THE ROYAL SOCIETY OF PUBLIC AFFAIRS

Look, I have a confession to make. I love the RSA (Royal Society of Arts). 

I love the building, the people there, the library and the events. But hardly any of the events are about culture or the arts – we’ve got Sir Peter Bazalgette shortly – but for something with Arts in its title that’s a bit sparse. And the library is more McKinsey meets Harvard Business School than “hand me the prussian blue and the burnt sienna, sweetheart”.

The RSA's mission expressed in the founding charter was to:
 "embolden enterprise, enlarge science, refine art, improve our manufacturers and extend our commerce".
But in its website, the RSA describes itself as
"an enlightenment organisation committed to finding innovative practical solutions to today’s social challenges".

Whichever way you look at it art has been demoted whilst we’ve been looking at the front of the building and feeling happy in the warm embrace of the name.

What Matthew Taylor has done brilliantly is indeed to make the RSA an enlightenment and  mind-opening organisation. What the RSA says today carries the weight of considered opinion but it’s missing a trick.
A trick I heard on Saturday Live on the Radio 4 when following a piece on GF Watts Richard Cole and Alain de Botton reflected that “art can really change the world”.

Who would deny the explosion of pop culture in the early 1960s changed the way we felt and saw things or that the beauty and power of Titian and Tintoretto helped build the character of 16th century Venice or that Dickens helped explain and change Victorian Society?  William Morris, Ruskin and we might have add the Bloomsbury Group and latterly Conran were people who believed art was part of and helped define a good life. Graffiti and rap, alien to many, helps shape today’s world. When we hear the Mozart Requiem it isn’t just a succession of tunes, it lets us see the “world in technicolour” as Eric Whitacre put it.

Art, quite simply, changes the way we feel, think and see things.

The current epidemic of book clubs and choirs is about something more profound than self-improvement. And as Gareth Malone discovered, and has harnessed, society is inspired by the art that lies unexplored within people.

The GF Watts Gallery in Compton near Guildford, the topic on Saturday Live, is a tribute to the Victorian artist whose painting “Hope” has inspired Barack Obama – it’s his favourite painting.

Through the period when Watts lived, Britain was characterised by urbanisation, mechanisation, poverty, a rapidly growing economy, Imperialism and an explosive arts scene – the Pre Raphaelites, the Romantics and the great Victorian Novelists.

And the RSA thrived.

Now as part of its mission to enlighten we’d like to see a little more focus by the RSA on the economic, social and global impact that the arts in the UK can have. If nothing else the influence this organisation might bring to bear on successive governments, who are deaf to the importance of the arts, might improve the current funding famine.

As Sir John Tusa (CEO of the Barbican Centre) mildly observed:
“I have no doubt whatever that we behave in a much better way because of the time we spend with the arts.”

He might have added that the RSA isn’t spending enough time with them.

Written for and first published on 'Business of Culture'

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