From CEMA to the Arts Council: Cultural authority, participation and the question of ‘value’ in early Post-war Britain

This chapter offers a close analysis of the short but crucial period that saw the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain from the ashes of the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA) following the end of the Second World War. It throws light on the ideas, hierarchies of cultural values, power relations, and notions of artistic quality that are embedded in this history and reflected in the resulting cultural policies. This history and its connection to the British adult education movement have been explored previously, though here I am focusing on identifying and analysing their unacknowledged yet persisting legacy in contemporary policy debates. The ultimate objective of the chapter is to demonstrate how crucial fault lines between different approaches to conceiving the value of culture and desirable forms of cultural participation that were already perceptible in the history of CEMA (having roots in the inter-war debates around adult education) came to be consolidated as the arts council was formed in 1946. The original contribution the chapter makes to contemporary debates around the so-called ‘participation agenda’ (Jancovich 2017) and the value of everyday forms of creativity and cultural expression is to both historicise and problematise their recent surge of popularity. Current understandings of the renewed interest in everyday participation and creativity, and cultural democracy will remain forever limited without awareness of their long history within twentieth-century British cultural politics and policy.