Following Arts Council England’s spending review debacle in late 2007, belief in the funding body dropped faster than share prices on Black Friday. Equity delivered a vote of no confidence against ACE at ‘the meeting’ in January at the Young Vic, there was damning criticism about the lack of transparency of its decision making process from across the board, and two small organisations even attempted to take their fight to court.
Former National Theatre and Royal Opera House executive Genista McIntosh - who was commissioned to undertake an independent report on ACE’s handling of the funding overhaul - summed up the problem quite simply in her final verdict.
She said: “ACE needs to remember that it is not a regulator of the arts sector, even though it has a responsibility for public funds. It should be an advocate, enabler, supporter, developer, critical friend - but not a policeman.”
Earlier this week her words were echoed by a panel of industry heavy-weights - Lyric Hammersmith outgoing artistic director David Farr, National Theatre associate director Tom Morris, Goldsmith’s College Fine Art lecturer Richard Noble and playwright and satirist Alistair Beaton - at a debate on whether artists should elect their own parliament.
The questions under consideration were -
Does anyone still respect ACE, or is it a dated bureaucracy?
Is it time artists took the distribution of public funds into their own hands and revitalise public provision for the arts by forming their own parliament?
Would this create a new set of cliques and covert interests? Or, would the parliament collapse under the weight of its own self-importance?
Aptly the event took place at the Young Vic, seemingly now the unofficial hotspot for ACE-bashing since the aforementioned meeting.
Arguing for the artists’ parliament, Farr said his own relationship with ACE was up and down, and described the funding body as a Kafka-esque “judge in the darkness” shrouded by a cloak of “mystery and obscurity”.
So, what’s to be done about that?
Farr believes that to stop the mistakes of the previous spending overhaul happening again, artists should have more of a say on how cash is distributed. His proposition takes inspiration from the ancient Greek model of democracy - that the industry should set up a parliament of 40 artists, from which two leading consuls will be elected to act as ambassadors for the arts.
But would this be giving artists’ too much power?
Farr said: “We are not suggesting a bunch of artists sitting around with their palettes in their hands making all the decisions, because artistic power will corrupt in a way that I dare to imagine.”
He suggests that ACE should not be abolished, but that the consuls will work with the “brilliant” arts council chief exec Alan Davey to make decisions, while civil servants will deal with the minutiae of work.
This sentiment was echoed by the NT’s Morris, who warned that without the funding body, the government would be able to take more control of the arts.
However, in an impassioned speech he argued: “I think it is absolutely essential that along with other things, the arts council regains that faith [of the creative community]. An artists’ parliament would help do that.
“It should be there to be called in at points of crises to help the arts council examine and correct its errors. I don’t think such a parliament should be making decisions on an ongoing basis, but it should re-examine the process of how funding decisions are made.”
So if it is all so easy, what’s to debate? If the arts council can no longer be trusted as the sole gatekeeper of public cash for the arts, is a parliament made up of artists the only solution?
Or would this be throwing the arts from the frying pan into the fire?
Noble believes so. Speaking at the debate he said that ACE has been bullied by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport to adopt “crude and ineffective” policies to turn art into an instrument of social inclusion.
He said that ACE should abandon “idiotic policies” and the “rancid swamp” of box ticking, reduce the number of officers and use the money to go to arts organisations, thereby reinvigorating the traditional meaning of the arms length principle of funding.
“To scrap the arts council for an artists’ parliament would make a bad situation disastrous. Parliaments don’t function well without strong executives. How would it be divided? The visual artists would work against the writers, actors against dancers and theatre directors against everyone,” he said.
And, as a bitter pill for the other panelists, he said that artists just frankly would not be able to collaborate with each other.
Noble’s tirade on ACE’s social inclusion policies were echoed by Beaton, who added that ACE should help artists pursue excellence and take risks.
However, while of course ACE should be focusing its efforts on helping to deliver the arts, are the social policies such as bad thing? After all, Beaton himself pointed out that all the members of the debating panel where male, white and university educated. Or should funding be separated from this idea of ‘instrumentality’?
And could an artists’ parliament be truly democratic? One audience member suggested that it would be like bankers appointing the chancellor. Surely the public have to fit somewhere into the picture? Is it right for artists and ACE to tell us how we should consume culture?
Or, should the public be lobbied to find out what they think and want from the arts? After all, art is made to inspire them… right?
For the record, about two thirds of people attending the meeting voted against the motion for an artists’ parliament.
It’s a complicated issue, and one that had its surface just barely scratched during the debate. However, to me the meeting revealed an industry that is still clearly bruised by the actions, bureaucracy and policies of ACE, and is grappling to find a way forward.
Leave a comment