Dear Tom: A Letter About Elitism

July 13, 2026 James Hamilton

Dear Tom,

A few months ago, when the UK state funding for opera was being cut, there followed one of those strange public debates in which two unrelated discussions went on at the same time almost unaware of each other. I’ve forgotten one side but the other was almost all pain and bewilderment at how opera, the great folk art of Italy, could be considered elitist when “Glasto” was so much pricier than Glyndebourne and tickets to the Gods were the price of a Glasgow pint. How could the successors of those who founded the Third Programme after the War because high art was for everyone be those who professed to distrust high art because of the cut of its gib?

I said I had my own views on this and for what it’s worth, here they are.

They start in, what, 1975 or 1976? The end of the summer term fifty years ago: my primary school teachers standing like foolish giants in amongst all of the tiny furniture that they’d pushed back against the wall to make way for a children’s disco. I remember sun coming through new windows, bowls of strong-flavoured crisps, fizzy drinks in disposable plastic cups and a tape recorder from which issued that year’s wave of early disco hits to which we, as good children, dutifully jumped around.

You don’t get to choose how you first meet the arts. I’d have walked home from the disco that July afternoon to a kitchen with foam tiles on the ceiling lit by the first fluorescent tube I can remember seeing, and on a shelf was the Sony mono radio-tape recorder, tuned to Radio One, that had been a present at my mother’s second wedding. The kitchen had started out as a lean-to scullery, and when that was converted they’d also knocked the two ground floor rooms together into one. This was where the television was whose adverts ordered me to “Look Out for Look-In!” (a sort of TV Times for kids) and I did, obeying Look-In’s further instructions to put its pop posters on my wall. I remember studying these, wondering who the people in them actually were.

I had no concept of “the arts” at this time of course, and in fact had been confused at one point by the fact that the same songs that were on Top of the Pops in the evening were played on the radio the following morning. I had made no connection either between the songs and the posters on my wall, and it would be years before I learned that you could buy records with the songs on, let alone that buying them was involved in their being on the radio. Others picked up on it all earlier: my friend H came to school crying one morning because Elvis had died, and it was the first time I’d seen someone deeply attached to a performer in that way.

But some variant of this story was essentially universal at that time and we all went through it. You’d become aware by one accident or another that there were paintings and poems and plays, but they felt cordoned off elsewhere in a way rock and television did not. For most of my contemporaries therefore, the first experience of what we would now regard an arts event was a pop concert or at least a gig of some sort. Whether it was regarded as the arts (the French seem to have done so earlier than the British) or just as youth culture, this kind of experience was what the vast majority of us went through. It was rock and pop, and it was television. The people who went through it with me and with us now run the country’s arts and artistic institutions.

Rock and television brought certain things with them, and as they were essentially contemporaries and allies, some of these they had in common. Both favoured the informal, the uninhibited, the extroverted. Both were subject to the draw of the fashionable, the cool and the bon-ton. Rock felt it had a contemporary moral side to it - in his Despatches, Michael Herr recalled how US paratroopers in Vietnam exchanged tapes of Rolling Stones music like gold or contraband. Rock was interactive, clannish, a site for self-expression.

The first experience of the arts for most then was of something that set out to centre, flatter and excite the individual, and these were ideas we all imbibed to some degree. Contemporaneously, television was self-centring, valorising presenters who reported on aspects of our pre-existing national culture with the air of a nurse talking to an elderly patient. The sense that the older world was lain open to implicit mockery was central to television from the start, and perhaps, as serious children, we took that message in too.

All of that amounted to a new overarching model that presented itself as unabashedly modern, contemporary and possessed of a will to prevail. We were all growing up inside it. I remember a motorway drive in the night: lights on the dashboard, the air at the Services dangerous with petrol, the hiss of my stepfather’s cigarette kissing the lighter, Tommy Vance’s voice on the radio saying Late..Night..Rock..

But earlier in the day we’d been to the Severn Valley Railway and I’d stepped out of the car’s velour interior into a world made of brick and iron. Here, the air smelt of steam and coal fires: everything was smart, clean and orderly, overseen by kind elderly men in smart uniforms whilst further away a brass band played chapel hymns whose sound was pulled and pushed by the wind. I’d read about this, or thought I had, in At Bertram’s Hotel or Betjeman from the old bookshelf at home that the adults in the house no longer seemed aware of.

It had a strong appeal. By 1978 I’d learned to steer clear of the bigger boys who dressed fashionably and listened to records. The scowling musicians on the album covers wearing clothes and faces appropriate to criminal vagrancy that said “We’re gonna do you, Dad” to Philip LarkinPhilip Larkin, “Minority Interest” 25 January 1971 All What Jazz: A Record Diary (London: Faber and Faber, 1985 revised edition) p. 270 said it to me as well. It wasn’t Bowie that opened up new worlds of possibility and colour in my case but the first side of Gustav Holst’s Planets Suite that my primary school teacher played to our class that year. On my first visit to a stately home, the children’s guidebook was home to cartoon drawings of an artist whose irrefutable message - “There are a lot of paintings at Hampton” - would provoke my first reflections about the visual arts.

I was the outlier in all of this of course, and in any case both rock and television had a point.

The polite, disciplined, Apollonian world I met on the steam railway was no eternal verity in itself and implied a rejection of an even older (Georgian and dissipated) world before it. The shared experience of intense suffering in two world wars had focussed and intensified all of that as a survival mechanism (and in the process substantially closed the gulf between Britain’s social classes: the moral imperative for the country was drawn from the mines and factories until long into the 1970s). Values rooted in particular circumstances flywheel on long after those circumstances have faded from memory. Twenty years after the defeat of Hitler, the formality and discipline of the years up to 1945 was often little more than blockage and futility. Rock’s intervention was not only welcomed by the young.

But even that is half a century ago now. The push against excess formality has decayed over time into an inarticulate instinct and drive against any expression of formality, however harmless in reality, a felt discomfort that exists in the modern mind unexplained but as a living entity.

This has a direct impact on the more traditional arts.

They’d be in difficulties in any case. The great democratising period of the traditional arts after all predates rock. The Proms began in 1895; Whitechapel Gallery opened in 1901; the Third Programme was launched in 1947; Sir Roy Strong became Director of the National Portrait Gallery in 1967 (but he had been assistant keeper since 1959). These things can’t happen twice. The curating and building of the 1980s and 1990s (the Tate alone opened the Clore Gallery, Tate Liverpool and Tate St. Ives during this period, with Tate Modern following in May 2000) are a professional lifetime behind us now. They can be equalled but not excelled. What is there for new curators to achieve?

At the same time, the more traditional arts (and let’s be frank here) do not centre or flatter the individual. They are the territory of Goya, of Górecki’s Symphony of Sorrowful Songs, of Chartres, the Duomo and Mozart’s Requiem, and they rest on an approach to formality and restraint that a new generation of curators find inimicable. What happens to classical music, opera and GLAMS more generally when they fall into the care of people who at a level below speech and argument find decorum disreputable and feel an imperative to respond to it?

I repeat, this is not some fault on the part of modern curators. It draws on an imbedded instinct that is practically universal. I have it; you probably do too. I may disagree at an intellectual and personal level that opera is elitist or that formality is a barrier to participation, but there is an inner tug in that direction, an unspoken inner demurral, coming not from ideas of opera but something older and broader about decorum and restraint that I acquired along with everyone else half a century ago and in the same shared circumstances.

It’s not about class, for all that it tries to exhibit itself as such. The men’s lounge suit is fast disappearing from everyday use, for all that it was one of the great democratising outfits in western history that, paired with a simple hair cut, could at one point put you on a level with a prince or a chairman. The new middle class casual aesthetic, though instantly signable, is harder to match. The orchestra that dresses in casual clothes isn’t doing it to stop a new audience from being put off from coming along by formality. The discomfort runs deeper than that and is sui generis.

Some variant of this process is the reason why the recent attacks on works of art and on Stonehenge failed to elicit the kind of horror from the GLAMS community that would once have been expected: protest is exciting, centres the participant and subverts the decorum of the site and object. It goes some way to explain why tourism has been allowed to inflict what it has on York, Edinburgh and St. Ives. It explains why there is rock at the Proms but no classical at Glastonbury, and it explains why when the Beeching moment arrived for public libraries in 2010 the sector had no effective means to fight back.

There’s a sense, isn’t there, that a lot of things in British and in Western life have run out of road at the same time, or, having lost their original purpose and imperative, remain in some corrosive, damaging, ill-understood form. That’s what the defunding of opera was about, one symptom of a great many in a process that if anything is accelerating.

But no trend lasts forever, and, to end on a positive note in spite of it all, I trust this will all look hopelessly mistaken and pessimistic eventually and even, God willing, in our own time.

Per ardua,

J