It was after the third song in Britten’s Les Illuminations that Ian Bostridge decided he’d had enough. Wheeling round to face the constellation of screen lights that dotted Birmingham’s vast Symphony Hall, the tenor called the show to a halt. Could everyone please turn off their phones? It was extremely distracting.
After the performance, which was two weeks ago, Bostridge was surprised to find his phone-happy audience had been perfectly within their rights. More than that: they’d actually been encouraged to video him. The City of Birmingham Symphony Orchestra (CBSO) had last year decided to drop “any perceived ‘rules’ of a traditional concert” in a bid to “challenge conventions” and get “young people” interested. Signs in its venues now ask ticketholders to “bring drinks into the auditorium. Clap whenever they like. Wear whatever makes them feel comfortable. Take photos or short snippets of film (and share them with us).”
It’s not the creep of phone culture that surprises: all hobbies and interests have gradually been subsumed into our main one – going on our phones. It’s that organisations such as the CBSO are embracing it.
The strict etiquette of the classical concert, like the opera and the ballet, has long been part of its essential atmosphere, its mystique. To experience this world for the first time is to be inducted into its codes and practices; in learning when to clap, what to wear, when not to distract everyone else, the newbie becomes the sophisticate. Times change, but the classical concert does not. Yet these sanctified institutions are now flinging all this aside to accommodate a culture that boringly suffices everywhere else. Why?
It’s not just the CBSO. Last week, we learned that the Mona Lisa could get a room of its own in the Louvre, the better to accommodate the hordes of visitors brandishing selfie sticks. It was 10 years ago that the National Gallery reluctantly allowed visitors to start photographing its collection, conceding that it couldn’t stop them, but asking that they stay out of people’s way. Now the gallery has announced it is handing money and a year’s free membership to a swathe of influencers, asking them to “make videos” in its halls. How times have changed.
When challenged, these institutions tend to say they are democratising their art: bringing in younger and more diverse crowds. A noble aim. But are they? A research project that looked at 10 years of ticketing data and some 32,000 survey responders has found that permission to use their phones during performances would actually make people less likely to show up, even if they were under 35 and new to the arts.
Meanwhile, there is a growing trend among generation Z for “dumb phones”; could it be that younger people appreciate the chance to get away from social media now and then? Leisure time, for this generation, seems increasingly productive: they use it to create content. It looks, in fact, a lot like work. But art shouldn’t be work. Rather than encouraging this industrious lot to churn out publicity on their behalf, couldn’t the arts enforce a holiday instead? No permission to film means no pressure to film.
Some argue, too, that it is “snobby” to keep phones out of “highbrow” culture when they are allowed at pop concerts and football matches. But I think there’s a case for getting rid of them even at more popular venues. Entertainment is increasingly fragmented – when everyone can watch what they like, on their own, and in their own time, there is no such thing as a group experience.
Mobile phones extend this fragmentation into the auditorium itself. Instead of revelling in the communal atmosphere, people are in their own heads, eyes on the screen, working on their content. When asked, gig-goers have said they find phones annoying, and wish they weren’t allowed. I’ve seen defences of phones in galleries that quote John Berger’s Ways of Seeing: that they help puncture the aura of “bogus religiosity” around works of art. I’ve seen arguments that permitting selfies “opens debates” about who gets to decide in what context art is consumed. But I’m afraid the straightforward argument of the curmudgeon is the right one. Phones don’t belong in art galleries or in concerts. They distract from the experience.
So what’s the real reason these institutions are bending the knee to influencer culture? The answer is simple. They need publicity, and the means to get it has shifted. As budgets have tightened, the old powers in the art world have declined, and new ones are in the ascendant. The gatekeepers that have for decades kept tight hold of tradition are on their way out, and instead the arts are increasingly beholden to the whims of online tastemakers. Somehow, for these dignified and venerable institutions, it has become important to go viral online.
Witness the tone of this advert from the CBSO, imploring audiences to “record a 15-second video of you and your friends enjoying the concert and DM it to us on Instagram, Facebook or X. Selected videos will star in our official 24-25 season trailer, reaching thousands of music lovers”. It verges on the desperate. But it doesn’t stop at begging for clicks. Artists and musicians increasingly complain that they are encouraged to spend time building a “personal brand”, rather than working on their craft. Celebrities and influencers are meanwhile being handed opportunities in the arts that their talents do not merit. I’ve written before that this culture of “gentlemen amateurs” was edging out real artists.
“For me, innovation is the key,” said Emma Stenning, the CBSO’s chief executive, last week. “There is not another business where innovation is not absolutely celebrated, prized and championed.” But the arts are not tech companies. They do not need to move quite so fast or break quite so many things. They don’t need to get down with the kids. And, especially, they don’t need to pander to online culture. They are feeding a beast that will one day eat them.
• Martha Gill is an Observer columnist
