Cuts for the Arts - sculpture by Christopher Locke made from scissors confiscated from airline passengers. via Neatorama.
Not that I wish to be the bearer of depressing news, but today’s the day we all find out how bad the cuts in funding to the Arts are going to be. The Guardian has very good coverage of the results – a good blog and an interactive Google-based map showing where the cuts are falling.
The good news in all of this (if you can call it “good”), is that we failed to get Arts Council funding for Studio A1, which means that we won’t lose our funding! I suppose this really counts as making lemonade out of lemons, but it’s a useful lesson: this is the way arts projects like Studio A1 are increasingly going to have to be funded in the future – through contributions and volunteer time from those who value them.
So, no thanks to the current government, but thanks to all our members who are making Studio A1 possible!
Hmmm… good point: if you get no support, then you can’t lose it. I also belong to CGS – a national group of artists using glass as their medium – and we lost all our funding (50k). The Arts Council said that we are not significant enough on the national scene, whilst doing good work locally. I’ve got two complaints about the way the Arts Council have done this: 1) the way criteria were going to be applied was unknown to applicants: you needed luck or a professional funding person to be able to make a successful bid and 2) cutting 100% of an organisation’s funding in a single year where funding had been provided for some time is not a sensible strategy for the survival of arts groups: much better to have planned a staged withdrawal. Humpfff…
Your observation about needing a “professional funding person” raises a very dark cloud. More and more, arts organisations are becoming dependent upon the professional fund-raising industry. Anyone who thinks that this is a good way forward should look to the example of the USA, where arts funding has become a multi-million dollar industry quite separate from any funds it raises for the arts, and it’s an industry which employs managers and specialist graduates, not artists. While majority public funding of the arts doesn’t exclude the growth of the fund-raising and lobbying industry, it does keep it under control. I have a feeling we are looking into a future where the arts is increasingly dominated by competitive, professional tendering and lobbying for private funds, to little benefit to the artists and increasingly threatening to their sense of creative independence.