News that Arts Council England will be requiring every funded organisation to submit from scratch an application for funding will have disconcerted many national and regional organisations, who have long argued that the state can only maintain a worthwhile creative landscape if it pays for it. But by ‘it’ they really mean ‘them’. There will be cries of outrage wherever funding is withdrawn from a theatre, gallery, orchestra, literary magazine or touring group which has come to expect it. I worked at the Arts Council for ten years as its Director of Literature, regularly called the Cinderella of the arts. I lost count of the number of times I appealed for something better than 1% of the funding for an art form which perhaps was the most internationally and historically well regarded of any the nation has produced, always to be greeted by baleful looks and sad bleats to the effect that ‘we would like to help more, but what would you cut?’ I was never short of suggestions – the theatre newly created in the West End within walking distance of fifty others and now enjoying a subsidy greater than the Poetry Society, for example. But the answer was always ‘not now, maybe some time’.
Well, the some time has come. By creating a tabula rasa the Arts Council in England is being given an opportunity that may never recur. Now it can ask itself why it funds some branches of the arts so much more than others. Is art for its own sake or for the betterment of communities and disadvantaged groups? Could a national opera house thrive on the beneficence of its richest patrons and, were it to do so, would the state be reneging on its belief in the value of opera? How without specialist advisory committees drawn from arts practitioners – they were all abolished within the last decade – are judgements about quality to be made, and in an egalitarian age is it in any case appropriate to rank one creator’s work above another? How are audiences for tomorrow assured in a society where everything has to be paid for and bought, but student fees are soaring?
Some of these questions were wrestled with at the conference held here at Cumberland Lodge in March last year when we asked this question: Do We Have the Arts Funding System We Deserve? At the end of a long day a straw poll was conducted.Would those present keep Arts Council England as it is, reform it, or abolish it? There was a decisive vote in favour of the last of these.My hunch is that a reformed Arts Council, starting out as though it were new and without the fetters of inherited assumptions (most of which can be dated back to its founder Maynard Keynes’s artistic predilections in 1946), would win the confidence of the public very quickly. Time will tell if the Arts Council has the courage of the conviction imposed upon it by the Coalition, that is, really to start out afresh.
Alastair Niven
Principal
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