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The Brian McMaster Review,Arts Excellent in the UK, perhaps... Jeffery Taylor on the glimmer of hope for UK arts that is the Brian McMaster review but sees problems from ministerial and bureaucratic interference... © Jeffery Taylor Former dancer, Dance Critic and an Arts feature writer for the |
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This time last week things were looking up for Arts Council England. Good will flowed in buckets from the whole industry as into the cosy world of arts administrators at the Great Peter Street HQ, dropped a new report, Supporting Excellence in the Arts by Brian McMaster. A new era dawned when we read “The best person to communicate with audiences is the artist…” McMaster also recommended a return to “peer review”, i.e. get working professionals involved with core funding decision making. Was this the end of years of bureaucratic box ticking and a return to the traditional hands off approach to arts funding in this country? When performers with theatre in their blood took decisions based on a lifetime’s experience, not a year’s foundation course at an old polytechnic with a fancy new name. Alan Davey, a known arts enthusiast, took over as ACE’s Chief Executive and simultaneously a couple of hundred state subsidised bloodsuckers were denied further feather bedding. At last, we cheered, the Arts Council was getting real again. On Tuesday it took just one sentence in a speech by Culture Minister Margaret Hodge, a multi-millionaire old Labour acolyte, to bring down the curtain with a thump. “The audiences for many of our greatest cultural events – I’m thinking in particular of the Proms – is still a long way from demonstrating that people from different backgrounds feel at ease with this,” she said. What a disgrace. What ignorant, arrogant and careless thinking. Thirty three brain dead words dismiss any intrinsic value in “our greatest cultural events” that the world at large and visitors to our shores for centuries have grown to love and respect. According to Mrs Hodge, these precious British jewels, world leaders like the National Theatre, Welsh Opera, the Royal Ballet, the Proms, Glyndebourne and the Royal Academy of Arts must be adapted and devalued to promote a discredited multiculturalism. As a sinister after thought, Mrs Hodge added the government “had a right to expect” arts organisations to make audiences “representative.” Anyone with the feeblest grasp of the tenuous relationship between any arts institution and the paying public knows such words are not worth the paper they are written on. In Mrs Hodge’s political rhetoric our cultural life, the very soul of our nation, becomes nothing more than a crude government instrument of social engineering. Josef Stalin would be thrilled; Mrs Hodge is not fit for purpose. Even more depressing, Alan Davey, newly appointed Chief Executive of ACE, cites “back to back meetings” when he declines to speak to this newspaper. Not only does our multi million weekly readership help pay Mr Davey’s salary and protected pension, it pours money into box offices across the country to support the very institutions Mrs Hodge wishes to dogmatise. Arrogance as well as ignorance, seems endemic among arts administrators. “We will treat them (ACE) with utter contempt,” insists leading West End producer, Thelma Holt, “until we are judged by a peer group. There must be change.” Holt, a former actress was trained at Bristol Old Vic, a venue facing closure under the recent clamp down. She resigned as Chair of the Arts Council Drama Committee in 1998 along with acting luminaries like Richard Attenborough, Alan Ayckbourne, Sam Mendes and Steven Daldry, when their influence in allocating money was withdrawn. “The present system cannot work,” Holt continues. “There are too many bureaucrats from non artistic backgrounds. Local politicians do not make artists.” Actor, director Sam West says, “The new chief executive of the Arts Council, Alan Davey, should instigate a system of peer review that involves artists at every level. Only then will he regain the trust of the profession.” When former dancer Wayne Eagling recently took over English National Ballet, he shocked ACE’s accountants when he claimed the right to lose money. A concept sacrilege to number crunchers, essential to the creative process. “I’m not here to be a caretaker,” he says, “I want to move the company forward artistically. I will buck the trend of prudence. Dancers need new stuff, so do audiences.” Twelve months ago a ray of hope beamed tentatively through the murky motives at ACE. Former dancer Janet Archer, 47, was appointed National Director of Dance Strategy and brought with her a much needed dose of common sense. “It’s about time we moved on,” she says, “from ticking boxes without regard to the public.” And she has refreshingly clear views about breaking through the bureaucratic fog; “The pendulum has swung too far, we need more professionals.” But the attitude that sticks in the throat of UK’s professional artists is the administration’s boast of being the artistic driving force instead of the facilitator. It speaks for itself that classical ballet, athletics and football, to name but three areas of the nation’s physical endeavour, not to mention the pathetic fiasco in British tennis, have lost a generation of talent thanks to political correctness. “I would not disagree with that,” says Archer, “and there is much to be done in improving training standards so that we can become world class again. I see myself,” she goes on, “as a facilitator to provide the very best platforms for the arts to flourish.”
Four little words, infinitely more potent than Mrs Hodge could ever conjure up, bring most hope for the future of arts in this country. Janet Archer sums up her professional attitude by saying: “I want to learn.” The sooner Archer gets the key to the Chief Executive’s washroom the better
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