Andrew Whyte leaves the Arts Council next week, rather peremptorily it seems. The rumour is that he has been ousted by the new chair, Dame Liz Forgan, who is said to find him too susceptible to the disease of control freakery. In fact he has a big new job to go to, in the civil service proper as director of communications at DEFRA on about the same pay scale, so it’s hard to see how it is a move up. The truth is that in his three years he has both presided over ACE’s acknowledged biggest PR disaster, the funding cuts of 08, and the biggest opening to information from and about the Arts Council since Anthony Everitt was secretary general a generation ago. And if it hadn’t been for the latter, the former would not have happened.
A splendid dinner at Whitgift, the public school in South Croydon, to celebrate the 500th anniversary marriage of Henry VIII and Catherine of Aragon. The table decorations are of red and white roses with pomegranates, Catherine’s badge; the wine is English and Spanish; and the music is by the schools own 16th century ensemble, complete with a unique shawm modelled on one found with the Mary Rose. For the dinner is more realistically to celebrate the exhibition the school has on of finds from the Mary Rose wreck. How the headmaster Christopher Barnett managed to persuade the Mary Rose Trust to put this show on is a mystery, but he did and the result would not disgrace a national museum. The real question is, why can’t it be seen anywhere else? Surely to tour it around the country to places where state school pupils could see these extraordinary artefacts – including the heads of the bosun and gunner reconstructed from their skulls – wouldn’t be beyond the bounds of the state, and seems to be exactly the kind of thing the newly retitled Creativity Culture & Education, formerly Creative Partnerships, could spend some of its large resources on. The dinner was fabulous, but it needs be obligatory…
As if he hasn’t got enough to do running the Barbican’s arts programme and the City’s Olympic effort, Graham Sheffield has got another job. He is the British Council’s long-awaited advisor for arts and the cultural economy – and that will be a dual role, too. He will also chair the BC’s arts advisory group in the rejigging of the department by its still newish head, Rebecca Walton, which she hopes will assure the cultural communities here and aboard of the BC’s newly discovered commitment to the arts.
The Wedgwood Museum in Stoke-on-Trent has won the £100,000 Art Fund Prize for museums and galleries for 2009. Owned and run by an independent charitable trust, the new £10 million museum is housed on the historic manufacturing site of Josiah Wedgwood and Sons, and tells the story of one of the world’s most recognisable consumer brands. Visitors to the museum not only see ceramics but also a range of manuscripts, documentation, factory equipment, original models and fine art related to this world-renowned ceramics company.
The Arts Council and the BBC have signed a partnership agreement to exchange and give access to archive material, and to share campaigns to develop new audiences for the arts.
The BBC’s new arts commissioning editor, Mark Bell, said the details of the agreement – signed by BBC chief Mark Thompson and ACE’s Alan Davey last week – were still being worked out, but the new deal would take the relationship to new areas of co-operation between the two institutions.
It follows the “memorandum of understanding” exchanged four years ago and drafted by Kim Evans, then ACE’s deputy chief executive and a former BBC producer.
The National Campaign for the Arts has launched its second arts manifesto in three years with a confident statement of intent based on a widespread consultation with arts stakeholders, said NCA director Louise de Winter.
The manifesto makes a pragmatic list of essential areas where it wants specific progress from the government.
Education: “We believe the future of the UK lies in a skilled, culturally educated and creative workforce that is innovative and adaptive to change”. Government should recognise and support the contribution, and facilitate greater collaboration between the arts and educators.
Economy: “we believe that the future of the UK’s economy lies in its capacity to create and innovate”. Government should se the sector as a long-term strategic investment.
Communities: “We believe that a stronger civil society lies in the experiences shared by a community for everyone to get involved, and that participating in the arts, crafts or cultural activities is often a first step towards greater civic engagement”> Government should make local councils write arts and culture into their strategic plans.
International standing: “We believe that the United Kingdom’s reputation in the cultural and creative sectors is vital to its overall international standing and will be core to its future success”. Government should therefore sustain current investment, and increase it when the economy improves.
A powerful voice: “We believe that art has the power to change lives and therefore its contribution to our national life should be supported and championed”. Government departments should develop a plan for creative and cultural involvement across all government departments.
News focus
NCA conference hears robust rallying cry, but also recession warnings
Although the arts must prepare for recession and inevitable funding cuts in the next year, “now is our moment”, said Melvyn Bragg in his capacity as president of the National Campaign for the Arts.
Speaking at the NCA’s conference Future Britain: arts leading the way, Lord Bragg said culture constituted the biggest single sector in the economy in terms of employment, and its importance should be championed.
The arts, He said, are critical to the development of the UK’s economy, and that by 2013 predictions suggested they would contribute as much as £85 billion a year in added value. Now as the time for every arts organisation to be on the front foot, asking how the arts could be ore-proactive.
His keynote rallying cry, made at the conference organised to launch the NCA’s new arts manifesto, came after speakers had warned that that the “phoney recession” would give way to real hardship, but that preparation could help ameliorate the effects.
Ed Vaizey, the shadow arts minister, said that he would find it difficult to make a case for cuts to arts subsidy to the Treasury because for such a relatively small amount of the money, the damage to the infrastructure and the bas political backlash would be disproportionate.
But Dame Joan Bakewell, chairman of the NCA, said that ten years of sustained funding for the arts was now under threat. “Any incoming government is going to have to make cuts” she said. “It’s not about money on the table anymore, it’s about what the arts can do for our country”.
Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, said the credit crunch had actually been good for the arts so far, allowing organisations to “demonstrate how good the arts are for us”. But fund-raising was gradually diminishing, though individual giving was increasing. Warning that we may be in for ten years of reduced funding, he said arts organisations should be finding new ways of developing audiences, using new communications media such as Face book.
So the message was that there needs to be more partnership – arts minister Barbara Follett said that many small arts organisations were doing similar work and should work in tandem to cut costs and increase effect – and not to let national and local government off the hook with subsidy.
Munira Mirza, director of arts for the mayor of London, said it would even be helpful if arts organisations made their own suggestions of where costs could be saved.
But politicians must be kept engaged, warned Arts & Business head of arts Verity Haines, because if subsidy went, so would private support, “overnight”. “It is the private sector that will recover first from this recession,” she said. . Businesses will be looking to cultural solutions; individuals will be looking to support dynamic artists and cultural bodies. The private sector holds the cards for many in the cultural sector”.
But audiences need to be consolidated, said Alan Davey, ACE’S CEO. “We need to be very confident and bold about the arts’ place in civil society” he said. “There’s a thirst for knowledge an understanding which we need to harness.”
In defence of commerce in culture
Earlier this month, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge turned down a grant worth £80,000 from the Art Fund because it refused to display the donor’s logo next to the artwork bought with its support. This in turn triggered the loss of a further £45,000 from the V&A and the MLA Council towards the acquisition. It’s director, Dr Timothy Potts, argued that “logos are the currency of marketing and commerce and this introduces a promotional element into the galleries that we regard as an unnecessary and unacceptable distraction - no matter how worthy the object of promotion”.
In response, CultureLabel’s Simon Cronshaw champions uniting culture institutions with mainstream consumer culture.
We may or may not disagree with the particular design or colour of logos, but without thinking or blinking, as modern cultural consumers, we understand the messages - the values, the heritage, the story - to which they provide a visual short-cut.
The Art Fund logo represents the democratic “people power” of 80,000 supporters saying that this painting is a national treasure worth saving, that individuals have gone to the effort of digging into their pockets to pay for it. Modern cultural consumers can handle – and perhaps even expect – to see messaging of this kind.
The current exhibition is a hit, but it hasn’t always been funny getting the Cartoon Museum established. Now, it’s developing.
“Time supposedly heals all wounds yet somehow the wounds inflicted on the body politic by Margaret Hilda Thatcher are still raw and after 30 years still suppurating. This may be because the narrative generated by her period in office which swept away all before it and was partly delusional still prevails to this day” - Steve Bell.
“How will the muse of history assess Margaret Thatcher? A unique phenomenon, nominally Conservative but more a believer in self-improvement and personal responsibility as the guiding principles from individual to find their way through life. The state should have a limited role and the market was a better way to resolve the distribution of resources and rewards. Such views led her to being both loved and loathed. Few can deny her achievements. She changed the political weather. – Kenneth Baker.
These are the diametrically views of two commentators, each distinguished in different ways, of the subject of the current exhibition at the Cartoon Museum, Margaret Thatcher. Both are trustees of the museum, showing that there are no biases in the journalism of the cartoon, nor in the museum devoted to it.
The exhibition, Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! which runs until July, marks the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher becoming prime minister, and as the illustration here show, no holds are barred. The Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson calls his profession “voodoo journalism”.
At the Royal Society of Arts in 1949, H M Bateman said, “Is it not high time that some official recognition of the worth of comic drawing was made? A permanent collection of some of the best examples should be got together and housed under one roof, forming a sort of National Gallery of Humorous Art. It is a fine art and a big industry, but it has no central home or headquarters, as every other art and industry on the same scale has, where the best is preserved and made available to the student and the general public.”
Quebec’s artists are a global phenomenon, from Celine Dion to the Montreal Jazz Festival, thanks to a unique government policy that values the arts as a major industry. Colin Hicks, the province’s London director of cultural services, tells Simon Tait how it works
You’ve never heard of it but, in its way, it’s one of the most powerful arms of the government. Conseil des Arts et des Lettres sounds like a quaint provincial French club for aesthetes, but without it we probably would never have had heard of Robert Le Page, Cirque du Soleil, La La La Human Steps or even Celine Dion.
For this is the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres de Quebec, the Canadian French-speaking enclave’s arts council, and all these international names started with the CALQ. The government is the provincial one sitting in Quebec City for which the CALQ acts as Arts Council, British Council and arts investment bank. It nurtures artists, supports them, promotes them, and then takes a cut of their financial success as well as standing back with the rest of the world and applauding.
“It’s a kind of a mixture of the francophone way of doing things, which is to put your cultural money where your cultural mouth is, and the North American ‘can do’ society” says Colin Hicks, Quebec’s British director of cultural services in London for the last 17 years.
With a population of 7.3m, the CALQ has an annual subsidy – or investment as they prefer to call it - of C$636m, or C$80 per head of population. That translates as £354m and compares with our own ACE’s £417 million for a population of just over 50m, or a little over £8 a head. The money comes from Quebec’s culture ministry, the only culture ministry in the world which combines the “condition of women” in its remit.
Next week a modern flat in Bethnal Green will be inaugurated as their first subsidised artist’s studio in the UK. The first tenant is Christian Quesnel, a comic strip artist in his 40s, who leaves behind in Montreal a wife and two daughters and who will have six months living and working here on a government subsidy. He will be creating new work, maybe even exhibiting if it’s appropriate, but his most important task will be more discreet: to network.
While culture in this country has only quite recently been recognised for its export value, Quebec’s artists have been seen as its chief export since the ministry was first set up in 1961, explains Hicks, a Brit who, before taking up his present post, worked for our Arts Council as the deputy director of South East Arts. As well as from the CALQ, Quebec’s touring artists also have the support of the Canada Council, the national equivalent of the Arts Council. “Because 22% of the Canadian population live in Quebec, 22% of the Canada Council touring budget goes to Quebec artists” Hicks says, “and since Quebec is a powerhouse for Canadian culture we spend a bigger share on touring – next comes Ontario and after that British Columbia.
“Quebec produces a lot of stuff, success breeds success, and Montreal, Quebec’s largest city, has become a magnet for other Canadian artists.”
But CALQ has also developed as a unique two-headed arts council: one is a conventional subvention agency, the other is an investment bank which puts money into cultural enterprises and expects to take a profit which can be reinvested. And with enterprises such Celine Dion selling 25m CDs a year, the tax return alone on any investment is impressive. Two years ago Cirque du Soleil, still based in Montreal despite its global presence, paid back its start-up subsidy is full; about 20% of Robert Lepage’s funding is still from the state, but in 2001 he gave something much more back in the form of La Caserne, his Montreal “Center of Creation” which is a rehearsal hall, workshop, flexible space, and collaborative creative centre that is also home to half a dozen companies which has been an inspiration in this country in the notion of “centres of excellence”.
The status has been politically hard fought for, and the Quebecois approach to culture is now at odds with the Conservative Canadian government’s, which is cutting its arts subsidy.
But a community that boasts 52 dance companies in Montreal alone knows that art, and particularly performance, has become a national expression. “Since 1994 cultural policy has been cross party, and has benefited hugely from not ever being a political football – which makes my job a lot easier because I don’t have to play politics and we can concentrate on the art” Hicks says. “It’s been fought for and the general populace of Quebec, not just the professional sector, do feel their culture is very much part of who they are.”
