The ACE Review
Although an Arts Council England spokesman denied it, there is no doubt that Genista McIntosh’s review of ACE’s latest funding round was prompted by the furore which it sparked. Indeed Alan Davey said in February that he would bring in an “external eye” to take a look at what could be learned and Baroness McIntosh is that eye.
He said then, “This is the first time that the arts council, as a single body, has led a single, integrated investment strategy for our regularly funded organisations. As a learning organisation it is important we now review that process in detail, establish what worked well and what improvements can be made next time. An external perspective on this is vital.”
As a member of the House of Lords (she is a Labour life peer) who has worked in senior positions at the RSC, the National and the Royal Opera House, as well as being a former Principal of the Guildhall School of Music and Drama, she is well qualified to do the job and has the political clout not to be ignored. Her previous review pulled no punches in her assessment of the relationship between ACE and the DCMS and she expressed concern about the disbanding of the Arts Panels, although she did accept the reasoning behind it.
This disbanding is a move which has come back to haunt the organisation, as many of us thought it would at the time. If peer review (which is what some commentators have called McIntosh’s task) is appropriate for ACE, then it is surely appropriate for its clients. One suspects that, had the arts panels or something similar existed over the past few months, then certainly some of the more stupid initial mistakes (the cutting of the grant to the Bush, for example) would never have been made.
The reaction of ACE to the anger that was unleashed bore all the signs of bureaucrats rushing to cover their arses and the comment of the spokesman, that it had always intended to conduct a review of the funding process, reinforces that interpretation.
Bureaucracy and the arts don’t sit well together. Bureaucrats like things neat and tidy, with boxes that can be ticked and priorities that can be itemised and met, but the arts simply don’t work that way. Trying to straitjacket the arts thus leads to the sort of thing that we saw from “Soviet Realism” - although even there the greatest artists managed to make fools of the aparatchiks.
One hopes that Baroness McIntosh will show that the pursuit of excellence demanded by Brian McMaster’s report cannot be successful if it is weighed down by the dead hand of bureaucracy and that Alan Davey will learn from the mistakes of his predecessor and let the Council be arts- rather than admin-led, and that it is truly a “learning organisation”.