Funding the arts: Bad policies and the bad ideas behind them

It will come as no surprise to say the funded arts sector is in near-permanent financial crisis. Gross inequalities in access to arts subsidy persist. This is true from both the producer and consumer perspectives. And fund distribution patterns are wildly uneven.

Average pay across the arts is very low, even in subsidised areas, meaning careers in the arts can only be sustained by people with additional means, their or a partner’s non-arts income for instance. High earners escaping this trap make up only a small proportion of the total arts workforce.

Most people choosing to engage with publicly subsidised art are better off and better educated than average. Funding largely benefits well-to-do arts consumers. These are the only people for whom current systems can be said to be working well.

This record of policy failure needs addressing. And before work to improve policy outcomes can begin, we also need to address the false beliefs that keep policymakers stuck on wrong tracks. Below are six of the most misleading.

1. “The Arts Council was founded by a Labour government over 75 years ago”

Labour’s assertion in its sector plan is simply not true. The Arts Council of Great Britain received its royal charter in 1946, yes, but its mission and client selection methods had been settled when John Maynard Keynes chaired a wartime predecessor body.

“[W]e do not intend to socialise this side of social endeavour”: Keynes made that clear to the nation in a radio talk broadcast days before Labour’s 1945 landslide election victory was announced.¹

The Arts Council’s first secretary-general followed up in a 1949 book about the new organisation: “The state which had destroyed the patron by heavy taxation had itself to step in … if the functions of patronage were to continue”.² Not a part of Labour’s post-war welfare state, then, but a bulwark against it, keeping the “fine arts” safe from socialism.

2. “Arts and culture have intrinsic value”

This quote, also from Labour’s plan for the arts, is useless as a rationale for public subsidy, because intrinsic value claims can be made for almost any life-affirming human activity.

Funds would run out long before every credible contender for support on intrinsic value grounds had been paid off. Better to argue that values are constructed. Social scientists have been saying this for over a century.

Arts education creates value by spreading knowledge and understanding and helping with skills development. The arts lose value when arts education opportunities are withdrawn.

3. Not-for-profit art producers share a public service ethos with the Arts Council, which commercial producers do not

Keynes and his early Arts Council colleagues made not-for-profit operation a condition of funding. This was a serious mistake.

Rent-seeking opportunities were and are rife in the not-for-profit sector. Costs there can be adjusted as much as necessary to protect the deficits on which funding depends. Since consumer expenditure on the arts is entirely discretionary, commercial producers are very interested in public service, and always have been.

Was it sensible to make all arts organisations register as charities before they could apply for grants?

4. ‘The arts’ and ‘culture’ are interchangeable terms

Arts Council England’s (ACE) current definition of culture in it Let’s Create strategy is absurdly reductive: “all those areas of activity associated with the artforms and organisations in which Arts Council England invests”.

What about faith cultures, food cultures, sports cultures, political cultures, workplace cultures, and so on? Since most people have multiple cultural affiliations, and only a few of these are artistic, arts policymaking siloed off from wider cultural policymaking is doomed to fail.

5. Local needs and opportunities can be understood by a national body

UNESCO established 50 years ago that “the first rule in any cultural policy must be decentralisation … the central state, with its heavy-handed bureaucracy, is obviously ill-placed to take stock of new needs and existing situations and adapt them to policy requirements”.

Cuts to local authority funding have savagely curtailed their ability to support artists and arts organisations with authentic community roots. Centrally approved, centrally funded art parachuted in instead – City of Culture initiatives, for instance – makes passing connection with local audiences but leaves no lasting legacy.

6. ACE is the national development agency for creativity and culture

This is far too grand a claim. Other agencies are as or more important. Examples include schools, universities, specialist training institutions (dance, drama, music conservatoires etc.) and the BBC.

Creativity is everywhere: in science, engineering, childcare, cookery, gardening, DIY … the list goes on and on. Everyone has a stake in culture, whether or not art funded by the Arts Council appeals to them.

Conclusion

Funding and other debates centred on Arts Council England fret about small parts of a huge jigsaw. ACE has neither the mandate nor the expertise to develop cultural policy on behalf of everyone, and this should be admitted.

There is no point to government-commissioned reviews that just look at ACE, something more ambitious should be attempted, coordinated across government departments and not left entirely to the Department for Culture, Media and Sport.

¹ Talk printed in The Listener, 12 July 1945, and in the Arts Council’s annual report for 1945, pp.20-23.

² Mary Glasgow and B. Ifor Evans, The Arts in England (London: Falcon Press, 1949), p.16.