The Sunday TImes published a piece on the 29th of August 2010 by Bryan Appleyard called 'A Cut Out and Keep Guide to Saving the Arts.' Sections of it appear below.
"Art is more important than almost anything else. But it is also very difficult to do and often difficult to understand. That is why it needs sustenance...Why should we pay for this obscure, difficult stuff for the fun of a few? And, come to that, how should we pay?
Answering those questions convincingly is now more urgent than ever. Cuts in public subsidy, quite possibly savage ones, are looming. A 15-year boom in arts funding — from government, private giving and the lottery — is ending.
What, then, is to be done?
What is not to be done is the pursuit of ideological divisions. Unfortunately, that is what seems to be happening. In July in the theatre newspaper The Stage, Nick Starr, executive director of the National Theatre, called on the Arts Council to cut its £4m grant to the organisation Arts & Business (A&B), which brings private money into the arts. “It feels increasingly uncomfortable,” he said, “that their Arts Council grant is almost twice that of the Royal Court and Young Vic. Colin [Tweedy, chief executive of A&B] is a tireless champion of his cause, and he will be furious with me for saying this, but I suspect I speak for many.”
Arts & Business is the most successful arts-funding organisation this country has ever known. When it started, there was barely any private giving to the arts in Britain. In 2008, the figure was £686.7m, falling slightly last year to £654.9m. By 2016, the figure will be £1 billion, according to A&B’s forecasts. And yet Starr thinks its tiny £4m grant should be cut. Why?
It is nothing to do, as Starr implies, with saving money, and everything to do with bad, really bad, politics. In the strange world of arts administration, some people think it is actually better if private giving falls or fails completely. I am not joking. They think that if it does, government will be forced to pay up. Now, with cuts threatened, they think this more than ever, and A&B’s Tweedy has become, as some sensitive soul told him, “the most hated man in the arts".
"Major arts institutions,” he tells me, “have written to me saying, shut up or else. I have been somewhat threatened. When our estimate of £1 billion by 2016 came out, it was interpreted by some as more damaging to the arts than Genghis Khan. It’s not a nice thing to be seen as as much of a problem as government cuts. I didn’t start the recession.”
Things have got to change, and the arts community is absolutely resistant
Perhaps the most astonishing thing about all this is that some arts people actually think they can talk the government out of cutting the arts, at a time when we are discussing cuts in schools, defence, child benefit.
"There is a strong feeling in the arts," Tweedy continues, “that when the government comes to it, they will not cut the arts. One of the problems in the arts community is this entitlement view that has developed in the past 15 years. It has been a golden age of arts funding. But things have got to change, and the arts community is absolutely resistant to that change.”
The big picture here is as follows. In the 15 years since the national lottery got going, money has poured into the arts on an unprecedented scale. Partly this was because of the lottery, partly it was because of Tweedy’s efforts, but it was also because of the startling generosity of the Blair-Brown administrations. They were generous, not because they loved the arts, but because this was part of their wider strategy of turning as many people as possible into clients of the state and, therefore, probable Labour voters. This is not because Labour people are especially bad, it is because they are politicians.
Welcome, arts guys, to realpolitik.
This golden age had to end, and that is what is now happening. The abyss that yawns is huge. Between now and 2013, Tweedy does not expect private funding to increase; probably it will fall somewhat. If you put that alongside the certain cuts, then the arts face a bloodbath. Government money will not rise in the foreseeable future, possibly for a decade or more. The only possible growth, therefore, will be in private funding; and yet some people in the arts seem to be trying to choke off that funding, or at least to silence its providers."
The piece can be viewed in full here, please note there is a subscription fee required to access the Sunday Times online.