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Whoever chooses to become chair of Arts Council England commands my deepest respect. They voluntarily submit to years of public flaying, to the vituperation of disappointed artists and curators, to the meddling of politicians passing through the Culture Ministry on their way up or down the political ladder, to the indifference of the public and the sniping of the media, to what the outgoing chairman, Sir Christopher Frayling, this week called "relentless venom".
So the first thing Frayling's successor, Dame Liz Forgan, should do is forget about being popular. Her organisation is one with a built-in contradiction: it is a bureaucracy for the anti-bureaucratic activity of art. It has to make rules for people who like breaking them. It also has to decide how to distribute its never-adequate resources among some of the most volatile and envious people in the country. As was said of academia, the politics are so bitter because the stakes are so low.
Instead she should put all her energy and talent into one task, which is making sure that the Arts Council supports art. This might seem obvious, except that one of the Government's favourite occupations is trying to get the relatively small budgets it puts into the arts perform tasks that other, better-funded departments should do.
At different times the arts are asked to assist with education, social inclusion, regeneration, race equality, community cohesion and economic growth. Art can sometimes contribute to all these things but to do so it has first to be strong its own right. And sometimes it doesn't: it is hard to say how the plays of Samuel Beckett or the paintings of Goya would contribute to community cohesion. They are just extraordinary, irreduceable things that are their own justification. The freedom that art requires to exist includes the freedom to be crabby and antisocial.
Worse, art is asked to perform these tasks because of its ability to symbolise. In other words it is used as a cheap way to make it look as if great strides are being made in race equality or social inclusion when the hard, expensive actions that might make a real difference are avoided. It is easier to fund a multi-ethnic dance troop, and cover promotional literature with their smiling faces, than address actual causes of inequality.
This is cynical hypocrisy, which leads good people to do moronic things, such as The Public, the £60 million cultural centre of uncertain purpose in West Bromwich. This ticked all the boxes - it was supposedly regenerative, accessible and inclusive - but no one could decide, artistically, what it was for. So money was wasted, the public were disappointed and art was not served. The Public is accessible as could be, with jaunty colours and something cringingly called The Pinktank, but it offers access to a whole lot of nothing.
My own experience of the Arts Council was as the director, until last summer, of one of their Regularly Funded Organisations, The Architecture Foundation. In general I worked with dedicated and well-intentioned people there who were trying to make sense of shifting policies and directives descending on them from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport, via the higher management of the Arts Council.
They worked to official criteria in awarding funding, most of which were to do with accessibility, diversity, education and young people. Only one criterion - "supporting the artist" - had anything to do with the artistic quality of the work being funded until, after a while, it was removed. The other aims are deeply admirable and important - arguably more so than supporting art - but it is asking too much of art to address them all, all the time.
The fine employees of the Arts Council also had their lives complicated by its endless organisational fidgeting, and worse. It was restructured in both 2002 and 2006. It also, a year ago, embarked on its notorious "Investment Strategy", under which funded organisations were sawn off with little notice or explanation.
A common cause lies behind both the neurotic reshuffling and the imposition on art of non-artistic roles. It is a nervousness about what art is, and especially what good art is. It is right to be nervous, as these are tricky questions to which final answers will never be found. The Arts Council, as an official body, is always likely to look dumb and rigid in relation to fleet-footed artists' redefinitions of what art is. But it has to accept these insecurities as part of its job.
So Liz Forgan has to help the Arts Council be a professional, single-minded and consistent body that concentrates on identifying and supporting whichever people and organisations truly create outstanding art. This includes an understanding that its role is humble and a little boring, leaving the big statements to the people it funds. In theory at least she has a following wind, as government statements now talk about "excellence" in art and the Council's plan for 2008-11 stresses the importance of "Great Art", albeit without showing any examples of great art in its many illustrations.
Forgan's job is to make these statements real. She can start by rescuing the Cultural Olympiad from the same ignominy as The Public. Officially it "will highlight the country's internationalism and diversity by using both culture and sport to create works and events that will bring people and places together, encourage audiences to take part, involve and inspire young people, and create a lasting legacy." In other words, it could be, like The Public, a soggy mush of box-ticking and good intentions.
It also has a budget - about £40 million - which sounds like a lot until you realise it has to be spread over the whole country. Forty million would barely pay for a packet of balloons for every citizen of the United Kingdom. What the cash could do would be to enhance good cultural work that is already happening. Some of the proposed Olympiad projects already do this, such as a Shakespeare Festival by the Royal Shakespeare Company. What it should not pay for are pious Olympic-themed projects that nobody wants.
The founding chair of the Arts Council was John Maynard Keynes. The great economist is in vogue these days. The Arts Council is one of his less popular inventions but as long as there is public funding of the arts - and without it most of our best theatres and concert halls would disappear - some body needs to administer it. Keynes said the Arts Council should "give courage, confidence and opportunity" to artists and their audiences. If it does this under Forgan, rather than its recent history of confusion, it will be a job well done.
Reader views (1)
Quite right. Art for Art's sake. But what a peanut budget! Wouldn't even buy you a single footballer, would it?
- John Problem, Hackney Wick, London, UK, 30/01/2009 11:56
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