Evenly buttered toast
The issue of artistic quality continues to make its presence felt among arts policy-makers across the UK. Arts Council England (ACE) has identified the maintenance of high quality artistic programmes as a driving force for its recession strategy. ACE has talked to a lot of arts organisations who have made it clear that, if there is less money around, the first thing that’s going to go is the risky, edgy, experimental work which drives innovation. While the emphasis on helping larger organisations may infuriate adventurous small-scale companies currently hanging onto an ever-shorter shoestring, championing artistic worth remains a worthy goal. Elsewhere in the UK, the emphasis has been different, with Wales moving towards spreading artistic richness more evenly over the land (AP207), and, even more interestingly, Northern Ireland apparently advocating more support for amateur, voluntary and community work (p1). There must be very few arts managers who do not participate in some way in the ‘voluntary’ arts economy, keeping up those creative skills for which they trained but then laid aside in favour of the phone and the computer. Robin Simpson, Director of the Voluntary Arts Network and an amateur musician himself, often argues that the divide between amateur and professional is largely artificial. (Perhaps it’s all about the mortgage, Robin.) However, there are other, more subtle lines to be drawn: for example, between ‘am-dram’ – often reviled, sometimes unfairly, by the professional arts sector – and ‘community theatre’, where professionals collaborate with non-professionals. Amateur work is already unwittingly threatening professional touring shows, as Charlotte Jones of the Independent Theatre Council revealed in AP205: venues make more money from hiring out the space to community groups than from mounting or producing professional work. We’re going to have to face the fact there isn’t enough butter to cover both sides of the toast, and avoid a war starting over who gets the crumbs.
Local heroes
Local authorities are major players in everything discussed above; as Lorna Brown, Chair of nalgao, points out on p8, they are huge funders of the arts and the sector needs that to continue. Our short series on the cultural policies of the three main political parties (Lib Dem Don Foster’s contribution is on p6) has also revealed that the local agenda is going to be at the forefront for all of them. This might or might not be a good thing: and it’s where the past two decades of making the case for the arts will really tell. Have all those community projects, those high-profile public artworks, those burgeoning festivals and those Lottery-funded building in their varying states of success made a sufficiently positive impact on the public consciousness that they will voice their support in the coming years when the axe swings too close for comfort? And does the public know enough about how these projects came to be? That could be our next battle.