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AI ProfileAndrew Dixon, chief executive, Creative Scotland
Scotland have rethought their national arts funding system, and after many political hiccups it finally comes into being on May 1.
And for the replacement of the Scottish Arts Council as it combines with Scottish Screen, the Scots have gone not just for an Englishman but for an old Arts Council England hand in Andrew Dixon as the first chief executive of Creative Scotland.
There will be a healthy element of diplomacy in the task – for a start, his office is split between Glasgow and Edinburgh to bridge that ancient rivalry – and as he prepares to take his job he has to be part of the alchemy, along with Scottish government ministers, of creating the board that combines sound governance with support and accountability. Many arts organisations across the UK will be watching carefully to see if he and his political masters get that right.
But it is, as he says, “a new start, an opportunity” to “maximise the creative sector in Scotland”. There’s a lot of cultural activity of which the nation is justly proud, he says, and which will have an important export role.
His job is going to be pulling together the various elements in a country – in including film, of course - whose artists have been historically proud of their independence. “It’s a great tradition, isn’t it?”
Andrew Dixon is 51 and started his career running Major Road, Graham Devlin’s issue-sensitive touring theatre company then based in Manchester. After four years he moved to Humberside as the county arts officer, and in 1989 shifted to the regional arts council as assistant director of Northern Arts, the start of 21 years on Tyneside. He was deputy chief executive between 1992 and 1997 taking over as CEO when Peter Hewitt went to London to run ACE, and oversaw the transformation from Northern Arts to Arts Council North East.
In 2005 he left to head up the NewcastleGateshead Initiative, the destination marketing and cultural agency that was about to launch Culture 10.
This was the programme devised after Newcastle/Gateshead failed to get the nomination to be the UK’s European Cultural Capital for 2008, “the best thing that didn’t happen for us”.
So Culture 10 picked up the pieces of the Capital of Culture bid to devise a unique curated programme of cultural events and festivals across the region, up to this year – how that programme is to progress post-Culture 10 is outlined by Ailsa Anderson and James Waters on page –. “It is a huge region, taking in Cumbria as well as Northumbria, but the potential is enormous” he said then. “Without compromising it has developed an audience for the culture here, and what we are doing now is beginning to attract cultural tourists – already they’re coming from Germany, Norway, Italy and Spain. But there’s more world to conquer still.”
RadarAs the dust settles on Apple’s launch of the iPad, rival hardware manufacturers are eagerly scrambling to produce new tools to power the forthcoming consumer boom in digital reading. Simon Cronshaw, co-founder of CultureLabel, explores how publishers in the arts sector can prepare to benefit from digital distribution, protecting their content in the process.
Is cyberspace lawless, separate from the real world, or do conventional laws and business models apply? After decades of internet exploration, we are getting closer to understanding that it’s a space where technical, financial, legal and business considerations are entirely interdependent, all equally critical pillars for successful digital publishers.
Adapting business models is central to the effective protection and management of intellectual property online. For many commentators, the best defence is a good offensive: providing access to content, in a manner that suits user preferences, at a compelling cost.
There are subscription services, pay per play/view models, and the opportunity to develop discriminatory pricing. Get it right and the rewards can be a global audience providing new income to invest in your artistic content.
Back in the 1990s, Napster demonstrated the counter-intuitive rationale for distributing content for free, and then monetising ancillary offerings instead. Two decades later, the newspaper industry is following suit with a variation on the model. The New York Times, for example, has just announced its plans to introduce a pay wall for online articles, with a central “metering” system where everyone gets a few free articles each month. Once users exceed the limit, they have to either pay or move on.
In the most successful projects illustrating this interdependency between business model and technology that we’ve delivered, the income generation principles that CultureLabel promotes (see www.CultureLabel.com/digital-museum/ for a free e-book) are matched with innovations in technology, like CultureLabel’s ability to process micro-payments and instant split-payments of multiple royalties. Both business model and technology must be optimised and in harmony for digital publishing to flourish.
So, why add your content to the digital space? Income to recoup costs and invest in content is not the only reason. Creating and distributing works can also have much to do with managing your reputation, gaining acceptance within online communities, or simply satisfying a drive to create.
For entrepreneur Esther Dyson, the end-game is nurturing a relationship with content users: “Controlling copies…becomes a complex challenge” she says. “Much chargeable value will be in the certification of authenticity and reliability, not in the content … The trick is not to control the copies of your work but instead a relationship with the customers – subscriptions or membership”.
If poetry must owe something to other poems or novels to other novels, the free circulation of ideas and information provides a difficult balancing act for arts publishers. Where on the spectrum does their distribution policy lie between the progress of art and the rights of authors?
The cuts will come, but they may provide the chance for new thinking in local government cultural provision. Simon Tait reports from Nalgao’s Outside In symposium
The atmosphere was heavy with words like “Armageddon” and “meltdown”, and with resentment at the unfairness of it all. After all, at long last the arts had established themselves in municipal thinking as integral to urban regeneration and community well being, and now they were facing terrible cuts.
Lorna Brown, chair of the National Association of Local Government Arts Officers (Nalgao) and head of arts and cultural planning for West Sussex, spelled it out for the 200 delegates. Between 2011 and 2014 local authorities’ budgets will be cut by between 7% and 15%, and because funding for culture – apart from for libraries – is a non-statutory local authority requirement, the arts is where the cuts will fall first, and the upper number for them is more realistically going to be 20%. And although she is also careful to underline that this is not across the board, the experience will be different from one authority to another, around the conference hall they were talking about the top figure being nearer 30%.
But the symposium Nalgao had brought together in Camden was not to hoist a rallying cry against cuts, which might have been the response ten or even five years ago. The purpose was to examine alternative ways of delivering what we all know the public wants but which the politicians are not going to help to ensure they get it.
Following a breakout session at the Nalgao annual conference last October, they commissioned a report on the benefits and issues involved in contracting out local authority arts services. The result was Outside In, compiled by Paul Kelly of Cultural Futures and Rick Bond of The Complete Works. “What is the change going to be” asked Kelly, “and how bad? There are different ways of managing the arts”.
Almost without exception, leisure/culture services are delivered in-house, but they don’t have to be. You can partially contract out, shifting a theatre to commercial management, for instance; you can put the whole operation out to a trust or to an independent company, which might save you VAT but would certainly mean you not being obliged buy in services from other departments that you don’t need, as often happens now; you can combine the cultural services of two authorities, maybe more, sharing the costs, the staff, audiences and, of course, ideas.
The council taxpayer has been a slightly obscure but powerful funder of the arts in this country. Obscure because it is very difficult to pin down figures in the patchwork nature of the 350 councils of different sizes and political colours that change, often, every four years. Taking regular figures from the Chartered Institute of Public Finance and Accountancy (CIPFA), analysts have always been content to agree that councils spend about same, or a bit more, than the Arts Council in England.
That assumption no longer applies. Last year ACE spent £438m of their government grant on arts funding, excluding lottery money; and although the local authority figure is said not to be a safe one and could be much more or possibly less, a survey last year estimated it at £220m.
AI Profile Stephen Snoddy, director, New Art Gallery, Walsall
There were lots of reasons why the New Art Gallery, Walsall, should have flopped: it was the wrong place or a £16m temple to contemporary art; its revenue funding was inadequate; it was hooked on an existing collection of little appeal to modern audiences; national critics would never trek to this corner of the West Midlands to review exhibitions; artists wouldn’t want to be seen in a town like this, alive or dead.
Only one of those proved true, in that critics from London still balk at going to Walsall. It’s their loss, because there has been a string of important exhibitions at the New Art Gallery. There have been major solo shows for Gordon Cheung, Vidya Gastaldon, Christopher Le Brun, Conrad Shawcross, Hew Locke, Neal Rock, Gavin Turk and Joanna Vasconcelos, and the current free show, Party!, devised as a kind of birthday cake, has work by a small nation of artists, alive and dead, including Peter Blake, Michael Andrews, Renoir, Spencer Tunick, Marc Chagall, Gilbert & George, Chris Ofili, Goya, Nan Goldin, Sam Taylor Wood and Gillian Wearing.
But it was a risky undertaking, one that Stephen Snoddy’s predecessor, Peter Wilkinson, had nursed for over a decade in a gloomy local public library to get the important Garman-Ryan Collection of art, essentially the work of Jacob Epstein, into a proper, purpose-built gallery. And he did it, in a building designed by the award-winning Caruso St John which didn’t stint. “It looks fantastic” he said last week. “The stairs, the floors - the quality was absolutely right to go for, and it’s something people in Walsall are as proud of as ever”.
But there were problems that had nothing to do with the running of the gallery. The major sponsor, alongside the Arts Council, was the local authority the party colour of which seemed to change every four years, with a differing shade of opinion on the gallery each time. When Jenkinson left a year after the opening to set up Creative Partnerships with ACE, an interim director was put it in, and then for two years it was run from a civic office, to the growing exasperation of the Arts Council who said they wouldn’t consider reviewing their grant upwards until there was a professional director in post.
While all this was going on, the permanent staff and in particular the head of exhibitions, Deborah Robinson, continued to devise imaginative exploitations of the Garman Ryan Collection and temporary exhibitions.
A new assistant director of culture and leisure at Walsall Council saw the importance of a professional head of the gallery and Stephen Snoddy was appointed in 2005, to the great satisfaction of the Arts Council.
Snoddy had a long track record. He was at the Arnolfini in Bristol as exhibitions head just as the BritArt phenomenon was exploding, and though he modestly protests that the could hardly ignore it the exhibitions of the work of the likes of Rachel Whiteread meant his eye for contemporary work was quickly acknowledged. At the Cornerhouse in Manchester he mounted the first John Baldessari UK retrospective at a time when no-one in this country rated him – when Tate Modern announced the big Baldessari which has just finished Snoddy had to call Nick Serota and contradict the publicity which said it was the “first” retrospective, and that he’d been there almost 20 years before.
THE OTHER POINT OF VIEWWe shouldn’t be, argues Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums
So, when is a museum not a museum? It may be apparent to all who work in them, but it’s not to anyone else. Try explaining to a member of the public why the Tate is a museum, not a gallery. Or the National Portrait Gallery is, well, a museum. Your first attempt at explanation might be to say that a museum has to have a permanent collection. Then you can try and explain why the Royal Academy of Arts isn’t, technically, a museum, despite its collection of Reynolds and Gainsborough upstairs. And why Eureka in Halifax, with no collection at all, is a museum after all. Then there are places with names like the Wallace Collection and Somerset House. What are they? And there’s the National Trust. They have over 200 museums, most disguised as historic homes.
That’s why Kids in Museums decided from the start that if visitors think it’s a museum, it’s a museum. That’s the only way to define it. It’s all to do with the choices a visitor makes. I don’t think someone thinks, “I wonder if I’ll take my family to the Victoria and Albert or Alton Towers today”. I do think they might make a choice between the National Gallery and Kensington Palace. So, as Kids in Museums sees museums from a visitor’s perspective, they’re all part of the big museum family as far as we’re concerned.
But some people are choosing to opt out of the museum fold, feeling, I presume, it’s a word so besmirched that it’s impossible to save. The first thing Vaughan Allen, a former style journalist, did when he took over Urbis in Manchester was change the name. “We banned the word museum. The word museum does mean things in cabinets, and we didn’t have any”he said. He isn’t the only person to shun the M word. A couple of years ago, the Museum of Television and Radio in New York announced it was becoming the Paley Center for Media. In a New York Times article, Pat Mitchell, the president and CEO, said, “Museum was not a word that tests really well with the under-30- and -40-year-olds, especially in the context of radio and television”.
He did not, however, list any positive associations for the title “Center”. Most Centers or Centres I go to are to have bits of me examined by a doctor, and it’s never pleasant. But many places prefer such words to being branded a museum. When I was writing a list of Britain’s best museums recently, I imagined most would want to be on it. But I was warned not to include the Eden Project in Cornwall, as they don’t like being called a museum because of the image it conveys, to some at least. (Eden – do write in and say that’s not the case and I’ll list you immediately!)
I have very mixed feeling on the M word. Museums have transformed dramatically in the last decade, and are often not the glass-cabinet stuffed, unloved, deadly silent places they were not so very long ago. But the word itself undoubtedly still has strong negative connotations, in particular for young people. Mention the M word to my teenager, and she has a tantrum. She’s not going to One of Those. Call it something else – a gallery, even – and she just might consider stepping over its threshold.
So, if we don’t have museums, what do we have? Quentin Blake is currently raising funds for a House of Illustration, to hold much of his work. Note – the word “museum” does not appear in the new building’s title. We could have more Houses of …, which does sound a great deal friendlier. House of Mummies, House of Dinosaurs, House of 19th Century French Porcelain. When the International Spy Museum in Washington DC was being built, the planners commissioned a study to choose a name. They came up with The House on F Street, which they felt conveyed an appropriate sense of intrigue. But when the public were surveyed, they overwhelmingly preferred the straightforward International Spy Museum, which seemed to them to represent what it actually was.
But perhaps we could find a single word to conjure up the spirit of the place, like Urbis, Eden or Fact in Liverpool. Under this poetic scheme, what could we call the British Museum? Conquer? And the National Gallery? Paint? Or, I quite like Frame.
But before any museum rebrands, listen to this cautionary tale. Urbis, no longer called a museum, is closing down, having lost support. It’s being replaced by a wonderful set of objects on popular culture. It will reopen as the Football Museum.
www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk
AI ProfileBrigid Larmour, artistic director, Watford Palace Theatre
There’s a fine line in the alchemy of running a provincial theatre between it being wonderfully exhilarating to utterly heartbreaking, and modern demands for high quality facilities, product and diverse audiences make the extremes even greater.
Watford Palace Theatre is a quintessential case in point. Serving a local community of around 800,000, it’s an Edwardian building which opened in 1908 as the Watford Palace of Varieties. An extension was added in 1983 and in 2004 it reopened after a two year closure for a £9m refurbishment.
That was when the alchemy started to curdle. The audience had to be wooed back, but the adventurous and even risky programming of Laurence Till – he opened with a modern Tanika Gupta reworking of Wycherley’s A Country Wife - failed to bring them back. The Watford Palace found itself deep in an unexpected crisis. Two years later, the “refurbishment of the audience” as Till put it still not properly under way, a TV career beckoned and Brigid Larmour was brought in to replace him.
What had happened was that with the reopening the staff had expanded from a seasonal operation to a year round one, the audience did not respond as it was hoped they would, and the business model went out of kilter with the subsidy spent paying off overheads rather than the product.
“So I came in to bring a different energy into the organisation, and to try and build the work and build the audiences” Larmour says. But first she had to go through the painful process of redundancy, not many, but in a small team like this the axing of even three or four leaves a scar.
Brigid Larmour, who celebrated the launch of her 2010 season at the end of last month with her 50th birthday, came to the WPT from a career that had had a steadily upward trajectory. After a peripatetic childhood and Cambridge, she went to the RSC, to Contact in Manchester, to Granada TV, to the National Theatre’s education department, to the BBC and then to Act Productions, the West End group for which she was artistic director.
One of her roles with Act was to find and nurture new writing, something that she did with conspicuous success and which is part of the WPT’s ethos now. Producing Lee Hall’s first hit, Spoonface Steinberg, brought from Newcastle to the West End, and workedwith the likes of Kathryn Hunter, Annie Castledine, Peter Gill and Anne Reid. She also set up Act Partnerships with regional theatres, notably with the Gate in Dublin.
She arrived at Watford three years ago with a pedigree, and a plan. “I came with the idea that participation is as important as producing” she says. “Increasingly, people (meaning potential audiences) want to have a stake in the work - it doesn’t mean they want to be an actor. When I arrived there was a successful established programme of curriculum work in schools, but we didn’t do anything for adults. Community shows were not fully integrated into the organisation”. One of the standout triumphs was the Opera Group production of Weill’s opera Street Scene in which members of the community provided the crowds.
It was part of her “Four Ps” strategy – producing, participating, presenting and partnership – which could become a paradigm for other theatres of the WPT’s size and constitution. Producing is enabling other companies to develop work initially for the WPT stage; participating is involving the community to grow audiences; presenting is a holistic attitude to what happens on stage, so that Larmour talks about “events” and “entertainments” now because they are as likely to be dance theatre, opera and even stand-up as drama on her stage; partnership is links with other houses and producers to make work which can have a life beyond the stage of the initial producer.
There’s a production workshop which means the WPT can provide sets for commercial clients, and for its associated companies at less cost than on the open market. “So we’re making the subsidy work harder”.
Contemporary dance devotees are in for a sensational treat – from a 50-year-old company from one of gth world’s poorest nations which has never toured here before
Last year British audiences at the Royal Festival Hall marvelled at the accomplishment and passion of the young musicians of the Simón Bolívar Youth Orchestra of Venezuela, and wondered why it couldn’t happen here.
This month audiences keen to admire high quality youthful performance have on offer a dance version, this time from Cuba, thanks to the determination and awareness of what is happening overseas of the Dance Consortium.
The members of Danza Contemporánea de Cuba are not in the early teenage years of Gustavo Dudamel’s Venezuelan musicians, dance demands more physical development. These artists are in their twenties, but have been dancing since they were tots as part of their elementary education. “It’s their chance to advance out of poverty” says Alistair Spalding, artistic director of Sadler’s Wells. “It’s like football here, an opportunity everyone can pick up on”.
Danza has been invited by the Dance Consortium, the co-operative of dance venues here that work together to showcase the best in new choreography and performance. Planning for his tour has been spearheaded by Spalding and by Assis Carreiro, the director of Dance East who last year opened a new international-standard dancer centre in Ipswich.
Danza has been described by The Guardian as “one of the world’s most exciting dance groups”, with its Cuban blend of modern American theatre, Afro-Caribbean dance and classical European ballet. “It’s about the whole dancer on the stage, the way they live the dance, their enthusiasm, their energy, the quality of movement” says Spalding. “It’s in their genes.”
Danza began more than 50 years ago when Ramiro Guerra, once a dancer with Martha Graham’s legendary company in New York, founded the Conjunto Nacional de Danza Moderna (National Modern Dance Group) and although the name was changed along the way, it remains essentially the same.
There are 60 dancers, all drawn from Cuba’s national art school – 21 of them are on the tour - and now under the direction of Miguel Iglesias, Danza imposes a gruelling training regime, and places a high premium on individual spontaneity and inventiveness. “The grammar of dance, the words of dance, is movement,” Iglesias explains, “but a choreography must have a central idea, an intention. We must provide a dancer with the intellectual means to turn all this sophisticated technique into the language of dance.
“Our approach always stays fresh. Each new member brings new experiences, feelings, intentions… They are young faces and bodies, some very young, but they are always extremely talented. Not all of them get to be stars, but we try to make sure everyone is playing the right role” Iglesias says.
Yet although Danza has toured the world, this is the first major tour the company has had to the UK, and the reason is simple, Spalding explains: “Really, it’s the rep”.
And although Danza has over 70 works in its repertoire, none are modern commissions so the dances tend to be traditional and static, in spite of the ingenuity of the dancers themselves. Cuba is a poor country, with a tiny annual budget al of which has to go on running the company. There is nothing left for commissions, an almost surreal situation for a contemporary dance group, particularly one with national status and an international reputation.
So the Dance Consortium has commissioned the Cuban George Cespedes, Danza’s principal choreographer, to create a new piece, and although it is based on the Cuban experience and on the traditional dance, the mamba, the music he has chosen comes from the progressive Cuban group Nacional Electronica, and it is called Mambo 3XXI. There are also new dances especially commissioned from international choreographers Mats Ek (Swedish), the UK-based Spanish Rafael Bonachela, and Jan Linkens (Dutch).
From February 23 Danza will tour to Newcastle Theatre Royal, the Brighton Dome and Sadler’s Wells in London.
Artsadmin is 30 years old and having nursed some of our most iconic artists into their careers is as innovative as ever. Simon Tait talks to its directors.
Artsadmin stands for everything in the arts zeitgeist right now, in January 2010: innovation, boundary crossing, excellence, hands-on support for artists. It was all in McMaster, it’s all in the Arts Council’s strategy for the next ten years.
Yet they are the disciplines that lie at the core of the organisation that has just celebrated its 30th birthday and has the same two-handed directorship that has guided it for 25 years, with one of them a founder.
In 1979 Judith Knight was the general manager of Oval House that was then, with the ICA, one of two London venues offering space to avant-garde performance, and Seonaid Stewart was theatre co-ordinator at the Oval. Both had an enthusiasm for inter-disciplinary performance.
“People kept asking us if we’d do individual projects” Knight says. “We didn’t want to do that, but we said ‘Why not try and put together an office?’ There was no business plan, but they discovered an instant need for what they were offering as producers, which was sharing and connection to give creative people the space and seclusion to make work. “But we were very careful who we worked with, the artistic policy was very important”.
It was a time when funding was scarce but ambition was high, when LIFT, Dance Umbrella and Serious were also starting, and Artsadmin have always worked with them. Their first clients were Hesitate and Demonstrate, which quickly developed a reputation in Europe, and Mike Figgis, both still associated with Artsadmin though Figgis now has a successful film career; and then The People Show, Pip Simmons Theatre Group and Forkbeard Fantasy, Bobby Baker and Graeme Miller among many.
After five years Stewart moved back to her native Scotland to work, and Gill Lloyd, moved over from The People Show to become co-director of Artsadmin. For her, too, this was not a business affair, it was an affair of the heart. “How awful it would be if, as a producer, you found yourself having to work with an artist or company you didn’t like but who could afford to pay more than someone you did?”
Artsadmin are producers, but much more. They facilitate the development and presentation of new work, but also offer artist development, mentoring and advisory service and bursary schemes.
For their first 15 years they were peripatetic, a team of four sitting above a McDonalds in Clerkenwell at a time when rents there were low. “We both had small children then so we installed a crèche. And we both had pets (Ollie, a senior black Labrador, still follows Lloyd about) and when a German magazine came to write about us, the piece seemed to be all about kids and dogs” Knight recalls.
What they needed, though, was premises of their own where they could offer rehearsal and performance space, and perhaps office facilities.
They discovered Toynbee Studios. These had been built by Toynbee Hall, the social change charity in Whitechapel set up in the 1870s that had built extra space in the 1930s for education projects. Latterly it was used by the Inner London Education Authority, with a theatre on the ground floor (the old Curtain) and a football pitch, believe it or not, on the roof, but when the ILEA was abolished in the early eighties the studios fell empty. Artsadmin were eventually approved by the charity and moved into what was then a three-storey block next to Toynbee Hall itself in 1994.
“It changed everything for us” says Lloyd. “We’d always toured nationally doing new work and we’re really proud of what we did between ’79 and ‘94, but the advisory service, the education thing, the bursary scheme were possible because suddenly things opened out. We could offer space to people, and somehow when you’ve got bricks and mortar the world takes you a bit more seriously. It’s a real solid base, literally, an identity the building reflected very much. In the 60s would have been an arts lab.”
Ambition grew, and when the chance to buy the lease on Toynbee Studios they put in for lottery money – they had been Arts Council clients since the mid-80s. But the chance of ownership was a catalyst for more improvement, and in 2007 the studios were launched after a £6.5m refurbishment, £2.5m having come from the lottery.
“We were lucky” says Lloyd. “We fitted all the criteria of the time - shared space, multi-use, and we got through the door before it started to close on London projects”.
Most of the refurbishment was invisible structural improvement to make a 70-year-old building fit for 21st century use, but the open roof has become the fourth storey, a sprung floor studio habitually used by the likes of DV8 and the Michael Clark Dance Company. On the third floor are rehearsal spaces and studios, on the second offices - Artichoke, Arts Catalyst, Crying out Loud, Curious and DV8 among them. There are 18 offices in all, all arts related, and more studios in the basement with the performance artist Frank B has his lair.
There are few art forms that aren’t entertained at Toynbee. The Curtain was 480 seats, but when the stage was extended in the mid-90s for a piece Mike Lee was making for the Barbican the seating was reduced to 280, and so it remains as a valuable rehearsal resource for theatre, film and television as well as for schools’ use. The oak-panelled courtroom, the first juvenile court in London, remains as an ideal recording studio and music venue.
But on the ground floor is one of the first installations Knight and Lloyd made when they arrived, the café, which they run themselves. “The whole thing needs a hub, it’s where residents here get together, and now that it’s more visible from the street (a street wall has been replaced by railings) it’s a popular local meeting place” Knight says.
Artsadmin, now with a staff of 24 whose ACE annual grant as an RFO accounts for half the turnover, continues doing the work it always had, plus some. They have to raise funds for artists’ projects; there 12 to 13 permanent artists in any year, each doing one or two projects “which could be a tiny site specific thing round the back or a tour to China” Lloyd says.
Education has been increasingly important element, and Artsadmin now has an education co-ordinator, Sam Trotman, who runs an annual summer school – last year’s theme was environmental sustainability. She has also created a youth board of artists aged between 18 and 25 who independently advise on programming.
“What has happened in the last 30 years is that the barriers between art forms that the funding authorities could seen have mostly disappeared” says Knight, “thought some of the press and media still find it difficult not to put things into boxes.”
To mark the 30th anniversary, the Toynbee residents were asked to create an image in the building, and the likes of Bobby Baker, Lloyd Newson, Mike Figgis, Franko B and Curious have all complied to make a unique memorial.
Artsadmin will continue to examine issues through what they do at Toynbee and who they work with, and Lloyd and Knight hope to be able to establish an annual festival there to address themes. Climate change will continue to figure large, and Artsadmin has been working with the British Council to find ways of reducing the carbon footprint for touring companies.
“This is going to be a difficult year for the arts in many ways, but what we want to make sure of is that in the search for young talent we don’t forget older artists” says Judith Knight. “Because, say, Bobby Baker is in her 50s doesn’t mean she is any less creative or in need of support, and I hope the Arts Council take that fight on. We certainly have.”
Arts Council England wants a strategy for the next ten years that can vault over government change. ACE chief executive Alan Davey explains
The arts in England are in a good place right now. In the last 15 years they have flourished and there is now a genuine acceptance that they are a part of the fabric of our nation. We want to build on that strength and ensure that in ten years’ time the arts will continue to thrive and everybody will have access the very best of them.
That’s why earlier this month at the State of the arts conference, Arts Council England announced a consultation on a ten year framework for the arts – Achieving great art for everyone. This framework will set our priorities for the arts in England over the next decade – for our own work and for the cultural and social context in which it will take place. The framework will set out some clear directions, but it will also be flexible, allowing for necessary changes in the face of the unexpected.
This document – and the ten year framework which results from it – brings together for the first time all art forms and development areas into one set of long term priorities. We know that in order to deliver the conditions in which great art can flourish we must look beyond the publicly funded sector; that’s why it will also look at the views of everyone from the commercial, amateur and voluntary arts sector as well as audiences.
We want to arrive at a strong but flexible long term plan that sets a direction and vision for the arts that the whole sector shares, and which can forge ahead through any changes in political or financial climate.
In Achieving great art for everyone, we set out a vision that sees this country as a place for world-leading artistic excellence and innovation, and a great place for artists to live and work.
We see a country where everybody feels they can enjoy the best of the arts, engaging and participating in new ways, where the arts play a dynamic role at the heart of society, locally, nationally and internationally, where they drive the creative economy and have adapted to a low carbon future.
We envisage arts organisations as resilient, naturally collaborative and adaptable, recognising the benefits of thriving within a mixed economy of support.
However, the speed and scale of change today bring exceptional challenges and opportunities for artists and arts organisations, and for the Arts Council in enabling the arts to flourish. That’s why we need a map for the future. We know that collaboration is going to be critical to our sector in adapting to the changes ahead.
We want to see the arts sector working more intelligently together, and that is why the contribution of artists, arts organisations and partners to this consultation is not just welcome, but essential.
In Achieving great art for everyone we propose five long term goals that can drive our development work, inform our funding priorities and strengthen our relationships with artists, organisations and audiences. We believe our proposals on how we will achieve the goals - including our thinking on new, more flexible, funding programmes - will enable us to be more effective, and encourage a greater sense of shared purpose. However, the proposals are just that: a work in progress, into which your contribution is essential. We want to create a framework that everyone in the arts can get behind, and develop a set of goals that we all want to strive for.
Later in the year, drawing deeply from what we learn, we will publish our priorities for our next investment plan and a ten year strategic framework. We will set out our long term goals, our ambitions for each artform and new ways of working with our partners and the people we fund. It will make a real difference to how we work and how we make our investment decisions.
Our framework for the arts will be an important document not only for us, but for anyone interested in, or working in, the arts in England. It will give clear indicators of how we intend to achieve our mission but at its heart it will be about pushing artistic boundaries and giving artists and arts organisations the space to experiment and to create – to take their art forms forward with the sort of work that audiences new and old will want to experience.
Whether you look at it as a prescription for excellence, or an antidote for stagnation, our ten year framework is something that anyone involved in the arts in England should want to help shape.
The consultation document is on our website at www.artscouncil.org.uk/consultation
The Crafts Council’s new programme Collective offers contemporary craft makers the chance to direct and develop their own professional development. Rosy Greenlees, the council’s executive director, introduces it.
Craft is a lively, entrepreneurial and independent-minded contributor to the economic, social and cultural life of the nation. Our role is to enable those at the heart of the sector to develop and grow and supporting makers has been central to the Crafts Council’s work over the last 35 years. The Crafts Council Development Award alone has helped over 1,200 new makers, including Caroline Broadhead, Tom Dixon, Thomas Heatherwick and Shelly Goldsmith, at the starting point of their careers.
However, over this period craft practice has changed and makers now have diversity of career paths and opportunities. It is crucial, therefore, that makers are supported throughout their careers extending and challenging their practice if they recognise the need to do so. With this in mind the Crafts Council has launched a comprehensive programme of support for makers. This programme, Crafts Council Collective, comprises five strands: Hothouse, designed for new and emerging makers, Injection and Artistic Licence for more established makers and Craft Rally and Portfolio for all makers. Collective will provide tailored business development, time for makers to explore their practice and take creative risks, support from peers and experts, opportunities to develop aspirational models of practice and opportunities to share knowledge, resources and advice.
Crafts Council Collective has been developed following extensive evaluation of former schemes, recommendations from the Craft Blueprint, developed in partnership with Creative & Cultural Skills and from Turning Point, Arts Council England’s ten year strategy for the visual arts. It will enable the Crafts Council to have an programme of initiatives that collectively strive to meet the needs of all 33,000 makers across the UK at all stages in their career.
The success of Collective will rely on strong partnerships with other organisations across the UK. We want to connect with exemplar regional or locally focussed schemes that already provide development and networking opportunities and extend these to a national level. Craft Rally, Portfolio and Hothouse will be delivered with a range of partners whilst Injection and Artistic License will be delivered directly by the Crafts Council. Whilst we continue to develop these programmes we will launch the first initiative, Craft Rally, in February 2010.
Craft Rally is a democratic, inclusive programme of CPD opportunity for all makers, regardless of location, discipline, point in career, or any other set boundary. Digitisation and virtual communication have revolutionised the way makers communicate and practice. Craft Rally will help connect thousands of makers many of whom work in isolation and often feel they lack peer support or networks. Craft Rally is a physical and virtual knowledge transfer network where makers can demonstrate and share innovative and aspirational models of practice. There will be four rallies per year across the country. The first Craft Rally will take place on 25 March at 45 Millbank in London and will be delivered in conjunction with ArtQuest and Yorkshire Art Space. The content of this rally and indeed all future rallies will be generated and steered by makers through a virtual network ensuring its direct relevance to the needs of the craft sector. Craft Rally is for makers, by makers.
The broader craft industry contributes £3 billion GVA (Gross Value Added) to the UK economy, greater than the visual arts, cultural heritage or literature sectors. Collective will ensure that individuals can take control of their own professional and personal development and together create sustainable models of practice for the whole sector that will define contemporary craft practice in the 21st century.
More information on all aspects of Collective in the Professional Development section at www.craftscouncil.org.uk/professional-development
