IN THE REACH and range of its responsibilities, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) is a curious institution, its original good intentions mired in fudge and compromise. It is a relatively new hybrid in the herbaceous border of government departments. Its forerunner was the Department of National Heritage, a short-lived body made up of various departments, which lasted from 1992 to 1997, the year in which the extended DCMS was created. Its ministerial team includes a Secretary of State and a Minister of State for Culture, Creative Industries and Tourism. It looks after not only the three broad entities of its title but is responsible for state ceremonials and royal funerals; it husbands the Royal Parks; it regulates gambling and racing; and it oversees late-night refreshment licensing. Under the heading of media is the vast and complex subject of broadcasting and communications. More recently it spawned an offshoot with an appointed minister to mastermind London’s Olympic games in readiness for 2012. In 1997 few people seemed worried by this yoking together of arts and sport. But the spiralling costs of the Olympics, the early raids on money from the arts to help pay for the games and the bleak economic climate have seriously undermined the administrative convenience of having arts and sport under one governmental umbrella and raise urgent questions about its future.

Worrying confusions, however, do not stop there. There has been an insidious crossing over of terms: criteria commonly employed for judging sport are now routinely transferred to the evaluation of the arts. This is especially true now that museums and galleries are being nudged towards ‘active’ participation in the parallel cultural Olympiad already in the planning. During the Beijing games last year several museums in Britain mounted shows on Chinese themes – from the First Emperor spectacular at the British Museum and chinoiserie in Brighton to displays of Chinese art, ceramics and artefacts in Yorkshire museums and in Birmingham. Similar shows were mounted in other countries. But how will projects that celebrate culture in Britain be measured for possible funding? Will an exhibition with a sporting theme succeed over others less obviously relevant? Tate Modern’s 2007 one-day event, choreographed by Humberto Vélez, of dozens of amateur boxers from the surrounding borough of Southwark let loose in the Turbine Hall was ‘a collaborative project to engage the community with the work of Tate’. Might this desolatingly worthy objective be something we are to expect from the cultural Olympiad, with enough desiderata – youth, diversity, multiculturalism, community – to satisfy the most exacting chairperson for ‘arts and leisure’? It would seem to be so from tentative plans announced last year by the Mus­eums Libraries Archives partnership (MLA) for a major national programme of museum exhibitions entitled Stories of the World. Its aim is to ‘put a diverse and inclusive range of young people at the heart of the creative process to reinterpret and cast new light on collections’. These are chilling words, especially for anyone over the age of about eighteen. But more disconcerting is the almost inevitable demise of the cultural Olympiad through the recent withdrawal of funding, thus neutering the MLA’s enabling role.

Among the many ways in which the purposes of our national museums may be subverted – as the MLA plan suggests – is the pretence that their contents could be chosen by the visitor or consumer or that the public could directly influence what they see. In practice this is invariably disastrous, frequently sidestepping the experience and expertise of curators and scholars and often introducing events that, under the designer-directives of access and inclusivity, have nothing to do with a museum’s true functions. Public participation is best judged through reaction and response rather than originating involvement. This spurious democracy may seem to be mere window-dressing but it contributes to the broader picture of the arts in Britain as purveyed by the DCMS with its burdensome targets and league tables, with ‘footfall’ as its measure of success and confusion over what constitutes ‘art’, ‘culture’ and ‘education’.1

It seems increasingly clear that sport should have its own government department but this is by no means an accepted view. When it was put forward in Sir John Tusa’s report A New Landscape for the Arts, drawn up for the Conservative shadow government, critics suggested that effective lobbying for the arts would be undermined if they were divorced from sport and that a new Department of Culture would be unlikely to attract a big-hitting minister. With the current stress on the educative value of museums and galleries surely they, at least, might come under the remit of the department of education or, as it was rearranged and renamed in 2007, the Department for Children, Schools and Families.

We have been informed on more than one occasion that we are in a great age for the arts in Britain. While it may be flattering to be told this, it is a foolish notion, shored up by statistics rather than achievement, as though we were judging the impact and success of an exhibition by the number of advance tickets sold; we could as easily be in an age that is seen by the future as impoverished. But if the government holds to this rosy view then it should be reflected in and supported by an administrative framework that allows coherence of purpose and max­imum institutional independence. It is hard to see the DCMS, as currently constituted, occupying such a role. In any radical review of public expenditure, contingent on current pressing needs to save money, the unwieldy configuration that is the DCMS must be seriously investigated at the highest level.