EDACS academic Dr Emma West was invited to share her research on BBC Radio 3’s Free Thinking in a programme on the economist John Maynard Keynes.
In conversation with presenter Anne McElvoy and guests Robert Hudson, Adam Tooze and Zachary D. Carter, Dr West shares her archival research into Keynes’ work for the early Arts Council and its predecessor, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), conducted as part of her British Academy-funded postdoctoral project Revolutionary Red Tape.
In the programme, Dr West explores how Keynes’s personal preferences and tastes shaped CEMA and later the Arts Council, moving them away from amateur participation and towards collaboration with professional companies. As the art historian and broadcaster Kenneth Clark later remarked, Keynes ‘was not the man for wandering minstrels and amateur theatricals. He believed in excellence.’
Dr West also discusses Keynes’ relationship with CEMA/the Arts Council’s Secretary General Mary Glasgow, an overlooked figure who played a crucial role in shaping state patronage of the arts in modern Britain. To read more, visit Dr West’s Revolutionary Red Tape blog.
Free Thinking: John Maynard Keynes is on at 10pm on Wednesday 22 March on BBC Radio 3. You can listen again after the broadcast via the BBC website/BBC Sounds.
