Arts & Business has launched a Private Policy for art “to ensure the British mixed economy model is not damaged by the recession”, said CEO Colin Tweedy. He said the significance of private giving was too often overlooked, but needs to be recognised and encouraged to help arts organisations through the economic downturn.
The initiative will include a council of leaders in both business and arts communities to act as a task force to advise on policy and practice; pushing for the reintroduction of the for the matching grant scheme that ran from 1984-2008; more philanthropists being honoured through The Prince of Wales Medal for Arts Philanthropy across the country to highlight giving of all sorts and sizes; and Leading On, joining Futurecity Arts to help develop the government’s initiatives to revitalise our high streets hit by the recession by filing empty spaces with art.
The new policy follows the results of a survey reported on in AI 230, which showed that while the majority of arts organisations had so far experienced no ill effects from the recession, others were seeing important finding sources falling away and were preparing for a bigger impact.
“Many in the arts are facing real difficulties - our own new research figures show over 60% of smaller arts bodies experiencing a fall in business investment” Tweedy said. “The private sector’s contribution to culture will recover more quickly than the public sector. And we believe that arts sponsorship will pick up faster than sport – 56% of decision makers now ranked the arts first choice.”
Arts Council England is to insulate vulnerable arts organisations and artists from the recession with a £44.5m fast track scheme mostly devoted to a new fund, Sustain.
The short, sharp initiative is for two years and the money will be generated by radically reducing lottery spending over the period.
Sustain will be an open application fund of £40m available to artists and organisations suffering directly because of the recession. There will also be a £4m increase in the lottery-fuelled Grants for the Arts budget, which partly targets individuals, and £500,000 to enable empty retail spaces to be used for artistic activities as part of the government’s Town Centres Initiative, reported on in AI 230.
Grants from £75,000 to £3 million will be awarded over, initially, 2009/10 and 2010/11. Any arts organisation can apply but priority will be given to those who are seen as vital to ACE’s mission of “great art for everyone”. The 2009/10 budget for Grants for the Arts will be increased from £52 to £54 million and will rise again in 2010/11 to £56 million.
Announcing the scheme, ACE chair Dame Liz Forgan said the package was devised to help the arts sector fulfil its wider social role as well as its cultural mikssion.
“The real challenge for the arts sector is not to ask ‘what is the government going to do to help us?’ but ‘what can we do to help the country weather and recover from this downturn?’” she said.
“Showing that we can make a real contribution in even the most difficult of times will be the best case we can make for continued public investment in the arts through – and just as importantly – beyond the recession.”
The increase is in contrast to the £4m cut in the arts grant for next year resulting from the Budget’s £20m reduction to the DCMS subvention for 2010-11. ACE has said it will absorb the cut without passing it on to clients.
“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. On the other hand, it could undermine years of creative and financial investment” Forgan said. “The Arts Council will do all it can to keep that investment in place. We cannot protect artists from the realities of recession, but we can be as imaginative, open and useful as possible in our efforts to get us all through this with minimal damage to the creative life of this country.”
Vanessa Swann was appointed chief executive, Cockpit Arts in 2002, and since then she has transformed the organisation from a managed workspace to a creative business incubator. In June she launches a new campaign to support designer-makers.
How did Cockpit Arts come about, what does it do and what is the origin of the name?
Our Holborn incubator is located in Cockpit Yard, WC1, which is the site of a former 18th century cock fighting pit frequented by nobility and at one time owned by a cabinetmaker. Cockpit has grown from its small beginnings in the late 80s as a volunteer-run initiative, involving just a few designer-makers, to become the UK’s only creative business incubator for designer-makers. There has always been an informal cross-fertilisation of skills, contacts and ideas in the (mostly) shared studios, but today we offer a package of services to help designer-makers grow successful businesses. Presently there are 165 businesses across the two sites, including a healthy mix of start up businesses, second career designers and established businesses seeking to move to the next stage of growth. We provide them with affordable studio space, intensive in-house business development support, a rolling programme of workshops and seminars, and access to finance schemes and selling and promotional opportunities, as well as office and IT facilities.
What is “Maker Difference”?
Our new campaign to raise awareness of, and encourage support for, UK designer-makers. We want to spread the word that buying beautifully crafted work is a sustainable alternative to throwaway shopping culture and can even have investment potential. Most importantly, it is also hugely satisfying and can be great fun. To get people involved, starting from June 12 we will be running lively open studios events. Visitors can see behind the scenes and meet designer-makers and there will be special attractions such as tours, screenings, activities for children and adults and pop-up cafes. There are more events to come later in the year as well as lots of great online content at www.cockpitarts.com.
Transitions Dance Company, founded by the late Bonnie Bird, is celebrating its 25th year. David Waring, its artistic director for the past four years but previously company director and a dancer in the company in the 1987 cohort, recalls the founder and assesses what has happened to TDC in its first quarter century.
Since it’s first tour in 1983/84 over 230 dancers have performed with the company, working with 80 choreographers and travelling to more than 130 venues around the world. Alumni include choreographers Matthew Bourne, Luca Silvestrini, Tom Dale, Stine Nelson (director of CandoCo), Paul Johnson (director of Dance Ireland), Ashley Page (director of Scottish Ballet) and Nicky Molloy (head of dance & performance, Southbank Centre).
Our founder, Bonnie Bird, continued as artistic director until her death in 1995 and had been one of the original members of the Martha Graham Dance Company in New York in the 1930s, but she is best known as a passionate and ground-breaking dance educator. She was the first official teacher of Martha Graham’s technique - pupils including Merce Cunningham and Remy Charlip - and collaborated with composers such as John Cage and Lou Harrison. She began a long association with Laban (then the Laban Centre for Movement and Dance) in 1974 and it was here that she founded TDC in 1983. She was the force behind the company - there to keep things on track.
Bonnie cared deeply about dance as an art form and the artists who lived and breathed it. Like her, I have always found it a privilege to work with the young performers in TDC who either have some experience in the dance profession or are about to enter it. I find their energy, curiosity and commitment to devising and performing new (and remade) work particularly exciting – these dancers really want to do it! Bonnie also wanted the art form to develop, which meant supporting and nurturing emerging choreographers – giving them a platform to show their work using a company dedicated to developing, and challenging, the talents of the dancers in it. By commissioning new work from outstanding choreographers and recruiting dancers emerging onto the international dance scene, TDC continues to contribute to the development of contemporary dance.
AI Profile – Nick Capaldi, chief executive, Arts Council of Wales
It was a big enough challenge, taking on Arts Council Wales, which only three years ago was fighting for its very existence against an ambitious fledgling Welsh Assembly. When he arrived, seven months ago, Nick Capaldi had no idea that an even bigger test was about to descend: recession was about to threaten its very purpose – ensuring the development of the arts in the principality.
“I’d no idea the bottom was going to fall out of the economy, but now it feels a little like a phoney war” he says. “We know that it’s going to be awful but it’s not awful yet, and we don’t know quite how awful it’s going to be and when it’s going to start. Everybody is braced.”
It’s a challenge the former professional pianist says he relishes, after 20 years with Arts Council South West, latterly as executive director.
“Wales is hugely different from the south west of England socially, culturally, politically, economically. Superficially there are similarities in that Wales is large country with huge rural areas and a dispersed population, but it also has significant centres and concentrations of population.” I
Arts Council Wales is the poor relation of Arts Council England, whose £430m a year compares with the £30m ACW gets from the Welsh Assembly. In January 2006 ACW was almost caught up in the political conflagration known as the “Bonfire of the Quangos”, and attempt by the Welsh Assembly to thin out the population of non-government organisations.
The then culture minister proposed to take over the funding of the six major clients of the Arts Council, Welsh National Opera, the BBC National Orchestra of Wales, Clwyd Theatr Cymru, Theatr Genedlaethol Cymru, Diversions Dance Company and the literature promotion agency, Academi. The stout defence of the arm’s length principle that was to blatantly at stake led to the effective dismissal of the chairman, and the threat was not finally lifted until the election of 2007 brought a new regime. “They stepped back, and the current minister is pretty good at sticking to the arms length principle. In fact he talks about it himself.”
Glyndebourne’s 75th season opens on May 21. Simon Tait went down see if nothing really ever changes at the mother of country house opera.
Looked at from certain angles, the Glyndebourne of 1934 seems not to have changed. The same comfortable-looking Elizabethan country manor house across rolling lawns of turf almost as old, sheep beyond the ha-ha, and, on festival afternoons, dinner jackets and posh frocks surrounding champagne and salmon under the ancient mulberry. In the shadow of the house, its owner John Christie built an opera house for his new wife Audrey, developed by their son George.
But now in the third generation of the family’s tutelage, Glyndebourne hopes it is slotting itself well into the 21st century.
Look beyond and you see the Glyndebourne of the 60th anniversary George built, a paradigm of 90s music theatre architecture (by Michael Hopkins) and project management, entirely privately funded. Look further beyond, up the hill towards Glynde, and you can make out the fin that is testing the airflows for the wind turbine Gus Christie will erect later this year to provided all the over the village that Glyndebourne has become will require.
Locals objected at the planning hearing, but, in the nicest possible way, Glyndebourne is the industry around here and no one seriously tries to bite this hand.
Not that Gus Christie is the kind of lord of the manor to impose his will, but beneath a very gentle manner he has a will. In his father’s day it would be unthinkable to have a whole summer festival without Mozart in it somewhere: there has been no Mozart for the last two seasons, and nobody has much noticed.
It is ten years since Gus took over when Sir George retired, and put together the team that is still together – David Pickard as general manager, Vladimir Jurowski as music director and Gillian Brierley as head of communications – and there has been a determined move towards the outer reaches of the opera repertoire.
“I feel that one of my lifelong jobs is to break down the stigma of opera that it is only for the elite, well-heeled few, so we’re doing all sorts of initiatives to try and broaden the reach” he says. “It’s one of those myths that it would be lovely to destroy about Glyndebourne, that people come here because all they want is to have a picnic and to see is pretty frocks. People come here because they’re absolutely passionate about operas, in many cases they want to be challenged and they want us to do new things.”
I gather the Arts Council was as surprised as the rest of us at the rapid turn-round of the news of how the arts had fared in the Budget, and if what I suspect is true it says a lot for the power of the arts lobby. There was relief all round that the cut which might have been as much as £14m was actually only £4m, less than 1%, and that ACE will not be passing it on to its clients. We all expected that the DCMS would have to absorb its own £20m cut and then work out where the damage would be most felt, a process which, experience tells us, can take a week. But the explanation seems to be that culture secretary Andy Burnham knew that speculation would become rumour would become outrage, and whatever he said then would either be a confirmation of worst fears or a climb-down in the face of a barrage of accusation, so he persuaded the Treasury to let him get this rare piece of good Budget news out to this so-powerful sector before that corrosive process could get started. There was an easier way. He could have just left it on a train.
The Tories are more than a little peeved with Michael Lynch, the recent Southbank chief, after his comments about the parentage of bankers who chose not to contribute to the cost of restoring the Festival Hall, and have effectively told him not to bother coming back to the Old Country. ‘We would very much like to foster increased levels of philanthropy here, but we’re not sure that referring to your potential donors as a bunch of b***ards, as Mr Lynch did, is a winning approach’ blogs arts shadow Ed Vaizey with all the hauteur of a government presumptive (to be pedantic, I think the object of Lynch’s fury only became a bunch of bastards after they had ceased to be potential donors, but I digress). Lynch is an avowed supporter of Australia’s Labor Party and liked to tell people that he managed to time his arrival here with the election of John Howard’s conservative Liberal administration. ‘Just to make sure he completely burned his boats before returning to Australia, he also added that for him “The prospect of being here under a Conservative government was not enticing”’ Vaizey adds to his complaint. He’s particularly miffed, it seems, because he even sent Lynch an email congratulating him on his CBE. So biting the hand that emails you to add to your sins, you’d better make yourself at home in Melbourne, Michael.
St Martin in the Fields was packed on Wednesday for Ewen Balfour’s memorial service where there wasn’t a dry eye for the loss of this happy man. He was one of those people who you think is your own personal best friend and when they’ve gone you discover there are thousands like you. There were contributions from the organisations he helped, often without anyone else knowing – he cycled round India and Vietnam to raise money for deaf children – and the music from The Sixteen and English Touring Opera singers was another kind of testament. His boss, Alan Parker, the creator of Brunswick Communications, said Ewen had been sent along by his father, Sir Peter Parker, as “a good man, a great contributor”, which sums him up nicely. But there was so much more to him, as Alan said: his contacts book was compendious and anarchic, ‘with “Pie Shop” next to “Prime Minister”’, and he was ‘ruthlessly uncommercial – his contribution was much more complex than that’. Working with Ewen was clearly like living with him – ‘he was a lot of fun, a lot of life’.
As the recession bites the need for cultural organisations to come together is becoming ever more vital but, as Peter Armstrong, director of development at the Royal Armouries shows, museums have been reluctant to take the step when partnerships at home and abroad could ensure their futures
Museums are curators of the past, custodians of the icons of our history. But that does not mean that they cannot be imaginative, or even entrepreneurial.
The fifth anniversary later this year of the opening of the Royal Armouries’ US offshoot demonstrates this point. When, in 2004, the Leeds-based museum took over an entire floor of the new Frazier International History Museum in Louisville, Kentucky, it was the first British – or indeed European – national museum to open a permanent collection in a foreign country.
Five years later, it is still the only British museum to adopt such an entrepreneurial approach, although both the Guggenheim and the Louvre have plans to open satellite operations in Abu Dhabi. We believe that the benefits that flow from cultural partnerships of this kind should be adopted more widely by other UK institutions.
These partnerships can – and should – be mutually beneficial: The Frazier has gained a collection of European arms and armour that does not exist anywhere else in America (North or South), while the Royal Armouries has gained in return a shop window for its collection as well as the opportunity to display objects that might otherwise have remained in storage.
