The Arts Council describes itself as “the national development agency for the arts... distributing public money to help artists and arts organisations.” Wherever there is the smell of money, however, art inevitably becomes a political issue. In this article, Corporate Watch takes a look at why a government body that is meant to “get more high quality work to a wider range of people” would be interested in radical and subversive arts projects.
Some history
The Arts Council was originally set up on an ‘arm’s length principle’ popularised by Lord Redcliffe-Maud. But key politicians and government officials have always had varying degrees of influence on the Council’s decisions through direct and indirect channels, from the Chancellor, Arts Minister, Parliamentary Committees, to the Council’s appointed chairs and panel members. As Raymond Williams put it in a 1979 article in the Political Quarterly on the Arts Council, “all that is gained by an arm’s length is a certain notion of removal of directly traceable control.” And let’s remember, the Council’s first chairman was none but the founder of Keynesian economics, John Maynard Keynes himself. The current advisory panels system, which is often bypassed in major decisions, is also part of his legacy. Funding the enemy
In early 1970s, the ‘community arts’ movement represented a serious challenge to the elitist Arts Council. “It is not easy,” said the then Secretary-General Sir Roy Shaw in his 1978-9 annual report, “to work with artists who not only consistently bite the hand that feeds them... but often explicitly repudiate the basic premise of the Arts Council’s charter.” In that same report, Sir Roy reminded us that Lord Goodman, the former chairman of the Council, had “questioned whether it was the duty of the state to actually subsidise those who are working to overthrow it.” The dilemma was carefully considered in a research on community artists commissioned by the Arts Council in late 1979. Despite disliking them, however, the Council has continued to fund many ‘community arts’ projects over the years, its defence being “they generate a new audience for the arts.” Between 1974 and 1978, the Council had already raised its community arts subsidy from £250,000 to one million. Today, although a great majority of its budget is still spent on purchasing ‘the best’ paintings and sculptures and the bottomless pit of the Council’s ‘big six’ companies (the Royal Opera, Royal Ballet, English National Opera, English National Ballet, Royal National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company), a significant proportion is increasingly spent on funding small, independent projects that combine arts with social struggles. Between 2008 and 2011, Arts Council England plans to invest over £1.6 billion of public money (from the government and the National Lottery) in grants. The money, according to the plan titled “Great Art for Everyone”, will be invested in 888 arts organisations, including 81 new ones. So the question remains: why would the state, in this case represented by the Arts Council, fund those it considers to be its enemies? Apart from the obvious issue of state sponsorship, it is our argument that, while old-fashioned ‘artistic philanthropy’ has almost died out, its core concepts and practices continue to live today. Activists or artists?
With these questions in mind, Corporate Watch had an informal chat earlier this year with a member of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army ( CIRCA), a member of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and a member of the social practice art group Platform, all of which have received funding from the Arts Council at some point. Our interviewees were aware of the criticisms that radical artists may encounter when seeking funding for their ‘artivism’. The argument that many activists are dependant on other forms of state funding, such as the dole, or that someone is going to get the money, so it may as well be activists, did not seem sufficient to justify reliance on the Arts Council. All three, however, insisted that it is a different story when an organisation is not totally dependent on funding i.e. if one doesn’t rely on a few large sources of funding and don’t take on permanent overheads. Small bits of funding here and there, they argued, should be considered different politically from core funding or large amounts of money with ties, which is how many NGOs operate. Platform, for example, has somewhat changed since it secured core funding from the Arts Council as time now has to go into maintaining this funding, although it does allow more stability and forward planning. Similarly, the Clown Army’s tour of England in 2005, which was funded by the Arts Council and concluded at the G8 protests in Scotland, meant that the emphasis had to be on the artistic aspects of clowning rather than seeing it as a tactic used by protesters against police repression. On the other hand, our interviewee argued, the funding enabled the tour, which was ultimately a political project, to go ahead to reach the G8 in Scotland, which might not have been possible otherwise. All three also seemed to agree that one of the dangers of fund-seeking is careerism. In their attempts to use their skills while still doing ‘something good’, many activists-artists have ended up becoming professional artists who risk compromising their politics to maintain their funding. This is almost impossible to avoid because formal engagement with and production of art, as well as having to be ‘accountable’ to funders, require meeting certain standards, building up the right kind of CV, spinning your project to fit the funder’s agenda and so on and so forth. It further creates a tension between those who seek funding to do activism and those who elect to avoid it, dividing the movement and marginalising the latter. The role of the Arts Council, thus, could be seen as streamlining political arts projects into ones that promote ‘social peace’ and ‘harmony’ rather than ones that embrace direct confrontation with the system and the establishment. This not only legitimises the state, represented by the Arts Council, and those who get funding from it, while marginalising or demonising those who don’t, it also channels activists’ energy into acceptable projects that might otherwise go into unwanted forms of dissent.
Some history
The Arts Council was originally set up on an ‘arm’s length principle’ popularised by Lord Redcliffe-Maud. But key politicians and government officials have always had varying degrees of influence on the Council’s decisions through direct and indirect channels, from the Chancellor, Arts Minister, Parliamentary Committees, to the Council’s appointed chairs and panel members. As Raymond Williams put it in a 1979 article in the Political Quarterly on the Arts Council, “all that is gained by an arm’s length is a certain notion of removal of directly traceable control.” And let’s remember, the Council’s first chairman was none but the founder of Keynesian economics, John Maynard Keynes himself. The current advisory panels system, which is often bypassed in major decisions, is also part of his legacy. Funding the enemy
In early 1970s, the ‘community arts’ movement represented a serious challenge to the elitist Arts Council. “It is not easy,” said the then Secretary-General Sir Roy Shaw in his 1978-9 annual report, “to work with artists who not only consistently bite the hand that feeds them... but often explicitly repudiate the basic premise of the Arts Council’s charter.” In that same report, Sir Roy reminded us that Lord Goodman, the former chairman of the Council, had “questioned whether it was the duty of the state to actually subsidise those who are working to overthrow it.” The dilemma was carefully considered in a research on community artists commissioned by the Arts Council in late 1979. Despite disliking them, however, the Council has continued to fund many ‘community arts’ projects over the years, its defence being “they generate a new audience for the arts.” Between 1974 and 1978, the Council had already raised its community arts subsidy from £250,000 to one million. Today, although a great majority of its budget is still spent on purchasing ‘the best’ paintings and sculptures and the bottomless pit of the Council’s ‘big six’ companies (the Royal Opera, Royal Ballet, English National Opera, English National Ballet, Royal National Theatre and Royal Shakespeare Company), a significant proportion is increasingly spent on funding small, independent projects that combine arts with social struggles. Between 2008 and 2011, Arts Council England plans to invest over £1.6 billion of public money (from the government and the National Lottery) in grants. The money, according to the plan titled “Great Art for Everyone”, will be invested in 888 arts organisations, including 81 new ones. So the question remains: why would the state, in this case represented by the Arts Council, fund those it considers to be its enemies? Apart from the obvious issue of state sponsorship, it is our argument that, while old-fashioned ‘artistic philanthropy’ has almost died out, its core concepts and practices continue to live today. Activists or artists?
With these questions in mind, Corporate Watch had an informal chat earlier this year with a member of the Clandestine Insurgent Rebel Clown Army ( CIRCA), a member of the Laboratory of Insurrectionary Imagination and a member of the social practice art group Platform, all of which have received funding from the Arts Council at some point. Our interviewees were aware of the criticisms that radical artists may encounter when seeking funding for their ‘artivism’. The argument that many activists are dependant on other forms of state funding, such as the dole, or that someone is going to get the money, so it may as well be activists, did not seem sufficient to justify reliance on the Arts Council. All three, however, insisted that it is a different story when an organisation is not totally dependent on funding i.e. if one doesn’t rely on a few large sources of funding and don’t take on permanent overheads. Small bits of funding here and there, they argued, should be considered different politically from core funding or large amounts of money with ties, which is how many NGOs operate. Platform, for example, has somewhat changed since it secured core funding from the Arts Council as time now has to go into maintaining this funding, although it does allow more stability and forward planning. Similarly, the Clown Army’s tour of England in 2005, which was funded by the Arts Council and concluded at the G8 protests in Scotland, meant that the emphasis had to be on the artistic aspects of clowning rather than seeing it as a tactic used by protesters against police repression. On the other hand, our interviewee argued, the funding enabled the tour, which was ultimately a political project, to go ahead to reach the G8 in Scotland, which might not have been possible otherwise. All three also seemed to agree that one of the dangers of fund-seeking is careerism. In their attempts to use their skills while still doing ‘something good’, many activists-artists have ended up becoming professional artists who risk compromising their politics to maintain their funding. This is almost impossible to avoid because formal engagement with and production of art, as well as having to be ‘accountable’ to funders, require meeting certain standards, building up the right kind of CV, spinning your project to fit the funder’s agenda and so on and so forth. It further creates a tension between those who seek funding to do activism and those who elect to avoid it, dividing the movement and marginalising the latter. The role of the Arts Council, thus, could be seen as streamlining political arts projects into ones that promote ‘social peace’ and ‘harmony’ rather than ones that embrace direct confrontation with the system and the establishment. This not only legitimises the state, represented by the Arts Council, and those who get funding from it, while marginalising or demonising those who don’t, it also channels activists’ energy into acceptable projects that might otherwise go into unwanted forms of dissent.