The Arts:John Tusa, who transformed London's Barbican, tells Sara Keatingthat art can provide comfort in difficult times, and culture is particularly important in the face of 'the credit crunch'
SIR JOHN TUSA is perhaps better described as an ambassador for the arts than an arts administrator. Having transformed London's massive Barbican complex during his 12 years as managing director, Tusa has become as well-known for his outspoken defence of the value of the arts as for the specific successes of his own cultural career.
He was in Dublin recently to address some of the National Concert Hall's major corporate supporters, where he spoke about his own experiences of "the trials and tribulations, the eccentricities and oddities of running a concert hall, and most importantly the value of their support." Having spent 33 years at the BBC, first as a news journalist and then as managing director of the BBC World Service, Tusa took over as head of the Barbican Centre, the largest performing arts venue in Europe, in 1995. With Tusa at the helm, the Barbican was to be transformed from a soulless, loss-making arts complex into a vibrant community hub of cultural creativity.
Built in 1982 by the City of London Corporation at a historic capital cost of £162 million, the complex boasted three cinemas, two theatre spaces, two art galleries, a concert hall, seven conference halls and three restaurants, but it had struggled to develop a distinct cultural identity, and each of the performance spaces was being run and managed independently, with little overlap either in budget, programming or in the audiences they attracted.
When Tusa took over, however, he set about restructuring the organisation and finding "a signature for the arts centre which would define what we did, both for the Barbican itself - for those of us who worked there, and those at the City of London - but most importantly for our audience. For quite a long time after the Barbican was built nobody was quite sure what its role was, but we worked hard to discover its purpose, and now you cannot imagine the cultural landscape in London without it."
The avenue of arts administration was an entirely new direction for Tusa. However, as he explains, "I knew how to run a large organisation based on values and that was crucial, but more importantly I had always been passionately interested in music, theatre and art. In fact, one of the greatest personal achievements during my time at the BBC - even when I was working on Newsnight- was that I can count on the fingers of one hand the amount of times I had to miss a trip to the theatre or the opera or an exhibition because work got in the way. I could bring that passion along with my practical skills to the job."
Tusa talks about the arts with practical, down-to-earth, logical clarity, and he is careful to avoid any metaphoric hyperbole - "any mystical language" - when he speaks about the importance of the arts in modern society. He prefers - as in his speech at the National Concert Hall, and in his two collections of essays, Writing from the Frontlineand Art Matters- to use real examples and his own experiences to lobby for the critical status of the arts. The success of the Barbican, he says, for example, stands as key example of the intrinsic value of the arts to society: "The Barbican has had a big effect on the way our particular area of the city, north London, lives, behaves and is perceived. It is not just a cold venue, existing merely as bricks and mortar; just the same way a painting is not just oil on canvas. Art does something to the immediate environment. It creates life, creates audiences, creates communities, all of which have all sorts of effects that people can't altogether imagine and can't predict. That is the value of the arts. That has been the value of the Barbican to the City of London.
"HOWEVER, SOMETIMES,"he insists, "there is too much emphasis put on the value of the arts. Yes, a good concert hall has an economic effect. Of course it costs money but it also makes money - if not always profit - and it creates jobs: that's fine. And a theatre will undoubtedly have an effect upon the artistic community, and an effect on schools and communities through education and outreach: also great. But if the arts didn't have those consequences, is that to say that they wouldn't really be worth anything? Well, absolutely not. If all you want is economic regeneration you can build a shopping centre. If you want social regeneration, organise a youth club. Without getting into that overblown language of mysticism that often surrounds these discussions, the arts are about the generation of new ideas.They are an expression of human nature and human curiosity. They express the intellectual life of the nation, and having something like a concert hall or a theatre or an arts centre to facilitate that is vital."
Tusa displays an astute awareness about the contemporary cultural climate in Ireland, and recent criticisms of the arts venues that have popped up throughout the country without consideration for the art that needs to go in to them. But Tusa, calling again on his experience at the Barbican, is resolutely optimistic.
"As far as embodying attitudes to the arts in a building, well sometimes you need buildings - for example Wexford has done more than enough to earn the right to a new opera house: it was building on 50 years of success. And there are other times when you find that once you build an arts venue, people will start to do things there that they wouldn't have done if the building hadn't been available. And yes sometimes, undoubtedly, you will find buildings, like the Barbican, where it will take 10 years for someone to find the right purpose, the right art, for it. But the key point really is that it will always be difficult for these buildings to survive without government support of some sort or another for the activities - the art - that goes on there."
TUSA HAS BEENa vocal advocate of the necessity, indeed the responsibility, of governments to subsidise the arts, "certainly for capital works, because if you don't have government support in the European model you just wouldn't get most of these buildings built and without those buildings you wouldn't have a place for people to develop their interest in and knowledge of culture. After that, the whole question is how much support the government should give to the running costs.
"It is not just a question that such subsidy should allow us to make every seat affordable to people on ordinary or low incomes," he adds. "That's absurd, and frankly, it's not right: those who can afford to pay £210 [€260] for a ticket to an opera should pay that, but then of course there should also be seats available that cost much less. But a pricing policy should be driven to get as much out of the box office as you can, and with as broad a range of audience as possible in mind, and with the Barbican, by the time I left, we were generating about 60-65 per cent of our annual revenue budget from our own activity - box office, commercial and so forth - and 35 per cent came from the City of London. But even though that is a significant income that we raised ourselves, without that 35 per cent council support we wouldn't have been able to make the work that generated revenue."
In fact it is the potential withdrawal of government support in the current economic climate that Tusa sees as the greatest short-term - and potentially long-term - threat to those who make and programme art. Even so, he finds some solace in that ineffable quality that makes the arts such an important part of the fabric of human life.
"We know that there will be a huge reduction in subsidy. The palliative is that we are coming from such a high point, a historic peak, in terms of state funding. But the other palliative is that art itself, culture, will continue to thrive anyway. All the evidence suggests that culture is even more vital in the face of difficulties like 'the credit crunch'. I don't want to get into any mystical philosophising but art can provide comfort in difficult times."
And what work of art would see him through the bad times? He answers my playful question as the interview draws to a close. "Schubert's Die Winterreise, a songcycle of 24 songs that tells the story of a broken-hearted poet as he makes a winter journey. It is 75-80 minute-long piece, for solo voice and piano. Its effect on me is indescribable, but it is magnificent."
