‘The paintings are dreadful’ said the Times of the exhibition at the Wallace Collection, ‘Bumptiously confronting Titian, Poussin and other venerable elders’ according t0 the Observer; ‘neither eloquent nor commanding in their manipulation of paint, (the pieces) merely go backwards, spelling out a derivation’ said the FT. The critics, be assured, do not like Damien Hirst’s No Love Lost, Blue Paintings at the nationally-funded Wallace Collection until January 25. Now I hear the opprobrium is falling on the museum, and its director, for putting the exhibition on. It seems to come from the collecting quarter that thinks no painting is worth looking at until it’s 100 years old, and preferably by an Italian or French artist. I’m sure the chairman, John Ritblat, is turning a deaf ear to these moaning ninnies, but I hope he’s also turning on them and reminding them that this particular director, Dame Rosalind Savill, who has transformed the once quaint and little regarded collection in a niche of Fitzrovia that came into the national ownership almost by accident into a genuinely international resource with a series of gallery transformations and brilliantly unexpected exhibitions, including the enormously coup of a Freud show a couple of years ago. So what is she to do? The most celebrated living artist in the world, recognized by his peers who have elected him a member of the Royal Academy, who is best known for his sculpture comes along as asks if he can have an exhibition of his paintings. Does she say, ‘I think not, Mr Errum, not our sort of thing you know’? Like the stuff or not, these 25 daubings have brought more than twice the normal number of visitors to Manchester Square, something of which I hope Sir John is as proud of as he will be of Dame Rosalind’s new 18th century galleries due to open next year. And I’m sure he is aware that in the context of places like the Wallace, there is such a thing as dumbing up.

ACE’s Grants for the arts scheme is closing to new applicants between January 18 and February 26. Philip Deverell, the scheme’s director, explains why

Since it was set up in 2003, Grants for the arts has been a National Lottery success story providing over 25,000 grants from £1,000 to £200,000 to an astonishing range of artists and arts organisations all over the country.

It replaced a plethora of small funding programmes, and has enabled individual artists and arts organisations to make transformational journeys and create some of the most exceptional work of the last decade.

Recipients have created work of national and international acclaim, ranging from Cornwall based company Wildworks’ unique landscape theatre that ties communities and place together, to Roger Hiorns’ Untitled, which he recreated for this year’s Turner Prize exhibition.

We are constantly looking to improve how the programme works to ensure it offers the simplest and most cost effective way for artists to apply for funding. That’s why Grants for the arts will be undergoing a number of changes over the coming months, both improving how the scheme works for applicants and saving almost £1.5m a year in administrative costs, which will be reinvested directly into the arts. The changes are firmly focused on improving the service for applicants, providing a consistent and transparent service across the country. The eligibility criteria and our assessment criteria will remain the same.

The biggest transformation is that a new national Grants for the arts network, based in our assessment centre in Manchester, will assess and monitor all applications. The new teams will be focused around individual artforms and will maintain close links to each region. Grants for the arts has been very successful in balancing the twin challenges of regional and artform difference. Grouping the teams in this way means applications will always be assessed by an artform specialist and with an overview of arts activity across the whole country. This allows the Arts Council to make funding decisions using a national framework and ensures consistent advice and assessment is given to applicants wherever they are based.

We’re also continuing to make it easier to apply for Grants for the arts. Following the simplification of the application form in May 2008, from the 1 March artists and arts organisations will now be able to submit their applications online. We are also simplifying the information we need for applications of £10,000 or less. This will speed up the assessment process and allow us to make decisions within 6 weeks (previously only applications of up to £5,000 we’re assessed in this timeframe).

These changes will deliver nearly a quarter of the £6.5 million we are saving in administrative costs as part of our organisational review, ensuring the Arts Council runs as efficiently as possible and maximising the amount of funding going directly to the arts.

We want to implement the changeover to the new team and online process as swiftly as possible, and in order to achieve this we will be suspending new applications to the fund for a period of six weeks, between Monday 18 January and Friday 26 February.

This means that applications need to be submitted by 5pm on Friday 15 January to ensure we can make a decision before the end of March. So anyone looking to apply for a grant should plan ahead and think about the best time to submit their application, not forgetting that from 1 March they can apply online and applications up to £10,000 will be assessed within 6 weeks.

Grants for the arts plays a unique role in the country’s arts ecology, providing an important addition to central government funding for one-off projects and ideas. I believe that the changes we are implementing will make Grants for the arts faster and more effective at helping artists take risks and create truly exceptional art.

AI Profile Tony Hall, chief executive, Royal Opera House; chairman, Cultural Olympiad Board

A year ago, in his last interview before stepping down as chairman of the Arts Council, Sir Christopher Frayling showed that he had become increasingly frustrated at the lack of action on the Cultural Olympiad. “There are too many front doors” he told AI. “The way through it is to get a ringmaster, someone with a vision.”

Tony Hall is not the ringmaster. Although he stands at a new single portal to a proper national cultural representation in the 2012 Olympics, and despite the press having hailed him as the visionary required, he expects to announce the actual master of ceremonies in the next few days.

The delay in appointing the director of the Cultural Olympiad is partly his fault, he concedes. “They weren’t offering enough and this is a serious job, a huge opportunity. We want somebody who is going to shift things”. He won’t say what was on offer, but it was around £90,000 a year and now will be nearer £120,000.

“There are so many strands to pull together” he says, adding that he hopes the director will bring on other people “to help do the heavy lifting”.

“We have chance in a million to do justice to 2012 –and it is 2012 in my opinion, not 2010 or 2011 – and to demonstrate to ourselves and the world how immensely powerful the arts, culture and creative industries are in this country” he says. “I think 2012 is a showcase of arts and culture in this country, and I hope that at the end of 2012 people remember it as a year in which they were wowed by concerts and opportunities they never dreamed of.”

Tony Hall himself couldn’t have dreamed, during his long career which took him to the top in BBC News, that he would be hailed as the saviour not only of the Cultural Olympics but of the Royal Opera House.

It’s almost nine years since he arrived at Covent Garden to take charge of a dysfunctional and ailing subsidised giant. The opera house had reopened a year earlier after a protracted, costly and controversial refurbishment, thanks to the determination of his predecessor, Michael Kaiser. But it was in serious of danger of closing again.

“Michael Kaiser did a remarkable job in opening the place, but there was not a shadow of doubt that it needed to go from opening into how do you keep this thing running” Hall says.

“I felt there were two things we needed to do: One, to ensure financial stability, we needed to get funding for the seasons, simple as that; but, two, to make the debate about the opera house about the art and what we do on the stage, not about the management and the board and the building which had been dominating headlines for so many years.”

The advantage he had was that he was coming from outside the arts, and could be a wide-eyed ingénue with no background to get in his way. He brought a pragmatism, got rid of Ross Stretton after a year in post as director of the Royal Ballet and replaced him with the respected Monica Mason, and added an artistic development arm under the former ballerina Deborah Bull. He says the credit for Covent Garden’s revival should go elsewhere, however.

“It was the passion and commitment and creativity of the place and people in all sorts of different ways” he says. “It wasn’t what you saw reflected outside, where it was the fact that there had been five of me in four years that people were aware of”. He defers to the work of Tony Pappano as music director, Mason and Elaine Padmore as head of opera for keeping the artistic quality high, and later Bull in the studio theatres doing new work and giving opportunities to younger artists – “this season Thomas Arne’s Artaxerxes has been a wonderful achievement, for instance”.

“Now it’s a really good and happy combination of talents” says Hall, “and I hope that’s what people see.”

But ACE chair pulls up shadow chancellor on error

Shadow Chancellor George Osborne has given the strongest indication yet of Conservative support for the arts if the party wins the general election next year.

“Right from the top our party, we are deeply committed to the British arts sector, and we want to see it flourish and thrive in the years ahead” he said at a conference at Tate Modern. “David Cameron is personally committed to the arts and culture”.

Beyond personal commitment he said there were deeper reasons for Tory commitment to the arts. “One of the core themes of the modern Conservative Party is social responsibility, and the belief that great things can happen when governments, charities, businesses and social enterprises work together” he said. “To me, the arts are a fantastic example of this.”

He said a Conservative government would end what he called “micromanagement” of the arts from Whitehall. “Instead of being defined as quangos, beholden to Treasury diktats, I want to see publicly owned arts bodies with the independence, confidence and incentives they need to focus on what they do best: being creative” he said.

However, as well as a commitment to continued government funding of the arts, the shadow chancellor delivered a warning that there would have to be restraint. A Tory government will insist on administrative cuts in subsidised arts organisations. The Arts Council spends 11% of its annual funding on administration, and the seven main funding distributors went £120m on admin. “This is completely unacceptable” Osborne said.

Nevertheless, he raised an eyebrow at the Arts Council by saying that “arts bodies are too often penalised by the Arts Council for attracting private sector sponsorship or philanthropy – we need to turn this situation on its head”.

Dame Liz Forgan, chairman of ACE, refuted the statement. “The opposite is actually true: we like private sector support, and Arts Council grants are often a lever to fundraising” she said. “I look forward to delivering the good news to the shadow chancellor.”

‘Memorandum of Understanding’ puts relationship on new footing

The British Council and Arts Council England have signed the first operative memorandum of understanding defining areas where the two councils can work together.

A framework has been established in which the two agencies can create and develop programmes together to “maximise the impact of both inbound and outbound showcase activities” the BC said.

They will collaborate on Unlimited, the Cultural Olympiad programme to include disabled artists in hcih the BC will support collaboration between foreign and UK artists, and Points of Culture, a continuation of the BC’s Artists Links Brazil programme, due to end next year but with a view to making new partnerships between Olympic host countries (Rio de Janeiro is to host the 2012 Games). They will also work together on music showcases

Leadership programmes operated by ACE, the Clore Foundation and the BC will host a joint symposium in 2010, and the two councils are together planning a London International Festival Symposium for 2012 as a platform for “a major public conversation on what it means to be an artist in the world today”.

And a Cultural Diplomacy Group has been set up under the MOU to bring together the four UK Arts Councils and Visiting Arts who will meet quarterly to look at how the UK’s culture can be presented on the world stage.

Culture Minister Margaret Hodge has announced the final list of cities which will compete for the title of UK City of Culture in 2013.
Fourteen bids have made the list. They include 11 single cities and one county, Cornwall. Portsmouth and Southampton’s joint bid is included, as is Ipswich’s bid with its surrounding districts in the Haven Gateway. They were whittled down from 33 bids although some bidders, like Aberdeen, subsequently withdrew:

The Full list is
Barnsley
Birmingham
Carlisle
Chichester
Cornwall
Derry
Durham
Hull
Ipswich and the Haven Gateway
Norwich
Portsmouth and Southampton
Sheffield
Southend
Swansea

The list of judges who will make up the Independent Advisory Panel, chaired by Phil Redmond, was also announced.They are:

. Derrick Anderson CBE
. Prof John Ashton CBE
. Anna Carragher
. Margaret Evans
. Lauren Laverne
. Rotha Johnston CBE
. Robert Palmer
. The judges will make their recommendations in the summer.

If a museum wants to gain the heart and soul of a family, it’s often easier if they’ve won over their stomach first. Dea Birkett explains
more…
I’ve just returned from a delicious conference in Brussels on museum
and food, organized by Eetiket. Eetiket is a vibrant young
organization, dedicated to making the eating experience for families
more fun and more educational, especially in museums.
(www.eetiket.be).

Among their wonderfully simple ideas is to have
special VIP reservation cards on museum café tables, targeted
entirely at children and families. It’s just one low cost way in
which families can be made to feel welcome the minute they walk in.

I’ve always thought museums don’t make nearly enough of eating.
Everyone enjoys a good meal. And there’s rarely a collection that
doesn’t contain reference to or images of food, whether it’s Warhol’s
pop art soup cans or Cezanne’s bowls of ripening fruit. But the few
who do have food trails often begin them in one gallery and end them
in another, or even in the entrance hall. But if the aperitif to a
food trail is the café, and, after winding through several courses of
galleries, it ends up at a table there too, then you obviously
enormously increase your retail opportunities.

It’s difficult to wander into a place where people are supping and dining without wanting to do so yourself.

But museums are rather sniffy about food, as if it might leave a bad
aftertaste on their precious collection. It’s something that has to
be not only kept out of the galleries, but divorced from them. I have
yet to find – although I’m sure you’ll correct me – a museum or
gallery which has objects displayed between its café’s tables.

Of course, it used to be like this with learning centres. They’d be
tucked away in the museum basement, so the noise and dirt children
were presumed to produce wouldn’t get in the way of the serious work of the museum upstairs.

That is changing, and young people are now allowed to bring their paints, pencils and sticky fingers into more and more galleries. But last summer, wandering around one national museum with my kids, I took out a little bottle of water so they could have a cooling sip on a very hot day. The room warden swooped on us immediately; we were told quite clearly that water was not allowed in the gallery. In fact, it’s often difficult to get hold of it anywhere in a museum.

One of the 20 points on the Kids in Museums Manifesto is about providing unlimited, free tap water in a museum café, a continual plea from visitors with small children.

There are many missed opportunities for museums to make their
catering so much more than a meal. Some, such as Museums Sheffield or the British Museum have themed menus, renaming familiar food. At Sheffield’s Bugs exhibition, meatballs became ‘Dung Beetle Balls’.
For the Moctezuma exhibition, in the Court Restaurant in the British
Museum, cheddar nachos become ‘Selection of Aztec Bites’.

But is re-titling and redesigning your menu enough? How does that
really make the eating experience relate to and be part of the whole
visit? In the National Museum of the American Indian in Washington
DC, the Mitsitam Native Foods café cooks traditional Native American
food over timber fires. General Manager Larry Ponzi says, “The menu
is designed to be consistent with the mission of the museum, which is
to educate visitors about Native-American life and culture.” I wonder
how many British museum cafés are included in the museum’s mission?

Augmenting the Mitsitam’s educational mission are little ‘food facts’
left on the tables each day, such as ‘Did You Know … Chocolate
originated with the Mayas?’

It’s a simple idea to make visitors talk about what’s happening
throughout the venue. Meals, like museums, are great places to
stimulate intergenerational conversations. During the Big Lunch
initiative last summer, the Eden Project suspended giant
‘conversation starters’ from the café ceiling, prompting families to
reminisce and discuss food and where it came from.
These rare venues realize, as few in Britain do, that families are
often led by their stomachs.

As one family with young children
commented in making their nomination for this year’s Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award, “The café has to be welcoming. It’s probably the only place in the museum we’ll go to twice during one visit. Everything else we just see once.”

What a difference a café can make to a family visit became clear
during the judging process for last year’s Family Friendly Award,
when families were sent out to road test anonymously the shortlisted
museums. One large judging family went into the shortlisted Dulwich
Picture Gallery’s café, and began to move a couple of tables closer
together so they could all sit as one group. They were immediately
told they weren’t allowed to do that. The adults had to sit
separately, on different tables, each looking after some of the kids.
Dulwich Picture Gallery did not win.

The first point on the Kids in Museums Manifesto is “Be welcoming –
from the café to the curator.” If a museum wants to gain the heart
and soul of a family, it’s often easier if they’ve won over their
stomach first.

To order a free copy of the Kids in Museums Manifesto, go to
www.kidsinmuseums.org.uk.
Follow the progress of the Guardian Family Friendly Museum Award on
twitter – www.twitter.com/kidsinmuseums

Kennedy’s move
The bombshell at the A&B Awards last night had nothing to do with any of the winners, or even Colin Tweedy’s speech (for him, pretty bland – is he anticipating political change?). No, it was the sudden announcement by the lady herself of the chair’s resignation. Helena Kennedy is leaving with immediate effect, one year into her second three year term, but even though she only told A&B two weeks ago I’m assured there’s no acrimony. ‘I think she wanted to clear her decks for another big job, either with this government or the next one, but she keeps her own counsel and no-one has any idea what it is’ says my source. It’s not the first tome the Labour peer has looked outside the A&B orbit for the next job: she was runner-up to Liz forgan to head up the Arts Council last year. Her interim replacement at A&B is Steven Williams, a director of Unilever and the man who engineered the hiuge Unilver sponsorship of the ongoing Turbine Hall exhibition programme at Tate Modern. One thing for sure it that she won’t be going back to the British Council, the chair of which is also currently vacant and which she left gto maker way for Neil Kinnock. After the experiences with the Bedwelty Kid I gather the word in Spring Gardens I ‘no more politicians’. Meanwhile, A&B are going to have to advertise, and probably hope that Williams applies – he was already on the A&B board and knows the ropes - and the Veronica Wadley doesn’t.

Forgan stirs it up
Another job Kennedy won’t be going for, then, is chair of Arts Council London, specially now that Forgan at ACE has upped the ante. Following Mayor Boris’s announcement that he won’t leave the post vacant after the debacle of Wadley, ex-editrix of the Standard and Boris cheerleader in chief in his election last year, but will go through the very possibly prolix appointment process, Forgan has imposed an interim chair. He is Ajay Chowdhry, the artistic director of Rented Space Theatre and CEO of the digital media company Enqii. Forgan didn’t ask for this situation, she was plunged into it by the leaked letter from her to Ben Bradshaw about the unsuitability of Wadley compared with the other candidates, but as they know at the BBC, the Guardian and HLF, she’s a feisty lady, and I gather that in her first week as the ACE’s new exec director of media etc, Alison Cole, has strongly advised her to cool it, but she stil felt constrained last night to declare at the TMA conference that she wouldnlt let the row dent the arm’s length principle, it was not a political issue, and ‘we should be allowed to get on with out jobs’…

Missing Boris
It was a busy night last night, and Boris chose to have a drinks party for journalists at his City Hall offices. Sadly, he hadn’t turned up after an hour and many left without the beneit of the mayor’s wisdom.

ACE is about to create a new system that will revolutionise the way it funds its RFOs. Simon Tait reports
Peer review - the notion of assessment of subsidised arts organisations by those working in the same creative orbit – has been talked for some years, and was seen merely as an evaluation by someone who was not a bureaucrat, viz. Genista McIntosh’s review of the Arts Council in 2007.

But when Brian McMaster mentioned it in his report on excellence in the arts for the Culture Secretary, his definition was more refined: effectively, judgement by those working at the same coalface.

That was the meaning that Alan Davey, the man whose role in the subsidised arts some believe equates to that of Hercules in the Augean Stables, chose to adopt when he announced a year ago: “All of us in the arts will need courage, boldness and ambition. To do that we’ll need knowledge – and not just from the Arts Council. We’ll need the help of practitioners and audiences’.

The peer review system the new ACE chief executive started then was to be a process whereby the Arts Council would no longer be seen as the remote judge of artistic performance of regularly funded arts organisations (RFOs) on which an annual grant would depend – a process which had got it into repeated trouble over the years, to the point of being sued at least once, and latterly in the now notorious triennial investment review of two years ago. This was to start a new age of self assessment.

Davey announced the consultation process, the pilots and the selection that would lead to peer review, which would be part of the self assessment ethic.

The consultation is now over, the pilots (in the north west and south east) have been deployed and analysed, the jobs advertised, interviewing has happened, and the applicants are just how being told whether or not they have made it. In January 150 of them will be announced, in March/April they will start work, and after some bedding in their assessments will come full into force in informing funding decisions for the 2013/14 financial year.

They will be the final phase of a revolution which began not with that Davey lecture at the RSA in November 2008, but with McMaster’s report on excellence 11 months earlier. It’s a concept being firmly grasped by both the national office’s directors of strategy and regional arts councils that will take the lead.

“It’s an important new dimension” says Susanna Eastburn, the Arts Council’s director of music strategy who is in the process of appointing 21 assessors. “It will get us closer to the companies and performers to have someone else informing the process.”

AI ProfileRoy McEwan, MD, Scottish Chamber Orchestra
Discreet whispers in the Whitehall corridors of power about “direct funding” make arts administrators write to The Times and politicians hit the denial button. Arts funding in England will remain at arm’s length, it’s safe in Labour/Conservative hands, the flagships will not be treated as special cases.

Not in Scotland, though. There, five arts organisations are now directly funded by the Scottish government, and Roy McEwan runs one of them. He is a veteran as far as running a single arts organisation is concerned, more than 16 years as managing director of the Scottish Chamber Orchestra.

A new era starts for the SCO on December 11 when their new young principal conductor, Robin Ticciati, makes his debut at Glasgow City Halls with a programme of Mahler, Brahms ands from the later 20th century Henze.

But the 26-year-old Londoner’s arrival is just the latest of many changes McEwan has seen in his time.

He took over from Ian Ritchie with the SCO on a high, an international reputation and a pioneering education programme, and he has developed it to even greater heights as far as quality of work and audience building is concerned. “You recognise some of the changes when they’re happening” he says, “but a lot of it you don’t realise until you look back.”

Born in Dumfries his career began in London after a degree at the London School of Economics, as the house manager of a small London theatre, and them manager of the Whitechapel Gallery before becoming administrator of the MacRobert Arts Centre at Stirling, then as its director. In 1993 joined the SCO.

“The biggest change was a couple of years ago when we moved to direct funding from the Scottish government. It gave us a greater feeling of stability, but a sense of place as well, as flagships and as cultural ambassadors.”