On angels and elections
“I was passing Antony Gormley’s Angel of the North just as news popped up on my phone that the new Mayor for the North East Combined Authority had been confirmed. I was on my way between Friday afternoon meetings on the Number 21 bus.
The Angel is a symbol of the region our new Mayor will represent. Seven local authorities stretching from north of the Tweed to the North Yorkshire border – the biggest Combined Authority area in the country. The 30-year-old Angel stands by the roadside, feet rooted in the heart of Gateshead. At the same time it is one of a small cluster of images from UK PLC, like Big Ben, which are recognised around the world. Truly local and global, Gormley’s epic sculpture is deeply bound to the region and its people.
It has been a long road to even this point in devolution – some would say tracking right back to the 1980s – and with a number of false starts along the way and there is clearly a very long route ahead. The initial deal and Trailblazer are clearly a start and not an end point. It’s nevertheless a milestone. As a crucible of industry and innovation, the North East knows how to be optimistic and determined, even if as a country we are often hedged by ifs and buts.
Both the deal itself and the incoming Mayor have been vocal about the importance of culture, creativity, tourism and sport for the North East’s success. And rightly so.
More broadly culture and creativity are critical to our country’s future. Their ability to stimulate and seed change are right at the heart of what we’re going to collectively need next. Of course we don’t all agree on everything. But we do agree things need to be better.
And now we’re in another election zone and, as John Prescott remarked 20 years ago, the tectonic plates of politics appear to be moving. Soon we’ll start a new chapter and work on what we want the 21st century to be. In the North East that will bring together a shift within the region and in the region’s position within the nation. It has to be a cause for optimism, despite all of the challenge and the dysfunctional noise there is in public debate around the election and more broadly. Again, we all seem to agree that public conversations in life and particularly online have become toxic and unhealthy.
This election, or at least the coverage of it, seems slightly unreal. Any meaningful discussion of the role of culture, or even of education, or how we address global challenges and the country’s role in the world making it into the conversation seems very distant.
But a lack of clear answers seems much more present than ever to me. This could be on the one hand fair enough. But having had the roller coaster of the first quarter of this century and seeing all we need to adapt to and take on as we head into the middle of this 21st century, it seems entirely reasonable that we don’t collectively have answers and are feeling a bit lost. But perhaps elections are fought on more limited turf.”
“Artists – creators – are brilliant at not knowing the answer. As are innovators and designers. Creativity and the skills which sit around it are brilliant at being comfortable with questions rather than answers and looking in new ways and beyond the immediate challenges – leapfrogging ahead to a different and better future. That is surely what we are going to need.
It is plainly obvious that creativity is a core 21st century skill. This has always been true of any point in history, and it is no less so for ours.
It’s with creativity that we’ll work through collective, practicable and fair responses to AI, climate change, social justice, our role in the world. It’s with creativity that we will work through these and other seemingly impossible problems, reconfigure our institutions, our engineering and technological solutions and our ways of doing things so that we can address them meaningfully and build a healthy new economy and society. Business, science, tech all absolutely depend on creativity just as much as we need the arts and creative subjects in and of themselves.
We can probably all see that finding a route to meaningful growth comes with a list of investment in our infrastructure; changes to planning to unlock more housing, better designed places and better devolved centres; and the redesign of our core systems like education, health, social care. And all of this in a green and tech-enabled way….
But how? One thing is for sure – creativity will be key to the design of all of this if we dare to be ambitious and dare to be successful.
So in local, regional and national government, we have to take creativity seriously. That starts in schools. Revisiting the curriculum and what all our young people get from it. The system – 20th century designed at very best – isn’t fit for purpose, it does the educational equivalent of fighting the last war.
Creative UK have adopted the brilliant tag line in their recently published manifesto – ‘a future economy is a creative economy’.
This isn’t just about creative subjects and the arts. It’s about what creativity can bring to everything else from organisational theory to farming, from medicine to engineering – ultimately as a core skill for an industrial strategy. A core part of this is having a diverse and exciting artistic community and having a population that participates in and has access to the arts. These are critical parts of a healthy, happy society; a society in which being creative is second nature for everyone. But it’s also about how we design our future and our future economy.
Once the election is done and the dust has settled we really need to turn to the serious matter of wiring creativity into our school and community life. Though artists and the arts, but also much more broadly. It won’t fix things immediately and it won’t bring immediate answers. But it will enable our next generation to form this century and build our future as a country and a society.
As the bus passed the Angel on 4 May I was reminded that, as well as symbolising our region as a geographical entity, its creation at the end of a century also symbolises our perhaps ambivalent but hopeful view of what is to come. It speaks through art of an optimistic future, and it is through arts and creativity that we can get there.”
Abigail Pogson, Managing Director