Arts policy
Dance till you drop
The Arts Council thinks it knows what's best for us. Susannah Herbert disagrees
You mustn't say multi-culturalism. The term is a little discredited. We say cul- tural diversity now.' Marjorie Allthorpe- Guyton, the head of visual arts at the Arts Council, is seeking the right words to explain why the nation needs to spend at least £1 million over the next three years on the culturally diverse Institute of New International Visual Arts.
Iniva — as it is catchily known — is 'a new contemporary visual arts organisation in inner London which will house a gallery alongside educational, research and pub- lishing facilities'. This year its budget is £392,500, though it is not yet clear what the money will buy. Its first fruit will be unveiled this autumn at the launch of a multi-ethnic volume called Disrupted Bor- ders. Ms Allthorpe-Guyton is sure it will provoke debate.
Iniva is an exciting new initiative which moves beyond the boundaries of European art,' says Anthony Everitt, the secretary general of the Arts Council. He claims that, `it will bring together the best of Europe and the United States with the contempo- rary art of Africa and the Pacific Rim. This global approach to the visual arts is unique and we are calling it the New International- ism'. We are calling it other things as well, out here in the real world, but 'the New Internationalism' has the right authorita- tive ring to it. Or should that be authoritar- ian? It seems the New Internationalism is going to be good for us whether we like it or not.
The Arts Council likes the idea of Iniva so much that it decided earlier this year to raise its visual arts budget by £460,000 and give more than half that sum to the project. At the same meeting, the Council jeopar- dised the fates of ten theatres and two orchestras by cutting the budgets of its drama and music departments.
What is going on? The Arts Council is under pressure. It has been told by the Government to expect a £5 million cut in its £225 million budget. In May, its internal workings were examined and found want- ing in a Price Waterhouse review, which painted a memorable picture of a 'cumber- some' organisation heavily preoccupied with feeding its network of committees, task forces and units with self-spawning strategies, reports and draft proposals. The Council, said the review, should leave social policy to the Government and get on with making artistic judgments. This week, Peter Brooke, the Heritage secretary, endorsed Price Waterhouse's findings and asked the Council to start cutting its costs immediately.
Staggering under this two-pronged attack, the Arts Council has found its feet only to place them in its mouth, declaring triumphantly that it intends to head in 'a new direction'. Instead of maintaining grants to its most far-flung and locally val- ued dependents — the repertory theatres, for example — it will now focus on contem- porary dance and the visual arts.
Never mind that the Council's own statis- tics prove that the audience for contempo- rary dance has fallen by 13.5 per cent in the past five years. Never mind that the award- winning London City Ballet has lost its Arts Council grant, despite having played to 700,000 people last year. Never mind that the Council's own history of interfer- ence in the visual arts has resulted in a col- lection of 7,000 pictures recently described in the Financial Times as demonstrating only 'the fashionable, narrow, unthinking exclusivity of our cultural officers . . . [whose decisions are] never excused, never defended, never explained'. The moral is: the Arts Council knows what is best for us. If we don't care for modern dance, we shall shortly learn to love it, because in certain parts of Britain there will be little else.
Take the new vogue for National Dance Agencies, or 'regional focuses for dance activity'. We have only six now, but the Council hopes soon to have one in each of its ten regions. At the same time, it is con- sidering a 'hit list' of ten repertory theatres which includes both the Bristol Old Vic and the Plymouth Theatre Royal: if the grants for both are cut, the West Country will be left with no major producing the- atre. So much for accessibility — which, incidentally, is listed as one of the Coun- cil's three main objectives in its 1946 Char- ter. Evidently the West Country will shortly have so many community dance artists, res- ident choreographers and in-house out- reach officers that it won't need a theatre.
The motives behind these astonishing `priority shifts' have yet to be spelt out to the people they will hit hardest. The usual dodge — blame the Government doesn't work neatly here, because it is the Arts Council itself which made the decision to divide the Government's £5 million reduction unequally, reserving the biggest cuts for drama and music while showering the money thus saved on its pet art forms.
Needless to say, theatres and orchestras are enraged. So is the Department of National Heritage, where Peter Brooke believes the Arts Council is 'not a healthy organisation'. lain Sproat, the Heritage minister, has even tried to persuade the Council to rethink specific cuts: his inter- vention on behalf of London City Ballet was rebuffed as breaking the sacred 'arm's- length principle'. The Council, meanwhile, seems to believe that its universal unpopu- larity proves it is doing the right thing. The unofficial motto is, `No gain without pain'.
There are echoes here: the Council no one loves is favouring art forms which mir- ror its isolation and unpopularity. Take Iniva once more. What is this New Interna- tionalism and who needs it? 'New Interna- tionalism recognises that all peoples and all cultures today are part of the same world.' Same world, my eye. If it costs £392,500 to demonstrate that, it's time to move to a dif- ferent planet.
Susannah Herbert is arts correspondent of the Daily Telegraph.
Previous page
