The pain…
Sir Andrew Motion, chairman of the MLA and former Poet Laureate, has joined the siren chorus warning of the effects of the government’s scorched earth policy for the arts, highlighting the local government sector.

‘If the Big Society means we aspire to create more civilised places where humanity prevails, and the individual spirit thrives, then artistic and cultural activity is not just indispensable, it must sit at the core, and national and local government must work together in one cause’ he said today.

‘Most of our country’s population up and down the country rely on libraries, museums, exhibitions, record offices and performances, funded or part-funded by local government. Towns and cities stripped of books, arts, theatres and celebrations of our past and future would be a grave threat to a bigger, better society.

‘But we must recognise the pressure local councils are under to protect much more expensive services, ranging from road maintenance to care of children and the elderly. We are obliged to ensure that the benefits of the relatively small sums of funds that go on arts and culture are accurately targeted, spread wide, and act as a catalyst for creativity. In this climate, it has never been more important to safeguard one nation whose heritage, culture and international excellence is more than the sum of its parts.’

It follows the revelation yesterday that DCMS has told arts organisations to look at cuts of between 25% and 40%, which Nicholas Serota, Vikki Heywood, Jude Kelly, Nick Starr, Julia Peyton-Jones and Alistair Spalding lined up yesterday to call ‘devastating’. ACE would have to cut at least 200 of its 880 RFOs, and the panel pleaded with the government not make them face ‘front-loading’ of the cuts from which the cultural and creative sector would never recover. Since then, Serota has gone into print in the Evening Standard to say we – part of our fifth biggest industry, tourism - are facing a cultural recession at the high point of a creative golden age.

A&B ‘s Colin Tweedy has also added his two-pennorth on behalf of private sector funding: ‘Every walk of British life is being challenged at this time. No one will be exempt. The private sector should be seen as a supplement to the public sector, but rarely a substitute. But together the public and private sectors are a powerful advocate, both for continuity and change. Let us not try and divide the two at this time.’

…and the pleasure
No thought of a scorched earth in Derry~Londonderry this morning as it celebrates being named UK City of Culture 2013, beating Birmingham, Sheffield and Norwich (my picture shows the mayor Callum Eastwood at the moment of triumph for the ‘Just Say Yes’ campaign). It’s a city small enough still to have a town clerk, who is Valerie Watts: ‘We have been given a once in a lifetime chance not only to share our innate talent, creativity and energy with the rest of the world, but also to transform this region forever’ she said as recession-blind champagne corks popped last night. ‘This is a new chapter in our journey from plantation to peace, and its legacy will last for generations. We hoped that the judging panel would understand our bold ambition and passion to tell a new story’.

More than that, Derry and the regeneration company Ilex are committing £200m mostly on getting a cultural quarter made out of the old Ebrington Barracks of odious memory, creating 3,000 jobs in 2013 alone, and hoping for another honour. They want the ancient walls of Derry declared a World Heritage Site in time for the 400th anniversary of them being built to keep Catholics out and Protestants safely in, which also happens to fall in 2013.

‘Cut us, don’t kill us’ plea as 40% cuts loom
The arts are being told to expect cuts of 25% to 40% which will mean ACE funding to 200 of its 880 RFOs being stopped altogether.

Cultural leaders led by the Tate’s Sir Nicholas Serota have made an unprecedented plea to the government not to ‘front load’ the cuts but to be given time for them to worked in. ‘You can cut us, but don’t kill us’ was their bleak plea this morning.

They have days to make their case, Serota said, with culture secretary Jeremy Hunt wanting to make an early Comprehensive Spending Review settlement with the Treasury for 2011-2014.

As it is, theatres are likely to go dark, museums to close for some days a week, new work commissions to cease and the arts’ contribution to urban regeneration wound down. The regions, less attractive to philanthropy and tourism than London and trebly bitten by loss of support from local authorities and from the abolished regional development boards, will fare the worst with companies and venues closing, never to reopen.

The Arts Council have told clients this week that even if the cuts are not imposed in full immediately, they can expect at least 10% cuts in 2011-12, twice as bad as their worst guess. In his letter to them, ACE chief executive Alan Davey said he will ‘argue that any cut needs to be managed intelligently and in a way that protects the achievements of the last 15 years. We need to be sure that any cuts we do get do not all take place in the first year of a four-year cycle. That would be doubly damaging’.

Nor will there be respite in philanthropic giving which the government puts great store by. It emerged this morning that leading philanthropists, including Sir John Ritblat, Anthony D’Offay, Lord Stevenson, Dr Keith Howard (a long-standing supporter of Opera North) and Terry Bramall, the millionaire builder, have written to Hunt to say giving cannot be expected to make god subsidy shortfalls. Dame Vivien Duffield is believed to be writing separately to the same effect. ‘Philanthropic giving is very carefully balanced’ said Julia Peyton-Jones of the Serpentine Gallery. ‘This money is freely given and can just as freely be taken away’.

Jude Kelly of the Southbank Centre said that the cultural offer was a vital part of the bid that won the 2012 Olympics for London, having impressed the IOC ‘in terms of the scale of it, the vibrancy, the outstanding quality, and the models whereby world class art links up with education and communities in a way that has taken many years to build’ she said. ‘To then be ravaged by cuts will make us unable to deliver all the things we said we would do’.

The arts have become essential to regional revival, said Vikki Heywood of the RSC. Based in Stratford, she said that the company is worth £58m to the economy of the West Midlands, and will be worth a lot more when their new theatre opens at the end of the year, but the cuts would reverse that.

Sadler’s Wells has become the national dance theatre but, said Alastair Spalding, the commissions, productions and off-site performances which have turned round its finances and reputation will stop.

Serota said he had been in Liverpool yesterday to accept the freedom of the City on behalf of Tate Liverpool. ‘It means we can herd sheep past the council offices, and if we were military to march through the city with drums playing and bayonets fixed’ he said. ‘We will not be fixing bayonets. Not yet’.

Crude gestures
BP’s travails across the ever murkier water are visiting them this side too, in their guise as art sponsors. It’s proving to be something of a toxic brand here too, with the National Portrait Gallery bracing itself for protesting environmentalists block the entrance to the BP Portrait Award which opened yesterday. And it’s not as if the NPG hasn’t got enough controversy to cope with – the winner of BP’s £25,000 first prize this time is Daphne Todd with her portrait of the corpse of her dead mother. But the NLG isn’t the only gallery likely to fine association wth BP awkward. It hasn’t passed the notice of activists that the chairman of the Tate is now Lord Brown, BP’s colourful former boss, and the pickets are expected ot be out on Monday when the Tate celebrates its 20 years of sponsorship by BP. The activists, perhaps taking cue from the Tate’s current show Rude Britannia, have dubbed themselves “Good Crude Britannia’, and the Tate and NPG aren’t the only arts institutions that have benefited from BP’s largesse, reckoned to be well over a £1m a year. The British Museum and the Royal Opera House have too, and together they have drawn a deep breath and issued a statement: ‘The income generated through corporate partnerships is vital to the mixed economy of successful arts organisations and enables each of us to deliver a rich and vibrant cultural programme. We are grateful to BP for their long-term commitment, sharing the vision that our artistic programmes should be made available to the widest possible audience.’

Bird flies
Meanwhile, the Tate is losing its well respected chief operating officer. Three years after joining the taste Julian Bird is to succeed Richard Pulford as ceo of the Society of London Theatre and the Theatre Management Association, starting in November.

£1m lift for Bishop’s organ
A minor triumph for the quiet man of arts management, successor as SBC’s ceo to the less reserved Michael Lynch last year. In his recent profile in Classical Music magazine Alan Bishop had this to say: ‘It’s funny how, when a newcomer arrives, certain things stand out, and this was on for me. It was a shame that time and money ran out before it could be done, but I am I determined that by 2013 we will have a magnificent fully working organ, my one particular passion. It’ going to cost over £2m o, but it has to happen’. Well, the Heritage Lottery Fund habve juist handed him nearly half of it, £950,000.
.

Piggybankgate
I have to say that I am no closer to finding out precisely why the Arts Council’s reserve fund is down from £18.4m to only £2.4m having been permitted by the DCMS to use £9m to offset in the in-term cuts of £19m. Where is the missing £7m? When I asked Alan Davey, he said he had no idea, I’d have to ask the DCMS. I did: “The £7m was from reserves built up by ACE over many years. These are public funds and, given the current climate, are now being used to meet the department’s contribution to the wider government deficit reduction plan” I was eventually told.

It is public funding, but it is dedicated public funding, even though the Arts Council has been forbidden to use it on several occasions when it has asked the department, as it is obliged to. This is because of arcane and complex Treasury rules which mean use of reserves held by non-governmental public bodies has to be covered by other funds held by DCMS. ACE’s reserve was created in 2003 from £10m accrued when the regional arts councils merged with the national body in 2002, and has been added to by interest and other contributions. Some of the money that came from the regional arts councils, for instance, was gifts, bequests, and earnings - what proportion of the reserve was actually public funding and what was not isn’t clear.

The first question is, if ACE had not agreed to the £7m being used, would Treasury/DCMS have allowed the £9m to be used to soften the blow to the “front line services” Jeremy Hunt said would not be affected, or would they now be facing a 3% cut instead of 0.5%? Secondly, if it is really a DCMS fund for it to use as it or the Treasury sees fit, why has it been left with the Arts Council? The third question is, what of other reserve funds accumulated by arts organisations like the national museums, the Royal Opera House and the Southbank Centre – is that money available “to meet the department’s contribution to the wider government deficit reduction plan”, or on the other hand will their grant-in-aid be reduced pro rata? The fourth is, if the reserves are, indeed, devoted to the cultural organisations that have built and hold them, what does this say about the endowment funds the culture secretary is urging arts organisations to create – will they be “public funds… to meet the department’s contribution to the wider government deficit reduction plan” too?

At their press conference last week Alan Davey and Liz Forgan put a brave face on the whole thing, and played the straight bat vital if they are to have any kind of relationship with the Jeremy Hunt and Ed Vaizey after this, but they must furious. I gather that Davey has insisted that £5m of the £7m estreated in this way gets returned in the spending review, but how will we be able to tell?

And the point is…
Meanwhile, A&B have asked me to point out that ACE had it wrong when they announced that they had been deducted £200,000, and there might be an insight here into what can go wrong in public finance. ACE announced a £0.2m cut having rounded up to the nearest decimal point from £0.16m. That might be all right for the Treasury working in their billions, trillions and gazillions, but in the arts the difference of pence can be crucial. So, for the record, A&B have been deducted £1,600,000 of 4%, not £2 million which would be 5%.

0.5% cuts across board
Despite Arts Council England having gone for an ‘equal misery for all’ programme to meet the governments demand for a £19m, 4%, in year cut, announced today, the government pledge to maintain front line services in the arts has been broken.

Regularly funded organisations will have .5% cuts, or an average of £2,000 each, and the cuts will not be applied until January to give organisations time to adjust programmes.

Cuts to RFOs would have been 3% had it not been for £9m being taken from ACE’s £18.4m reserve, and DCMS have taken another £7m from the reserve for as yet unexplained reasons, leaving £2.4m in the emergency fund.

Worst hit are Creative Culture and Education which loses £1.6m and Arts & Business, £200,000, a 4% reduction to each. Of the RFOs, the ten biggest funded take the brunt, led by the Royal Opera House with £142,000. Colin Tweedy of A&B said: ‘We will endeavour to continue to do our utmost to see private sector investment in culture grow in the years to come and that the Government’s wish to see philanthropy take centre stage is realised’.

‘For some it will be serious but we hope that it will not be so difficult that it cannot be managed’ said ACE chair Liz Forgan. Chief executive Alan Davey said the reason why ACE took a bigger hit than other DCMS NGOs was the existence of its reserve fund, but he said front line services would inevitably be affected.

The Arts Council now has to plan for expected worse cuts in the Comprehensive Spending Review in the autumn for 2011-2014, Forgan said.

Other savings have been made on a public engagement programme, audience development and partnership working with local authorities.

Meanwhile, DCMS has scrapped the planned Stonehenge Visitor Centre to save £17m, the BFI Southbank film centre (£45m), the theatre ticket scheme A Night Less ordinary (£100,000), and Find Your Talent (£2m).

Wadley’s in
Veronica Wadley has been appointed chair of Arts Council London by the Mayor, Boris Johnson. Pause for the shock of this news to subside.

To rehearse the story, Wadley was the editor of the Evening Standard (which reported her success on Thursday’s front page with ‘Top arts job for “crony” Wadley’) at the time of Boris Johnson’s election in 2008 and was his implacable champion to the point of some threatening to take the paper to the Press Complaints Commission. Last summer she applied to be the new London arts chair and, though a shortlisting committee discarded her, Johnson, in whose gift the appointment is subject to government approval, put her name forward. The then culture secretary, Ben Bradshaw, wouldn’t sanction it, saying it broke the Nolan Rules on political interference in public appointments; Johnson fumed and darkly muttered that he would leave the post unfilled until after the general election, and so it has happened. In the meantime a huge row erupted, greatly to the embarrassment of the national ACE chair Liz Forgan, and it was agreed that a new selection procedure would be devised, excluding Johnson, and Wadley would have to reapply. She did, and despite an open letter on Tuesday from The Guardian’s Dave Hill calling on David Cameron and Nick Clegg to intervene in the interests of non-croneyism, Jeremy Hunt has confirmed her appointment. Also in the meantime, Wadley has been busy visiting London arts organisations and creating a favourable impression, as well as declaring in the Spectator that arts organisations need to ‘monetise assets’ and warning ‘subsidy junkies take note’. There have been carefully worded welcome messages from Liz Forgan (‘our London and national councils are finally at full strength, which is excellent news’), Julia Peyton-Jones (‘a fresh eye to the work of Arts Council London’), Nick Hytner (‘She is enthusiastic, perspicacious and informed’) and Colin Tweedy (‘…good for our cultural partners and good for our commercial partners’).

But how much power does the chair of Arts Council London actually have? Her council is effectively an advisory body for the executive director, the highly regarded Moira Sinclair, whose immediate boss is not Wadley but ACE chief executive Alan Davey. Wadley, along with all the other regional chairs, also gets a seat on the national Arts Council. It pays her £6,400 a year for up to 30 days’ work, but it also gives her automatic entrée into the cultural salons and arts powerhouses of the capital, places where her opinions will be heard, noted and given currency with decision-makers. The story of Veronica Wadley, cultural mover and shaker, starts here,

The 1985 show
Hunt’s decision to impose a 4% cut on the Arts Council instead of the 3% everyone else in the DCMOS family is a warning shot across the bows that the arts are in for it. Talk of 5% cuts a year for the next three years are leaving national companies gloomy, never mind the smaller fry. One ceo of a national institution and as diplomatic an arts mandarin as they come, tells me bleakly ‘It would take us back to 1985’.

Bradshaw’s guide
And while the ‘Beware forest fire’ signs have been going up, where was HM Opposition? I called the former culture secretary and current Labour shadow for a comment only to get an answering machine message. Two days later, with deadlines long past and the stories already soaking up chip fat, an email arrives: ‘I am very concerned about the potential impact of these in-year cuts on our arts and cultural life. But I fear much worse to come. The Liberal Democrats seem to have meekly caved in during the coalition negotiations and abandoned their pre election commitment to protect spending on arts and culture’. I offer it now because you won’t have seen it anywhere

The question as to why the Arts Council took such a large hit in Monday’s cuts – 4% or £19m when everyone else in DCMS only had 3% - has an answer: culture minister Ed Vaizey says it is because of the £18.4m reserves ACE has which it can dip into, and he thinks the hit can be ‘mitigated’ more when more lottery money starts coming on stream from next April. By then, though, the arts will almost certainly have much worse cuts to deal with. Talk is of 5% a year up to 2014 being docked, scorched earth.

ACE has tried several times to get access to the reserves – created by the merger between with the regional arts boards in 2002 and since prudently added to – but has been forbidden to each time by DCMS. That was the old regime, though, and ACE will smart from already havig had this year’s money cut by £4m and having added a further £6.5m from its own savings, but Alan Davey and Forgan will not want to get into a fight with the new DCMS team over that. ‘We have received confirmation from the department that the additional £5 million cut the Arts Council has been asked to make is to be mitigated - if possible - by the freeing up of our blocked historic reserves’ Davey says today. ‘We are now getting on with the task at hand and making sure we do our absolute best to minimise the impact on the art and the frontline organisations who enable it to happen’.

It seems likely that they will be able to manage it, with our without the reserve, with no serious hit on the RFOs. Nor are they going to tackle the red herring of lottery money yet, which will need legislation if it is to be used to plug holes in revenue funding.

But if tapping into reserves to maintain support of ‘front line services’ – Hunt’s phrase - is to be acceptable practice it goes against the very policy the new government is advancing, in calling on arts organisations to create endowment funds. That will undoubtedly be seized on by the opposition as the Conservatives reverting to type, and all the pre-election pro-arts speak perfidious lip service.

And while ACE gets down serious with Vaizey and Hunt there may be other awkwardness. Vaizey was speaking at the Arts & Business launch of its new Big Arts Give project, showing his approval of A&B and its new emphasis on philanthropic giving. But when asked if he would chop A&B, he invoked the arm’s length principle: ‘That up to the Arts Council’. So if ACE does decide it can do without handing over £4m a year to A&B, will DCMS feel obliged to take it over – after all, it was in the DCMS fold until 2001?

National museums, of course, are already directly funded from the department, and the Tate gets a cut this year by £2.1m, the British Museum will lose £1.8m, English Heritage £4.8m and the Science Museum £1.476m. The MLA gets a 3% cut, and Roy Clare, the chief executive, is almost enthusiastic about it, even though much paring has been done already and their regional offices have gone. He gives short shrift to the quangos that give their chairs limos and whose CEOs go first class (not the case at the Arts Council, it has to be said). ‘The game’s up’ he tells me ‘and this round of in-year cuts is a medicine we have to swallow like grown-ups’.

The Evening Standard chose a rather nasty and unjust way of marking Dame Rosalind Savill’s annoumcement of her retirement as direct of the Wallace Collection, choosing to unearth a seven year old review by Brian Sewell who dismissed the exhibition of Impressionists - ‘What is the director thinking of with this circus-barker business promising a “spectacular exhibition” of the birth of Impressionism?’ he demanded to know. She was thinking of the partnership she was forging with other museums and galleries around t e country, in this case the Bowes in County Durham, and how to bring new audiences into what Sewell called ’the place that all who know it well want to keep to themselves as a haven shut off from the itinerant hoi polloi of London’s grungy tourist trade’. She has been at the Wallace since 1974, director since 1992, and in that time she has transformed the profile of the place without affecting its dignity or compromising its collections. Quote a feat, beginning with the centenary project which was a Millennium opening, giving a pleasant sky-lit restaurant in the original ‘bagatelle’ courtyard, and with exhibitions like Freud and Hirst turning heads, and, perhaps more in character with the place, Marie Antoinette. She will be 60 next year and with her gallery refurbishment programme well under way, it’s a good time to go ‘before I’m too old to do anything fun and useful!’ she tells me.

One job Ros Savill is well qualified for which might have been useful but not as much fun as the Wallace would have been director of the Victoria & Albert Museum, but it looks like it won’t be available as soon as expected. Talk was that Mark Jones was leaving this year, ten years in the job, his knighthood in the bag and the creation of the medieval and renaissance galleries a triumphant accomplishment, and he had his eyes on the wardenship of an Oxford college. He hasn’t got it, and instead has signed a new five year contract with the V&A.

We might, a moment after they’d seen the Imagine version of the Rime of the Ancient Mariner at he QEH last weekend. I never thought of that weird old totem of a pome as life affirming, rather the opposite, but this was. Imagine is the Southbank’s children’s festival, and the project had involved six London primary schools, 500 kids, the folk band Bellowhead, the poet and performer Lemn Sissay, the storyteller Jan Blake, the Southbank’s’ Pulse singers… tous le monde, and all put together by Shan Maclennan. It was a professional show, and not a little embarrassing for a flinty old hack who found himself at the end weeping silly buckets amidst a sea of bewildered but joyous juniors. And it wasn’t till later I discovered that this had been the brainchild of the writer and jazz musician Keith Shadwick who succumbed to cancer in the summer of 2008 so couldn’t see the final fruition of his brainwave. So if anyone wants an argument for not only preserving arts subsidy but ratcheting it up, this is all you need.