The Arts Council and the BBC have signed a partnership agreement to exchange and give access to archive material, and to share campaigns to develop new audiences for the arts.
The BBC’s new arts commissioning editor, Mark Bell, said the details of the agreement – signed by BBC chief Mark Thompson and ACE’s Alan Davey last week – were still being worked out, but the new deal would take the relationship to new areas of co-operation between the two institutions.
It follows the “memorandum of understanding” exchanged four years ago and drafted by Kim Evans, then ACE’s deputy chief executive and a former BBC producer.
The National Campaign for the Arts has launched its second arts manifesto in three years with a confident statement of intent based on a widespread consultation with arts stakeholders, said NCA director Louise de Winter.
The manifesto makes a pragmatic list of essential areas where it wants specific progress from the government.
Education: “We believe the future of the UK lies in a skilled, culturally educated and creative workforce that is innovative and adaptive to change”. Government should recognise and support the contribution, and facilitate greater collaboration between the arts and educators.
Economy: “we believe that the future of the UK’s economy lies in its capacity to create and innovate”. Government should se the sector as a long-term strategic investment.
Communities: “We believe that a stronger civil society lies in the experiences shared by a community for everyone to get involved, and that participating in the arts, crafts or cultural activities is often a first step towards greater civic engagement”> Government should make local councils write arts and culture into their strategic plans.
International standing: “We believe that the United Kingdom’s reputation in the cultural and creative sectors is vital to its overall international standing and will be core to its future success”. Government should therefore sustain current investment, and increase it when the economy improves.
A powerful voice: “We believe that art has the power to change lives and therefore its contribution to our national life should be supported and championed”. Government departments should develop a plan for creative and cultural involvement across all government departments.
News focus
NCA conference hears robust rallying cry, but also recession warnings
Although the arts must prepare for recession and inevitable funding cuts in the next year, “now is our moment”, said Melvyn Bragg in his capacity as president of the National Campaign for the Arts.
Speaking at the NCA’s conference Future Britain: arts leading the way, Lord Bragg said culture constituted the biggest single sector in the economy in terms of employment, and its importance should be championed.
The arts, He said, are critical to the development of the UK’s economy, and that by 2013 predictions suggested they would contribute as much as £85 billion a year in added value. Now as the time for every arts organisation to be on the front foot, asking how the arts could be ore-proactive.
His keynote rallying cry, made at the conference organised to launch the NCA’s new arts manifesto, came after speakers had warned that that the “phoney recession” would give way to real hardship, but that preparation could help ameliorate the effects.
Ed Vaizey, the shadow arts minister, said that he would find it difficult to make a case for cuts to arts subsidy to the Treasury because for such a relatively small amount of the money, the damage to the infrastructure and the bas political backlash would be disproportionate.
But Dame Joan Bakewell, chairman of the NCA, said that ten years of sustained funding for the arts was now under threat. “Any incoming government is going to have to make cuts” she said. “It’s not about money on the table anymore, it’s about what the arts can do for our country”.
Tony Hall, chief executive of the Royal Opera House, said the credit crunch had actually been good for the arts so far, allowing organisations to “demonstrate how good the arts are for us”. But fund-raising was gradually diminishing, though individual giving was increasing. Warning that we may be in for ten years of reduced funding, he said arts organisations should be finding new ways of developing audiences, using new communications media such as Face book.
So the message was that there needs to be more partnership – arts minister Barbara Follett said that many small arts organisations were doing similar work and should work in tandem to cut costs and increase effect – and not to let national and local government off the hook with subsidy.
Munira Mirza, director of arts for the mayor of London, said it would even be helpful if arts organisations made their own suggestions of where costs could be saved.
But politicians must be kept engaged, warned Arts & Business head of arts Verity Haines, because if subsidy went, so would private support, “overnight”. “It is the private sector that will recover first from this recession,” she said. . Businesses will be looking to cultural solutions; individuals will be looking to support dynamic artists and cultural bodies. The private sector holds the cards for many in the cultural sector”.
But audiences need to be consolidated, said Alan Davey, ACE’S CEO. “We need to be very confident and bold about the arts’ place in civil society” he said. “There’s a thirst for knowledge an understanding which we need to harness.”
In defence of commerce in culture
Earlier this month, the Fitzwilliam Museum in Cambridge turned down a grant worth £80,000 from the Art Fund because it refused to display the donor’s logo next to the artwork bought with its support. This in turn triggered the loss of a further £45,000 from the V&A and the MLA Council towards the acquisition. It’s director, Dr Timothy Potts, argued that “logos are the currency of marketing and commerce and this introduces a promotional element into the galleries that we regard as an unnecessary and unacceptable distraction - no matter how worthy the object of promotion”.
In response, CultureLabel’s Simon Cronshaw champions uniting culture institutions with mainstream consumer culture.
We may or may not disagree with the particular design or colour of logos, but without thinking or blinking, as modern cultural consumers, we understand the messages - the values, the heritage, the story - to which they provide a visual short-cut.
The Art Fund logo represents the democratic “people power” of 80,000 supporters saying that this painting is a national treasure worth saving, that individuals have gone to the effort of digging into their pockets to pay for it. Modern cultural consumers can handle – and perhaps even expect – to see messaging of this kind.
The current exhibition is a hit, but it hasn’t always been funny getting the Cartoon Museum established. Now, it’s developing.
“Time supposedly heals all wounds yet somehow the wounds inflicted on the body politic by Margaret Hilda Thatcher are still raw and after 30 years still suppurating. This may be because the narrative generated by her period in office which swept away all before it and was partly delusional still prevails to this day” - Steve Bell.
“How will the muse of history assess Margaret Thatcher? A unique phenomenon, nominally Conservative but more a believer in self-improvement and personal responsibility as the guiding principles from individual to find their way through life. The state should have a limited role and the market was a better way to resolve the distribution of resources and rewards. Such views led her to being both loved and loathed. Few can deny her achievements. She changed the political weather. – Kenneth Baker.
These are the diametrically views of two commentators, each distinguished in different ways, of the subject of the current exhibition at the Cartoon Museum, Margaret Thatcher. Both are trustees of the museum, showing that there are no biases in the journalism of the cartoon, nor in the museum devoted to it.
The exhibition, Maggie! Maggie! Maggie! which runs until July, marks the 30th anniversary of Mrs Thatcher becoming prime minister, and as the illustration here show, no holds are barred. The Guardian cartoonist Martin Rowson calls his profession “voodoo journalism”.
At the Royal Society of Arts in 1949, H M Bateman said, “Is it not high time that some official recognition of the worth of comic drawing was made? A permanent collection of some of the best examples should be got together and housed under one roof, forming a sort of National Gallery of Humorous Art. It is a fine art and a big industry, but it has no central home or headquarters, as every other art and industry on the same scale has, where the best is preserved and made available to the student and the general public.”
Quebec’s artists are a global phenomenon, from Celine Dion to the Montreal Jazz Festival, thanks to a unique government policy that values the arts as a major industry. Colin Hicks, the province’s London director of cultural services, tells Simon Tait how it works
You’ve never heard of it but, in its way, it’s one of the most powerful arms of the government. Conseil des Arts et des Lettres sounds like a quaint provincial French club for aesthetes, but without it we probably would never have had heard of Robert Le Page, Cirque du Soleil, La La La Human Steps or even Celine Dion.
For this is the Conseil des Arts et des Lettres de Quebec, the Canadian French-speaking enclave’s arts council, and all these international names started with the CALQ. The government is the provincial one sitting in Quebec City for which the CALQ acts as Arts Council, British Council and arts investment bank. It nurtures artists, supports them, promotes them, and then takes a cut of their financial success as well as standing back with the rest of the world and applauding.
“It’s a kind of a mixture of the francophone way of doing things, which is to put your cultural money where your cultural mouth is, and the North American ‘can do’ society” says Colin Hicks, Quebec’s British director of cultural services in London for the last 17 years.
With a population of 7.3m, the CALQ has an annual subsidy – or investment as they prefer to call it - of C$636m, or C$80 per head of population. That translates as £354m and compares with our own ACE’s £417 million for a population of just over 50m, or a little over £8 a head. The money comes from Quebec’s culture ministry, the only culture ministry in the world which combines the “condition of women” in its remit.
Next week a modern flat in Bethnal Green will be inaugurated as their first subsidised artist’s studio in the UK. The first tenant is Christian Quesnel, a comic strip artist in his 40s, who leaves behind in Montreal a wife and two daughters and who will have six months living and working here on a government subsidy. He will be creating new work, maybe even exhibiting if it’s appropriate, but his most important task will be more discreet: to network.
While culture in this country has only quite recently been recognised for its export value, Quebec’s artists have been seen as its chief export since the ministry was first set up in 1961, explains Hicks, a Brit who, before taking up his present post, worked for our Arts Council as the deputy director of South East Arts. As well as from the CALQ, Quebec’s touring artists also have the support of the Canada Council, the national equivalent of the Arts Council. “Because 22% of the Canadian population live in Quebec, 22% of the Canada Council touring budget goes to Quebec artists” Hicks says, “and since Quebec is a powerhouse for Canadian culture we spend a bigger share on touring – next comes Ontario and after that British Columbia.
“Quebec produces a lot of stuff, success breeds success, and Montreal, Quebec’s largest city, has become a magnet for other Canadian artists.”
But CALQ has also developed as a unique two-headed arts council: one is a conventional subvention agency, the other is an investment bank which puts money into cultural enterprises and expects to take a profit which can be reinvested. And with enterprises such Celine Dion selling 25m CDs a year, the tax return alone on any investment is impressive. Two years ago Cirque du Soleil, still based in Montreal despite its global presence, paid back its start-up subsidy is full; about 20% of Robert Lepage’s funding is still from the state, but in 2001 he gave something much more back in the form of La Caserne, his Montreal “Center of Creation” which is a rehearsal hall, workshop, flexible space, and collaborative creative centre that is also home to half a dozen companies which has been an inspiration in this country in the notion of “centres of excellence”.
The status has been politically hard fought for, and the Quebecois approach to culture is now at odds with the Conservative Canadian government’s, which is cutting its arts subsidy.
But a community that boasts 52 dance companies in Montreal alone knows that art, and particularly performance, has become a national expression. “Since 1994 cultural policy has been cross party, and has benefited hugely from not ever being a political football – which makes my job a lot easier because I don’t have to play politics and we can concentrate on the art” Hicks says. “It’s been fought for and the general populace of Quebec, not just the professional sector, do feel their culture is very much part of who they are.”
The Pleasance is 25 years old, its founder 70, but the Edinburgh venue has London sister that will take the brand to new heights
It takes time and a lot of determination, not to mention enough imagination to change your mind, to turn what started as little more than the consuming hobby of a former schoolmaster into a pillar of Fringe theatre, but it can happen. Look at the Pleasance.
It was the light in Christopher Richardson’s eye when he first went to the Edinburgh Festival in the 70s in the company of a few interested young men – Rowan Atkinson, Richard Curtis and Howard Goodall, to be precise – and decided to become a part of the Fringe.
In 1985 he and his team of volunteers created a theatre and bar out of a building he rented from Edinburgh University’s Students Association which had once been a hostel for fallen women - “I’ve always loved the thought that this was the place where they fell” - in a narrow street called The Pleasance. It now has 28 spaces with over 200 shows scheduled this year and close on 250,000 visitors, and a London Pleasance that is going to outgrow it. Pleasance is a brand.
This week the Pleasance is celebrating both its own 25th anniversary and Richardson’s 70th birthday, and it marks a new push to establish Pleasance London, in Carpenter’s Mews off the Caledonian Road behind King’s Cross as well as the 2009 Edinburgh season.
Richardson’s career is a famous theatre story. Born into an army family and a child of the public school system, he first designed a set at Wellington College where Nicholas Grimshaw, the president of the Royal Academy, and former Edinburgh Festival director Brian McMaster were his schoolmates. After a skirmish with the army, he studied furniture design under Hugh Casson at the Royal College of Art, and then went on to teach, first at a prep school and then at Uppingham where he taught Stephen Fry.
As well as sets he designs theatres, especially for schools like Roedean, but also the Young Vic in its version before Steve Tompkins’s transformation, Jersey Opera House and the Theatre on the Lake in Cumbria.
Pleasance Edinburgh became a test tube for talent, and still is. Frank Skinner and Steve Coogan shared the stage in the first year, Skinner far outshining Coogan in Richardson’s opinion, but Jack Docherty, Arthur Smith, Graham Norton, Fascinating Aida - back this year celebrating their own 25th anniversary - and even the playwright Patrick Marber (“Yes, he did stand up – what better way to hone your lines or work how to deliver them than to work as a stand up?”) all started there.
Imposingly over six feet tall, mercurial, often testy, but commanding undying love and loyalty from those who work with him, he made Pleasance Edinburgh into one of the cornerstones of the Fringe. He dresses like a retired colonel on holiday, and he once successfully disguised himself in his own theatre by the simple expedient of not wearing his panama hat. His friend Bill Burdett-Coutts, who runs another Fringe cornerstone, the Assembly Rooms, says he is an omnipresent image. “It’s tempting to think him eccentric, but in fact he’s not” he says. “What he has is a vast enthusiasm for supporting the talent that emerges through the Fringe. He also has a unique spirit, which has driven him through the years to keep the Pleasance the remarkable place it is.”
Richardson had a London flat in Caledonian Road and in 1994 he took over a nearby former omnibus shed, a vast space that had been the HQ for Circus Space. There was already a bar-restaurant downstairs, and he created a 250-seat flexible theatre space and braced himself for a surge of enthusiastic audiences.
“You see, I’d seen the railway coming (the development of the King’s Cross area just to the south), but unfortunately I was ten years too early” he admits. Under his successor it is about to blossom.
Richardson retired in 2005, handing over to another former pupil of his at Uppingham, Anthony Alderson, but is still a presence, like a favourite and indulged uncle. Alderson, who has acquired a large new space next to the theatre Richardson crated 15 years ago, has given his hopes for Pleasance London forward jolt.
“Christopher was the Pleasance, he built it and its atmosphere and then made it into a charity which was a brilliant move, but the organisation he created was always going to be bigger than he is, so it’s moving on” says Alderson. “There’s a new energy in the programming. It needed some young blood in the thing, so it’s changing a lot.”
Last year they presented Steven Berkoff’s On the Waterfront, this year the find is likely to be the Comedians Theatre Company version of School for Scandal, or possibly A British Subject, a play by the actor Nichola McAuliffe and her husband, crime reporter Don Mackay, about Afghanistan. Stand-up still has its place, and Al Murray will be back.
But outside of festival time, Alderson’s focus is going to be on Carpenter’s Mews, which he says is going to eclipse the Edinburgh operation before long.
The London Pleasance will be available for rehearsal, a convenient and flexible space for theatre, TV and film use. But principally it will be the launch pad for new work produced by new writers and directors – Rufus Norris and Edward Hall both started at the Pleasance. And beneath there is the restaurant which is requisite to successful venue management today.
“We’re going to be a kind of revolving door – people will come in doing one thing and leave doing something else because of what’s happened here” says Alderson. “And there’ll be no restrictions, only one proviso: whatever happens has got to be good. Christopher’s Pleasance is a brand now, and we have to live up to it.”
AI Profile – Munira Mirza, director of cultural policy, London
We are in the midst of the Story of London, the first major undertaking of Mayor Boris Johnson’s young and bird-like director of cultural policy, Munira Mirza.
At the launch photoshoot at the Tower of London a couple of weeks ago she seemed lost beside the bulk of the mayor and the traditionially built Beefeaters – the photogenic Wesley Kerr, seasoned broadcaster and HLF London chair, and TV historian Tristram Hunt could barely hold their own in front of a lens in such company – but this is really her show.
She says coyly that it’s just been “one of the things that’s going on, but one of the more interesting ones”, but if it’s the success that it looks like being it will be it will be down to her for conceiving, organising and bringing in the essential partners, HLF and English Heritage. This being Volunteer Week in London, one of those tings is going down to the Arts Depot in Finchley for a day’s volunteering – “well three-quarters of a day to be honest, I’m pretty busy”.
The MLA completed the final piece of its reorganisation jigsaw with the announcement that it will take over the operations of MLA London by the end of the year.
The move follows months of negotiations with the Mayor of London, who has a statutory right to nominate the chair of the MLA’s London region. Trustees of MLA London have agreed to support the changes and move to wind-up the last remaining regional MLA agency and complete the major shake-up of the museums body.
Following its reorganisation last year, the MLA has already set up area teams covering the North, West and East, each headed by a director, supported by a regional manager in each English region and a small team of area engagement advisors. A spokesman for the MLA said a similar structure would be in place for London, but it was not yet known how large that team would be. The new structure also proposes a London sub-group of MLA’s Board to focus on the delivery of priorities for the Capital.
Geoffrey Bond, chair of MLA London, said: We recognise that the best future for museums, libraries and archives in London lies in having a team integrated within MLA, increasing efficiency, working closely with the Mayor’s Office.”
• The MLA has set up a £100,000 small grants programme to promote adult informal learning . Museums, libraries and archives may apply for grants of up to £5000 for projects to be delivered by end March 2010. The deadline for applications is 17 July.
New figures from the Arts Council of Wales show that more people in Wales are attending at least one arts event once a year or more. A survey of 1,000 people in 2008 showed that this percentage had increased from 76% last year to 79%. The figures also show that There has also been an increase in attendance for arts events over the last ten years averaging at 72%, (compared with 66% ten years ago). Also significant, says the ACW, is the increase in the numbers of people from economically deprived areas attending arts events - up five percentage points to 30% in 2008, on top of a 7% increase in 2007. ACW is planning an even larger and more detailed survey of the arts to be published in 2010.
http://www.artswales.org/publications/Omnibus_Survey_2008_Final_Report(E).pdf
