Cronyism isn’t nice but it had become a fact of life – barely an eyebrow was raised when Sue Woodford became chair of Arts Council London and would therefore have a big say in funding for the Southbank Centre, then chaired by her husband Clive Hollick – and the Nolan Rules about political interference were put in place to stop it. But perhaps they weren’t designed for BoJo. It is in the Mayor of London’s ‘gift’, as they liked to say as if he’s some kind of Medici, to appoint Lady Hollick’s successor, and he needn’t have consulted anybody. He wanted Veronica Wadley, who as editor of the Standard had been his cheerleader in his election campaign last year. He even mentioned it to Arts Council England chair Liz Forgan who apparently had no objection. But then he decided to make things fair and above board and suggested to the DCMS that they go through a short-listing process anyway, even though it was not necessary, and Ben Bradshaw agreed. A short listing committee was put together – Forgan, Johnson’s culture chief Munira Mirza and the former civil servant David Durie. They got together a long list of four to whittle down to three who would then be interviewed by two Greater London Assembly civil servants. So they wheeled in the four: Wadley; Patrick McKenna, who used to run the Really Useful Group; Tim Marlow, Sky’s voice of contemporary art and director of White Cube; and Nicholas Snowman, former boss at the Southbank, at Glyndebourne and now at Strasbourg Opera. Unsurprisingly, given the field, two of the board decided that Wadley was the least well qualified for the job. 0irza thought she was perfect, and so did Boris who threw his toys out of the pram when Wadley’s name duly didn’t go forward, insisting that an all male line-up was not acceptable (he’s very PS, Boris) she should be considered, and Ben Bradshaw, the culture secretary, accused him of breaching Nolan. Happily, I gather that Boris is now rowing back from his decision to leave the post vacant ‘until there’s a new culture secretary’.
News focus
Arts Council England close the books today, October 9, on their Sustain programme, devised to help arts organisations survive the recession, after just four months.
With a week’s notice, today is the last date for applications to the £40m fund from lottery money, but it may not be the end of ACE’s rescue mission. When the last grants are made in November the council will assess whether more help, and perhaps a Sustain 2, will be necessary, and if so where the funds would come from.
“The speed at which Sustain’s funds are being awarded is indicative of just how much the fund was needed” said Alan Davey, ACE’s chief executive. “And there are still big challenges ahead – we need to look beyond the recession to the long term future of the arts in this country and to maintaining and developing their world class quality through continued high levels of public and private investment.”
ACE chair Dame Liz Forgan announced the scheme in April this year, to provide extra financial and technical support over and above existing funding. “Of course, we understand that the national debt has to be tackled, but a few million off the arts budget is going to make no appreciable difference to that task” She said then. “On the other hand, it could undermine years of creative and financial investment. The Arts Council will do all it can to keep that investment in place.”
In the fourth round of awards there are 16 beneficiaries with grants ranging from £940,000 to £84,900, most of them to help with falling box office revenue and disappearing income from trusts and foundations but also, as in the case of the Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, education, community and audience development work.
The money is paid over two years and projected to cover the estimated period of the effects of the recession, “meaning the positive effects of the programme will continue to be felt up to March 2011” said the ACE’s spokeswoman, adding that the indications were that applications were diminishing and that those organisations most in need were being helped.
To date ACE has handed out £17m from the National Lottery fuelled fund in 52 awards from 151 applications, and there are applications still being considered worth £35m for the last £23m. The last tranch of grants from Sustain is expected to be made in November.
The latest beneficiaries from the Sustain Fund are:
Northampton Theatres Trust, £940,000
Bournemouth Symphony Orchestra, £568,000
Salisbury Playhouse, £400,000
Northern Stage, Newcastle, £376,000
National Youth Orchestra of Great Britain, £350,000
Battersea Arts Centre, London, £295,000
The Roses Theatre, Tewkesbury £261,300
Almeida Theatre Co., London, £175,000
St George’s Bristol, £171,000
Eastside Educational Trust, London, £150,000
Camden Arts Centre, £140,000
Barbican Theatre, Plymouth, £135,300
Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival, £117,700
The Poetry Trust, Suffolk, £102,000
Music Beyond Mainstream, North Yorkshire, £94,000
Arts Depot Trust, London, £84,900
Theatre to go dark ‘to take stock’
The Hackney Empire, rescued by a £15m refurbishment programme and reopened four years ago, is to close in January “for a period of reflection” on its financial crisis.
Interim chief executive Clarie Middleton said the theatre would go dark in January, after the pantomime run, and staff will be made redundant retaining only a skeleton team. Middleton, who replaced Simon Thomsett in August, said the plans were for the Empire to reopen for the 2010-11 panto season.
The Empire, built a century ago by Frank Matcham as a music hall, was refurbished after a passionate fund-raising campaign led by TV personality Griff Rhys Jones.
Revenue funded by both the Arts Council and hackney Council, Middleton denied that pressure had been put on the board to close. She said the situation was similar to that at the Bristol Old Vic two years ago which closed while a new business plan and future artistic programme was devised, and has now reopened. Middleton also presided over the Bristol Old Vic’s reorganisation, and that at the Northcott Theatre, Exeter.
“The idea is that we stop, take a breath and take stock of the way the organisation operates” she told The Stage newspaper. She said she hoped that it would be flourishing again in time for the 2012 Olympic Games.
“This is the board’s plan” said an ACE spokesman. “Of course, we and the London Borough of Hackney have been in very close conversation with them for quite a considerable period of time, but the changes that are taking place at the Empire and the measures that they are having to bring into make that happen is the plan of the board.”
For 40 years the Centre for Young Music has given young Londoners free quality music teaching, but not it’s moving into a new league
It is a rather belated coming of age that arrives at 40, but that is what has happened to the Centre for Young Musicians. The centre, once described by the Times Educational Supplement as “one of London’s most valuable musical assets”, is leaving its most recent parent, Westminster City Council, and joining the City of London Corporation’s Guildhall School of Music and Drama, and the grown-up world of the Barbican Centre.
At last one element of the CYM is already familiar with that august venue. The London Schools Symphony Orchestra is one of its ensembles and is an habitué of the Barbican Hall, but the formal link – announced at the Barbican during the LSSO’s concert two weeks ago – moves the centre into a new realm with infinite new possibilities.
The CYM was created in 1970 by the old Inner London Education Authority to give Saturday morning music training to talented young musicians between the rages of eight and 18 from London boroughs, for free: lessons and access to instruments were provided.
It has been a unique catalyst for young Londoners, some of whom could not be reached by conventional education but have found inspiration through music. Most come from inner city state schools, one on three from economically disadvantaged backgrounds, half from black or ethnic minority families.
The CYM Saturday Centre gives weekly tuition in instrumental work, ensembles, orchestras, singing and general musicianship - 72 ensembles meet on a Saturday and 7 choirs. There are also open access holiday courses and CYM-associated junior centres in 13 London boroughs, as well as the LSSO and London Youth Wind Band advanced ensembles.
It is the closest thing we have to Venezuela’s sensational Simon Bolivar Youth Orchestra which thrilled sell-out audiences at the Royal Festival Hall earlier this year, and the move could bring it even closer.
AI Profile
Gregory Nash Artistic director, The Point
Well, today Gregory Nash is artistic director of The Point at Eastleigh. On Monday he will be executive director of the Young Vic in the kind of translation from regional local authority arts management to a national role that, until quite recently, was considered impossible.
He will be back at Eastleigh, though, in November for the opening of the latest development phase of The Point, the performance venue set in the old council offices of Eastleigh, the 19th century Hampshire railway town.
Nash has not only fulfilled the borough’s ambitions for The Point, he has changed them and created a unique cultural facility in the four years he has been there. The new building has a sprung floor studio with movable seating for 80, living accommodation for eight artists, a foyer, conference room, roof garden and outdoor cinema, designed by the Hampshire practice of Chaplin Farrant Wiltshire.
His move with 17 years as a dancer and choreographer in his background to the Young Vic, another modern phenomenon of a venue under the hand of David Lan, comes as a surprise to at least one section of the cultural community.
“No-one in theatre thought it was in any way weird” he says. “People in the dance world were very surprised because they assumed dance people can’t cross over, and there is a slight gleefulness that here’s a sign that they can actually get out of the dance ghetto”, something to which we will return.
Actually, Gregory Nash’s career has dodged between theatre and dance in a hitherto unconventional way. Born the son of emigrants – first from Ireland to England, then to Australia and finally back to England – he was brought up in Worthing where the then important Connaught Theatre had a powerful youth drama section, which he joined. An inspirational movement teacher helped the physically agile boy who was not interested in sport to find his way, “so I came to dance through theatre”.
THE OTHER POINT OF VIEW
Is it time of the arts to take a stand over child porn? Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, thinks so.
The arts world is wallowing in a moral mire. Last month, I wrote about explicit images being portrayed in an exhibition at the Hayward Gallery, and the warnings attached to it. Within a few weeks visitors to another gallery had another notice to read: Tate Modern put up a warning about the Richard Prince photograph of a naked 10-year-old Brooke Shields, part of their Pop Life exhibition. Already no one seems to remember exactly what the words were, but the Tate says it read, ‘Something like … “Visitors may find the image in this room challenging in content.”’
But words can’t protect you from the power of an image. Saying it’s going to offend isn’t a defence against it offending. In the “photograph of a photograph”, Shields’ pre-pubescent body is smothered in oil as she stands in a marble bathtub, her hair and face heavily made up. Although the picture had been displayed without comment at the Guggenheim two years earlier, Scotland Yard felt it was their duty to intervene under Britain’s obscenity laws. Officers from the obscene publications unit arrived on the first morning the exhibition was going to be open to the public (30 September) and advised the image be removed. Interestingly, the press had already seen the photograph at an earlier opening without any legal intervention, as had those invited along to the private view the night before. Are arts correspondents and Tate sponsors of sounder moral mind than those who pay to enter an exhibition?
The Tate is very shy about the exact circumstances of the image’s removal from the gallery wall. They won’t even confirm whether the officers arrived with a search warrant. All they’ll say is that the “room is temporarily closed while in discussion with the police”.
What sort of discussions? And shouldn’t these discussions be held in public, not between the authorities and a single museum? Surely the issues raised here – the relevance of context in displaying difficult images, permission from those portrayed, obscenity, censorship - are pertinent to every gallery. It’s disappointing that there has been, as far as I know, very little attempt at any open debate about this removal. Couldn’t the Tate have used its very powerful position within the cultural sector to lead on such a debate, welcoming the opportunity to bring these issues out into the open and get visitor feedback? Instead, it’s working towards a few handshakes and secret agreements behind closed doors.
The other big child abuse story connected to the arts in the last month has been handled very differently. Movie director Roman Polanski has been arrested in Switzerland and is facing extradition to the US on charges of raping a minor in 1977. Here, the arts have come out in support of their own. It’s a shameful stance. Here’s a man who has pleaded guilty to having unlawful sex with a 13-year-old while also, undeniably, making a few very good films. But just as putting up a warning isn’t a defence against displaying obscene images, so making groundbreaking movies isn’t a defence against child rape.
To anyone outside the cultural elite, the case for Polanski’s extradition seems clear cut. The removal of the image at the Tate Modern isn’t so simple. But this instinct behind being vociferous about the film director and ignoring the removal of the photograph is the same – to close ranks. Both being outspoken in support of Polanski and silent over Brooke Shields only makes the public more suspicious of the artistic community, believing it to be small and self-serving.
Only when the creative industries open tricky issues up to public debate will they gain the trust of their visitors and viewers. Sadly, these two events have shown that they’re incapable of doing so. Yet.
Dea Birkett, director of Kids in Museums, wants to put children where they belong – with the rest of us
Who doesn’t want more for kids? Eureka!, the National Children’s Museum in Halifax, is hoping to develop a children’s museum for London in the developing King’s Cross area.
I know it sounds like an odd position for the director of an organisation called Kids in Museums, but I prefer places which aren’t just for the young. There’s a difference between more opportunities for children in museums, and more children’s museums. I personally believe that kids have the best time in a museum when there are also lots of adults there, also having a good time.
But it’s not only better for the kids. My problem is that children’s museums can be slightly tedious for grown ups. I like crayoning as much as any other middle-aged mum, but I don’t really want to do it in a museum. And in terms of having conversations with my kids – which must be at the heart of any family visit – I’d be far more likely to hold them around some astounding historic or scientific object than buttons and levers.
The children’s museums movement, arising from the States, quite rightly “embraces the concept of learning through play” and “characterised as being hands-on and multi-sensory”. But why do we need a separate building solely dedicated to these activities, rather than incorporating it in to every gallery, in every museum?
Of course, much of the work being done in children’s museums is innovative and important, often attracting new audiences and families. Discover in East London focuses on storytelling, with a Story Garden and Story Trail through the Sparkly River and over the Creaky Bridge. Eureka! in Halifax was the first children’s museum in Britain and is hugely successful, attracting five million visitors since its opening.
This is all fabulous work, and perhaps particularly necessary over 20 years ago, when Eureka! was founded. But is this the future? If we are going to have a new museum, should primary school pupils be its target audience? Other learning institutions are becoming more inclusive. Special schools are being phased out in favour of mainstream inclusion, and extended schools are being developed for all the community, of any age. So is it the right path to persist with separate museums for small children?
But age apartheid isn’t confined to the walls of the new museum itself. Eureka! London will be housed in the King’s Cross “Children’s Cluster”, advertised as “an environment that is safe and harmonious”. I’m not sure exactly what that means. Shouldn’t everywhere be safe for children, not just a “cluster”? And safe from whom and what? It’s a horrible thought that all adults entering will have to be CRB checked and all surfaces so soft there can never be a scuffed knee.
The additional question is whether central London needs a new museum, especially one which will, presumably, charge an entrance fee. There’s already over 240 museums in the capital, many of them free. Perhaps money (an estimated £35million) and effort would be better spent enhancing and, possibly, enlarging some of these, rather than starting again from scratch. Why not have dedicated children’s facilities, areas and activities within what we already have? The Walker Gallery in Liverpool, for example, has an excellent Big Art area, especially aimed at very young children. Other museums, including the Tate, are considering using a similar model. And why let those museums that don’t now cater for children off the hook so easily? Why give them the chance to point up the street and say, if you want playful, hands-on activities for kids, why don’t you go there? We’ve got more serious, adult things to do.
I’m all for more kids in more museums. But let’s have more play, more learning and more interactivity in all museums, not just those housed in a Children’s Cluster.
This summer, the Royal Society of Arts published its Education Charter. Paul Collard, chief executive of Creativity, Culture & Education, explains why he is supporting the Charter:
This summer, Creativity, Culture & Education (CCE) published “Creative Partnerships: Changing Young Lives”, a compilation of independent research reports and case studies investigating the impact of the government’s flagship creative learning programme, Creative Partnerships. This collection of reports also included a think piece about the RSA’s initiative in publishing a Charter for education, inviting organisations and individuals to support its aims.
In essence the Charter describes the good practice that CCE is already bringing into schools through Creative Partnerships. We believe that awakening a love of learning at an early age is crucial to continuous learning and development throughout life. The Creative Partnerships programme, which is delivered nationally by CCE, fosters innovative long-term partnerships between schools and creative professionals, including artists, performers, architects, multimedia developers and scientists. These partnerships inspire young people, teachers and creative professionals to challenge how they work and experiment with new ideas – in turn leading to young people leaving school with improved attainment levels as well as that all important love of learning.
A group of MPs have called for the MLA to be stripped of its responsibilities for libraries.
The All Party Parliamentary Group on libraries claims that there is too much confusion amongst various bodies with responsibilities for library governance and leadership. It wants the government to establish a Library Development Agency for England with a remit to champion libraries, share good practice and provide leadership. It also wants to end the split between government funding for libraries and functional responsibility which is currently shared by two government departments, the DCLG and the DCMS. A single government department should have both responsibilities, says the group.
The move follows an by the all party group, which was funded by the National Literacy Trust and the Chartered Institute of Library and Information Professionals, which has a history of clashes with the MLA.
Roy Clare, chief executive of the MLA said:
“The MLA has a job to do and is clear about its remit as the government’s lead agency for developing and improving England’s museums, libraries and archives. We are seeing daily evidence of the advantages of integrating library, museum and archive services with each other – and also with other forms of local service delivery. We see this convergence as both cost-effective and offering better quality services. We doubt that there is wisdom now in forcing libraries backwards into silos.”
The DCMS is due to report on the results of its own review on library services later this year.
Bletchley Park, the historic site of secret British code breaking activities during World War Two and birthplace of the modern computer, has finally won approval for a grant bid from the Heritage Lottery Fund.
The HLF has agreed a first round pass of £460,500. This means that can now move on to the next stage of their development plans before a firm funding decision is made by HLF on a further bid for £4.1million. The museum wants to carry out urgent repairs to key buildings, improve visitor facilities and expand the site’s educational programmes
Other major award winners sharing £13.3 million worth of grants are All Souls Church in Bolton, the National Maritime Museum in Greenwich, Vindolanda in Northumberland and Stowe Landscape Gardens in Buckinghamshire. Wentworth Castle in Yorkshire also get £220,000 towards a potential application of nearly £2.5million to restore a rare Grade II* Victorian conservatory.
Carole Souter, chief executive of the Heritage Lottery Fund, said:
“Today’s projects are perfect examples of the breadth of our heritage: a 19th-century church in the heart of Bolton; a maritime archive of global importance; a Roman settlement providing a snapshot of the ancient world; and spectacular 18th-century landscape gardens.” The Bletchley Park Trust has made a number of previous attempts to secure Lottery funding and earlier this year won £1 million from English Heritage and Milton Keynes Council to carry out urgent repairs. The Trust estimates it needs £10 million in all for its proposals.
