Stephen Moss: You've got to find it for yourself

I have a childhood memory of an eccentric woman on the estate on which I lived once playing the Blue Danube Waltz very loudly. I must have been about 14, hanging about near her flat, and remember that, for me and the boys I was with, her taste in music was confirmation of her strangeness.

Until I was 21 I had no interest in classical music. Harriet Harman, the shadow culture secretary, would say I was deprived. In a speech today at the ever-so-trendy-and-inclusive Roundhouse in Camden, north London, she warns of the danger of "a generation of young people with no meaningful exposure to arts and culture". Harman is doing two things here: bashing the coalition for cuts in arts education, but also attacking arts organisations for not doing enough to attract the young.

Covent Garden gets it in the neck. "Even from the cheapest seats in the house, I couldn't see in the audience anyone who wasn't like myself: white, metropolitan and middle class," she complains of a recent visit. The poor old Proms cops it, too, despite its rampant popularisation in recent years with Dr Who proms, proms based around film music and endless events for kids.

Now, maybe she is right about arts education. But her point about making classical/serious music (the term we should use remains problematic) available to the young is misplaced. This sort of music, like much of education itself, is wasted on the young. Early exposure to, say, Mozart's operas or the symphonies of Haydn will do more harm than good. Save it for later. "Outreach" is just a box-ticking fetish; a hoop that every Arts Council-dependent music group now has to go through.

My own conversion came in a blinding flash. I shared a house in my early 20s with an Italian who, being Italian, was highly cultured. One morning, while leaving the house, I heard the strident opening bars of Brahms's Third Symphony calling me back. It was the beginning of a lifelong interest, but more than 30 years later I have barely scratched the surface. The operas of Mozart still elude me, and I would do anything to avoid a performance of The Marriage of Figaro.

Harman makes the mistake of thinking opera and classical music are inherently good things that everyone should be exposed to. Opera houses and concert halls similarly fret about their greying audiences. Peter Gelb, general manager of the Metropolitan Opera house in New York, has even declared opera to be dying, so ancient is its audience. The cavernous Met offers such a naff audience experience that its death would be welcome. But opera as a genre isn't going to die. Covent Garden is white and plutocratic because the seat prices are outrageous. Only bankers can afford stalls seats at £200-plus. But you can plug into a performance of Monteverdi's Orfeo, the first opera and the greatest, free on YouTube. Access all arias.

So should we, as Harman recommends, take lots of 14-year-olds to see a performance of Orfeo? Maybe, though I suspect they'd be bored out of their heads. The arts only start to make sense when you put the pieces together, which is why getting any coherent sense of opera or classical music or serious drama takes years.

Culture is for everyone. Thanks to the internet, it is now freely and easily available. If you want to find it, you will, though it may take a lifetime to work out what it all means and what really matters. Dipping in courtesy of well-meaning outreach programmes doesn't work and may well be counterproductive. And if you never find it – if you fail to realise that the late quartets of Beethoven are the greatest musical statement of all time and still the most modern pieces of music ever written – no lives have been lost. It's only art.

Bonnie Greer: Left to those who 'get it', opera will die

I wouldn't have accepted board appointments to the British Museum; the Royal Opera House, Covent Garden; the Serpentine Gallery; the presidency of the Brontë Society; and now a seat on the cultural board of the first world war commemoration, if I didn't believe not only that culture belongs to all, but also that there is a duty in a democratic society to make it accessible to all, too.

When I wrote the libretto for the composer Errolyn Wallen's short opera Yes for the Royal Opera House's Linbury Theatre my aim – and the aim of ROH2, the house's experimental arm – was to extend the notion of "opera"; of "classical" itself.

Yes, based on my Question Time appearance with Nick Griffin, was and is quite simply an experiment, an attempt, a deliberate provocation to the idea of what opera is. It wasn't meant to "succeed", but to talk to the audience it was written for: young people for whom the word "opera" is worse then vile; ethnic minorities who would never have ventured into The House; and just plain folks who might want to see how something they saw on TV just might be turned into whatever the hell opera is. If they had had the opportunity to be there, instead of the legacy critics and the traditional opera audience who largely came because it was at the Royal Opera House, this work's fate might have been different instead of the ad hominem attacks it got. Somebody said to me: "Hey, that's 'opera world'."

If it is, the art form's in deep trouble.

Opera, the theatre, dance, painting and sculpture, writing, music – all of it cannot be the domain of mink coats and pearls, top hats and tails, landlocked critics and the cognoscenti – those who "get it". Why? Simple. Because if it's left to them, it will die .

In my new memoir: A Parallel Life, I chronicle the attempt of a young black woman in Chicago to put on my play, to create theatre in an environment – in a city – that did not support the notion back in the late 1970s that theatre belonged to the people she wanted to serve. She inspired me to go on to teach Shakespeare – not a watered-down version, not a "hip" version but the bard's words themselves – to kids who were told that Shakespeare was not for them. They got him. And it changed their lives. I saw it: in New York's Harlem and in London's Brixton.

The beauty of our public funding system – getting smaller every day – is that we are not beholden to "the prince".

"The prince" – the modern Medici – is the root of the American funding system in which well-meaning philanthropists – the rich and the powerful – "choose" you. They choose you because you mean something to them or to their cause. We're not there yet here in the UK, but with our dwindling arts subsidy we could end up that way.

Culture is a nation talking to itself and to the world, extending its humanity to others and in turn, increasing it among itself, within itself. It is civilisation that becomes the edifice that culture builds. Therefore it is not a pastime; it is not something limited to the few. Culture is who we all are. It must continuously be de-ossified. Because the making of it, the having of it is our birthright.