It was interesting to learn of the RSA’s hope to run an annual State of the Arts conference (AP210). It sounds remarkably like the sizeable annual arts (craft and film) conference that used to be run every summer by the Council of Regional Arts Associations (CoRAA), with broad participation from the sector (professional and amateur), local government, Scotland and Wales. It was deemed to be of sufficient importance for the Arts Minister of whichever government was in power to travel outside London to make a significant keynote speech at the opening session. Memories include having been on the platform beside Thatcher’s Minister, Richard Luce, in Newcastle City Hall in 1987 when he gave his famous “end of welfare statism in the arts” speech. The only year lacking government political presence was 1989 when we held our conference in France to coincide with the Bicentenary of the French Revolution, courtesy of a South East Arts twinning with the city of Dieppe (the Labour Shadow Minister, naturally, seized the opportunity and participated).
When the Conservative government commissioned the Ministry’s retiring chief civil servant to report on streamlining and restructuring the public arts funding system (Wilding Report, September 1989), his Recommendation 64 declared that the Arts Council of Great Britain should take on a number of functions then discharged by CoRAA – specifically citing the annual conference. Furthermore, Wilding wrote, “If CoRAA were not already doing this, it would be necessary to invent it.” The last CoRAA Conference, consequently, took place in Liverpool in June 1990. These conferences were the scene of robust – even passionate – and generally very well-informed debates between people who rarely got to spend long periods in each others’ company. Moreover, in the days before the merger of Arts Council England (ACE) with the Regional Arts Boards, they engaged people who were sufficiently independent of each other for deference to be rare and risible, and for any consensus to be hard won (and therefore hard to break and harder to resist). The days and nights were long but the evolution of national policy during that period can be charted through the subjects debated.
For 20 fallow years, ACE has been too profoundly uncomfortable with even the thought of such an ‘uncontrolled’ event. The RSA, with its splendidly appropriate founding object ‘to encourage Arts, Manufactures and Commerce’, could perhaps continue in partnership with Alan Davey’s restructured ACE. If they were to devise an event of sufficient substance and duration to be able to examine contemporary arts policy in its wider social, economic and cultural context, then this is greatly to be encouraged. It would be even better if it could be as peripatetic and non-metropolitan as its predecessor.