Arts debate

Art necessarily does not like to fit into a box, and yet for the purposes of funding the Arts Council has to banish us to tick boxes. We will need some very big boxes to fit everybody in, but we don't have the resoures to stretch so wide.

The question of the responsibilities of a publicly funded organsation will depend on their specific vision and creed. Their responsibility is to fulfil their mantra, not to change tack and conform to a set of rules laid out by a funding body. that is the cart leading the horse.

Of course this creates an obvious problem if in doing so they become something that the arts council doesn't deem suitable for public funding. its a catch 22 scenario really. But why should all publicly funded bodies have the same attainment targets? Shouldn't the public have organisations working on their behalf to produce excellent art with no apologies, and other organisations who make very definite moves to affect education and community development? Why water them both down by insisting that they carry both burdens? (mixed metaphors! apologies!)

Beware of easy answers.

Here's a possibility, though I'm happy to be corrected - The responsibility of a publicly funded organisation is quality - to be the best of the best. to set the pace for others to aspire to. The best at what? Whatever it is that they exist to do.

It is inportant for a public funded body to ensure that works of art are commissioned & preserved for the public, bearing in mind that said works must also be in keeping with public opinion. not an easy task.

For the members of the Arts Council, who are, after all, appointed to make the decisions, then responsibility should be to their functional area of concern. This, unfortunately, is such a vague idea (as most of the comments on each of the discussion areas of this debate show) that, in practice, responsibility is split between the general public (for whom the decisions are being made), and the people who are being supported (to allow them to do whatever it is that they are doing).

At this level responsibility develops an informal dimension based around accepted custom and practice. Responsibility to the public could involve displaying parts of the Arts Council's own collection of art in different areas of the country, or it could mean ensuring that nothing that is offensive receives public funding, or it could mean deliberately funding the most offensive thing that you can think of to get people to discuss art. All of these can be seen to be things that publicly funded arts organisations could do, as well as demonstrating responsibilities towards access, creation and criticism (and any other abstract concepts that can be added in to the debate).

Decisions about what the responsibilities should be, or can be, depend upon what political choices you wish to make between a host of formal and informal demands upon the organisation concerned. Both are important and cannot be dismissed as irrelevant: finding a balance that can be lived with is much more complex. It is to be hoped that the debate, if nothing else, demonstrates how difficult it is to reconcile such widely competing demands upon publicly funded organisations.

Two background papers cross-refer and need to be contested: they are the 'Strategic Challenges' laid out by Catherine Bunting, and the 'Literature Review' of Emily Keaney.

I would recommend looking at these papers as an essential part of this debate (although Emily's is a bit heavy going for those not used to academic research papers)

In Catherine's paper she argues that [in the]"changing social and cultural environment we have identified a number of key strategic challenges" and that these should be addressed through this initiative which is ACE's "first ever public value inquiry" She moves through arguments culminating in section 4, "Our Value Framework", where again the notion of 'public value' is cited as the basis for this exercise.

Emily in her literature review looks in some depth at what this notion - 'public value' - is, where it has come from, and how it has been developed since being dreamed up in an American university 12 years ago.

I want to put a twofold argument:

Firstly that the whole notion of 'public value' is a highly contestable one.

Secondly that it is inappropriate to use in the context of ACE.

DODGY NOTION
Emily states early on that the notion arose as a counterpoint or counterweight to the concept of 'shareholder value', which I hope many will understand as a synonym for the rapacious profiteering of private sector companies. As such the concept adopted much of the underpinning ideology of business management and marketing, and tried to apply it to the public sector. She says:"There was substantial agreement that the traditional model of a monolithic, supply-led public services sector was uneconomical, because it provided little or no incentive to operate efficiently." Ironically last week's Economist magazine contained the following quote from a leading energy analyst (energy supply of course being one of those monoliths):
"I wouldn't say that competition has been tried and found wanting, but its been tried and found difficult"

As many people cautioned the ideology behind privatisation was bollocks at the time and its bollocks now. However the whole 'public value' notion grew within that climate which the Labour government encouraged quite as much as its predecessors.

There is much to be gained from scrutiny and analysis of management and marketing in the public sector but it has been a feature of public sector practice for years. 17 years ago I chaired a committee of Newcastle City Council that focussed on management and marketing; we examined customer focussed service delivery, pancake management structures, and the competing interactions of the 3 E's: Economy, Efficiency and Effectiveness. The 'public value' concept must be seen in this context: as part of a continuum of efforts to do better and, as I have argued above, we should be wary of 'public value's' particular provenance.

We should also be wary of the notions of measurement so enthusiastically promoted by Government. At their worst these are misleading and restrictive interpretations of 'trickle down' logical positivism, the concept that if you cannot measure it then it doesn't exist. Hardly appropriate to cultural creativity and leading inexorably to the tick box mentality we all hate.

WRONG CONTEXT
More importantly, because I believe 'public value' does have some use and relevance in the public sector, is its inappropriatness for ACE.

Emily studies at some length the development and uses of 'public value'. What starts to stand out clearly from this is that the relevance is to those organisations and institutions who DELIVER services. Her examples encompass Central and Local Government, the BBC, the National Trust. All of which do something ACE fundamentally does not do: deliver services to the public.

As I understand it the primary role of ACE is to distribute money to people who are service deliverers: artists and arts organisations. I do not consider it either seemly or proper for ACE to swallow hook line and sinker the latest fashionable conceptualisation of public service ideology. It is supposed to stand at arms length from Government and should take an appropriate distance from these contested interpretations of the world. This over-closeness to Government rhetoric is a significant problem for ACE who should assert greater independence. When I recently complained that info sent to me was jargon rich and content light I was told off by a Member of the Council (to whom I had copied the complaint) who thought it sensible to respond to current Government buzz words. Well it may be sensible to bandy such jargon back and forth when dealing with the civil servants and politicians who can do no better; but I believe it is downright patronising and offensive to use when addressing artists.

ACE has a duty, of course, to follow the twin imperatives of its charter and thus support artists and their organisations, and encourage public engagement with the creative life of the Country. To conflate these duties, as part of this debate, with the broader questions and concepts of public governance might suggest an exaggerated sense of their own importance in the world.

As a number of contributors have remarked, and as Peter Hewitt himself said on the radio, in the final analysis ACE will take whatever decisions they consider the best in pursuit of their Charter objectives.

Whatever this debate throws up.

I am fully in favour of the debate of course, I am taking part in it. But this point is an underlying weakness of the conceit under which the debate takes place. As Emily points out late in her paper:(5.2)
"[people consulted will] disagree about how much something is valued, or whether one type of activity is more valuable than another, they may be assessing that value in totally different, and potentially incompatible, ways. This is what philosophical jargon terms 'incommensurability', and it means that it is often impossible to simply rank outcomes in terms of which one will offer the most public value."

You might take from that a sense that the whole framework ACE have constructed for this debate has just shot itself in the foot.

But I am not here just to carp and criticise:

There are two principles ACE should move forward with, both I believe in the spirit and letter of its Charter, through which it should execute its responsibilities.

Quality and excellence for the whole community.

Engagement and participation for specific, targeted communities.

The first of these is long-standing and non-controversial, I hope, the second a more disputed area. Catherine in her paper suggests that:"such instrumental purposes are unlikely to be prioritised by many artists and arts organisations" and refers to Tessa Jowell's 2004 paper 'Government and the Value of Culture' where Tessa explicitly questions the value of culture within education, health, etc as it is only an instrument of change. Here I think she is dead wrong. The transformatory effect cultural engagement can make enriches all lives and it is a duty for ACE to support such work. The difficulty comes in the choices of which work with which communities. I believe quite simply that disadvantage and exclusion should lead the prioritisation criteria. Some specific communities - the disabled and BME being the obvious examples -have very successfully fought their corner in recent years but many cannot shout as loud and articulately as they. It is the responsibility of ACE to address the needs of those who cannot shout and to do so will be painful. Many will feel it the responsibility of educationalists to engender learning, of the health services to promote wellbeing, and the criminal justice system to tackle crime; but all of these 'silo' approaches can demonstrably be seen to be inadequate. Cultural engagement reaches parts of the human being other engagements do not and we owe the opportunity to those who need it.

If you've made it to the end well done, I hope I might have touched a few chords.

How is public funding constituted?

Is public funding money from the tax payer or the National Lottery?

Before there can be valid debate there must be some definitions and suitable questions.

"We the undersigned petition the Prime Minister to allow BMX'ers to ride the London Bridge skate plaza."

Details of petition:

"Currently there is a skate plaza being built near London Bridge by "IA architecture" and designed by some of the skaters behind the "Side Effects Of Urethane" exhibitions. It is being built on land donated by the "Southwark Council" As it stands, BMX'ers ARE NOT allowed to ride this brand new skate plaza that is soon to be opened. The project is being funded by the Art Council. Public money that everyone should have a say what it is used for, or who can use what is built with it. It is donated land and it should be open to everyone, skater, bmx'er, blader's etc. I feel this is extremely unfair that us BMX'ers are being excluded from being able to ride our bikes in legal areas, forcing us to find "spots" on the streets, often getting us in alot of trouble with the police and being seen as a nuisance with the residents. By signing this petition, you agree that you feel the same way, and that you want BMX'ers to be allowed to ride at the skate plaza."

Instead I would like the arts council to focus on providing strategic support to partners through a combination of directly employed staff and retained advisors whose quality of work the AC could monitor.

The AC needs to have a clear strategy for supporting the arts in an area, and all funded organisations need be helped to understand where they sit within this strategy and how they will be judged to be contributing to achievement of the AC objectives. In line with the CSR and government policy funding agreements with partners must be for three years, preferably on a rolling basis. This would give parters the stability they need to develop quality work.

I think that the responsibilities that come with accepting & spending public funding should be transparent, then it will be easy to determine whether an organisation meets or fails to meet those responsibilities.

If any organisation fails to see that responsibilities should be accepted because of being publically funded, then they shouldn't be funded.

Publically-funded arts organisations have a responsibility to balance creativity with running an effective organisation. In a way, they should be examples of quality, sustainability and good organisational practice. Obviously some organisations would cease to exist without public funding, but public funding should not be used to prop-up failing, poorly managed or under-inspired organisations.

What if there were to be a change to the WAY that organisations are funded, cease financial support to Arts centres or buildings, and put more funding into Arts events that take place in venues that are more accessible to the wider cultural community?
This would stop the embittered stake-holders moaning and squabbling and prevent the need for micro management by funding bodies....
Strategic funding enables arts policy to be honed by practitioners and delivered to the widest audiences possible. Which is surely the collective responsibility of arts orgainsations, to be publically accountable for its funding.

I also support the comments (above) from Clive Gray.

The question may have been posed with the Arts Council in mind; but others such as Local Authorities are also "publicly-funded arts organisations" and have these responsibilities too. As Laura Pottinger's comment (above) reminds us, their statutory mandate in this regard may be worth another look.

Given the way the question was asked I'm unclear how any of the feedback received in this way can be seen as in way statistically valid or available for use in informing future investment decisions given that it's entirely unclear who has made the comment.

I'd have thought a debate which separated out the "arts world" professionals from the public might actually generate an interesting and illuminating perspective on the nature of how the public see public value.

At the end of the day, everybody has to remember who generates these public funds and who the Arts Council is ultimately accountable to - and it isn't the DCMS or the government.

An escalated series of complaints reached the Ombudsman, last year, who judged that she was not qualified to define what is or isn't art.

A short description of my local arts team - clearly very biased - could be "as bent as a nine bob note". The consequence of this is that a huge amount of public money has been wasted on both insubstantial and superfluous works.

The prime requirement of a public arts body is that it should be open and fair, and that its dealings are transparent at every stage. Cliques, in-groups, out-groups, favoured friends - all this nonsense - must be eliminated once and for all. A simple name change is not enough.

I believe that funding for the arts has to embrace everything. Even the much maligned graffiti we all moan about is a form of artistic expression albeit a frustrated one. But because it is not seen in the context of the Tate Modern or The RA, is frowned up. These talents should be harnessed. Surely this is where some for the responsibility lies in recognising, nurturing and encouraging art in all its forms. The encouragement and focus Rolf Harris gives in his public painting events is an excellent way to promote this. There should be more of these events to draw out his untapped talent in our country.

Ensure the widest possible range of audience see, interact with, or participate in the work

Contribute to the growth and development of their chosen artform

Use the arts to contribute to the growth and development of the world in which we live

Make work that is of the right quality for its intended audience or participants

Spend public money only on the intended project, programme of work

Evaluate their work

be really good at what you do and then...

find your place in the arts ecology and expand - reach new people, talk to the communities who live around you, ask them onto your boards and find out what they are interested in.

have a clear vision, but be flexible. always be willing to learn something new about your audiences and participants, and constantly develop to ensure you are not stagnating

With this in mind I think this debate should be focused on the way we want our (money) Arts Council England to identify with us. How it's relationship to the smaller organisations will deliver a better, clearer and more transparent piece of machinery. one where the activity of the artist has not gone through a figure X£00000 before their day rate of £000 can be realised and the outcome benefiting to the community.

I firmly believe that to alow the 'arms-length' principal, honourably divised to ensure that the suits of Whitehall are not able to impose arbitrary financial restrictions and what we may term ' unqualified aesthetic descisions' on the development of the arts, to be critically weakened by the appropriation of such a principal as 'public value' represents a highly regressive move for the Arts Council. Quite apart from the hugely problematic task of defining just what would comprise public value in as 'contentious' a field as the arts, just the very notion of borrowing a political / economic concept from Thatcher's philistine 'privatised Britain'in which the arts were seen as drain on the public purseis surely depressing.

it may be with this idea that there are more graduates and qualified vocational artists then the government could feasably support, but i think that means that people need to decide earlier whether they really want to be publicallly funded artists, or arts students who will take another career, or to perrhaps specify while studying if they want to learn teaching skills or youth arts skills. artists with these skills could also be supported by another sector then the arts.
at the moment, universities dont really prepare arts graduates for their careers, so i think theres a great loss of artistic energy and resources as artists come out of uni trainings, try to be artists, and fail. i think a combination of a change in the methodologies of public funding to give a narrower band of self selected people a low level of constant funding, and a change in vocational training to help artists choose their diverse ways of applying themselves to society would mean better trained more valued and confident artists as a greater public resource.

Asian and African communities more then white sometimes traditionally see the arts as something to indulge in children (if at all) before starting training in something more stable and statory such as healthcare or business.
i think that vocational arts training is massively comprimised by its lack of ethnic diversity, and that a move to secure artists careers through training and funding in the way i suggest above could make it a more attractive and viable career, perhaps going some way to changing the status of the career in diverse commmunities.

the more we can reduce the culture of tickboxes and adminsitration for the arts, the more we can encourage diversity in approaches, diversity of opinions, and diversity in ways of thinking, generally around the arts.
otherwise ther eare professional hoop jumpers who cost a lot, who fill in the forms, and the artists themselves are again at the bottom of the pile.
who cares if the assessors think the potential work is good or bad or of use or not of use. i belive public subsidy should support people and lives and processes. the arts council should just trust us, and support us. the work will make a difference to someone, and the artists want to make the work. support processes that let vocational artists make INFORMED decisions to select themselves, and then support them unconditionally.

Arts organisations are happy to audit and re-describe their work in any way that releases money. It is a corrupting process. The money comes, but at a price. Sycophancy and fear have inspired great art throughout history and across the world’s cultures, but the codes and ambiguities that square consciences are crucial. The demand for statistics inspires only creative accountancy. The subsidised cultural sector in this country is an adjunct of the welfare state, suffering from the same fudges and compromises that have always bedevilled health and education. Developing approaches to public patronage that are egalitarian, vital and liberating has been and will continue to be a long road, but it feels like we’ve taken a few wrong turnings recently. Behind the audits and re-descriptions, there is too much emptiness.

Social value can differ with different art forms, but legitimate responsibilities can include: generating a sense of belonging and identity, shared experience and community; articulating unwelcome truths and rattling cages; privileging the marginalised; providing structures through which we can make sense of our own lives and recognise the society of which we are a part; righteous indignation; social healing; honesty. Many of these functions can all too easily be replaced by their PR versions. Honesty of practice is a fundamental responsibility. With deceit written into the system, a responsibility to be oppositional should figure quite high on any value-for-money agenda.

The artist acts alone with fundamental questions on the value of existence. What does it mean to be human ?

I think the position the artist takes is one of caring for themselves in what they do is the very best possible. It comes from themselves with hardly a glance at an audience. This does not mean that society is ignored because the artist lives in the same world as anybody else. Society benefits from art as long as art is freely available, which it is, and any pressure from funding bodies to try and direct art in terms of public value is a nonsense, it also reveals a sense of ignorance about art.

To repeat - the artist questions the society by asking 'what is it to be human?' - and that surely is enough to satisfy any critical evaluation.
This is not to say that people in general shouldn't make efforts to be creative. But creativity in its general usage is about people being aware of an aesthetic side to their life. In this sense ideas of community art is where the aesthetic can come through. But this emphatically is not an art form that pushes the boundaries of thinking that effect the very essence of what it is to be human, which is after all what we are all on about.

Also, I think it's important to keep art free. I struggle with the imbalance between paint, photography, sculpture etc being so easily and wonderfully accessible, but then music, dance and drama is often so expensive to enjoy. It's a shame that these immersive arts are often beyond the point of accessibility for many.

What did ACE do to promote this debate to the vast number of UK artists? Cough loudly in a cupboard a few times? Most arts organisations funded by ACE promote their activities vastly more effectively.

Is it only me who thinks such poor promotion of this public debate is damning evidence that ACE is not capable of doing its job effectively?

The idea that responses are published on the site with full names and full commentary is initimidating - if even I, as a graduate with an interest in the arts who's not shy of sharing an opinion or two, feel pressured to come up with something witty, original and ingenious and thus am put off responsing at all, what kind of participation are you going to get from people who are less likely to want to express themselves in full sentences, publicly and nakedly, sans spell check?

I think one of the responsibilities of a publicly-funded body is to be accessible and approachable, and I'm not sure that having the debate in quite this manner is going to reach the widest audience. Can the shy people have a nice, ticky-box questionnaire alongside the more lengthy, eloquent debate of the erudite, please? All I really wanted to tell you was to keep funding Bloodaxe Books and the Blue Room amongst all the other wonderful things you do in the North East and now you've got me going - perhaps vindicating the nature of the debate..? Hm. Okay, you got me. But you won't get everyone this way.

Public money must be used to maximum effect which will knock minority interests on the head!

We make arts organisations and artists justify themselves to fit with an ever shifting public and social agenda, which they are obliged to keep chasing in order to function. Through this process the art or artform is undervalued. It is forgotten that it is the creative focus which sparks the work of the artist and inspires community involvement and without resourcing and respect for the artform development, ultimately the benefits received by the community are diminished.

Yes, the arts and arts organisations can and often do a very good job serving a range of social agendas and changing individuals lives. However it is the creativity or the artform which is at the heart of this work, that makes it's value significant and it's impact potential huge. It is the art form that defines it from being a social service.

Arts organisations which meet these objectives should be supported in continuing their work.

www.pulp.net

Music for Change is an RFO. This support allows us to offer increased accessibility to the arts, including education and community development. We feel that it is a vital part of any publicly funded arts organisation's work to give back to society as much as possible in relation to the art form it delivers.

We feel that as a publicly funded organisation we should:

. Remain honest, open and accountable
. Be professional
. Broaden the public's experiences of the arts
. Benefit the wider audiences as well as the artist
. Balance the supply and demand of art forms
. To listen to the public and give them some of what they want, but also to take risks and give them something new and not necessarily asked for
. Balance the responsibility of safety and controversy with relevant, non-exclusive and non-self indulgent arts
. Make the arts accessible, promoting inclusion wherever possible
. Take the arts to familiar as well as unchartered territory
. Provide consistent monitoring and evaluation of the work we do as an organisation

In addition, Music for Change needs to:

. Fulfil our charitable aims
. Promote the functional role of the arts as well as their intrinsic value
. Value both the quality and quantity of experiences that the arts can provide, and see each as being equally important and valuable
. Develop artists and provide a support system for them to develop and nurture their skills
. Provide and develop a skilled and committed team of administrators, support staff, managers, and trustees to deliver the above.

These views are particular to Music for Change. Other organisations with different perspectives will have their own responses and views which are equally as valid and should be voiced. The arts debate is a great opportunity for this to happen.

Our public funding enables us to provide a service. Our responsibility is to offer a good product which brings new and existing participants into the arts. We are also responsible for all the other things which go with running any business - financial management and accountability, equal opportunities, care and safety.

But most of all we have the responsibility of offering the very best service we can for the enjoyment and fulfilment of anyone who works with us.

An organisation should widen its reach into areas by disseminating leaflets to libraries, museums, schools, churches, mosques, market places, superstores, hospitals, and as many places where public access is inevitable.

Arts organisation should open their resources more to the public, and not be isolated, the community should be engaged in the interpretation of the objects displayed in museums, galleries and libraries especially when it involves objects that relates to them, so that younger generation can have true education.

How far should an organisation go to widen its reach? Organisations can't be masters of every social agenda, so better a master of one than a Jack of all trades.

How important is it to support work that is risky and has limited appeal? Fist develope the audience.

If you’re a publicly funded arts organisation, what, if anything, should you give back? High quality art work/experience. Assessable, with a well though-out underlying social objective.

Museums, Galleries, Theartres and mainstream Arts organisations have respeonsibilities to wider society, they need to produce excellent art, encourage grassroots talented artists through enabling them to produce high quality work and provision of avenue to promote grassroots emerging talents. Using the work grassroots should not give anyone the impression that wor of grassroots are of lesser quality. Actually, where I come from grassroots are the one with untailored imagination who produce arts through feelings and communicate it in their design. As a leading African woman artist in this country, I have not been encouraged by Galleries to exhibit my work but I have had many mainstream museums and galleries taping into my work and rebranded it as their idea, only to just say thank you and no acknowdgement to my name. Most recently, a major museum used my work as presentation of their work published by a lottery fund distributor as a product of the museum. It was another demorilising saga only to see my work been claimed as their own work with no mention of my name or AWAD or African women’s production. Is this what mainstream museum or arts organisation call widening its reach? If a publicly funded arts and culture mainstream organisation exploit grassroots ethnic minority’s artistic work without any acknolwedgement and financial compesiation should this be seen as responsible behaviour to wider society or excelleny. It is impossible for ethnic minorities, espcially African women artists to challenge exploitation of their work by publicly funded arts organisations as this is the historic behaviour we inherited from slavery and colonisation. It is important, that publicly funded arts organisation give back honest behaviour, high quality production, acknolwedgement of minor artists,financial and practical support such as avenue for exhibition or self presentation of their arts. Major galleries and theatres need to demonstrate that they are not insulated any longer by presenting ethnic minorities work in collaboration with the people. Also, I need to mention their respeonsibility towards gender concerns as many women artists are not supported or represented in mainstream arts organisations It is important for the Arts Council to ensure that public fund is made available to encourage new talents and arts education in schools and for the Africans and other ethnic minorities. Onces we are supported through funding, we would demonstrate innovative methodology of good practice to mainstream organisations through working together.