The arts and the 'nanny state'

Torn Sutcliffe

The last century has seen a revolution in the arts as in the sciences. Indeed it is tempting to attribute changes in taste, on the part both of the public and of creators, to the revolution in technology. The advent of Photography, for example, coincided with, and may be said to have permitted, abandonment of representation as a primary Obligation for painters and sculptors. Mechanisation in film and television, radio and gramophone, has revolutionised the economic structure of the artistic world and enabled a vast general public to enjoy what Were formerly minority, 'elitist' arts limited, in terms both of content and of accessibility, by the circumstances of live performance. Film and rock music may be regarded as new art forms.

What has happened is comparable to, and an extension of, the takeover by the newly enfranchised bourgeoisie in the early 19th century of the artistic patronage that was formerly an aristocratic preserve: with galleries and public concerts, performers and artists found new markets to serve Which often demanded new kinds of material. These markets also implied a close and healthy relationship between public and creators. But mechanisation, enabling mass dissemination of artistic material and regenerating folk culture in terms suited to the industrial society, also reinforced the exclusive, special and occasional quality of those performing arts that could not — technically — be enjoyed on a comparably wide basis. And it is into those performing arts that subsidies have increasingly been poured, for they could not compete with the economies of scale that the new kinds of mechanisation made possible. In the process, the subsidisers have happily adopted the pseudo-aristocratic status of patrons of the arts, spending the public's money for the good of the few — just as the civilised prince did formerly.

Yet public subsidy has come to mean a generalised responsibility, an obligation.to every kind of artistic activity however infinitesimal the public for the product might be. Public subsidisers are more inclined to have broad, tolerant tastes and less happy to be caught exercising subjective preferences. (Unpopular artists thrive, in the sense of getting limited support not justifiable in commercial terms, as never before.) Subsidy implies the application of expertise, telling people what is good for them both in terms of the product and the financial reward to the producer. It means the growth of institutions and the investing of power in the hands of the kind of people who always come to the top of an Establishment, which tends to confirm the existing social mould.

The dilemma of arts subsidy, where public patronage has to reconcile concerns with fine art and folk art, where the two kinds of patronage have to be expressed awkwardly in the same body politic, was recognised by Maynard Keynes himself, according to Mary Glasgow's 'The Concept of the Arts Council' in Milo Keynes's collections of essays on Maynard. 'Keynes once said that if a subsidising body were 100 per cent successful it would end up by spending nothing at all, except on administration. It would choose so well and back such uniformly certain winners that all its loans would be repaid in full and none of its guarantees ever called . . . The Arts Council certainly does not now work as a sympathetic non-profit-distributing investment trust, and is unlikely to reduce its scale of operation.

Subsidy can distort the commercial mechanism, undermine the vitality of arts that best thrive with no bureaucratic interference. We are now seeing, in rows over community arts projects, in controversy over Arts Council axing of various arts organisations' grants, how difficult and how important it is to spend public money on the arts in a way that preserves as much commercial vitality as possible. It is hugely important who does the spending, and it is preferable for that spending not to be institutionalised by being channelled through a single body or a few bodies. Ideally the sources of subsidy or 'non-economic' contributions to artistic activities should be as diverse as possible, so that numerous decisions and enthusiasms are reflected in the profile of patronage. If the British tax system were changed towards the American, it would rekindle the old duty of the individual to give to worthy causes and more than our cultural life would benefit.

For the British state to relax control over the extent of public support for the arts and other allowable charities, by permitting individual one-off donations to be advantageously tax-deductible, would displease the Treasury and the Inland Revenue. The money thus spent would still be at the expense of the public purse (in the same way that mortgage interest allowance is said to be a `subsidy').

But such a change would spread involvement (both through charitable giving, and through cheer-leading) over a far, far wider range of people. That would genuinely strengthen the sense of community, and encourage entrepreneurs to link new publics and the artists serving them up and down the country. Just as the present tax system discourages giving, and assumes for the state all charitable responsibilities, so the present structure of arts subsidy is based on centralised provision and metropolitan decision-making even when it passes through the regional arts associations.

If Mrs Thatcher really wished to attack collectivism, she could make an effective revolution by this tax change. Self-help for arts organisations would be transformed. If the exercise of power by the Arts Council seems questionable and at times dangerous, the answer is not to fiddle with its structure or argue the justice of its various decisions, which frequently are matters of taste or subjective assessment. The Arts Council is a useful tool for the attainment of specific policy objectives. But it is part of the nanny state, like the Independent Broadcasting Authority and the BBC. If subsidy declines and other sources of funds are encouraged, organisations will be less dependent and the Arts Council's power will be healthily reduced.

This reform might not lead to the American situation very rapidly. The habit of giving, once lost, is not easily reacquired. Britain may be less well provided with the rich and generous: our rich have certainly got out of the way of fulfilling their social obligations by giving large sums to the arts or other good causes. We may never reach the situation in Houston, Texas, where the Grand Opera gets 40 per cent of its income from voluntary local contributions, and 5 per cent from corporate grants as against 42 per cent earned mostly from ticket sales, and only 13 per cent from public subsidy of one kind or another. The Welsh National Opera, by contrast, gets 71 per cent of its income from subsidy, 23 per cent from the box office, and a mere 4 per cent from a few generous sponsors. But South Wales is, admittedly, a declining industrial area at the moment, whereas Houston is the fastest growing (now fifth largest) city in the US.

Everybody, except arrant puritans and philistines, supports the arts. But if the middle classes are demonstrably the main consumers of subsidised culture, should the burden of funding fall on the whole community when ticket pricing and tax deductible donations can ensure that the users pay most of the bills? To `privatise' the arts would also free the Arts Council to concentrate on neglected areas, such as training, giving a start to new enterprises, funding workers' or students' performances. At present much effort is put into being both judge and jury of the achievement of the client — trying to balance commerce and art, and failing (for example) to rationalise the number of orchestras sharing an inadequate total of subsidy in the capital, according to the present dispensation.

Public money does not touch every part of the nation's culture. Pop music, television drama serials, many novels and pictures have been created without it. Nevertheless, Melvyn Bragg got it right in the Sunday Times: `Without the Arts Council's carefully planned distribution of public funds, the greater part of [the £250 million a year arts-culture-entertainment industry] would collapse completely tomorrow morning.' The Arts Council has become a life support system on which many of our cultural institutions are completely dependent. Mr Bragg did not ask if it might be desirable for the `twelve hundred institutions and scores of individual clients' to leave the intensive care unit and return to a normal degree of self-sufficiency. There is surely a natural cycle of life and death for arts institutions (and artistic creativity) and centralised funding interferes with supply and demand, and the size of the market, aspects to which the Arts Council addresses itself partially and inadequately.

In this context, the argument over Public Lending Right was interesting. The spread of free public libraries, increasingly funded from the rates over the last century, certainly encouraged reading among the poor. But what of the market for cheap books? The way book prices are now going, only the well-off will be able to afford them. PLR is designed to compensate authors for the decline in sales due to libraries, a decline hastened by reduced library budgets. Yet the technology exists (in Hongkong and the US, for example) to produce books at a price that can foster a larger market, and so bring authors their return. In preference to a further impost on library budgets so that authors receive transfer payments, public libraries should begin to play a different role. The book trade should be offered a healthier market, perhaps with libraries helping to foster sales. Instead of attempting to democratise the Arts Council, we should democratise its clients — in other words make our arts institutions more responsive to market forces and the interests of the people they exist to serve.

The major disadvantage of the Arts Council life support system is the difficulty of assessing the success or failure of institutional clients and how to deal with failure. For clients success is — in one sense — achieving and maintaining subsidised status. Every time Arts Council officers and their advisory panels of experts withdraw subsidy, they apply a pseudo-professional, `Big Brother knows best' opinion of the value of the institution in question. That opinion is inevitably an Establishment opi nion, partly influenced by the established press, partly procured incestuously within the relevant professions.

Some institutions over the years have managed to place themselves in an unchallengeable position, for reasons of sentiment and nostalgia (the Royal Court Theatre, for example), or by identifying with national prestige (the big four companies, English National Opera, Covent Garden, the Royal Shakespeare Company, and the National Theatre). Loss of grant and switches in subsidy seem likely to affect only those who are beyond this pale of Establishment. How can even so skilled, disinterested and effective a body as the Arts Council adjudicate between the unanswerable cases for support put up by these privileged institutions and the numerous other desirable causes that arise all the time? Since opera cannot pay its way, and since our great theatrical institutions cannot raise their funds through the box office without catering for an even narrower, richer audience, the only option apart from higher subsidy is to oblige them (and by tax changes assist them) to raise their funds from a range of donors. A slow reduction in public subsidy might then be achieved.

The National Theatre is a classic instance of the bind into which our present system of arts subsidy can lead. Since the new building was opened, five years ago, it has been hard to know whether it is primarily a company of actors, a repertory principle, or the operation of a building. As now established, it is all three — and requires a very high level of public funding, by British standards. When the movement in favour of a British national theatre started, a century ago, there was no Royal Shakespeare Company, fulfilling the obvious major obligation of any such institution, a Shakespeare repertoire. When the original national company was launched almost 20 years ago, it was already on the heels of an ambitious expansion of the Stratford setup. Immediately the National began pressing the case for a fitting home, which — when designed and built — is on such a scale that it requires at least two companies of performers to keep it open and is completely uncommercial in its running costs. To add insult to injury, Sir Denys Lasdun's theatre (which has earned most praise not for its auditoria but for its foyers) imposes insuperable artistic limitations on the unfortunate actors who have to use it. The Olivier is an inflexible and vast arena seating little over half the people who can be got into the Theatre Royal, Drury Lane (which is the same size), and actors invariably have to shout. The Lyttelton is a cinemascope proscenium, where actors must cross vast spaces from the wings to achieve the proximity of the playhouse. The Cottesloe, though adjustable, has little atmosphere. Most unjustifiable is the inequality between production costs at the National (£85,000 on Galileo) and at a small local theatre like Stratford East (£10,000 on Hamlet). But we are stuck with this absurd monster, even more certainly than with Concorde. It would require a combination of interest and authority for which there is in Britain simply no provision to return the National to a sensible size (one company) in another home (the Old Vic). The only hope is that the Arts Council could reduce its automatic transfusions of funds, if the burden of paying for the folly could be shared with private and institutional Patrons as in Houston. To change the role of the Arts Council — or to restore it to the role Keynes envisaged — will be to oblige all our performing institutions to earn their Privileged positions from a full range of Patrons, buying tickets and giving donations — and what could be more democratic than that?