As the Conservatives clutch at political straws, the Labour party is readying itself for government. Some predict a general election as early as next spring. In Thangam Debbonaire – who started out as a professional cellist – there is the unusual prospect of a culture secretary who understands the arts from deep personal experience. Two months into her job shadowing the unimpressive incumbent, Lucy Frazer, she is in listening mode. The next step is to get herself a serious, ambitious plan for power.

As Labour culture secretary, she would almost certainly score easy points by just not being Tory. That means, to pick some random examples, by not being among the 12 Tories to hold the post in 13 years. By displaying less ignorance about the brief (Nadine Dorries’s startling misapprehension, when culture secretary, that Channel 4 is publicly funded, stands out amid a strong field). By not relentlessly starving, punishing and criticising the BBC, the UK’s largest cultural organisation. By not dragging the arts into a cynical, divisive culture war. By not being part of a government that unleashes something as self-harming as an exit from the European Union. By not engaging in a zero-sum game in which London is pitted against the rest of the country in the name of levelling up.

But Labour needs to set its sights much higher than avoiding the Tories’ egregious failings. It needs to cherish and grow the arts again. And it needs to do so with purpose, optimism and pride.

The scale of the challenge is vast. The Tory destruction began in 2010, as soon as the coalition came to power, with George Osborne’s austerity cuts. The then culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, removed an instant £19m from Arts Council England’s budget, while the overall budget of the Department for Culture, Media and Sport was reduced by 24% between 2010 and 2014-15, pulling it down from £1.4bn to £1.1bn. These seem tiny figures because they are: utterly inconsequential when set against Osborne’s total cuts, irrelevant when compared with overall government finances. Still, they were enormous enough when applied to individual arts organisations.

Now, after 13 years, grant-in-aid and lottery funding for the arts in England have undergone a real-terms cut of £178m. But of course cuts to the arts have never been about the money. They have been ideological. The Tories wanted a smaller state, objected to market interventions, strongly favoured science and technology at the expense of the arts and humanities, and, particularly during the later years of culture-war obsessed Tory rule, made no secret of their loathing of what they saw as a centre-left dominance in institutions from universities to heritage organisations.

These basic deprivations have been vastly compounded over the same period. Local authority support has drained away from civic museums and local theatres as councils’ income has plummeted and costs for statutory obligations, such as social care, have soared. School budgets have been starved: the Tories have been content to deny children from poorer backgrounds the soul-enlarging delights they make sure to provide for their own offspring, such as learning musical instruments, extracurricular theatre and visits to museums. The appalling blow of Brexit hit everyone and everything from touring musicians to international art loans and film production.

It was then that Covid-19 brought the cultural sector near to collapse. Along with the hospitality industry, it was among the worst hit parts of the economy. Though the Tories did bring forward a package to prevent the immediate, widespread bankruptcy of cultural institutions, there has been no serious attempt to put the arts world back on a sustainable footing. Inflation and the cost of living crisis have been deeply damaging. Now, instead of the much-vaunted “headroom” in the economy being used to help fix basic public services, including the arts, Jeremy Hunt, in his autumn statement, has declined to lift departmental spending in favour of sprinkling pre-election sweeteners to the Tory base.

The cultural sector is now immeasurably weakened compared with the pre-2010 years. Experts in preserving a good shopfront, our museums, theatres, orchestras and galleries have done their best to conceal the rot from the casual visitor. But they are damaged; they are shabbier, smaller, more timid than they used to be. They are taking fewer risks – of the sort that led to brilliant but unpredictable long-running theatre hits such as War Horse or Matilda. The Covid years in particular mean that fewer children are being exposed to theatre or music or dance or art: those things that can spark a child’s imagination, show her something curious and strange, deepen her understanding and empathy, shift the course of her life.

For those who work in the arts, whether as employees or as freelance artists, the situation is precarious. In the NHS in recent years, the Tories have made the service almost impossible for healthcare workers to thrive in or even survive in. The same is true for the arts. Earlier this year, in the wake of an exodus of artistic directors from theatres, the boss of Battersea Arts Centre enumerated 33 reasons why working in the arts was so difficult at the moment – from weak boards to a combative social media environment. But in the end, much circled back to underinvestment. Shrinking arts organisations and the underpaid, fatigued people who work in them are struggling to create the long-term conditions for the things they went into their job to achieve: to enable the creation of great art. To make our towns and cities places worth living in. To allow people from all parts of society contact with art’s life-changing possibilities.

An incoming Labour government will be failing the country unless it steps up to the challenge of fixing this situation. It will not be difficult to do in one sense: comparatively small amounts of investment make vast differences. But it must be done in the full, confident sense that doing so is not an optional, frivolous add-on to the real job of governing. A healthy, fully functioning cultural infrastructure is a sign of a healthy, fully functioning society. The Arts Council, founded in 1946, should be spoken about in the same breath as the NHS, founded in 1948. Both belong to Labour’s postwar conviction that good things ought to be available to everyone, regardless of their income.

Investing in the arts also happens to be a sound economic investment, in which relatively small amounts have excellent returns, entirely in line with the shadow chancellor Rachel Reeves’s ambition to pursue economic growth. It is a means of restoring local pride and reinvigorating town centres, of attracting tourists and delivering soft power.

But it means so much more than that. It is about giving people back public space – space in which they can exit their digital echo chambers and together confront unfamiliar, difficult ideas. It is about offering people ideas beyond their immediate experience – ideas that can bring delight, hope and joy, but also spark individuals’ ambitions, or suggest possibilities beyond their immediate horizon. It is about offering people the chance to live with dignity, to be better citizens who treat each other with decency and understanding. It is the stuff of being fully human. Debbonaire, Reeves and Keir Starmer need to think big. And they need to do it now.

• Charlotte Higgins is the Guardian’s chief culture writer

The artist is completely focused, a black oil crayon in her hand as she repeatedly draws a small circle on a vibrant teal canvas. She is unbothered by the three people closely observing her every movement, and doesn’t seem to register my entrance into this bright white room inside the National Gallery of Victoria.

The artist is a robot; more specifically, Basia is a 30kg “Spot” robot dog designed by Boston Dynamics. You’ve probably seen videos of these dogs opening doors, climbing stairs and decorating Christmas trees, while performing eerily fluid actions that cause people to write comments like, “Can’t wait to have a pack of these chase me through a post-apocalyptic urban hellscape!” The robots are designed to perform tasks that are dangerous for humans: they tend to be bought by mining and construction corporations, as well as police and the military. You may have also seen them enforcing social distancing in Singapore, delivering food to hostages during a home invasion in Queens, dancing in a baseball stadium in Japan, or even in an episode of The Book of Boba Fett. Now you can watch them paint.

From next week, three Spots named Basia, Vanya and Bunny will begin a four month residency at the NGV’s Triennial in Melbourne, where they will be creating art in their purpose-built studio. It feels like a clinical creche: there are docking stations where the robots “sleep” and recharge their batteries; little cubes of QR codes are scattered about like toys, telling the robots where they are in the space.

All of this is being overseen by Agnieszka Pilat, artist of choice among Silicon Valley’s venture capitalists and a former artist in residence at SpaceX and Boston Dynamics. For years Pilat has both painted tech and trained tech to paint. She is a self-described techno-optimist who loves the robots: she even lives with Basia, and takes her for walks around her neighbourhood in New York City.

“You know old cat ladies?” she says to me. “It is my dream to be an old robot lady. And 50 years from now, I think it’ll be possible.”

Not everyone loves the robots as much as she does. When Pilat walks Basia in New York she always wears matching yellow, to signal to any alarmed passersby that the robot has a human companion. “If the robot comes with a human, it is better – a woman, even more so,” she says. “It takes off the edge a little bit.”

That police forces keep buying Spots hasn’t helped. When the New York police department sent one equipped with cameras into a home invasion in the Bronx, and another into a hostage situation in Manhattan, there was fierce backlash, with Spots becoming a symbol for misplaced funding priorities – the basic model starts at US$74,500 a piece – mass surveillance fears, and heavy-handed policing in poor communities. “Now robotic surveillance ground drones are being deployed for testing on low-income communities of color with under-resourced schools,” Alexandria Ocasio-Cortez tweeted. The NYPD briefly cancelled its contract with Boston Dynamics but in April this year announced it was buying two kitted-out Spots for $750,000.

Last year Boston Dynamics spearheaded an open letter pledging they would not weaponise their robots or allow individuals to do so. The lack of weaponry on Basia still doesn’t quell the instinctual repulsion I feel, the suspicion that she might suddenly run at me at any moment.

“We have this,” Pilat says, patting the knee-high barrier that surrounds the studio, “because even I don’t even touch them. It is really a safe place.”

“I know people think, the robots are coming,” she says, feigning terror. “No – they’re awkward, they’re like little kids!” She sees my face, and adds: “My first reaction is probably no different than yours. I don’t really understand them, to be honest. That’s why I have to work with engineers. But I understand that they’re fascinating.”

Pilat has been working with an engineer and her assistant to shape the robots’ “personalities” through a collage of AI, software and machine learning. Basia is “the serious one”, completely focused on her painting; Vanya is the “mother of the group” who will pace around the space observing; and Bunny is a show-off who will, according to her programming, frequently wander over to pose in a window specially designed for selfies.

“Art is the background for selfies – that is what it has become, right?” Pilat says bluntly. “I don’t deplore it – when you go to museums, people are all taking selfies. But we’re totally embracing it. People will want to take pictures with the robots.”

Basia will paint roughly one canvas every three days: 36 in total, which will form a kind of robot manifesto told through 16 symbols; a primitive, pictorial language of squares, lines and circles Pilat designed based on the robots’ physical capabilities.

“It’s almost like kindergarten,” she says. “Basia will make mistakes.” Are they able to surprise her? “Not often. But sometimes they do something we didn’t expect and you get goosebumps. Of course, it’s all programming – but it’s the ghost in the machine.”

Pilat is uniquely shaped by technology. She grew up behind the iron curtain in Łódź, Poland, and vividly remembers her first encounter with technology: seeing adults gathered around a radio in a locked room, covertly listening to Radio Free Europe. “Technology was giving us hope, to my parents,” she says. “I truly feel technology has been always there for me. And now there’s lots of unease towards technology, I feel a debt to repay my old friend.”

Pilat moved to Silicon Valley in 2004. Having studied illustration and painting, she developed a theory that, as portraiture captured the aristocracy of the past, it should now capture today’s elite: the machine. She approached engineers at Boston Dynamics and asked to paint a robot. OK, they said – but why just paint it when you could play with it?

Pilat frequently refers to herself as a “propaganda artist” for machines, a reference to her upbringing in communist Poland where “art was all propaganda, art told you what to do”. Later she admits she is being deliberately provocative. “It is a little bit sarcastic – I’m playing at being 100% for technology, which is very controversial. Of course there are valid concerns about technology. But I chose to engage with it and train it. It’s my way of dealing with the problem.”

You do have a company logo emblazoned across the face of your art, I point out. “Removing the logo is a breach of contract,” she replies. “I’m under NDA so there’s only so much I can disclose, but I’m very mindful of being financially dependent on a company. And I’m not [financially dependent on Boston Dynamics] because it puts in question what I’m doing. I don’t work for Boston Dynamics. I work for the robots.”

Boston Dynamics is not paying Pilat to use its robots: she owns Basia, leased Vanya and borrowed Bunny from RMIT. But isn’t she wary of the good PR that comes from the robots doing something nice like painting, rather than frightening people in the Bronx?

“It is the [Boston Dynamics] engineers that want me to do this, not the marketing people or the CEOs,” she says. “I guess I do put a softer edge on the robots. But on the other hand, I’m a bit of a problem for them too because they don’t really need me. I come in and do silly stuff with the robots.”

She adds: “I will tell you a secret. It’s much easier for me to sell work that I paint myself, with my human hands, to collectors. There is a resistance to machine-made work. But I think this work is much more important than my own.”

It is her belief that “silly stuff with robots” is helping people come to a better understanding of our future with robotics and AI, a more complex view than what they see in YouTube videos of robots being controlled by cops. “Part of why I’m excited to do this is because I understand the fear,” she says. “I do think we have a different relationship when you meet them. When I take them on a walk, people are nice. They ask questions. If they have concerns, they’ll tell me. But when a video of me walking Basia ends up online, that’s when people start screaming at me.”

The NGV show is a first in many ways: it is Pilat’s biggest show and it is also the first time she is leaving her robots to their own devices. “I will miss them,” she says. “They are celebrities – when I come with the robots, it is an exciting thing. If it’s just poor little me, it is like I don’t even exist. Nobody wants to take pictures with me on the street.”

• The NGV Triennial will run from 3 December to 7 April