Arts debate

Above is what in our finding and over 300 musician came forward from all background:- English, Irish, Indian, African and still figures are adding.

I am not sure what this debate is for: - I have carried out extensive research: - Art council how the whole system works.
I was totally shocked and stunned. I am finding difficulty to find appropriate word to describe (?genocide? is closest I can find)
(1)How many organization given grants and for what? Individuals grants and for what?
(2)Sub contract company e.g. artreach how many of this private companies has been given contract and for what, How art council finds these companies?
(3) How many regional jobs and jobs title e.g. contemporary officers, audience development officer, cultural ambassador etc etc and their role,
(4) How many Venues and their names e.g. castles and theatres and town halls
(5)Finally brief about the decision panel who they are? Are they elected or officers of art council? and how they decide on basis of text on form? or performing skills? or practical contribution? Of individual, organisation, venues, sub contract companies in the past.

I have one plea. Please make sure that the art of film is not excluded from the debate, which it so often is.

Colin Richarsdon

Reply to Sandeep:
You ask some important, difficult questions. Let's see if there will be any answers.

It is disappointing, therefore, that the Arts Council have decided,in its celebrated 6oth year, to cease funding and to actually disassociate itself from this award.

Kate mentions the importance of involving schools and social services, and last year the award went to Fin Kennedy, who has been instrumental,in schools and social services, in bringing theatre and drama into the lives of young people... but this kind of dedication to a craft does not usually make the pages of the glossy mags or the Sunday supplements; awards like this are at least an acknowledgement that the work of the playwright is many and varied, and often unseen, and frequently "unfashionable"; as Art so often is.

It almost feels that jettisoning the award is a statement about the "modernity" that the council aspires to. In doing so, however, it dismisses without regret an honourable man who dedicated his life to the profession that he loved.

But it doesn't matter what I think. I hope Geoff meets some prisoners, some disadvantaged kids, some disabled people, and many more of those whose lives are and have been transformed -- and who have created arts of the highest quality, however you measure it -- and is able to ask them whether what they are doing is real art or not.

I havnt argued that the arts cannot have beneficial outcomnes for the disadvantaged groups you mention.I am arguing for equal weight being given to the arts itself and their integrity in current policy. Kathryn might think that what these groups produce is of the highest quality but thats the point about cultural democracy: values are always relative to the view point of the perceiver. Her definitiuon of high quality may be in purely aesthetic terms average, poor or not able to be valued in the same way .That does not mean that the arts cannot be used in this instrumental way but these activities should be funded out of educational or social budgets additional to the funding for the core work of professional companies.

May be More practicing artists from all background (must not be fantasize with one type or style of arts/music) on the Council's Board !

Need genuinely work on ground meet local artist and creative people attend what's on town, go to businesses e.g. Richardson group ask them find out why some artist/creative don't want to know you! Check all organizations/theatre/venues what they doing after receiving large sum! What public/artists think about them and why!. (Dedication and humble approach when meeting creative people, get ready having late lunch! or no lunch!).

I regret I personally am unable to make 14th so register that as an apology/ intention to attend in principle.

Hope it goes well

Mark

The people of the Arts Council need to be brought before the taxpayers to account for their biased and racist largesse and political correctness and "ethnography" be properly analysed, so that the ARts Council are forced to recognise the ethnic interests 85% of the Arts Council should be funding are those who actually live in England and consider themselves to be English.

Paying for foreign artists to visit America however laudable is mispending the taxes of English taxpayers, at the very least it should have been an English Artist sent on such trip - why does the Arts Council believe they should fund the worlds cultural development, when the English culture is unsipported, side-lined and starved of cash.

I would point out that this behaviour runs contrary to the United Nations Rights on Indigenous People, where it explicitly expects governments to support the indigenous culture and not partake in cultural genocide, which by any measure is exactly what the Arts Council has been responsible for.

Fortunately the tide of incompetence and discrimination is now truning, and we along with a large number of other organisations look forward to a robust exploration of the Arts Council and its race discrimination against England.

I am disgusted at the crude nationalism of some of the contributors. I can only assume that the BNP has seen the open nature of this space as a mechanism to plug their facist views. I hope that others will also express their opposition to such nonsense.

The ACE is attempting to do something different, whether individuals like it or not. I would suggest that a focus on what this is would be more useful for the debate than a succession of knee-jerk responses.

However, unlike the BBC, the Arts Council's current spending policy is not accountable to its society, the very people who pay for it.

For example, Arts Council England will this year spend over £62 million on Opera but the equivalent spend on jazz is only £1 million. Both arts forms have a similar audience size. How is this ludicrous discrepancy explained?

For example - (and I only use music as an example, the same is true within and between other genres) it is clearly the case that Opera is heavily funded and that jazz, folk music, electronic music and other similar specialist musical forms are funded at much lower levels. The key question is why? What is the rationale today against which this debate is taking place. On what basis is the decision made? Is the amount fixed? The ratio fixed? The percentage fixed? Or is it that Opera is doing something that other artforms should be doing more of? How can we describe a system of fairmness that everyone can at least understand, even if they don't agree.

Theo's comment above about being addressed like four year olds is spot on but we don't have to take a debate entirely on the organisers' terms.

Have to say I think it's a good idea. I'm looking forward to seeing discussion of arts administration that's not written in fluent workshop.

Recently the British public flocked to see exhibitions at the National Gallery by painters such as Caravaggio and Turner even though they had to be booked and paid for! The public want something worth looking at, they want art that will challenge them, they want the British art scene to be dynamic and renowned, not the joke it is today. It seems the Arts Council must take on board the public’s views as it is being trusted with their money. And I for one am very glad to see them doing this kind of research, and would like to see this debate extended further into the public arena.

Rock and Roll had hardly been disclosed to the UK when ACE came into life 60 years ago. Probably because of that it is still looked down on by most ACE staff and other vested interests who seem to conspire to ensure that rock and pop will not get hardly any ACE cash at all. I keep being told that,  'Rock and pop is not art it is commercial' (I might pick this point up on another posting) but I doubt however, that it has anything to do with art and everything to do with CLASS. For example, you try getting funding for left-field club music and you'll get a straight bat from ACE officers. Call it Sonic Art and they'll bend over backwards to encourage and fund you. Clubbing is a working class art form you hear on radio 1 'sonic art' is a funded arts world construct (it is actually just out-dated experimental club music repackaged and made by people who can write funding bids) that you hear on radio 3. Ooh I sense an arts project in that!!

Seriously though, can we have an honest debate and not be afraid to talk about class divisions when we do it. There must be loads of research about who consumes what kind of art and their socio-economic position. Who sets the rules about what is art? Are they representative of the UK or just a middle class mates network who want to keep all the cash for their arty friends and enforce on to the rest of us their own narrow vision of what is good for us?

Also, I'd like to remind you that one of the reason you are a great people is exactly that (and I've never received any grant eh)you are the most tolerant society in the whole of Europe and you should be proud of it and of having organizations really keen to sponsor artists of any background.
Back home is all another matter. It's really difficult to be a young artist(and access to funding is a dream) unless you are part of a small circle of yuppies..

How can all cultures within one society be "equally funded"? The UK is a mixture of many cultures but we have a large majority of the population in England (still over 80%) who consider themselves to be English, irrespective of their ethnic origin. The White Anglo Saxon majority have an absolute right to see their culture properly preserved invested in and celebrated.

It is a forward thinking policy for the UK to also support the cultural life of minorities, but minorities should not expect nor feel they justify "equal" treatment in funding and support. Afterall this is England and English culture should predominate. If minorities are not satisfied that they are a minority then they have every right to return to the their cultural majority and continue as they wish, but England has a right to be English, to celebrate English cultural endeavour, and to enhance her own English traditions. 10% of the population should not be allowed to eclipse the other 90%, what of English culture or have those minorities who feel they have a God given right to have English taxpayers fund highly sectional events, which does nothing for integration, but encourages apartheid, separate development.

It is unacceptable for the Arts Council to continue to behave as if the minority cultures in this country are the majority - they are not. QUite frankly the majority population are fed up with having to listen to the ongoing drivel spouted by governmet funded organisations who are intent on ramming the whole multicultural experiment down everyones throats and all we have are desperate alienated communities, racial divisions the like of which we have never experienced in this country and a wholly unsatisfactory arts scene, which seems to eulogise the talentless and bizarre whilst grinding into the ground solid well loved aspects of our communal history.

The people of England have every right as an Indigenous People to have indigenous culture properly catered for. The United Nations have a whole series of "best practice" as it relates to the protection of indigenous culture and quite frankly the Arts Council (along with many other QUANGOS are simply not living up to their responsibilities). Windell is wrong to object to the majority of Arts funding going to white projects (if that really were true which I doubt) the majority of this country fall into this bracket and that is how a democracy works. Those who represent the largest part of society should receive the proportionate funding to reflect that. I realise WIndell and others like him believe that the reverse should be the case, minorities should have the lion's share and the rest can sling their hook, but for the last 10 years we have had that situation and look what a shambles has been made of our arts heritage.

All you have is the larger part of society totally alienated from so called ARTS events which are simplistic, crude and of interest to very tiny niche interests. What we need is for the tail to stop wagging the dog and the majority to get back into the driving seat.

If it is so right that Scotland and Wales have their cultural needs properly catered for, then the ARTS Council for England should become exactly that. Promoting English artistic endeavour, using the ARts funds to bring society together, an end to the racialising of arts funding, an end to promoting barriers between society by funding alien cultures that don't wish to integrate, and a much more creative use of English taxpayers cash to promote a wholly inclusive "English Culture". Which can be vibrant and eclectic, but NOT driven by minorities who want to wear their minority badge as one of difference and separation, rather minorities who want to adapt their cultures into a wider English Culture which all can take part in and all have an interest in supporting.

And to the person who commented that people writing on this site were from the BNP I can assure them they are not, the United Nations also states that indigenous peoples shall not be harrassed or abused in their wish to have their indigenous culture respected - the English have the absolute right to be listened to and respected in their own country.

You are arguing that the minority should not get more funding from the Arts Council than white English artists, but that is neither here nor there. The Arts Council aim to fund projects that benefit the people of England, and that is the issue. The public should be able to attend and get invloved in Arts activities that are of interest to them, whether the cultural definition is English or not, and that arguement will come down to public opinion.

I personally have no interest in obscure, abstract art (of most artforms) but I have no objection to it being funded for the enjoyment of others; as long as the art that I DO have interest in IS funded to an accessible degree. To state that "the larger part of society are being subjected to ARTS events which are simplistic, crude and of interest to very tiny niche interests." is ignorant and unrealistic. Many English art organisations are regularly funded while minorities may get funded for one off projects. And what evidence is there that the English society you speak of are wholeheartly supporting these organisations? The clause within the Arts Council (and most other organsations) regarding minorities is not to overtake English art but to ensure that they are recognised and represented within the arts industry.

This has turned into a English against minorities debate, which effectively has nothing to do with Arts.

I agree to both.
I think it's incredible that the politicalisation and instrumentalising of art has gone so far today that artists involved with new radical artistic ideas that are experimental in nature are often dismissed as irrelevant. Or perhaps more importantly, some omission in the box ticking is 'found out' in order to refuse an application.

Another imortant point that I think has been raised before, is that the so called 'arms length' policy does not really apply in todays world, and it would be foolish to think that it does.
To me it spells disaster for an important regeneration in the art of ideas in the arts where new paradigms can foster new developments and forms of art. Not only do the arts have a purpose to lift our spirits but they obviously have a purpose to encourage new kinds of thinking, as only an historical view of the great periods of innovation reveals.
What I am saying is that the new and unfamiliar should get an equal chance when it come to funding emergent possibilities, hard though it maybe to trust one's judgment.
I think it needs to be realised that a new look is brought to separating the 'social' from the 'regeneration of thinking' that the arts are renowned for. And in this there needs to be much more discussion with artists, and to not rely an the easy path of form filling and those metaphorical 'boxes'.
Like some sort of exam, which is humiliating to say the least.

I hope this debate keeps heating up — as it should, and I welcome the opportunity it allows.

Yes, there are minority societies within English society, that is a sad truth and a disappointing outcome to 10 years of racial tribalisation by Labour and its ethnic minority PC aparatchiks. Rather than using the Arts to create a new "English" artistic form, which can be embraced by all, the Arts Council has gone down exactly the same road as Labour, breaking up the concept of Englishness, into the petty sub-sets which now drive wedges into our communities.

Ethnically defined arts other than promoting and enhancing the majority English culture is a dangerous and divisive policy and I concur entirely that social policy should be divorced from artistic policy BUT English Arts is English Art, it isn't Scottish Arts and it isn't Welsh Arts it is ENGLISH.

OK we might be in a quandry as to what is considered to be English these days, but that is largely down to the deliberate policies of mass inward migration which the English have never been consulted about and the policy of ethnic and cultural genocide practiced by New Labour.

It is little more than promoting cultural genocide to say that whilst 20/30 years ago English ARt might well have been seen as Maypole Dancing, Country Dancing, water colour painting, English music etc etc and then to say, because of a mass influx of non indigenous people, (who are still less than 10% of the total population the Home Office keeps telling us), that all of a sudden, English ARTs is now (predominantly) Indian Dancing, Carribean music, hip-hop, and basically anything that doesn't contain English in it.

That kind of logic is the racism the majority of the population abhor. And the childish comment about England having brought slaves here shows you what idots are having a say in arts policy! So all of a sudden we must start catering for a newly "imagined" cultural past so that we atone for past misdemeanours is the kind of politically correct clap trap that quite frankly doesn't stand up to any scruting whatsoever.

No one alive today is responsible for slavery, and if we were to take that line we should be sticking in bills to the Italians for enslaving the Angles, and the Danes for pillaging our villages a 1,000 years ago. What utter rot.

No, the Arts Council has got the balance wrong. It has failed to support the English Music Festival which managed to find a top line up of leading musicians, people like Lloyd Webber et al, and would prefer to fund minority arts events because this allows them to tick boxes to comply with "diversity" objectives.

The truth of the matter is that the majority of the population is not interested in niche minority arts. Yes, there will always be a few enthusiasts, or the usual suspects who detest their country so much they would prefer to see any kind of art providing it wasn't English. On the other side, there are millions of people who have just given up on the arts because they consider it to be stuffed full of Labour stooges who are anti-English and an establishment who maked anti-English discrimination almost official policy.

There are over 2,000 English Dances with accompanying music - where do you see these?

There is English Folk Music - when can we have a festival that doesn't include a kettle drum - but instead allows the English to listen to their indigenous folk music.

I just believe that the ARTs Councils has betrayed the English and has used our money to do it and the organisation needs to take a long hard look at itself and prove to the people of England that it isn't simply frittering away public money on "arts" projects which do nothing for building the cohesion of a shared English Culture.

For those who waffle on about Britain, I would just remind you, that Britain is Wales, Scotland and Northern Ireland and they all have their own ARTs QUANGO to support their arts activities. The Arts Council for England should be the equivalent for England - the question is does it know enough about England to be supporting English culture?