In the final months of world war two, the nation’s visionary policy-makers began to turn their thoughts to how a traumatised country could be rebuilt. Out of the ashes of those dark days came radical reforms to tackle health, education and poverty, but the British population, numb and jaded by the horrors of war, also needed something more intangible to lift the spirits and nurture hope and aspiration.
After witnessing the success – and unexpected social value – brought by the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), a wartime body established to boost public morale, the influential economist and civil servant John Maynard Keynes started imagining a more permanent way in which the government could support the arts.
As a member of the Bloomsbury Set, Keynes was a firm believer in the intrinsic value of culture. In June 1945, he drafted a charter to establish “a semi-independent body … provided with modest funds” that would distribute state funding for art, drama, dance and music. This would meet the goal of Labour’s 1945 election manifesto pledge “to assure our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation” – the first UK government policy on the arts.
“State patronage of the arts has crept in,” said Keynes at the time. “It has happened in a very English, unostentatious way – half-baked.” Keynes was clear that the body should abide by an “arms-length principle” and remain independent from meddling politicians – memories of how European states had abused culture as a tool of oppression must have been fresh in his mind.
Keynes didn’t live long enough to see his vision realised, dying of a heart attack within a year. But just a few months after his death, in 1946, the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) was granted a royal charter and given a budget of £235,000 (£29m in today’s money) to spend on cultural pursuits. In August, the charter celebrated its 70th anniversary, having survived seven decades of social change. To trace its history is to see a microcosm of postwar British cultural and political life. But to what extent has it lived up to its original purpose?
“Organisations don’t often take much notice of their history but if you look at some of the initial intentions, a lot of them are still reflected in our priorities: art for everyone, a mixed [funding] ecology and building on the role of local authorities,” says John Orna-Ornstein, the director of museums at Arts Council England (ACE), the largest of the four national arts councils created as a result of the devolution of ACGB in 1994. The others (Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and the Arts Council of Wales) play a similar role for the arts in their respective nations as ACE does in England.
“The council is not just about superficial access, but also about art and culture that excites, engages and improves people’s lives,” Orna-Ornstein says.
Dual purpose
But the tensions in arts policy today were evident from day one. The royal charter cited two overarching objectives – “to increase the accessibility of the fine arts to the public” and “to improve the standard of execution of the fine arts”. Those goals – access and excellence – have sat uneasily alongside each other, at times coming into conflict. With limited funding, what should the council support: the most, or the best?
The choice taken by ACGB in those early days was clear. Although the charter’s aims included establishing arts centres in every town, promoting touring and other measures to increase access, ACGB’s focus tended towards excellence, with much of its funding going to a small number of institutions mainly in London. It was a policy described by the council’s secretary-general in 1951 as “few, but roses”. The imbalance was further exacerbated in the 1950s by the closure of regional councils that had been established during wartime by CEMA.
Funding inequity
Efforts to address this inequity have taken place in the years since, such as the creation of independent regional arts boards in the 1960s. But reports such as 1984’s The Glory of the Garden on the regional theatre landscape, and the 2013 independent analysis, Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital (RoCC), have shown that this deeply ingrained funding imbalance has never gone away. The resources sucked up by national cultural institutions, often in the capital, is an issue in all four home nations, although the RoCC report refers specifically to England.
Another mis-step of those early days was the ACGB’s narrow, patrician view of what constituted “fine art”, a definition that excluded emerging mediums such as film, and also overlooked popular culture and the work of artists from diverse backgrounds. This was one factor that led to a decades-long structural problem with diversity, which continues to manifest itself in the arts and culture sector today. “Diversity is a massive challenge,” says Orna-Ornstein. “Some organisations are doing fantastic work but we still have a lot further to go.”
These problems aside, the foundation of ACGB heralded many early triumphs. It played a key role in the 1951 Festival of Britain, the UK-wide exhibition that intended to foster a sense of postwar recovery and optimism through a celebration of science, technology, architecture and the arts; its legacy is most visible on London’s South Bank where the Festival Hall still survives from 1951, and the Skylon restaurant’s name doffs its cap to the original celebration’s striking vertical sculpture (see front cover). It also brought touring exhibitions, new commissions and summer arts festivals to towns across the UK.
ACGB played a significant part in persuading local governments that arts funding should be a legitimate part of their budgets. Its efforts to bring art to the masses resulted in beautiful works of art popping up in unexpected places. Sculptures by artists such as Barbara Hepworth were included on the new housing estates beingbuilt in bomb-damaged towns and cities, for example.
The introduction of National Lottery capital funding for the arts in 1992 was a huge boost, enabling ACGB to more fully realise the charter’s ambition to establish arts and cultural centres in towns and cities (although recent research revealed that this too disproportionately benefited London).
Meanwhile, the arts council’s ongoing relationship with new artists is evident in the Arts Council Collection, which also celebrates its 70th birthday this year. Now administered by the Southbank Centre on ACE’s behalf, the collection holds almost 8,000 pieces of modern and contemporary British art, with a focus on emerging artists. Early works by influential postwar artists appear, including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, all of which are available as loans or for touring exhibitions. It is one of ACGB’s most important legacies and to mark its anniversary year the artist Ryan Gander has curated an exhibition with works he has chosen from the collection, alongside new commissions by him and other artists. It is on display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
So what would Keynes make of ACE as it looks today? Drafted by a man whose very name is an epithet of stimulus-based economics, the charter reaches its 70th year in the midst of a decade of austerity, with severe funding cuts to the arts.
“We don’t deny it’s a difficult time,” says Orna-Ornstein. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with local authorities. We make a holistic case that emphasises the benefits of investing in culture.”
Never immune from the political climate, the arts councils (particularly in England) have responded by funnelling more money to help organisations become resilient, and generate more income through initiatives such as increased commerciality, as well as emphasising the economic case for culture.
But Christopher Gordon, an author of the RoCC report, believes cuts are once again laying bare structural inequities.
“There’s still a massive, unequal divide between promoting excellence and access. Attempts to widen that out have become more difficult since local authorities have taken such a hammering. There’s no money in participation and engagement – programmes such as Creative People and Places were the first to have their funding cut.”
Autonomy from government has also worked against the organisation, Gordon believes, letting the arts council off the hook when it comes to tackling regional imbalance or distributing lottery funding. “It can get away with what it wants to do and ignore the things it doesn’t.”
Radical solution
Others are critical of the council’s lack of transparency on funding decisions and inability to listen to criticism, saying the way it operates means funding recipients are sometimes unwilling to give honest feedback. “The three-year agreements have produced a climate of fear, where people are afraid to tell it like it is,” says an arts figure who asked to remain anonymous. “It claims it’s an open discussion but the council has always had its head down with its mates, funding people it knows and trusts.”
David Powell, another RoCC report author, has a radical solution.
“The arts council aged 70 is of pensionable age and we should pension it off. If we want a system to deliver cultural equity, we can’t get that by continuing to trim what the arts council already does. We don’t have a system to fund widespread change at local level – we need something else.”
It’s a provocative statement, but food for thought as the sector endures a turbulent period. What the arts council will look like 70 years from now is probably beyond even the imagination of Keynes himself.
Now at the mid-point of that strategy, ACE has announced another radical change to bring museums and libraries further into the fold: all ring-fenced museum funding is to be scrapped, including the MPM, resilience and museum development funds.
Instead, from 2018 funding for museums will be integrated into ACE’s other streams, namely National Portfolio Organisations (NPO) and Grants for the Arts (now renamed Grants for the Arts and Culture to reflect its wider remit). NPO funding will come in four-year agreements rather than three, and will be divided into three tiers, with less administrative burden placed on those bodies applying for smaller grants.
The museum sector in England has largely welcomed the changes. “For independent museums in particular, Grants for the Arts and Culture offers new opportunities for smaller museums to apply for innovative projects in a way that wasn’t possible before,” says Richard Evans, the chairman of the Association of Independent Museums and the director of the independent Beamish Museum in Durham. “A relatively modest investment in the right place at the right time can have a huge impact.”
A sector consultation commissioned by ACE ahead of the changes revealed concerns about increased competition between organisations, but this doesn’t worry Evans. “It’s not a concern I share – ACE investment in museums is relatively small, museums have more to gain with this than they have to lose,” he says.
Kim Streets, the director of Museums Sheffield (a current MPM), agrees. “I’m not worried about greater competition – the level of competition is already high and all of us need to be making good applications. The big challenge is less about ACE funding and more about advocacy [with local government], making sure the role of arts and culture in regeneration is understood and valued.
“It is a positive move that museums are part of the overall package. In some sense, if you’re separate you’re somehow ‘other’.”
But a note of caution comes from John Roles at Leeds Museums, another MPM. “About the only thing we do know is that those of us who are MPMs have until now been able to apply for Grants for the Arts, but in the future we won’t be able to,” says Roles.
“Assuming we remain an NPO, we will need to build any Grants for the Arts aims into our four- year bid, which loses the opportunity for spontaneous opportunities that might arise.”
John Orna-Ornstein, the director of museums at ACE, says he hopes greater integration will foster new partnerships between museums and other arts sectors, doing away with “artificial boundaries between one area and another”.
The investment changes are also an opportunity to address regional imbalances and work more closely on the ground to identify local needs, with a new place-based scheme incorporated into ACE’s existing strategic funds.
“These changes will enable us to make the right decisions for each place – metropolitan and non-metropolitan,” says Orna-Ornstein.
“The cultural infrastructure varies and we have a different role in different parts of the country. Now we can make sensible, long-term strategic decisions to enable us to put resources where they are most needed.”
Night in the Museum: Ryan Gander Curates the Arts Council Collection, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, runs until 16 October
After witnessing the success – and unexpected social value – brought by the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), a wartime body established to boost public morale, the influential economist and civil servant John Maynard Keynes started imagining a more permanent way in which the government could support the arts.
As a member of the Bloomsbury Set, Keynes was a firm believer in the intrinsic value of culture. In June 1945, he drafted a charter to establish “a semi-independent body … provided with modest funds” that would distribute state funding for art, drama, dance and music. This would meet the goal of Labour’s 1945 election manifesto pledge “to assure our people full access to the great heritage of culture in this nation” – the first UK government policy on the arts.
“State patronage of the arts has crept in,” said Keynes at the time. “It has happened in a very English, unostentatious way – half-baked.” Keynes was clear that the body should abide by an “arms-length principle” and remain independent from meddling politicians – memories of how European states had abused culture as a tool of oppression must have been fresh in his mind.
Keynes didn’t live long enough to see his vision realised, dying of a heart attack within a year. But just a few months after his death, in 1946, the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) was granted a royal charter and given a budget of £235,000 (£29m in today’s money) to spend on cultural pursuits. In August, the charter celebrated its 70th anniversary, having survived seven decades of social change. To trace its history is to see a microcosm of postwar British cultural and political life. But to what extent has it lived up to its original purpose?
“Organisations don’t often take much notice of their history but if you look at some of the initial intentions, a lot of them are still reflected in our priorities: art for everyone, a mixed [funding] ecology and building on the role of local authorities,” says John Orna-Ornstein, the director of museums at Arts Council England (ACE), the largest of the four national arts councils created as a result of the devolution of ACGB in 1994. The others (Creative Scotland, Arts Council of Northern Ireland, and the Arts Council of Wales) play a similar role for the arts in their respective nations as ACE does in England.
“The council is not just about superficial access, but also about art and culture that excites, engages and improves people’s lives,” Orna-Ornstein says.
Dual purpose
But the tensions in arts policy today were evident from day one. The royal charter cited two overarching objectives – “to increase the accessibility of the fine arts to the public” and “to improve the standard of execution of the fine arts”. Those goals – access and excellence – have sat uneasily alongside each other, at times coming into conflict. With limited funding, what should the council support: the most, or the best?
The choice taken by ACGB in those early days was clear. Although the charter’s aims included establishing arts centres in every town, promoting touring and other measures to increase access, ACGB’s focus tended towards excellence, with much of its funding going to a small number of institutions mainly in London. It was a policy described by the council’s secretary-general in 1951 as “few, but roses”. The imbalance was further exacerbated in the 1950s by the closure of regional councils that had been established during wartime by CEMA.
Diversity is a massive challenge. Some organisations are doing fantastic work but we still have a lot further to go"
Funding inequity
Efforts to address this inequity have taken place in the years since, such as the creation of independent regional arts boards in the 1960s. But reports such as 1984’s The Glory of the Garden on the regional theatre landscape, and the 2013 independent analysis, Rebalancing Our Cultural Capital (RoCC), have shown that this deeply ingrained funding imbalance has never gone away. The resources sucked up by national cultural institutions, often in the capital, is an issue in all four home nations, although the RoCC report refers specifically to England.
Another mis-step of those early days was the ACGB’s narrow, patrician view of what constituted “fine art”, a definition that excluded emerging mediums such as film, and also overlooked popular culture and the work of artists from diverse backgrounds. This was one factor that led to a decades-long structural problem with diversity, which continues to manifest itself in the arts and culture sector today. “Diversity is a massive challenge,” says Orna-Ornstein. “Some organisations are doing fantastic work but we still have a lot further to go.”
These problems aside, the foundation of ACGB heralded many early triumphs. It played a key role in the 1951 Festival of Britain, the UK-wide exhibition that intended to foster a sense of postwar recovery and optimism through a celebration of science, technology, architecture and the arts; its legacy is most visible on London’s South Bank where the Festival Hall still survives from 1951, and the Skylon restaurant’s name doffs its cap to the original celebration’s striking vertical sculpture (see front cover). It also brought touring exhibitions, new commissions and summer arts festivals to towns across the UK.
ACGB played a significant part in persuading local governments that arts funding should be a legitimate part of their budgets. Its efforts to bring art to the masses resulted in beautiful works of art popping up in unexpected places. Sculptures by artists such as Barbara Hepworth were included on the new housing estates beingbuilt in bomb-damaged towns and cities, for example.
The introduction of National Lottery capital funding for the arts in 1992 was a huge boost, enabling ACGB to more fully realise the charter’s ambition to establish arts and cultural centres in towns and cities (although recent research revealed that this too disproportionately benefited London).
Meanwhile, the arts council’s ongoing relationship with new artists is evident in the Arts Council Collection, which also celebrates its 70th birthday this year. Now administered by the Southbank Centre on ACE’s behalf, the collection holds almost 8,000 pieces of modern and contemporary British art, with a focus on emerging artists. Early works by influential postwar artists appear, including Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Francis Bacon and Lucian Freud, all of which are available as loans or for touring exhibitions. It is one of ACGB’s most important legacies and to mark its anniversary year the artist Ryan Gander has curated an exhibition with works he has chosen from the collection, alongside new commissions by him and other artists. It is on display at Yorkshire Sculpture Park.
So what would Keynes make of ACE as it looks today? Drafted by a man whose very name is an epithet of stimulus-based economics, the charter reaches its 70th year in the midst of a decade of austerity, with severe funding cuts to the arts.
“We don’t deny it’s a difficult time,” says Orna-Ornstein. “We stand shoulder to shoulder with local authorities. We make a holistic case that emphasises the benefits of investing in culture.”
Never immune from the political climate, the arts councils (particularly in England) have responded by funnelling more money to help organisations become resilient, and generate more income through initiatives such as increased commerciality, as well as emphasising the economic case for culture.
But Christopher Gordon, an author of the RoCC report, believes cuts are once again laying bare structural inequities.
“There’s still a massive, unequal divide between promoting excellence and access. Attempts to widen that out have become more difficult since local authorities have taken such a hammering. There’s no money in participation and engagement – programmes such as Creative People and Places were the first to have their funding cut.”
Autonomy from government has also worked against the organisation, Gordon believes, letting the arts council off the hook when it comes to tackling regional imbalance or distributing lottery funding. “It can get away with what it wants to do and ignore the things it doesn’t.”
There’s still a massive, unequal divide between promoting excellence and access"
Radical solution
Others are critical of the council’s lack of transparency on funding decisions and inability to listen to criticism, saying the way it operates means funding recipients are sometimes unwilling to give honest feedback. “The three-year agreements have produced a climate of fear, where people are afraid to tell it like it is,” says an arts figure who asked to remain anonymous. “It claims it’s an open discussion but the council has always had its head down with its mates, funding people it knows and trusts.”
David Powell, another RoCC report author, has a radical solution.
“The arts council aged 70 is of pensionable age and we should pension it off. If we want a system to deliver cultural equity, we can’t get that by continuing to trim what the arts council already does. We don’t have a system to fund widespread change at local level – we need something else.”
It’s a provocative statement, but food for thought as the sector endures a turbulent period. What the arts council will look like 70 years from now is probably beyond even the imagination of Keynes himself.
Strategic changes
Museum ecology may have evolved separately to the arts sector in every UK nation, but it changed significantly in England five years ago when the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council was abolished and museums were brought together under the auspices of Arts Council England (ACE). The Renaissance in the Regions programme, which gave core funding to regional museums, evolved into the Major Partner Museums (MPM) scheme, and ACE updated its 10-year strategy to include museums and libraries, renaming it Great Art and Culture for Everyone. Now at the mid-point of that strategy, ACE has announced another radical change to bring museums and libraries further into the fold: all ring-fenced museum funding is to be scrapped, including the MPM, resilience and museum development funds.
Instead, from 2018 funding for museums will be integrated into ACE’s other streams, namely National Portfolio Organisations (NPO) and Grants for the Arts (now renamed Grants for the Arts and Culture to reflect its wider remit). NPO funding will come in four-year agreements rather than three, and will be divided into three tiers, with less administrative burden placed on those bodies applying for smaller grants.
The museum sector in England has largely welcomed the changes. “For independent museums in particular, Grants for the Arts and Culture offers new opportunities for smaller museums to apply for innovative projects in a way that wasn’t possible before,” says Richard Evans, the chairman of the Association of Independent Museums and the director of the independent Beamish Museum in Durham. “A relatively modest investment in the right place at the right time can have a huge impact.”
A sector consultation commissioned by ACE ahead of the changes revealed concerns about increased competition between organisations, but this doesn’t worry Evans. “It’s not a concern I share – ACE investment in museums is relatively small, museums have more to gain with this than they have to lose,” he says.
Kim Streets, the director of Museums Sheffield (a current MPM), agrees. “I’m not worried about greater competition – the level of competition is already high and all of us need to be making good applications. The big challenge is less about ACE funding and more about advocacy [with local government], making sure the role of arts and culture in regeneration is understood and valued.
“It is a positive move that museums are part of the overall package. In some sense, if you’re separate you’re somehow ‘other’.”
But a note of caution comes from John Roles at Leeds Museums, another MPM. “About the only thing we do know is that those of us who are MPMs have until now been able to apply for Grants for the Arts, but in the future we won’t be able to,” says Roles.
“Assuming we remain an NPO, we will need to build any Grants for the Arts aims into our four- year bid, which loses the opportunity for spontaneous opportunities that might arise.”
John Orna-Ornstein, the director of museums at ACE, says he hopes greater integration will foster new partnerships between museums and other arts sectors, doing away with “artificial boundaries between one area and another”.
The investment changes are also an opportunity to address regional imbalances and work more closely on the ground to identify local needs, with a new place-based scheme incorporated into ACE’s existing strategic funds.
“These changes will enable us to make the right decisions for each place – metropolitan and non-metropolitan,” says Orna-Ornstein.
“The cultural infrastructure varies and we have a different role in different parts of the country. Now we can make sensible, long-term strategic decisions to enable us to put resources where they are most needed.”
Night in the Museum: Ryan Gander Curates the Arts Council Collection, Yorkshire Sculpture Park, runs until 16 October