modes will have cultural, as well as sporting and recreational dimensions.
As part of its design strategy, the ODA has committed to ensuring that a diverse range of emerging and established designers and architectural practices with a track record of high quality are given the opportunity to get involved in the build of the Park.
The Park will give a lasting legacy to the east End of London.
Clearly, the majority of activity will take place throughout the country and will be driven by cultural players throughout the nation.
You might wonder how this will be paid for.
The Legacy Trust, which is made up of £40 million, will support cultural and sports engagement across the UK in the run up to, and during the 2012 Games.
The Trust will ensure that funding is spread throughout the UK.
This is not just about sport.
My challenge to the Trust is that they spend close to 70% of their funding on culture.
And at least double their £40 million pot.
How they spend this is a matter of local involvement.
But I can think of examples of worthwhile projects.
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For instance, we could have an annual cultural festival for young people - like the UK School Games.
These proposals will be organised through relationships with LOCOG and the Nations and Regions Group.
And, David Lammy chairs a Culture and Creativity Advisory Forum whose aim is to ensure that the interests of the Culture Sector are properly reflected in the Olympics and, again, to solve problems at national level that might otherwise block cultural ambition.
We already have city festivals – why not more?
This is a great opportunity to create city pride.
If we could establish an annual young persons’ festival, we will make a good fist of responding to the Olympic ideals.
So, that is my vision of the Cultural Olympiad – a clear programme of events and national projects that will be developed by LOCOG and others in partnership with the cultural sector, and a much bigger flowering of cultural activity in the whole nation, led by artists and communities and cultural organisations, but engaging with and inspired by the Olympic ideal as expressed by Coubertin and by the Ancient Greeks.
Coubertin spoke of the Olympics having an aspiration “to an ideal of a higher life, to strive for perfection"; and to glorify beauty by the "involvement of the philosophic arts in the Games".
The Ancient Greeks too saw the Olympics as a celebration of body and mind, and the Muses were present at the Ancient Games, because, in the view of the Greeks, what you did in pushing your body to perfection had to be matched by pushing your mind and spirit too – through poetry, the representation of physical perfection and aspiration, and through drama.
Just think about that.
We have got the chance through the London 2012 Olympic Games and Paralympic Games to raise the bar and to re-integrate culture into the Olympic ideal.
We have looked at the success and failure of past Games to craft London 2012.
But when it comes to culture, it’s no exaggeration to say that our ambition is not Sydney or Barcelona or Athens.
It is Olympia.
Because this time, there will be so much more to the Cultural Olympiad than the ceremonies, important though they will be.
More than the live concerts across the country, fun though they will be.
It will be the beginning of something much, much more ambitious.
The matching of physical excellence with cultural excellence.
It’s what the Greeks expected. It’s what Coubertin dreamed of.
Following Liverpool’s example, I’m determined that London 2012 will make it a reality.
Thank you.
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