Creative Scotland may be planning to spend £45k on an “opinion survey to better understand our customers,” but Andrew Eaton-Lewis thinks the funding body is still getting it wrong.
As reported in this newspaper yesterday, Creative Scotland has just announced it is planning to spend £45,000 of public money on an “opinion survey to better understand our customers”.
There are so many worrying things about this that it’s difficult to know where to start. Let’s take them one by one.
1. “Customers”? This is an organisation that has just gone through a year of painful self-examination in the wake of widespread and damning criticism from artists – hundreds of whom signed an open letter expressing serious concern about the organisation’s “corporate ethos”. The writer and musician Pat Kane, who has just spent several months chairing a series of Open Sessions for artists to air their concerns, wrote in his summing up on Monday that “the greatest and most common anxiety was that a ‘financialised’ and ‘corporatised’ language … had become too dominant in the operations of Creative Scotland”.
As reported in this newspaper yesterday, Creative Scotland has just announced it is planning to spend £45,000 of public money on an “opinion survey to better understand our customers”.
There are so many worrying things about this that it’s difficult to know where to start. Let’s take them one by one.
1. “Customers”? This is an organisation that has just gone through a year of painful self-examination in the wake of widespread and damning criticism from artists – hundreds of whom signed an open letter expressing serious concern about the organisation’s “corporate ethos”. The writer and musician Pat Kane, who has just spent several months chairing a series of Open Sessions for artists to air their concerns, wrote in his summing up on Monday that “the greatest and most common anxiety was that a ‘financialised’ and ‘corporatised’ language … had become too dominant in the operations of Creative Scotland”.