A Breath of Fresh Air!
What a breath of fresh air Brian McMaster’s Review is! (See our summary) The title says it all really: Supporting excellence in the arts - from measurement to judgement.
For far too long the arts have been weighed down under tons of priorities and targets which must be met to get funding. The quality of the work - McMaster’s excellence - has been forgotten in the indecent haste to follow slavishly every government “initiative” (access, diversity, inclusion, etc. etc. etc.) and to set “measurable” targets (”How many people will take part?” or ”How many target groups will be reached?” rather than “Is it good?”).
Now McMaster, with the support - God bless him! - of Culture Secretary James Purnell, had redressed the balance and is proposing putting the pursuit of artistic excellence at the centre - a place from which it should never, ever have been moved. It says much about the organisation’s utter lack of understanding of what the arts are about that ACE has allowed itself to be led down the social engineering/target setting road with nary a squeak of protest.
“It is,” Purnell said in his introduction to the Review, “time to trust our artists and our organisations to do what they do best - to create the most excellent work they can - and to strive for what is new and exciting, rather than what is safe and comfortable. To do this we must free artists and cultural organisations from outdated structures and burdensome targets, which can act as millstones around the neck of creativity.”
If I had an order paper, I would wave it in the air and shout, “Hear, hear!”
One is tempted to wonder if the bureaucrats in Great Peter Street knew what McMaster was going to say - and how could they not? He is, after all, a member of the Council of ACE) - and decided to rush their “reforms” through before his Review was published. If so, they miscalculated badly.
They cannot (surely? If they did, why go ahead?) have foreseen the furore their proposals would cause. Protests not just from the affected organisations but from theatregoers, Equity, the Theatres Trust, theatre journalists, Old Uncle Tom Cobbley and all have now been added to by the Conservative Party. Tory culture minister Ed Vaizey said today, making a very pertinent point, “It is astonishing that the Arts Council was allowed to proceed with cuts before the publication of the McMaster Report.”
He went on to say, “It is completely unacceptable to carry out the biggest cull of arts organisations in history in just six weeks. With the current chief executive leaving in a month, the head of the London arts council already gone, and the new chief executive on holiday in Mexico, arts organisations are entitled to ask who is making these decisions.”
And, we might add, deciding on the timing.
ACE must cancel the cuts, reinstate the status quo for the time being, give those companies which are genuinely not achieving the chance to put things right, and revisit its whole method of deciding upon who gets what on the basis laid down by McMaster. If that means we have to wait another year for any changes, so be it.
And for goodness sake, let’s have some genuine artists at the core of the funding decision making rather than bean-counting, target-setting, social-engineering bureaucrats.