‘And Jacob said to Rebekah his mother, Behold, Esau my brother is a hairy man, and I am a smooth man’

It may not be hairy, but I hope it won’t be smooth. In a world of fixed agendas, set processes and corporate vocabulary, this Institute, I hope, will be rough-edged. 

For I am tired of apparently smooth passages provided by smooth talkers. I go back to John Ruskin in ‘The Nature of Gothic’, one of the great Victorian texts for the foundation of a great Victorian city. There Ruskin says one thing I have never forgotten. In countering the institutionalised estimates of the world, he says that all too often people won’t accept that imperfection of a high order is better than perfection of a low order. In other words, according to the normal estimates of our society, to roll a stone of one hundred weight all the way up a hill is accounted success; but to roll a stone of ten hundredweight only halfway-up a hill is deemed failure; yet the latter is far greater an endeavour. An ostensibly small thing easily dismissed as failure may be greater in reality than an easily apparent success, but we need to change the way these things are measured or recognised if we are to get to that reality.

I have no love of romantic failure, having had quite enough of it; but I hate the varnished pretence of success that results from merely evading trouble. Individual language that doesn’t try to smooth over the difficulties; the meeting of urgent problems with painful risks; things that are alive even if incomplete, awkward and emotionally vulnerable – these are what this Institute should be about if it is indeed to be an institute against institutionalisation. Then ‘culture’ is not to do with posh add-on extras but with the essential creative quality of human life, individually and socially. Creativity: pompous and rotten word, but a good thing. The capital which this institute will draw on arises not only out of the Capital of Culture but also out of the struggling efforts creatively involved hereafter in what we should think of as the great Liverpool experiment. We are rough and ready.

Philip Davis is a member of the Institute of Cultural Capital board. Find out more.

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