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City of Culture?

Thursday, 21 September 2006

You're having a laugh according to Vitali Vitaliev As the Capital of Culture year draws ever closer, EN's Editor-at-large Vitali Vitaliev goes in search of Liverpool's cultural soul and instead finds kebabs and chips.
“No one goes to Liverpool for pleasure” – Graham Greene, 1936.
The office wall, covered with multi-coloured post-it notes, looked like an enlarged version of my kids’ “star chart” to register and reward their “good” behaviour.
“You are not supposed to see this, it’s still embargoed,” Jason Harborrow, Chief Executive of Liverpool Culture Company, told me amiably. Being the first journalist to see the 2008 Capital of Culture draft programme (the heavily scribbled-upon notes on the wall represented just that) was obviously my “star reward” for coming to Liverpool.
The very concept of “the Capital of Culture” does not make much sense to me. If one (or several, for Liverpool will share its title with the Norwegian town of Stavager that I have never heard of – a 2008 double-headed cultural dragon of sorts) city or town is proclaimed “capital”, does this imply that all other places in Europe should be designated “Cultural Provinces” of the year?
And does culture as such – a peculiar, volatile substance that (like a gas) fills every open space available – need a “capital”?
I remember going to Glasgow in 1990, when Scotland’s largest city carried the burden of the European City of Culture (“Capitals” appeared only since 2006, and finding it as rough and deprived as ever.
Also, I was rather surprised to learn that Luxembourg was nominated European City of Culture in 1995, for, having visited the Duchy in the Ditch one year before, I learned, among other things, that the city-state, then officially the world’s the wealthiest nation (with a GNP of $3 billion a year) had neither opera nor ballet nor a single concert hall and only three museums. To cap it all, Luxembourg’s Minister of Culture was simultaneously the country’s Minister of Agriculture.
His job must have been a great sinecure: there was not a lot of either in Luxembourg back then. I hope the situation in the Duchy has changed for the better by now, and culture is being defined separately from agriculture. My hope rests upon the fact that Luxembourg (together with some obscure Romanian city – or town, or, possibly, even hamlet – Sibiu) has been named a European Capital of Culture for next year, 2007!
Once was obviously not enough for Luxembourg, or rather for Brussels, from where all culture capitals and cities have been nominated since 1999 (EC Decision 1419/1999). Does it have something to do with the fact that Luxembourg’s suburb of Kirchberg is home to many an EU institution?
Goodbye, Paris, Rome, Venice and London. Enter Sibiu, Stavager and Luxembourg. But let’s return to Liverpool. The Liverpool European Capital of Culture (for brevity let’s call it ECOC from now on) bid was largely over-shadowed by the sudden resignation of the festival’s Australian (Tasmanian, to be more exact) artistic director Robyn Archer, who failed to return from her leave last July.
“Resignation leaves Capital of Culture in shambles”, screamed the Guardian’s headline on 6 July. As for Liverpool’s own press, they were even less scrupulous and happily indulged in Robyn’s character assassination, branding her “a star and a diva” and alluding to her murky past as “a cabaret singer”.
According to the Liverpool Echo, Robyn didn’t even have a proper workpermit to be employed in the UK. “She may have as well come from Mars,” the paper concluded.
Well, while living in Australia I had a couple of encounters with Robyn who, among other things, organised Melbourne’s annual street festival “Moomba” (it was rather brilliant, by the way), and can testify to the fact that, apart from her Tasmanian origins, there was nothing “Martian” about her.
The whole hullabaloo over her resignation (for purely personal reasons) was a classic example of making a mountain out of a molehill – in a truly provincial fashion. I asked Jason Harborrow whether the Guardian was right and the would-be Culture Capital was indeed “in shambles”?
“Of course not. Robyn’s departure was just a blip, blown out of proportion by the media. We have plenty of other people to replace her and are thinking of having not one, but several artistic directors.”
I liked Jason. He had a strong (if somewhat sweaty) handshake and confidence-oozing manner. “A Scouser by choice” (in the words of his “news officer” Mike Doran), he was born in the North West. At 36, he has a brief but impressive CV that includes the position of Commercial General Manager of Manchester’s 2002 Commonwealth Games.
“I am realistic rather than optimistic,” he said with a smile before switching over to business-speak : “We have secured £95 million of funding via private and public sector,
whereas Cork [the 2005 Capital of Culture], for example, had only £3 million. We aim to create a more established cultural infrastructure in the city by taking responsibility for all major cultural events in Liverpool.”
“How is your bid different from that of Cork, say?” I asked suppressing a highly uncultured yawn. “There are two ways of doing [sic] Capital of Culture: to do a festival for one year, or to do it multi-year for a long time. Unlike all previous bidders, we chose the second option, and our programme will last for seven years – from 2003 to 2010...”
“What are you planning to achieve?” And here Jason said something really interesting: “Our key objective is to change perception of Liverpool. I call it ‘Brand Liverpool’. We’ll change it by presenting this new brand – not just football and the Beatles – to encourage people to come here and see modern Liverpool for what it is.
“We are already succeeding: the number of visitors keeps growing, and Liverpool has moved up the tourism ladder – from the 16th-most visited place in the UK to the 6th.”
During my own short visit I was able to see Liverpool “for what it is”. The extremely dug-up (I was told that all the construction work had nothing to do with the ECOC) city centre goes dead after 6 pm, if not to count several drunks and a couple of bored teenagers kicking a football across one of the city’s main – and totally deserted – transport arteries.
Being confronted with a family emergency, I had to make an urgent phone call (I don’t own a mobile) and discovered that 90 per cent of public phones were out of order. The only catering outlet that was open was a solitary kebab shop, with the floor and counters in desperate need of cleaning.
Don’t get me wrong: I have always loved Liverpool – its history, its docks, its peculiar sense of humour, its independent and rebellious spirit, its quiet and rather charming “provincialism” manifesting itself in a strong inferiority complex, or, as Robyn Archer would be likely to put it, “a chip on the shoulder”.
One of the clearest incarnations of this deeply-rooted complex is the monstrosity of the Metropolitan Cathedral of Christ the King, known locally as “Paddy’s Wigwam”. With its leaking phallic-shaped dome and battered walls, it is a cross between London’s Waterloo station (pre-restoration) and the BT Tower.
Standing over a vast crypt housing a car park – all that is left of Sir Edwin Lutyens’ grand design, conceived in the 1930s and abandoned after the last war – the building was to have 92 chapels and would have been larger that St Peter’s in Rome. It would have taken 250 years to complete. What better monument to the proverbial “chip on the shoulder”? You
don’t transform a provincial city into a “capital” by erecting the world’s largest cathedral or by proclaiming (or nominating) it an ECOC.
Each city, town or person has to be able to take pride in what it (he/she) genuinely is. Pretending to be something else leads straight into the old trap of becoming too big for one’s own shoes, and that is simply laughable. Develop culture, arts, businesses and everything else – by all means – yet please, do not call yourself a “capital”.
“Inferiority complex and lack of confidence did play a role in our ECOC bid,” acknowledged Harborrow before we parted, and I couldn’t help admiring his honesty.
The popular guide book Lonely Planet noted in the 1990s that “Liverpool greets a visitor with a distinctly gap-toothed smile. The holes testify to the wartime bombing and economic collapse...”
These days the “smile” is still gaptoothed, only the holes are not due to the bombing, but to the construction work on the wave of the UK’s economic boom. House prices have tripled since 2003 in Liverpool – a city that next year will celebrate the 800th anniversary of being granted its first charter by King John.
I was encouraged to have learnt that, among other numerous “events” to mark the occasion (they include a “musical fireworks championship”), German artist Hans Peter Kuhn is constructing a giant fluorescent QUESTION MARK on the bank of the Mersey.
That question mark – and not the ubiquitous and cocky ECOC posters – should, to my mind, become Liverpool’s main symbol, not just for 2003-2010, but for many more years to come.