You can’t force low-income people to go to an art gallery or the theatre if they don’t want to

I went last week to see the justly praised production of Wagner’s The Mastersingers at English National Opera, and I didn’t see a single black face there, nor even much dark hair (except in the case of Melvyn Bragg who, though now greying a bit, still seems to have Ronald Reagan’s gift for keeping white hairs at bay). This chimed with the finding of the Warwick Commission on the arts in Britain that much the greater part of live-music audiences, theatre-goers and gallery visitors is old, white and middle-class. Even though this wasn’t actually the reason for the Arts Council’s drastic decision to curtail ENO’s funding — this was because of its allegedly shambolic management — it easily might have been. For the Warwick Commission’s report has reawakened concerns that the publicly funded arts are, as it put it, ‘predominantly accessed by an unnecessarily narrow social, economic, ethnic and educated demographic that is not fully representative of the UK’s population’.

This is a longstanding worry. Already more than a decade ago, Britain’s most famous museums and art galleries were being warned that they could lose their government grants unless they managed to attract more visitors from ethnic minorities and low-income families. Specifically, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport demanded that 18 of them, including the National Gallery and the Victoria and Albert Museum, should aim for a rise of 8 per cent in the number of visitors from the poorest and least privileged sections of society. In addition, it required that seven million more children should visit them during the next few years. These objectives were agreed by the museums and galleries, which were warned that if they failed to respect them they could have their public funding cut off.