Tiffany Jenkins: Why should artists be agents for the government?

Did you know America has a Hip Hop Ambassador appointed by The US Department of State? Or that the ice skater Michelle Kwan holds the office of American Public Diplomacy Envoy? What a relief this knowledge must be. You can now rest at night, knowing the future of the world is taken care of with skating and rapping. Bush need no longer be a worry.

Soon a similarly influential role could be coming to an artist or cultural organisation near you. Today, the think-tank Demos releases the solution to all the political and social challenges we face. Their new big idea, in the report Cultural Diplomacy: We're all Diplomats Now, is that museums, galleries, libraries, art, theatre and music, can play a critical role in international relations. Demos recommends that they address troubles in the Middle East, terrorism, climate change, and enhance relations with diasporas. It proposes that members of arts organisations form a cultural diplomacy group run by the Foreign Office, and that organisations be "incentivised" to follow government policy.

Tessa Jowell is enthusiastic about this mission, and is floating it as a new strategy. A recently appointed manager has been working on the viability of the idea for the DCMS, undeterred, it seems, by the hostility towards Labour's record on international relations and the criticism of its cultural policy to date.

Clearly, Labour and sympathetic think-tanks feel that arts leaders might do a better job than globetrotting Tony Blair to win hearts and minds. They may have a point, but it's a dud of an idea. The last thing we should ask culture to be is diplomatic.

This proposal is a masterclass in stupidity that is politically naive and professionally irresponsible for the cultural sector. It assumes that all government policy is automatically a good thing. It suggests that following the decisions of those in power is the right thing to do. But the last time I looked, foreign policy was in a pickle and there are no signs that this will change.

Problems in the Middle East, terrorism and climate change are not easily addressed. I have questions about the solutions put forward by all political parties on these issues. I disagree on many of them, and they need better opposition, not meek acquiescence. But at least I can debate them and vote MPs and parties out.

Who elected the director of the British Museum as the saviour of the Middle East or the Royal Shakespeare Company as the solution to global warming? I would prefer to hear from them lessons in the artefacts of human civilisations, or of language and characterisation.

Demos and those enthusiastic about this mission need history lessons. Government and the arts have a past marked by a struggle over control. Have they forgotten the attack on the entertainment industry in America under McCarthyism? Leaders do not take kindly to criticism, and have a poor record when it comes to supporting those who are challenging, experimental, or down right intellectually dangerous.

This is a subservient relationship that the cultural sector will come to regret. Endorsing government policy will cultivate a timid artistic climate. Already, over the past few years, exhibits, plays and art works have been shut down after cries of offence or because they have been deemed politically difficult. Consider the MoD's attempt to block the artist Steve McQueen's postal tribute to soldiers fallen in Iraq, highlighted on the front page of yesterday's Independent.

What if a stunning, beautifully written, one-woman show challenges the orthodoxies around climate change; would it be curtains for the production? Will biographies of revolutionary leaders, which could be construed as sympathetic towards terrorism, be removed to a section in the library where readers require approval from the Foreign Office?

You would think arts organisations would aim to avoid agitprop. Surely they would fight for independence and challenge this constraining role? But, easily flattered, many have embraced it and are falling over themselves to act as diplomats. The report has been draw up in consultation with significant organisations including the British Museum, the British Library and the V&A.

For some time, the cultural sector has justified its remit as one of solving social problems, too unconfident to speak of the arts in their own right, rarely voiced as a good thing without tick boxes or obvious outcomes. They've identified cultural diplomacy as a way of gaining legitimacy for the institutions they can no longer justify. But they need to learn to say no and fight for what they are good at. Arts organisations and artists should think twice about becoming agents of government propaganda.

Cultural diplomacy is a wrong note for cultural organisations. Museum managers should be researching the objects in their collections and sharing that knowledge with as many as possible. Arts practitioners should be experimenting with form, colour, texture and sound. Theatre should be putting on good plays with challenging writing and nuance. Libraries should be taking care of all books, not only promoting the comfortable canon.

The arts play a social and provocative role, but one that brings complexity and ambiguity to our lives. They should not be constrained by political diktat. Culture is not for mopping the minister's brow, flattering Blair, Brown, or Cameron. Cultural foreign policy is one piece of political theatre where the cultural sector should bow out.

The writer is director of the arts and society programme at the Institute of Ideas