Culture: Arts funding | guardian.co.uk
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Wilton's Music Hall gets £700,000 capital boost
The money comes from the SITA Trust, better known for funding community centres and playing fields
Really good news for Wilton's Music Hall in east London which has secured an important funding boost from an organisation better known for helping nature and community projects.
The SITA Trust has given Wilton's - the last surviving Grand Music Hall anywhere in the world - £700,000 which means that vital work on the fabric of the building can now begin.
Who, you might ask are the SITA Trust? "We are quite a quiet funder," Jools Glanville of the Trust told me. "We don't tend to get national headlines."
Well they should, having given out £85m over 15 years to innumerable worthy causes. The money comes from the landfill tax that the government began levying in 1996 and Sita Trust gives money out to projects which help communities. In practice that often means community centres, village halls and playing fields and the Wilton's money is the biggest arts heritage grant that it has given out.
Glanville said the trust was delighted to be able to help and hoped the money would provide leverage and encouragement for others to come up with more much needed money.
The cash allows Wilton's to complete phase one of their three phase capital project. Together with funds already raised it means major works on the roofs, basement, soundproofing, ventilation and electrics can be carried out.
Frances Mayhew, Wilton's artistic director, said this:
"We are simply thrilled with this grant, it really has made all the difference to our Capital Project and we cannot thank SITA Trust enough. Wilton's is such an extraordinary heritage building and, a thriving cultural centre for now, that simply has to be saved. SITA Trust recognised this and this remarkable grant will mean we can complete Phase 1 of the Capital Project and save the stunning auditorium at Wilton's. This gives us confidence that we can raise the necessary funds for Phases 2 and 3 of this Project to secure the terrace houses that are our Front of House areas. We now urge everyone to step forward and help us raise the next £2.2 million needed!"
Wilton's supporter and patron of the capital project David Suchet said:
"Wilton's is a place that is very dear to my heart and I am passionate about saving this wonderful building which really is unique – the only one in the world. This grant from SITA Trust is the most generous, important and tremendous boost for Wilton's. I am so looking forward to this building work starting, hopefully as early as June, knowing that Wilton's is at the start of being saved once and for all. We cannot thank SITA Trust enough for believing in Wilton's and starting to make this happen."
It comes after a rough old time for Wilton's which failed in its bid for £2.3m of Heritage Lottery Fund money last year - not because it was undeserving, but because there was not enough money to go round all the causes. The HLF's chief executive Carole Souter said in a statement at the time: "This was a competitive round of funding – three times over-subscribed - and, in spite of huge enthusiasm for the project, we simply did not have enough money to fund it in this round as other projects were even stronger."
While this is the biggest arts/heritage grant the SITA Trust has given out, it does often help arts organisations and has given money for Lawrence Batley theatre in Huddersfield to get new lighting rigs and £50,000 to the Old Vic in London to replace the squeaky floors and carpets in the dress circle.
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£20 for an exhibition – are museums fooling the public, or themselves? | Charles Saatchi
There's no point in museums being free if the cost of special exhibitions is prohibitively and unnecessarily expensive
It's lovely to stroll around our museums for free. Not so nice to find that, once you have been sucked in with no admission charge, the exhibition you want to see costs a tenner or more to enter. It's irritating for the visitor, and perplexing.
Are museums being elitist, and feel that only people who are prepared to pay the £10, £12 or £14 admission fee are worthy of seeing shows by their selected artists?
No, no, museum directors would argue, we have to charge for admission to exhibitions in order to finance the running costs of the museum, the transportation and insurance of the exhibited works, the cost of installing the show and so on.
But even London's leading museums, admirable in so many ways, only earn about 7% of their annual costs from ticket sales – the rest being provided by the public purse, and sponsorship. For example one of the museums I love visiting, the Tate, raises just £6.9m from admission charges across all four of its galleries, set against its running costs of £98.5m.
Why bother fleecing the public for such a piddling contribution when the taxpayer is already funding the great bulk of your costs? It's simply double taxation on paying visitors.
I may not know much about finance, with a Fail in GCSE maths, but I do know that attendance at our own gallery could drop by 50% if we charged admission. Perhaps this is because our audience is often young, and not always affluent. Being free-entry for all exhibitions has allowed us to offer five of the six most-visited shows in London over the last two years, according to the Art Newspaper's survey of museum attendance.
I may be a full-blown egocentric, and deeply self-serving, but I do not believe that this is because people flock to share my taste in art. Neither do I believe that more people are interested in seeing our shows of new art from India, or the Middle East, or Germany, or even the UK, than they are seeing a Rothko retrospective at the Tate Modern. Or Picasso at the National Gallery. Or David Hockney at the National Portrait Gallery. We attract many visitors because people don't wish to fork out the whacking entry charges to these important shows. It is a generally held view that had these spectacular exhibitions been free, attendance would have probably quadrupled.
If, for example, the Rothko retrospective had open admission, sales of catalogues, posters, keyrings, notepads, calendars, tea towels and other knick-knacks, would surely have doubled, tripled, or even quadrupled – there is a good chance that the income produced could have been as great as that raised by charging for entry. It's an estimate that is shared by a number of managers of the vast retail outlets at our leading museums.
It may also be true that if museums weren't featherbedded by state funding, and instead focused on maximising their public appeal, they would discover income from sponsors would be easier to attract. Sponsors like to back popular, well-attended exhibitions; the promotional budgets they hand over to museums then offer greater, more tangible value.
Of course one of the drawbacks of heavily attended exhibitions is that visitors feel short-changed by the crowds; the experience of viewing a big-name show is often unpleasant, claustrophobic, and destroys any hope of experiencing the works in any thoughtful way.
Museums would find that if they stay open until 10pm, a lot of overcrowding evaporates and people are able to enjoy the works at times that suit them; we use after-hours to give our 500,000 gallery members, Facebook and Twitter followers, their own late nights.
The worst of all museum sins, in my view, is to charge schools for their pupils to see their shows. From our own experiences, state schools have no budget to pay for their students' entry. Only private schools can manage it, often by asking parents to cover the cost of school trips.
The Tate's standard rate for school pupils is £5 a head for groups of 10 or more, and the National Portrait Gallery charges £9 a head for pupils in groups of 20.
I'm not trying to pick a fight with the Art Gods. I simply think something got screwed up with a policy of keeping museums free – and then frustrating visitors by charging them for entry to the shows they most wish to see.
I like to think that museum directors are not elitist, would like to attract the widest possible audience and are up to the challenge of managing their museum's affairs so that the widest number of us can benefit. Of course I could be wrong; perhaps they are just snooty types, who don't want a lot of riffraff around. Or, worse, they could be so removed from reality that they can't quite follow that £20 is a bit much even for a professional couple to part with every time they want to take in a show.
• Follow Comment is free on Twitter @commentisfree
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Museums hear fate after 29 bid for share of £60m Renaissance money
Winners include Brighton, Birmingham, Oxford and Cambridge. Losers include Sheffield which warns of job losses and a fall in exhibition standards
Arts Council England has named 16 organisations as winning bidders for a share of £60m Renaissance money which is given to the nation's museums.
The winners, which will have the exact amounts finalised and published in April, include a partnership of museums in Cumbria; the Museum of London and museums in Brighton.
There are though some high profile losers, not least Museums Sheffield which applied for £1.4m a year and was turned down. The organisation, which looks after the Millennium Gallery, Graves Gallery, and Weston Park museum, has vowed to appeal warning that the failure to secure Renaissance money will mean a 30% fall in its overall budget from April.
Nick Dodd, Chief Executive of Museums Sheffield, said:
"This is bitterly disappointing news. Funding from the outgoing Renaissance in the Regions scheme has transformed the quality of museum and gallery provision in Sheffield over the past 8 years. We know we put together a compelling case for continued funding under the new Arts Council grants programme, which met all the published criteria. This decision will have a devastating impact and leaves Sheffield, South Yorkshire and the East Midlands grossly under-funded by the Arts Council in comparison with other parts of the country. We fully intend to appeal and will be questioning the Arts Council's strategic and geographical distribution of this public money"
Councillor Julie Dore, Leader of Sheffield City Council, said:
"This is a huge disappointment for the city and Museums Sheffield. We know Sheffield had a very strong bid and should have been recognised for its cultural offer. I want to know why we were not successful and how we compared to others. We want to stand up for Sheffield, support the appeal and will await the decision with interest."
Without the money Museums Sheffield predicts having to lose "around 45 key professional posts" as well as "greatly reduced educational activity for schools and adults in Sheffield" and "the end of significant exhibitions of a national standard."
So what's behind the Arts Council decision? Cluny Macpherson, Regional Director for Yorkshire, said:
"We appreciate how disappointing this news is for Sheffield Museums. Yorkshire has an incredibly strong museums offer, which was reflected in the high quality of applications we received from the region, and it was with regret that we couldn't fund Sheffield Museums as a Major partner. But with applications nationwide amounting to double the budget available, we had to make some really difficult choices in order to achieve the best result we could for the wider museums sector, and for audiences across the country.
"We recognise the excellent work Sheffield Museums have been doing and we are already speaking to them about how we can support their ambitions for the future through other parts of the Renaissance programme. Although Renaissance funding was always intended to be additional to core funding, we realise that this is a significant change which is why we will provide transitional funding for next financial year."While Sheffield was one of 13 organisations that failed (another was a partnership between museums in Derby and Nottingham), there were 16 winners which will receive a share of around £20m a year for three years including all the 11 museums which make up the Tyne and Wear Museums and Archives as well as all the museums run by Oxford university and Cambridge university.
Timothy Potts, director of the biggest museum in the University of Cambridge Museums partnership, the Fitzwilliam, said this:
"We are greatly encouraged and extremely grateful that the Arts Council England has fully supported us in our ambitions. Between all eight museums, we offer access to a wide range of collections representing the arts and humanities, through the social sciences, to the physical and life sciences. All eight museums remain free of charge to visitors of all backgrounds, as well as providing a critical resource for research and teaching. We look forward to working closely with the Arts Council in realising the exciting potential of the UCM partnership – one that will benefit everyone, especially the public."
The full list of winners is:
The Beamish and Bowes Museum; Birmingham Museums Trust (Birmingham City Council, Thinktank); Bristol City Council; Cumbria Museums Consortium (Tullie House, Wordsworth Trust, Lakeland Arts Trust); Horniman Museum and Gardens; Ironbridge Gorge Museum Trust; Leeds Museums and Galleries; Manchester Partnership (Manchester City Galleries, Manchester Museum, Whitworth Art Gallery); Museum of London; Norfolk Museums and Archaeology Service; Oxford University Museums and Oxfordshire County Museums Service; Royal Albert Memorial Museum, Exeter and Plymouth City Museum and Art Gallery; Royal Pavilion and Museums, Brighton and Hove; Tyne and Wear Archives and Museums; University of Cambridge Museums; York Museums Trust.
The Arts Council took over the distribution of Rensaissance money after the Museums Libraries and Archives Council (MLA) was scrapped last year. It said it received 29 applications for £116.4m of money over three years, almost double what it has available to give out.
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UK film-makers divided on David Cameron's support for box-office hits
The prime minister's suggestion that lottery funding should be aimed at mainstream, money-making movies has been met with cautious optimism from the British film industry
Reaction continued to be divided across Britain's film world yesterday in the wake of comments by prime minister David Cameron, ahead of a visit to Pinewood studios, in which he suggested that lottery funding of cinema projects would be aimed towards "commercial" projects. Cameron was laying the groundwork for the publication on Monday of the report by the film policy committee, headed by Lord Smith.
Veteran producer Andrew Eaton (24 Hour Party People, The Killer Inside Me, Junkhearts) said that he agreed with Cameron's expression of support for "the sector in becoming even more dynamic and entrepreneurial". "It's about what you regard as success," Eaton said, suggesting that Mike Leigh had been unfairly singled out as a non-commercial film-maker, as films like Vera Drake and Secrets & Lies had achieved respectable box-office results.
He also applauded the suggestion that recoupment for lottery fund providers may be lessened or even scrapped. "Look, if a Japanese car company builds a factory in the UK no one complains – so I have no problem if a film's profits go overseas, so long as they reinvest."
Kate Ogborn, producer of Terence Davies's The Deep Blue Sea, strikes a more cautious note, pointing out that "smaller" and "mainstream" films are locked together in a mutually beneficial symbiosis. "Much of the talent that is involved in the mainstream commercial successes Cameron is calling for found its way to the industry and the public through smaller scale films – Tom Hiddleston being a great example."
In the event, Cameron's visit to Pinewood, where he was expected to amplify his remarks, was a non-event. With the British film industry hanging on every word, his only reported comments were to fail to remember the name of a movie gossip website, and describe a motion-capture studio as "pretty clever".
But film-makers are still hopeful. Ogborn says: "Surely we all want a film industry which is eclectic, diverse, and allows for risk-taking, bold and imaginative cinema to flourish." Eaton, a former deputy chair of the UK Film Council, sees the British film industry in a state of continuous development. "I don't think the government can take much credit for what's happening now. What we're seeing is the natural maturity of the film business – we're just getting better at what we do. Last year was the best year for British independent cinema that I can remember."
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Hands off British film, Mr Cameron | Peter Bradshaw
It is absurd to imply, as David Cameron has, that hearty commercial films are starved of cash by arthouse conspirators
They say that in politics, if you're in a hole, you should stop digging. And yet there's something about the subject of British cinema that gets the prime minister repeatedly reaching for his spade. Perhaps it's something to do with Meryl Streep's Maggie gazing down from every bus, and maybe that film's sentimentalisation of a Tory leader has emboldened David Cameron to believe this is solid ground for him. He will keep on making these eye-catching and brazen announcements about British film – a topic on which, as Clement Attlee once said to Harold Laski, a period of silence on his part would be most welcome.
On Radio 4's Today programme, Evan Davis cheekily asked him to comment on a listener's view that in a Cameron biopic, Malcolm McDowell should play the lead (having famously played the public-school cad Flashman). Cameron opined that If … was a good film of McDowell's. Huh? Did Mr Cameron fully understand that Lindsay Anderson's If … was a searing attack on the public school system from a socialist director? Well, he was responding to a question, and he was caught on the hop.
But now he has made a calm and considered visit to the set of the new 007 film at Pinewood Studios and, on the occasion of a report into film-funding from Lord (Chris) Smith, that Blair-era figure who once wrote a solemn study titled Creative Britain, commented publicly that lottery money now needs to be targeted at "mainstream" films. Yes, of course, those commercial blockbusters and box-office sizzlers, as opposed to lefty chin-stroking arty-liberal fare (like, presumably, Lindsay Anderson's If …) Really, prime minister? What a bold new idea!
The sheer audacity is staggering. He says he wants to "build on the incredible success of recent years", but one of his administration's most sensational acts of party political grandstanding and spite was to cancel the UK Film Council – a creation of the Labour years – just when it was delivering not merely critically admired work but precisely those commercial hits of the kind Cameron professes to yearn for.
Could there be any better example of the classy, Brit-heritage smash than The King's Speech, a film which would not have existed without the UK Film Council's support? And yet just when this movie's producers were taking their Oscars away in a wheelbarrow, the Film Council was in the process of being wound up. It was the equivalent of David Cameron rushing on to the field at the final whistle of 2003 Rugby World Cup, calling for silence, and announcing that the coaching system was all wrong, and Clive Woodward and Jonny Wilkinson should be given their P45s right away.
I suspect Cameron now realises the UK Film Council move was one of his government's silliest blunders. It wasn't broke – so he broke it. Now he's returning to the fray, with some choice rhetoric about getting our British movie industry to up its game to rival Hollywood, a rhetoric he has learned from the Blair-Brown administration which, in fact, really did care about boosting cinema.
But it's not just a case of taking the "commercial"-looking projects and throwing money at them for higher returns. It doesn't work like that. Producing movies – any kind of movies – is a gamble. As the great screenwriter William Goldman said: nobody knows anything. The UK Film Council got it pretty wrong in the early years of its existence in chasing, and being seen to chase, commercial hits. It resulted in some embarrassing dross, chiefly about mockney gangsters.
Are we destined to go through this again? The UK Film Council was not perfect, and it certainly had its critics, but its successes were coming through the pipeline because it was always keen on self-scrutiny and research, always trying to get the balance between supporting crowd-pleasers and critical darlings. Because these go together, and the distinction is never clear in any case.
The challenge is to make good films, and to make as many as possible and to raise the statistical likelihood of success as high as possible. It may sound naive, but not as naive as this implied image of hearty commercial films starved of cash by lefty arthouse conspirators.
Cameron says he is against big government. Perhaps politicians like him will now resolve to leave the world of film alone for a bit.
• This article was amended on 12 January 2012. In the original Harold Wilson was attributed as saying "a period of silence", when in fact it was Clement Attlee. This has been corrected.
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Will Cameron's speech on funding only be fit for the box-office kings?
David Cameron is set to call for UK lottery funding to go to films with big box-office potential. But what will that mean for small-scale, independent cinema?
The plans to overhaul public funding of British cinema, which David Cameron will announce later today during a visit to Pinewood studios, has so far drawn divided reactions.
According to early reports, Cameron will call for lottery funding to be aimed at big-budget, commercially successful films, and away from small-scale, independent cinema. Citing the box-office and awards success of The King's Speech and Slumdog Millionaire, he said: "Our role should be to support the sector in becoming even more dynamic and entrepreneurial, helping UK producers to make commercially successful pictures that rival … the best international productions."
Iain Smith, the chair of the British Film Commission, an organisation also cited favourably by Cameron for its work in attracting overseas productions to shoot in the UK, said in response: "It is reassuring to hear the government understands the role big-budget, international movies shooting in the UK plays in building a world-class skilled workforce, while boosting the UK economy."
A report on the Today show suggested that the likes of Mike Leigh – a critically successful but far from commercial film-maker – are "finished", but given that Leigh is currently marked with establishment favour by an Olympics commission, that may be a hasty conclusion.
Leigh's contemporary Ken Loach – another critic's favourite but no box-office heavyweight – has suggested that the government's plans include the return of profits to the producers, instead of the funding bodies as is currently the case. If this proves true, it will mark a sharp change from the modus operandi of the UK Film Council, which provided funding from lottery sources as a "loan", and expected repayment from a film's income.
With the much-criticised abolition of the UKFC being their first major act in the film-making sector, the coalition have been under pressure to develop a more coherent, constructive policy toward the sector. The costs associated with transferring the UKFC's functions to the BFI appear to have wiped out any of the financial savings the UKFC's abolition was supposed to achieve. Now it seems that the coalition will be considerably more relaxed about returns to the public purse of money handed out to UK film producers.
What this means for the future of UK film production has yet to be established. A runaway hashtag on Twitter, #fundablefilms, is drawing spoof suggestions for future film titles. It is notoriously difficult to predict commercial success in cinema, and during the lottery era the UK funding agencies have proved vulnerable to the financial machinations of wily film producers – the main reason why the UKFC's safeguards were introduced. The spectacle of profits being creamed off by Hollywood studios, after start-up funding from the UK lottery, is a very real possibility.
Furthermore, commercial film-making carries enormous financial risk; will the British public be happy to see millions go down the drain on inevitable failures? Whenever public funding bodies try to act like studios, they end up getting burned, as the furore around Sex Lives of the Potato Men demonstrated.
Moreover, what would happen to small-scale, high-impact films such as Shame, Wuthering Heights, The Deep Blue Sea and We Need to Talk About Kevin; all low-budget, "difficult" films that required a "cultural" imperative to get off the ground? Let alone the likes of Lindsay Anderson's If…, which Cameron professed to admire only days ago.
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Barking's Broadway theatre left reeling as council withdraws £331,000 subsidy
Negative reviews for decision by London borough of Barking and Dagenham to stop funding well-regarded arts venue
It is the quietest week of the year at the Broadway theatre in Barking, Essex. The Christmas tree has being taken down and the auditorium is being cleared up after the organised mayhem of the panto.
It had been a good year: about 250 professional shows, audiences up by a quarter from the year before and even a financial surplus.
A few weeks ago the venue was preparing to enter the new year with vigour, buoyed by a declaration of faith from Arts Council England, which awarded it a 53% funding increase last March.
Now something like despair is in the air. Before Christmas, the cash-strapped Labour Barking and Dagenham council dropped a bombshell – it plans to end the theatre's £331,000 subsidy from April.
"It was a complete shock, we were not expecting it all," said Karena Johnson, Broadway's chief executive and artistic director. "It is an incredibly shortsighted decision and in the long term will cost the council more."
The news has caused considerable consternation locally and in the arts community.
The theatre is the only professional arts venue in a deprived London borough which has more than its fair share of problems, not least the presence of the BNP which at one time held 12 council seats.
Last year the Broadway staged a season of work which addressed the BNP's rise. The party's website now has a news article which says "nationalists will be delighted" at the council's decision.
The Broadway and other arts organisations have found they present an easy target for local authorities having to make swingeing budget cuts.
Last year, Artsdepot in Finchley, north London faced a similar situation when Barnet council said it was axing all of the £195,000 annual grant it gave.
Unless the council changes its mind, the trust that runs the Broadway will be wound down, staff will be made redundant and it will lose the money it gets from the arts council.
Critics say that without the theatre, Barking town centre would have little more to offer than a pub and a chicken shop.
They also question the timing, as Barking and Dagenham is one of the 2012 Olympic boroughs.
The Broadway was opened by the council seven years ago and Johnson has overseen success since arriving in 2009. "We need some good news stories in a borough which is deprived," she said.
As well as professional events – coming soon are Lee Nelson (a comedy character created by Simon Brodkin) and a one-woman theatre show by TV and film actor Louise Jameson – the theatre is used for numerous community events and has projects which help local artists and writers develop their skills.
Johnson has been heartened by many messages of support – including one from David Lan, artistic director of the Young Vic, which last year staged its production of the play Sus at the Broadway.
He condemned the council's move and said the theatre was the only place of its kind in that part of London.
"Karena is doing a really courageous, imaginative job in already very difficult circumstances.
"If it is only the rich boroughs that can support art in its many forms then you will get what Richard Eyre has called a 'cultural apartheid'," he said.
Essex-born playwright David Eldridge, whose play In Basildon opens at the Royal Court next month, also spoke in support of the Broadway.
Eldridge – from a "hardworking blue collar Romford family" – told the Guardian: "I feel passionately it's very important that at a time of economic hardship the arts continue to serve, not just the wealthy middle classes of London's more affluent boroughs but the decent, ordinary and hardworking people of boroughs like Barking & Dagenham."
He added: "The Broadway is Barking & Dagenham's only theatre and its doors need to remain firmly open."
The Broadway had already had its budget cut and Johnson said everyone involved with it had been realistic and were preparing for further cuts – the mood music was that the council was "very pleased with our performance".
The council says the venue will remain open, not least because there is a contract with the local further education college to use the space.
It said it recognised the value of having a theatre but was being forced to make "unprecedented savings".
A statement said: "We can't leave things as they are; the theatre has got to take its fair share of the budget cuts.
"We are confident that there will still be a professional theatre programme presented at the Broadway; however, it is inevitable that with less funding available there will be a reduction in the number and type of shows that will be put on.
"Although the number of shows may go down, this will provide an opportunity to provide more opportunities for local people to perform at the theatre and to attend a wider programme of participatory arts activities than is currently available."
Moira Sinclair, in charge of London for Arts Council England, said the Broadway had been offered more money "because we believe it is an important venue for audiences in outer London".
She added: "This funding was awarded to Barking Broadway theatre trust on the condition that they would be able to put a high quality artistic programme in place and had a viable business plan to support this.
"If the trust is unable to operate its business because of the local authority decision we would therefore be unable to award a grant to them."
In the Broadway theatre cafe, friends Linda Petrosino and Jenny Williamson discussed the decision. Both live locally and visit regularly.
"It is a real shame," said Petrosino. "There's nowhere else in Barking I can go. I'm a retired woman on my own and I can come here on my own. I feel comfortable. I know a lot of women who do that." Petrosino also volunteers front of house. "To go all the way into the West End at night is not an option for me," she said.
Williamson, who brings her grandchildren to performances aimed at younger age groups, said the Broadway was vital.
"There's no cinema in Barking, it is the only entertainment," she said. "Losing it would be a real shame and I don't understand it. In the scheme of things what they are talking about is not a lot of money."
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David Edgar: why should we fund the arts?
Publicly funded arts institutions are under more pressure than ever to quantify the social benefits they bring, as would be done for schools and hospitals. But isn't the crucial role of art to challenge the way society is run?
Please God, no. Over 60 years after the foundation of the Arts Council, 50 years after the creation of the RSC, with publicly funded British plays the toast of Broadway, visits to newly free museums doubling in a decade and British concert life the envy of the world, surely we don't have to justify giving public money to the arts? Again?
Well, yes, we do. Despite the culture minister Ed Vaizey's insistence that the 30% cut in the Arts Council's budget is a temporary expedient, many of his Conservative colleagues consider any public funding of the arts a form of grand larceny. Ivan Lewis, Labour's former culture spokesman, acknowledges that the case for the arts is yet to be won even within his party; and the new arts spokesman, Dan Jarvis, sees quantifying the value of the arts as one of his most urgent priorities. In the zero-sum economy of austerity Britain, the arts are increasingly required to couch their case in terms appropriate to those basic services – social care, education, policing – with which they're in competition for dwindling public funds.
It wasn't always like this. When it was founded in 1946, the Arts Council could justify its activities in its own terms: it was there to widen access to the arts throughout the country, as well as to maintain and develop national arts institutions in the capital. Behind the latter policy lay a theory of artistic value that you could call patrician: art's purpose as ennobling, its realm the nation, its organisational form the institution, its repertoire the established canon and works aspiring to join it. In this the council was seeking to reverse a rising tide of populism (art's role as entertainment, its realm the marketplace, its form the business, its audience mass), a goal summed up in the founding chairman John Maynard Keynes's ringing declaration: "Death to Hollywood."
Over the following 30 years, this view of the value of the arts came under attack, not from the market place but from artists who were artistically and often politically oppositional. In the theatre in the late 1950s, on the BBC in the early to mid 1960s, and pretty much everywhere from 1968, patrician arts institutions were challenged and in many cases transformed by those who believed the arts weren't there to elevate or divert, but to provoke.
What both the patrician and the provocative shared was a primary concern for the people making the art. During the 80s, in the arts as in so many other spheres of life, Margaret Thatcher sought to shift power from the producer to the consumer, using the market to disempower the provocative (from political theatre groups to the high avant garde) in favour of the populist. This was seen most clearly in the cluster of forms that defined the cultural 80s. Popular in form and patrician in content, the heritage industry was cultural Thatcherism, promoting (as the then secretary of state for national heritage, Virginia Bottomley, put it in May 1996) "our country, our cultural heritage and our tourist trade".
In this context, the major justification for government arts funding became its contribution both to that trade and to trade in general, a case based on the mounting evidence of the economic value of the arts to the so-called leisure industries, and thereby to the regeneration of Britain's post-industrial cities. This argument was clearly attractive to the (largely) Labour councillors running such cities in the 1980s. The equally appealing idea of the arts as part of the "creative industries" was taken up by New Labour's first culture secretary, Chris Smith, who set two further objectives for arts policy: that access to the arts should be widened, and that they should contribute to the government's social objectives, particularly urban regeneration and combating social exclusion.
A real alternative to heritage and populism, New Labour's arts policy had dramatic outcomes in making entrance to museums free, increasing subsidy to regional theatre and widening access. But there were growing grumbles about the social instrumentalism that went with it. Virtually the first thing Nicholas Hytner wrote as the new director of the National Theatre was a peroration against "a relentless and exclusive focus on the nature of our audience". At the same time as Ofsted's Peter Muschamp praised theatre groups for "enabling pupils to discuss and explore complex social issues such as bullying", members of those groups were being driven crazy by local authorities' demands that plays about bullying (or racism or Aids awareness) had happy endings. Critics from the right – such as Munira Mirza of the thinktank Policy Exchange – challenged the statistical evidence for the social benefits of the arts and inquired whether arts organisations that didn't meet government-imposed social targets would lose their grants.
By 2004, such critics had gained an unexpected ally, when Chris Smith's successor as culture secretary, Tessa Jowell, wrote a paper arguing that instrumentalism devalued the arts' primary purpose, which is to communicate perceptions about the human condition that can't be communicated in any other way. In 2007, Jowell's successor, James Purnell, proudly announced the end of "targetology", and commissioned a report from the former Edinburgh festival director Sir Brian McMaster, which sought to wrest power back from the arts consumer, under the banner of "excellence". At last, the artist and the art were to be back in command.
Sadly, McMaster failed to reckon with the recession, the deficit and a consequent pressure to justify arts spending in terms comparable to those used to defend threatened social and educational services. A vast array of studies and reports have been produced over the last five years – some by government bodies, many by independent think tanks – arguing that the arts can't hide behind grandiose rhetoric but must demonstrate the quantifiable value they provide to the public which pays for them.
What good are the arts?
Some of the arguments have been around before. London's commercial theatre earns over half a billion pounds a year; the Young Vic's artistic director, David Lan, found that 75% of the directors, designers and writers working in the West End came from the publically funded theatre, demonstrating its contribution to one of the capital's most obvious tourist attractions. In addition, there is mounting proof of the social value of the arts: even Mirza acknowledges that there is "compelling evidence" for the benefits of arts participation in the treatment of mental health patients. And John Carey – whose 2004 book What Good Are the Arts? is a 300-page philippic against the arts having any educative role whatsoever – finds himself impressed by the success of arts activities in building self-confidence and self-esteem among young prisoners. A recent Europe-wide study of 5,000 13- to 16-year-olds found that drama in schools significantly increases teenagers' capacity to communicate and to learn, to relate to each other and to tolerate minorities, as well as making them more likely to vote (by contrast, those who didn't do drama were likelier to watch television and play computer games).
Increasingly, such benefits are presented not as happy byproducts of artistic activity (and therefore able to be provided by other agencies more cost-effectively) but as part of its very essence. Five years ago, the Arts Council set out to produce a threefold definition of art's purpose: to increase people's capacity for life (helping them to "understand, interpret and adapt to the world around them"), to enrich their experience (bringing "colour, beauty, passion and intensity to lives") and to provide a safe site in which they could build their skills, confidence and self-esteem. Other forms of endeavour do some of these things. Only art does all three.
This is a persuasive argument. But, in the current climate, the arts are required to show that they're doing this for people not conveniently assembled in schools, hospitals and prisons, in a manner that accords with the Treasury's methods of assessing how other government activities achieve their objectives. Hence a desperate scrabble around value measurement methodologies (some drawn from healthcare, others from the property market) to try to find mechanisms appropriate to calculating the value of visiting art galleries or the opera. So a technique called contingent valuation finds out (through an opinion poll) what people would be prepared to pay for a particular good or service if it weren't provided free, "valuing" diverse cultural institutions, from Irish public broadcasting via Durham Cathedral to the British Library (whose services provided £363m of notional value for a funding outlay of £83m). Such hypothetical exercises are – to put it mildly – vulnerable to the suggestion that respondents might exaggerate what they'd pay for services that are clearly a good thing and currently free.
There's another problem. Almost all the documented social benefits of the arts have been achieved not by people attending plays and concerts but by those who participate in them. And while many publicly funded arts organisations have participatory programmes, most public money still goes to subsidise people sitting or standing silently looking at other people do things (or, in the case of books and pictures, things they've done). Unless the current balance of arts funding between – say – the London Symphony Orchestra and Burnley Youth Theatre is to be reversed, most public funding will continue to go to activities whose value is hardest to measure.
Hence a move within the arts to try to make spectatorship as involving and transforming as participation. Already, much thought has been devoted to democratising the processes by which professional art is produced. This is not just a matter of audiences responding to what they see through surveys, blogs and the like, though this can and should have a real effect on how work is curated. The Young Vic and the Almeida are examples of theatre companies whose outreach programmes are designed to involve young people both as participants and audience members. Graham Vick's Birmingham Opera Company integrates professional singers and musicians with community performers who reflect the city's diversity and who bring an equally diverse audience with them. There is increasing public involvement in the commissioning of public art. Research into the National Theatre's NT Live found that audiences who saw the simultaneous cinema broadcasts of its performances of Phèdre and All's Well that Ends Well found the shows more emotionally engaging than the theatre audiences, and said it would make them more rather than less likely to visit the National Theatre itself as a result. Empowering the audience would address the tension between the interests of producers and consumers that has bedevilled arts policy for almost 70 years.
Such empowerment doesn't have to be conservative. If it's true that arts participation makes young people more likely to vote later on, then it should also make them more critical. One frequent argument for funding the arts is their role in promoting continuity with the past, community cohesion and a sense of national pride. In fact, of course, British theatre in particular has been subverting such notions ever since the emergence of John Osborne, Arnold Wesker and Joan Littlewood nearly 60 years ago. It is this provocative mission that sets the arts apart from the other creative industries with which they are too easily lumped (by government and opposition alike). It is not the role of advertisers, architects, antique sellers, computer game manufacturers or fashion designers to challenge the way society is run. But the arts do it all the time. As David Lan puts it, dissent is necessary to democracy, and democratic governments should have an interest in preserving sites in which that dissent can be expressed.
When the cuts start to bite …
For me, however, the most compelling argument for funding the arts is not factual but counterfactual. The cuts which start biting in April will have major and still unpredictable effects on arts provision in England. Unless the National Theatre, Walsall's New Art Gallery, Battersea Arts Centre, Sadler's Wells and Cardboard Citizens are all profligately run, or the prospects for private patronage have been scandalously underestimated, then a failure to win the argument for continued public funding – even at reduced levels – would lead to the closure of the great majority of currently funded arts organisations, especially outside London. Even if some London flagships survive, they would be unable to continue the very participatory projects that are being urged on them and to which they are increasingly committed. Would any government really want to be the one that closed the Ikon Gallery, DanceXchange, Manchester's Royal Exchange, Graeae or Opera North?
David Edgar's play Written on the Heart is currently running at the RSC's Swan Theatre in Stratford.
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This week's arts diary
Geoff Dyer savages Julian Barnes, plus in defence of the hedge fund knight, and the mystery of St Cecilia
Geoff Dyer savages Julian Barnes
It was something of a surprise that the Man Booker-winning Julian Barnes missed out on the Costa novel prize, announced last night. But maybe the Costa judges read Geoff Dyer's startling and damning assessment of Barnes's The Sense of an Ending: the two writers are, presumably, not Christmas card exchangers.
Writing in the New York Times under the heading Julian Barnes and the Diminishing of the English Novel, Dyer skewers Barnes's book. Its main character, boring arts administrator Tony Webster, is a man who seems to spend his life just not getting it. "My feelings exactly," Dyer writes. "I didn't get the book when I first read it. I still didn't get it when I reread it ... To me, there seemed less to get second time around. If such a thing is possible, I didn't get it even more than I hadn't got it first time around."
But Dyer's criticism goes deeper. It is contrived, he argues. But perhaps most damningly of all, Dyer says the book is not terrible, "it is just so … average. It is averagely compelling (I finished it), involves an average amount of concentration and, if such a thing makes sense, is averagely well written: excellent in its averageness!"
In defence of the hedge fund knight
There's been a lot of huffing and puffing over the knighthood for Paul Ruddock because: a) he's given £500,000 to the Conservatives over the last decade; and b) he runs a hedge-fund company that made money from Northern Rock's collapse.
Maybe critics are right. Maybe it does reflect all that is rotten in the honours system. Or maybe he is getting it for the tens of millions he has given to the arts. Perhaps I'm naive but, in terms of passion and philanthropy, he does appear to be one of the good guys, having been a successful and hands-on chairman at the V&A in London since 2007. At the British Museum, where there is a medieval gallery named after him, his money made possible a major redisplay in 2009. Isn't he setting an example we wish more of the super-rich could follow?
Other less controversial arts honours include a knighthood for Antonio Pappano, the Royal Opera House's conductor turned TV presenter; a CBE for the Scottish National Portrait Gallery director James Holloway; and OBEs for Frieze art fair supremos Amanda Sharp and Matthew Slotover; and many more in a list that rewarded the arts well.
The mystery of St Cecilia
Over Christmas, the Guardian ran the story of Dulwich Picture Gallery's marvellously restored 17th-century painting of St Cecilia. To recap, the painting was in terrible condition and consigned to storage until a restoration funded by the Friends of DPG. It looks magnificent, but one question remains: who painted it?
The eminent art historian John Spike emails from Italy. "The extravagantly coloured and voluminous draperies point clearly enough to the painter Francesco Guarino," he says. "Guarino was a more colourful and decorative follower of the famous Massimo Stanzione." A good theory, says the gallery, although it fears the work might not be quite good enough to be a Guarino. The jury remains out.
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Art Fund membership up 15% despite downturn
Charity that helps museums and galleries acquire artworks has seen record gain in membership over past year
Museum and gallery goers have been backing British culture, despite the economic downturn. Record numbers have joined the national fundraising charity, the Art Fund, boosting its membership by 15% last year.
The fund allows regional and national institutions to acquire important works for their collections.
"It might look surprising when set next to some of the more urgent charitable causes," said Stephen Deuchar, director of the Art Fund. "Yet there has been a quickening of the philanthropic pulse which means that more people, not just the upper echelons, are doing more to support galleries and museums. There seems to be a greater understanding that the quality of British life is bound up with the quality of these things."
Deuchar puts the trend down to an urge to improve communities and the reinvention last spring of the fund's National Art Pass, allowing holders to gain discounts and free admission to arts venues.
"When this organisation started, it was about large-scale philanthropy and the good of the nation. Now it has been replaced by the feeling that it is about the individual and the world they want to live in," he said.
In 2011, the Art Fund supported or pledged to support the acquisition of almost 150 works of art. Items acquired with its help included Alex Katz's portrait of Vogue editor Anna Wintour, which is now in the National Portrait Gallery and currently its most popular picture and bestselling postcard.
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