Is culture still bad for you?

Culture is bad for you represented the culmination of several years of data collection and analysis. It also reflected the huge efforts of project partners who had supported the Panic! project. Create London and Arts Emergency worked with us in a context in which they were hugely concerned about inequality in the arts.

Five years on from that first edition, the authors – Orian Brook, Mark Taylor and I – have been asking ourselves whether the book’s provocative title, along with its specific focus on inequalities in cultural consumption and production, are still relevant in 2025.

Inequalities persist

Certainly, inequality in the arts has not gone away. Our updated statistics still have the power to shock. We show how inequalities, particularly those associated with social class, but also at the intersection of class, gender and ethnicity, have persisted over the years since the first edition.

New sources of data, such as the 2021 census, show the scale of intersectional inequalities, and the nature of exclusions blighting sector workers such as musicians or artists.

We see ongoing struggles for support for those who don’t fit a narrow version of an ideal worker favoured in hiring and commissioning across the sector. Having caring responsibilities – particularly childcare – impacts on creative careers when industry is unwilling to recognise or support these important aspects of people’s lives. This impact is, without doubt, unequally distributed between men and women.

The pandemic exacerbated these existing inequalities in the workforce. Even more striking is the impact of the pandemic on cultural consumption. One popular narrative, backed by the experience of those already engaged and interested in the arts, was that culture helped millions of people through the experience of lockdown.

Patterns of everyday creative activity unchanged

Drawing on new academic research on cultural consumption during the pandemic, we show how few of the population changed their consumption and tastes during lockdown. Patterns of everyday creative activity remained unchanged, and organisations’ digital offer struggled to attract new audiences.

This is not to diminish the importance and impact for those who found digital modes of cultural engagement a lifeline in 2020. What it shows is the ‘stickiness’ of consumption inequalities that will not be overturned by digital forms of delivery.

This theme, of the extent of the challenge of making culture more equitable, is made more pressing by the current moment. In some of the nations that have inspired institutions and individuals demands for change, the creative sector now faces a hostile environment for efforts to diversify the workforce and create a more equal audience.

At home, funding pressures that were acute before the pandemic are clearly a crisis now. Indeed, Culture in Crisis was the title of one of the major research reports assessing the impact of Covid on the sector.

Optimism amid the sense of crisis

But there are moments of optimism within the sense of crisis. Cultural policy in the UK is clearly taking inequality seriously. From attempts to address bullying harassment and discrimination in the film industry, through new spending commitments for the arts outside London, to more general rhetoric over access to arts in schools and beyond, addressing inequality is clearly on the political agenda.

At the same time, the cultural sector confronts the impact of almost 15 years of austerity; Brexit; a cost-of-living crisis; struggles over art and culture in schools; and a crisis in higher education institutions. These are just some examples of the broader context with implications of inequality in culture.

The wider story of the decline of much of the public realm and welfare state provides additional pressures that organisations by themselves struggle to address. Yet the need for broader social change does not ease the responsibility of key decision makers to meet inequalities with specific roots in attempted return to business as usual that followed the pandemic.

Grappling with this context, and the specific issues within the sector, calls for a new approach to cultural policy. This cannot be the task of central government alone, although it clearly sets many of the rules of the game, particularly for funding and regulation. Ultimately it falls to all of us – as practitioners, decision makers, researchers, audience members and participants – to both demand and to create a more equal and open cultural sector in the UK.

Culture is bad for you: Inequality in the cultural and creative industries (revised and updated edition) by Orian Brook, Dave O’Brien and Mark Taylor is published by Manchester University Press, March 2025, and is available as a paperback or ebook.