No Strings Attached!
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) No strings attached! www.form.uk.com ( Why Arts Funding ® should say no to Arts & Business President: Nutmeg House HRH The Prince of Wales Instrumentalism Gainsford Street Design by Form Butler’s Wharf Chair: London SE1 2NY Baroness Helena Kennedy QC Claire Fox T: 020 7378 8143 Chief Executive: F: 020 7407 7527 Colin Tweedy E: [email protected] www.AandB.org.uk Trustees: Dr Chris Gibson-Smith Charity Number: 274040 Anne Gunther Company Limited by Guarantee Jonathan Mildenhall Number England: 1317772 Kate Mosse George Osborne MP Alan Smith Stevie Spring Rick Wills Company Secretary: Martin Williams Arts & Business aspires to be the Preface world’s most successful & widespread Colin Tweedy creative network. We help business Claire Fox is the director of the Institute Fox questions who it is setting these people support the arts & the arts of Ideas (IoI), which she established to targets, or in turn making the policy? create a public space where ideas can If it is the Treasury then to who is this inspire business people, because good be contested without constraint. Claire Governmental Department ultimately initiated the IoI while co-publisher of the accountable? Is the electorate asking business & great art together create controversial and ground-breaking current them how to run arts policy or indeed affairs journal LM magazine (formerly aware that they are more or less doing a richer society. Living Marxism). The IoI has since worked so? If they are providing or agreeing PSA with a variety of prestigious institutions in targets how can any locality really specify Britain and abroad. The most high profile what they want the arts to achieve in of these is the Battle of Ideas, which falls their own patch? Yes, she recognises, in the last weekend of October, and I there has to be a culture of accountability, heartily recommend it to anyone with a mechanism whereby people can ask an appetite for wide-ranging, serious and see how a democratically elected and free-thinking debate. Arts & Business government is spending their money? always welcomes such debate, hence But has it gone too far? Some sense this series of Future Culture essays. there is a troubling trend at play and Claire presents this in a compelling Claire has a particular interest in and fiery way. education and social issues such as crime and social exclusion. Claire is also As she acknowledge, hers may be a a passionate supporter of the arts, and dissident voice, but I doubt this troubles strongly believes that they should be her. Claire makes valid points and her valued for their own sake. counter-blast should not be ignored, though I sense investing in the arts may At a time when even Bryan Appleyard always involve self interest, from buying confesses he is finding arts funding an a ticket, positioning a brand, to achieving interesting debate, it was only right to immortality by having a wing named invite one of the UK’s most dynamic after you. commentators to contribute the fourth essay in A&B’s Future Culture series. The funding environment is changing and Arts & Business has to be receptive Claire argues that efforts to dilute the to a critique and increase the circle of arts for the benefit of the socially excluded discussion. There are serious issues at are patronising rather than democratic play here. The recent Taking Part survey, and questions why we have become so a study of how people spend their leisure obsessed with the instrumental arguments. time, revealed that a massive three Why aren’t we investigating, questioning quarters of the population are attending and celebrating what culture actually does arts events or enjoying artistic activities. in and of itself far more? If it is all about This is good news, but the scale of the the money, would this confident approach private sector contribution to make this lead to better funding possibilities for the happen is too often neglected. arts as a whole? Essay Claire Fox Arts & Business is not looking to minimise This essay is intended as a provocation, Let me introduce people in the arts to a the need for public sector funding for the an attempt at reposing and opening up little noted phenomena. Sport for sport’s arts. We believe categorically in a plurality the debate about arts funding. It is to Arts sake is as unpopular in policy wonk circles of funding. A&B’s research proves that & Business’ credit that they invited me to as art for art’s sake. When you look at the there is more than an association; there write it, knowing as they do that I may well Mayor of London’s website promoting the is a causal link between increased public critique some sacred cows and challenge positive benefits of the Olympic Games subsidy of the arts and a healthy private some of their own core practices and — ‘sport’ is not mentioned. Instead the sector contribution. With the immediate arguments. I hope readers — including arrival of the Olympics is presented as future of public subsidy for the arts politicians and business leaders — will a chance to bolster policing, education, unknown, there is still time to influence congratulate them for allowing a dissident housing, planning and development, policy and win the argument this time voice into the debate rather than holding transport, the health of the nation and around for the arts. them responsible for any of my arguments. even a reduction in CO2 emissions. Sport doesn’t get a look in. Meanwhile Gordon By recognising and celebrating the role The Olympics challenge Brown has proclaimed his “great ambition of the commercial sector and the role of for 2012” is “a nation fitter in health and individual supporter, we can avoid any The Times’ Ben Macintyre put the boot stronger in civic spirit”, suggesting the dependency on a single line of finance, into philistine politicians when he wrote Games are an ideal way to tackle youth and find more effective ways; new ways “Ministers are only too happy to be spotted obesity and to increase volunteering 2. — be they showcasing artists as cultural at sporting events, and use political entrepreneurs, making venture philanthropy rhetoric... peppered with cheap references The treasury has regularly heralded 2012 work for the arts, new tax policies, sign to the latest football or cricket match. But as a means of achieving a whole range of posting responsible cultural business when did you last hear a Labour politician ‘non-sporty’ ends from urban regeneration practice — to bring better resources to refer to the ballet?” 1 Macintyre is not alone to economic prosperity; indeed it lists many the arts. Indeed in the next two months in suggesting that populist politicians are of the same outcomes that the arts have Arts & Business will launch a major happy to move money from artistic projects tried to claim as their own over recent years. initiative to stimulate major giving in the to sport because the latter is more in tune Therein lies the rub. In publicity for this City of London. Arts & Business has the with popular taste than opera and ballet. year’s Museum and Galleries Month crucial knowledge, pioneering ideas and There has been much chagrin in the arts (MGM), we are told “new museums and research capability to show us all how to world at Tessa Jowell’s announcement that galleries have contributed to the economic embed a corporate cultural responsibility. lottery funding to the arts and heritage is and social regeneration of industrial to be slashed by £190 million to pay for cities”. But if the millions that have been Let us know what you think of this the ever-spiralling costs of the Olympic spent on Tate Modern or the Lowry Centre essay or other aspects of A&B’s debate, Games. The prevalent explanation for in Salford or the BALTIC in Gateshead are by visiting: what Macintyre describes as, “robbing justified less as arts projects and more as artistic Peter... to pay sporty Paul” is that keys to regeneration, how can the arts www.AandB.org/futureculture this government has never believed in the world object when another competing bid arts in the same way they believe in the to regenerate a different desolate inner city power of sport. But this is a misguided area comes along? Hence arts and sports assessment. In fact, government is looking find themselves competing — not as to the Olympics to deliver almost identical discreet public goods or ends in their own outcomes as those they have demanded right — but as interchangeable instruments of the arts over recent years. promising to deliver on a set of identical priorities laid down by government diktat. In 2005, a series of publications spawned the arts have been asked to deliver on by a rather unwieldy partnership of: Sport a range of economic, social and political England/ the Home Office/ the DCMS and ends. Policy documents such as the the Local Government Association (LGA) 2001 ‘Libraries, Museums, Galleries and entitled Sport playing its part was published. Archives for All: Co-operating Across the They were aimed at “guiding and supporting Sectors to Tackle Social Exclusion’ made policy makers and practitioners” to use the approach explicit. In the same year sport more “proactively” to support “the the new utilitarianism was summed up by delivery of the shared priorities of central Tessa Blackstone, in her first ever speech and local government”. And guess what? when Secretary of Arts. She asked, “This subservience by the These had little to do with sport per se. “Can the arts be more than just frivolous, arts to external demands Rather sport is described as a useful trivial, irrelevant?” She then went on to may appear to be a canny “engagement mechanism, to build present ever more instrumental social relationships with hard to reach individuals demands: “I am in no doubt that the arts way of accessing funds, and groups”.