Review essay: the Arts Council at 70

2016 marks the 70th Anniversary of the founding of the Arts Council. The organisation itself has celebrated the birthday in typically 2016 style, with a hashtag on Twitter and an invitation for people to participate in #70Things (each one of which has an artistic or creative flavour). I proposed dedicating this year’s Cultural Trends Conference to the anniversary, in an attempt to reunite key people who have played an important part in the development of Arts Council policy over the years.

We explored three themes on the day: excellence, regionalism, and the use of evidence. Each theme was the subject of a Witness Seminar: a format designed to explore subjects in contemporary history that lack any substantive paper trail. Witness Seminars resemble a combination of a reunion and a group interview. The panellists for each session were selected through discussions in the Cultural Trends Editorial Advisory Board. We wanted to ensure that a lengthy period of history was covered by the panellists, but naturally this was restricted by the availability of speakers and the fact that, beyond a certain time in history, the responsible agents for public policy are neither “with it” nor “with us”. As you read the transcripts, it is worth doing so with a critical eye; the history is contended.

Currently, there are three histories of the Arts Council that are worth seeking out. One is official but uncritical, another is gossipy and seemingly unreliable, and the third is all-too-underdeveloped. Sinclair’s (1995) Arts and cultures: The history of the 50 years of the Arts Council of Great Britain is a lengthy tome. Sinclair was granted a good deal of access to the big names at the Arts Council, and takes a chronological approach to the organisation’s first 50 years. It does little to offer an independent or critical stance on the events. Little reference is made to non-Arts Council agents and testimonies go largely uncorrected and unchallenged. Witts’ (1999) Artist unknown: Alternative history of the Arts Council is quite a different beast, although it covers the same chronological period. In it, axes are ground and scores settled. Nothing about it gives the reader a sense that this is a balanced or objective account of the Arts Council, in some ways that’s part of its appeal. But there are some revealing anecdotes and it’s an interesting, if curious, read. Hutchison’s (1982) The politics of the Arts Council is an essential little book that takes a more thematic approach. It was written by a distant predecessor of mine and every point he makes still feels relevant some 30 years after it was written.

Organisational histories of the Arts Council can be supplemented by other biographical accounts. For example, The culture gap by Hugh Jenkins (former Arts Minister) is delightfully intelligent (given it was written by a MP) and Roy Shaw’s (former Arts Council Secretary General) Arts and the People is provocative and righteous (Jenkins, 1979; Shaw, 1987). Scholastic interest in the history of cultural policy has waxed and waned, but the recent work of Anna Upchurch signals an encouraging move to get stuck into the heritage of this (e.g. Upchurch, 2011). Alongside histories of the Arts Council itself there are sweeping accounts which critically illuminate the entire notion of cultural policy (e.g. Carey, 2006; Hewison, 1997). One or two specific aspects of the Arts Councils work have attracted scholarly attention. The Giving Voice to the Nation project looked at history and drama from 1984 to 2009 (Dorney & Merkin, 2010) and the Step by Step report examines the specific area of young people and the arts from 1944 to 2014 (Doeser, 2015).

One of the aims of the conference was to bring a number of diverse voices to the fore, to supplement these published histories. We were especially pleased to get a range of speakers who could cover the work of the Arts Council from the early 1970s to the early 2000s. And we were delighted to round off the day with a speech from former Arts Council Chair Dame Liz Forgan, which (while perhaps more upbeat than the sessions that preceded it) was not without a juicy revelation or two.

The transcripts from the day are freely available to view online [http://explore.tandfonline.com/page/ah/cultural-trends-conference]. A few of my personal highlights are detailed below. In essence, these reflect the following themes: individuals and networks, buildings and places, perennial contradictions, the market versus subsidy, and the fact that (for those of us who have been employees of the Arts Council) there is very little that is new in this world.

A key recurring factor in all three sessions was individuals and their networks. I was especially interested to hear how Naseem Khan built an alliance of colleagues around the diversity agenda:

When I went into the Arts Council in 1996, there was an immediate absence of, or very few, people of colour. […] What I tried to do was to create a network of officers within the regions. There were a number within each Regional Arts Association. There was somebody who was officially looking after diversity and they tended very often to be a young black woman, very low down in the pecking order. It was a matter of creating a network, a feeling of expertise and a push from below.

I was also struck how the micro-geography of policy-making is perhaps underplayed in official histories. The fact that this or that person works in the same building, or the way some people are comfortable with a setting while others are intimidated  …  This played out in how people experienced affinities and oppositions. Jo Burns said,

I was giving money to John Cooper Clarke and Lemn Sissay. The relationship was actually very healthy, a balance between that rather grand, Oxbridge institution in Piccadilly and the regional organisations running around, being counter-cultural and challenging the old order.

The same image comes from Robert Hutchison’s experience of Head Office:

What I came into in 1973 […] was a patrician organisation. This was an organisation of Lords and Ladies and similar types. It was actually what I felt: it was a mix of a London club and an Oxbridge college, and it had many of those assumptions. All the directors were male, needless to say, and as far as I can remember there was not a single black or Asian member of staff. […] There was gentlemanly vagueness and functional ignorance.

The perennial contradictions and challenges of increasing access and widening participation reached a particular fever in the mid-1970s. As Sandy Nairne experienced,

There was a moment in the late 1970s when Roy Shaw had a big wobble about whether the Arts Council should be funding community arts. [… .] I had a wonderful year going around the country looking at wonderful community arts activity, and came back and told him it was fantastic, which was not what he wanted to hear.

And Ken Worpole confirmed

What happened was that, as the same time punk came along – in 1976 – this notion that everybody could express themselves and make culture hit the Arts Council at the end of the 1970s. […] Their idea was steeped in the [Workers’ Educational Association] thinking: that the people must be led towards the light, and it was through education or the training that cultural democracy would emerge.

This is almost an exact rehearsal of contemporary debates brought about by the work of 64million Artists [http://64millionartists.com/] and the Understanding Everyday Participation project [http://www.everydayparticipation.org/].

There is a persistent absurdity to much of this, but also a growing professionalism (in the administrative sense). It was sobering to hear Pauline Tambling report that, “Quite irrespective of how much you spend on evaluation and research, having the knowledge of what you are actually doing is fundamental. We did not have a list of nationally funded organisations until 2000”. But this felt like an improvement on a world (as Luke Rittner recalled) where there would be the “making of policy around a dinner party the night before coming into the office”.

I especially welcomed Ken Worpole and David Powell’s contribution to the sessions, because they reminded us that the bit of the cultural sector that dominates the thinking and rhetoric of the Arts Council is only one part of a much larger sector. And that creative people are sometimes seeking to disrupt and overthrow, but also merely need a leg-up, to help them make their own way in the world, and are not seeking a diet of never-ending subsidy. As Ken Worpole reflected from his time with the Greater London Council, “The new generation – particularly ethnic minorities – did not want to go the Arts Council for public subsidy. […] These groups wanted to be in the marketplace”.

Finally, it was depressing and reassuring in equal measure to discover that so much of what I encountered while in the research team at the Arts Council was also in place during the seventies, eighties, nineties and noughties. Some things never change. I winced with recognition when I heard Andy Feist say

I always smile to myself at the challenge that the poor old DCMS civil servants had. Everyone around the table would say, “Okay, the first thing that we have to measure is excellence” and essentially the measure is: “We cannot really do it this year” and they never do it. It is a much harder environment to work in. The objectives are much clearer in many other areas of public policy.

And the pressures I recall, to produce “helpful” and “useful” research were there a decade before I joined. As Ann Bridgwood said, “Creative Partnerships was a good example, where they wanted evidence of the impact before it had even started”. But other things do change. In discussing the ever-changing structures of local government and local arts administration, Tim Challans reflected that “The Regional Development Agencies are like a lot of other things that we have discussed: they came and went. Whilst culture will continue because culture is created by people and not by institutions”. Plus ça change, plus c’est la même chose.

Acknowledgements

Many thanks to everybody who helped make the Conference possible and who took part with such enthusiasm and sincerity. Especially our Witnesses: Luke Rittner, Sandy Nairne, Naseem Khan, Ken Worpole, Jo Burns, Robert Hutchison, David Powell, Tim Challans, Andy Feist, Ann Bridgwood and Pauline Tambling. And our session Chairs: Robert Hewison, Kate Oakley and Sara Selwood. I am delighted that Dame Liz Forgan could be out Keynote Speaker. Thank you to King’s College London for generously hosting the event and allowing me to dedicate time to its preparation, and thank you to colleagues at King’s, Taylor and Francis, and the editorial board of Cultural Trends for their feedback and assistance as the event was taking shape.