ARTS

Has the Arts Council had its day?

Should it be scrapped, shaken up or absorbed into a new Culture Ministry? John Parry investigates

It is always difficult talking to people in the arts community, especially those in the subsidised sector, about the possible demise of the Arts Council. They talk in whispers constantly looking over their shoulders, worrying, metaphorically I hope, about bro- ken legs or the future of their families as though the Arts Council were the Mafia and its chairman, Lord Gowrie, some sort of vengeful godfather. The problem with thinking the unthinkable about the Council is that it has been with us for so long it has become part of our heritage, our culture. After more than 50 years it is difficult to imagine being without it. Or is it?

Before the election, the then shadow arts minister, Mark Fisher, told me that the Council had a secure future and that he envisaged a much broader and more authoritative role for it. Since the election, his new boss, the Heritage Secretary Chris Smith, has made it very clear that this is not necessarily the case. He is not con- vinced that the Arts Council route is the best way to distribute the government grant or the Lottery money to the arts, and he has already let it be known that he will be monitoring the Council's activities over the coming months and carefully examining the alternatives. He said to me at a recent lunch that he had a genuine desire to think from first principles about how money gets to the arts.

In the light of this approach, Smith's decision to allow Lord Gowrie to stay on as the Arts Council chairman until his con- tract runs out in April 1999 takes on a rather more sinister aspect. If Smith does eventually decide to do away with the Arts Council, the process will certainly take at least a couple of years, so there is no point in changing chairmen beforehand.

Gowrie himself concedes that an incom- ing government is right to look closely at how public funds are spent but denies there is anything sinister involved. He says that Smith has no political reason to move him. He emphasises his apolitical stance point- ing out that he has not taken the Tory whip in the Lords since April 1984 and that he has many friends in the Labour party.

However, his sanguine attitude is not widely shared and there is a growing awareness across the arts community both subsidised and otherwise that the Arts Council has reached its sell-by date — the knacker's yard scenario as one administra- tor put it. The Council is widely con- demned for being over bureaucratic, overstaffed, over expensive and arrogant. Its main concern is seen to be its own sur- vival. Most seriously of all, perhaps, it is regarded as having lost touch with the real reason for its existence. In 1945, the creator of the Arts Council, Maynard Keynes, made that reason very clear. He said its purpose is 'to create an environment, to breed a spirit, to cultivate an opinion, to offer a stimulus to such pur- pose that the artist and the public can each sustain and live on the other in that union which has occasionally existed in the past at the great ages of a communal civilised life'. But Keynes died before his dream came to life.

Fifty years on, Britain is a very different place from those immediate post-war years, and, while the Council has had many won- derful periods offering 'a stimulus to such purpose that the artist and the public can each sustain and live on the other', it is now in such a state of low esteem in the eyes of the public and the arts community itself that there has to be a dramatic change.

In his excellent analytical book Culture and Consensus, Robert Hewison pinpoints 1993, the year the Arts Council of Great Britain was reduced in stature to the Arts Council of England, as the most humiliating year in its history. It was being forced to make real cuts in revenue funding and was required by government to cut more than half a million pounds from its administra- tion costs. It was also required to cut the number of Council members from 20 to 16.

In an effort to show that it had teeth, which it very clearly did not, it proposed to cease funding up to ten regional theatres. But the scheme was so maladroitly handled that it had to be very publicly withdrawn amid a welter of leaks and high-octane recrimination in the theatre world. This was followed by an equally incompetent attempt to cut the funding of one or even two of the four main London orchestras. The Council used the distancing device of appointing an outside body to advise it, as though it was not already knee-deep in advisers of its own. The end result was a laughable climb- down, followed by the resignations of the director of music, Kenneth Baird, and the chairman of the music panel, Bryan Magee. Even the secretary-general himself, Antho- ny Everitt, resigned the following year to no one's surprise or regret.

His resignation was timed, he claimed, to coincide with the departure at the end of his contract of the chairman Lord Palumbo to give the incoming chairman Lord Gowrie a clean slate. This would be Gowrie's opportunity, before the 50th anniversary celebrations, to draw a line under the fiascos of recent times, reshape the Council and rekindle the confidence of both the government and the arts con- stituency. Sad to say, he bungled it.

His first and most important job was to find a replacement for Anthony Everitt. It needed to be someone completely fresh from the outside, untainted by the failures of the previous administration. Remark- ably, Gowrie took the easy way out and appointed Mary Allen, Anthony Everitt's deputy. Whatever her qualities as an administrator, she was the one person who had stood side by side with Everitt support- ing his wrong-headed tactics over theatres and orchestras. In fact, she should have resigned with him.

Now the Council's reputation is even lower than it was then and Gowrie is searching for yet another secretary-general to run the show after Mary Allen's sudden departure to the war-torn offices of the Royal Opera House and the shambles Gowrie's own word — left behind by Sir Jeremy Isaacs. But the omens are not good.

While no one doubts that Lord Gowrie's heart is in the right place or that he is a charming and cultured chairman, he loftily refutes any criticism of his failure to take hold of the Opera House problem years ago as glib and easy. And his decision to appoint yet another outside body to exam- ine, among other things, the relationship between the Council and the Opera House, has left most people in the arts community wide-eyed with astonishment.

So is it time for the 'knacker's yard sce- nario' to be put in place?

Surprisingly, Lord Gowrie's predecessor, Lord Palumbo, would not be at all con- cerned if the Arts Council were to be scrapped and its responsibilities handled directly by the Heritage Department. He takes the pragmatic view that the arm's length principle has gone anyway and, as long as arts funding is guaranteed and min- isters are prepared to face their critics directly, then so be it. Patrick Deuchar, chief executive at the Royal Albert Hall, believes it is time to be rid of the Council and that it is possible to find a better alter- native. He sees the annual £7 million cost of running the Council as 50 per cent too high, its Westminster headquarters too grand and wonders whether too many arts organisations are being supported. David Whelton, managing director of the Philharmonia, would be confident of the future of his orchestra with the French system of a culture minister dispensing the money directly, and Sir Peter Hall, the lion who roared throughout the Eighties at the Council and its then chairman Lord Rees Mogg, wants it rethought, reconstituted and renamed. Timothy Clifford, director of the National Galleries of Scotland, describes the Council as dull, stultifying and needing new blood at every level. What is clearly needed is another May- nard Keynes to reinvent his dream for the 21st century. Memo to the Heritage Secre- tary: The time has come. Have courage. Be bold. Find this person or scrap the whole Arts Council concept altogether. Create a new Culture Ministry and do the job your- self. If it works so well in France, surely we could do it even better here.