Today (1st September) on the Radio 4 progamme “Iconoclasts”, journalist Stephen Pollard argues that the arts should no longer receive ANY public funds. He says ...
“This evening I would like to persuade you that taxpayer funding of the arts is one of the great scams of our time, a “Robin-Hood-in-Reverse” grab by which a self-appointed group of arts bureaucrats spend other people's money to fund their own wishes. When they're not promoting the minority tastes of a cultural elite, they are funding supposedly worthy projects which cannot raise enough money from the rest of us of our own personal choice, but which the arts bureaucrats think we ought to fund.
Take the plethora of annual festivals. According to the British Federation of Festivals, over 300 take place every year. From Lichfield, Larmer Tree and Cheltenham to York, Harrogate, Cambridge and Fishguard. It sounds wonderful, spreading culture and pleasure across the nation. The reality is rather different. A recent programme at the Huddersfield Festival, for instance, featured Austrian composer Helmut Oehring. As the brochure puts it, “his parents were deaf-mutes, and a lot of his music explores the relationship between music and deaf people”.
Do not fall for the idea beloved of the arts world, that the network of tax-subsidised festivals are just a more professional re-creation of traditional British celebrations of local arts and craft. They are not: there are few clearer examples of this “Robin-Hood-in-Reverse” principle than the recent explosion in such arts festivals.
The entire racket is run by administrators who glide seamlessly from one public sector job to another, using other people's money to finance their own minority tastes, and then taking the moral high ground when it's put to them that they're engaged in a form of grand larceny, obtaining money from those who have no interest in any of their efforts, and using it to fund, for instance, retrospectives of the paintings of Lucien Freud and “artist-in-profile” concerts exploring the work of Karl-Heinz Stockhausen, to take just two recent examples.
I take those examples because I went to both of those. That was my choice, and my pleasure, but why should my cultural pursuits be paid for by other people, any more than someone else should pay for my Spurs season ticket?
Not that anyone should think that arts funding is about subsidising high culture and bringing it to the masses. How elevating it is to discover where Arts Council England's billion pounds of spending is going. A four-fold grant increase, for instance, to the Luton Carnival, to a total of £124,524 . Which of us is not thrilled to have worked that extra hour to pay more tax to help fund it?
Arts Council England makes sure that street artists (“buskers”, it seems, is a derogatory term) are well looked after. Zap in Brighton (which appears to be some sort of night club - GOS) have received £25,000 a year, Circus Space has been given £70,000, and Circomedia has been handed £80,000 to train street artists. One might have thought that buskers got their money from passers-by, depending on whether or not they were any good. It is of course much more sensible to take money from taxpayers and hand it over to the mime artists to make sure that they're always in pocket. How philistine we would be as a society, if the Covent Garden piazza were not properly staffed with fire-eaters.
The real problem is that arts funding is a monster which, given its head, develops an insatiable appetite and spends for spending's sake. As Arts Council England's manifesto put it a while ago, and I quote: “we achieved a major increase in public investment in the arts. Now we intend to capitalise on that success by backing the country's artistic talent and winning further support for the arts”. In other words, “if you think we were whooping it up at your expense before, that was nothing!” By the way, “manifesto” is an interesting label, given that the Arts Council is the body which is set up specifically to ignore the public's wishes and provide an income to organisations that they would not receive by the free choices of consumers of the arts.
Rarely is the money spent as the public who supply it would choose to spend it. Nothing better illustrates this than the National Lottery fiasco. More than £500million has gone on building new museums and extensions since the first tranche of lottery funding became available in 1995. Instead of using the money to help existing museums with proven track records of providing services which, indeed, the public did use, it was frittered away on a series of follies, the upkeep of which alone added another £29million a year to the running costs of the country's museums.
Kevin Kostner might have become a hero to a generation for believing, in the film “Field of Dreams”, that “if you build it, they will come”, but his character was using his own money. The lesson of lottery funding is that if the arts establishment decides to build it, they will NOT come. The Lifeforce Centre built beside Bradford Cathedral at a cost of £5million closed in 2001 after seven months. It was projected to attract 40,000 people a year. In its first week it had 62 paying visitors.
The Centre for Visual Arts in Cardiff was forecast to have 220,000 visitors; in its first year it managed 47,500 and closed in November 2001 after costing £9million to build. The £15million National Centre for Popular Music in Sheffield closed after 16 months. It was supposed to attract 400,000 people a year. Fewer than 90,000 went through its doors. On and on it goes, with our money.
Even in times of plenty, arts funding was a moral outrage. Today, with police, education and other budgets being slashed, it has become a monster that simply has to be slain.”
The GOS says: I suppose I should declare an interest here. I used to run a very successful organisation of four children's choirs across two counties. We did well in national competitions, we appeared on television several times, we made CDs and undertook a number of European concert-tours. I also promoted several major events at professional concert halls featuring literally hundreds of performers.
All of this was done entirely without external funding of any sort. I failed completely to attract commercial sponsorship, and no official or charitable agency would offer us any kind of grant, presumably because loads of ordinary kids standing in straight rows and singing very beautifully is in some politically-correct way less worthy than a few Big Issue sellers polishing their tongue studs and learning to juggle.
These days I still have a vague connection with a very fine local choral society. Despite the fact that this provides a vital outlet for the social and artistic needs of a large number of mature people, enabling them to delight capacity audiences with recreations of some of the world's major works of classical music, they receive no money from Arts Council England or the National Lottery or any other bugger. They have to fend for themselves. Luckily, they manage.
Stephen Pollard is 100% right: taxpayer funding for the arts should cease forthwith and entirely, simply because it isn't going to the right places. He is absolutely correct in his assessment of the army of so-called arts administrators (“Those who can, do; those who can't, get cushy jobs administering the ones who can”). Just like local government officers and civil servants, they have become adept at job-creation, inventing projects that require their own continued employment and promotion. They leach away money that could go to actual artists, musicians, actors etc. who usually don't have very much of their own.
Their greatest creations are the festivals Pollard mentions. Here in East Anglia, the world-famous Aldeburgh Festival almost never includes any participation by local people. Famous names from around the world congregate in Sunny Suffolk to be lunched, fawned over and name-dropped by administrators, but the idea that a local choir or orchestra might get a look in, however skilled (and trust me, some of them are), is pure fancy.
Norwich has an excellent arts festival. A few years ago its organisers preferred to pay for a very ordinary girls' choir to come over from Norway to give a concert in Norwich Cathedral (I know, I was there), when thirty miles down the road was an award-winning children's choir that would have given a superior performance for next to nothing.
This kind of absurdity is repeated in every town and county the length and breadth of Britain. The money goes to the undeserving, the place-holding, the sycophants, the trendy and the worthless, while ordinary talented, diligent people carry on and plough their own furrow without financial help and, praise be, with considerable success. Amateur music is alive and well in Britain, no thanks to the Arts Council, the National Lottery or the government. I'm assuming, because I know no different, that the same is true in the other arts with the possible exception of modern dance which in my experience is a wasteful, navel-gazing, self-regarding discipline and therefore does receive a measure of official support, allowing troupes of dancers to spend several weeks at a time working out routines that last less than fifteen minutes, get performed to tiny audiences a couple of times and add nothing at all to the sum of human achievement. I used to share an arts centre with these people, so I know.
There should be no taxpayer funding for any artistic endeavours. Art is by its very nature something you do for its own sake. By its very nature it is something you do, rather than something you watch or experience. If you don't do it yourself just for the hell of it, if you simply stand there and watch other people doing it, it ain't art, it's entertainment – and if you're going to expect the taxpayer to fund entertainment, you might as well offer government grants to keep Big Brother on the air, or a bursary to Jonathan Woss so he can continue his exploration of obscenity in the environment.
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