A culture of amateurisation

I’ve had a couple of conversations with colleagues in the arts which have crystallised something for me about what is happening to the arts and culture under this government. It’s basically the amateurisation of the arts – the opposite of the professionalisation of our sector which we been urged towards over the past 15 or more years.

I’m indebted to my colleague Catherine Sutton at Arts Inform for the phrase – we were discussing how the Big Society idea seems likely to end up with some of us doing for free what we used to do for a living. This was sparked by an article in Classical Music magazine in which the Culture Minister, Ed Vaizey, seemed to suggest that if we were dissatisfied with our local library service, then we could improve it by going in and getting “behind the desk” to run it ourselves. In other words, if we think we can run the service better than a professional librarian can, we should do it ourselves as amateurs – incidentally, putting a professional librarian out of work thereby. (Presumably then the librarian could go and deploy his or her talents working in the local supermarket.)

Now I’m far from being opposed to amateurs. In my musical life I’m partly an amateur – and enthusiastic and long-serving member of the horn section of the Milton Keynes Sinfonia and other ensembles. I owe a great debt to amateur music-making, as other members of my family do to amateur dramatics. I admire the work of Making Music and the Voluntary Arts Network. But I mourn the loss of the support from government for a professionalised sector and the recognition of professional performers, artists, managers and others. I also think that the people who run Making Music and the Voluntary Arts Network are exemplary professionals.

A further perspective came from another friend of mine who said that she felt that the professionalisation of the arts had become a missed chance – that we have mistaken professional attitudes and practices with spending a lot of money on nice offices and high-class print. More money should have gone into the actual work and into developing our own skills, rather than producing plush leaflets and aping the ways of top business executives. I don’t entirely agree with her that the arts sector has done that badly – but I don’t entirely disagree, either, as we uncover new ways of saving money in our drive to cut costs.

However, I’m also reminded of  a regional theatre which some years ago very nearly found itself being run by a local lawyer who thought the job of general manager would be an ideal early-retirement hobby, especially as it would obviously be mostly in the evenings…

We have to stick to our guns – to preserve the professional pride and standards of arts management (and arts education, arts marketing, arts development) while keeping the ship afloat in dismal times. We need to hold our own, not only against the relentless reduction in funding, but against the renewed tide of assumptions that the arts are just a hobby and could be done in their spare time just as well by any moderately educated person who loves art.

On being a loser

It’s an interesting position to be in: the organisation I’m working for (Arts Inform) has just been told that we have failed to gain National Portfolio Funding. What are my thoughts, apart from, ‘oh, damn’?

First, we were not surprised. Despite an excellent track record going back 15 years, we’re a ‘second tier’ organisation, and very few of those have made the cut, thanks largely to the orders from on high to protect ‘front line arts organisations’. (The government would say they had made no such order, but they made their preferences very clear.) We are in the company of many fine ‘second tier’ organisations which have had the same outcome.

Second, I was heartened by the fact that our assessment by ACE was good, and by conversations which quickly followed that announcement which indicated very strongly that we are still valued by the Arts Council and by our partners in the sector. The future is not therefore a bleak wasteland, though it still presents enormous challenges.

Third, there was (somewhat late on in the day) a very small feeling of relief – coming over me like a trickle of cold water in a warm bath – on realising that if we are no longer Arts-Council-funded, we are in a sense free – we don’t have to do what ACE tells us to any more. Don’t misunderstand me – we feel very grateful to have had this support for years, and have been and still are working with very good officers to deliver good work. Our current status as an RFO doesn’t run out until 31st March 2012… but after that, we will have to dree our own weird. Not an unpleasant feeling by any means, if a less secure feeling than we had before.

I feel very sad for other arts organisations which have unexpectedly lost all their funding. One that springs to mind is the Henri Oguike Dance Company. I first experienced his work when I was part of the team at Eastern Touring Agency, and I’ve never forgotten its intelligent musicality and originality. I hope Henri’s team are feeling at least some of the more positive reactions I’ve described.

At all events, the blow has fallen, and we must pick ourselves up and find ways of carrying on. I think the first thing I need is a lie-down for half an hour in a darkened room – and then I’ll be equal to anything.

Toodle pip!

A return on our investment?

Why can’t the Arts Council invest in commercial shows and use the profits to support more arts organisations?

This question occurred to me as I was reading Ruairidh Nicoll’s piece in the Observer about the Royal Opera House. He points out that the ROH only has 2,268 seats, so it can never, ever be a ‘people’s palace’, even if the seats were a quarter of the price (to be fair, you can still stand for four quid). However, the Royal Albert Hall has something over 6,000 seats, and Raymond Gubbay uses it to put on huge, popular and increasing critically-acclaimed productions such as his current Madame Butterfly.

If the Arts Council were to be able to buy a few shares in that, it would do a number of things: make money for ACE which it could distribute elsewhere; get a return on the money ACE has already put in over decades to the creation of the talent which Mr Gubbay is able to draw on to produce his shows (including great backstage and technical staff); show approval of and support for Mr Gubbay’s entirely laudable aim to bring opera to a wider audience; increase the cash at Mr Gubbay’s disposal at the outset of a production, enabling him to continue and increase the artistic success of his work.

No doubt this sounds naive and possibly old hat, but maybe it’s an idea that could come round again in the endless turning of Fortune’s wheel. (I do hope you noticed that reference to another hugely money-spinning choral and orchestral work.) It’s a model used by the UK Film Council, though perhaps we oughtn’t to say that out loud given that body’s imminent demise.

The ROH is going to take the Royal Ballet to the O2 Arena, which is a great idea and for which they have to sell 52,000 seats. Will this make money? If so, could the Arts Council have bought into it and generated some funds? I can’t see why they shouldn’t be able to – plenty of registered charities invest to generate financial return which can then be put to good charitable use.

Of course there would be downsides – if the show tanks, then that’s public money down the drain. However, I feel sure there’s a way to minimise the potential damage – for example by using ring-fenced reserves, and also by being very careful when choosing which shows to back.

Some of you will be thinking that this is a bit of a right-wing idea to come from the pen of Lady Eff, but there again, most of us have our savings in interest-generating funds, and this idea is not so very different.

Addicted to heroines

Many of you will have noticed that Tuesday is an important day this week. No, it’s not just the pancakes – though obviously that’s a significant culinary moment for many. It’s International Women’s Day.

I thought I’d celebrate it by highlighting the Bechdel Movie Test. Alison Bechdel is a wonderful artist who produced the ‘Dykes to Watch Out For’ comic strip all through the 80s and 90s, and wrote the truly marvellous ‘Fun Home’ graphic novel. Read these if you possible can.

She also promulgated (though did not actually invent) the Bechdel Movie Test. (It has ended up being named after her by accident.) It exists to test the visibility or otherwise of women in mainstream cinema. It involves asking three questions:

1. Is there more than one female character in this movie who actually has a name?

2. Are these female characters ever depicted having a conversation with each other?

3. If they are seen talking, do they talk about anything other than men?

It’s astonishing and horrifying to discover the roll-call of movies which do not pass on these three simple test questions. They include many thrillers and blokes’ pix, but also family and young people’s films such as Shrek and the Pirates of the Caribbean series. Watch the video on this page of her website to find out more – and then next time you go to the movies, keep on the lookout for any films that pass the Bechdel Movie Test.

Yo sistahs!

The blame game

OK, I made a few positive comments about Michael Gove last week. Now it’s no more Lady Nice Guy.

I’m extremely fed up with what is fast becoming the mantra of the Government whenever anyone protests against any cuts. ‘Oh, that was a local decision – we can’t possibly do anything about it.’ The implication also seems to be ‘and by the way it’s therefore nothing to do with us, not our manor, guv’.

The first instance I came across of this in the arts was Ed Vaizey brushing off the 100% cut of the Creative Partnerships programme as ‘an Arts Council decision’. This isn’t actually good enough: he has to take some responsibility. It was the Government which cut Arts Council England’s grant by 29.6%, and at the same time impressed upon ACE that it wished to see ‘front line arts’ protected. CP wasn’t front line: cuts had to be made fast: out it went. Mr Vaizey is simply wrong to try to imply that he had nothing to do with it. If he was going to shorten the already stubby arm’s length of Government by indicating where organisations should be saved, the other side of that coin is that he could have said ‘but please don’t cut CP’. (Whether ACE is right to have followed his wishes is another argument altogether.)

Mr Vaizey was at it again last week at the State of the Arts Conference, implying that cuts to local authority grants were somehow the fault of arts organisations which didn’t have a good enough relationship with their LAs – not that LAs had to find quick (if regrettable) wins in the game of slash ‘n’ burn.

Michael Gove has recently done the same thing, concerning music services. Speaking on Music Matters on BBC Radio 3, he was questioned by Tom Service about the Henley report. Mr Service asked about those councils – such as Wiltshire and Central Bedfordshire – which are already making cuts. Gove’s reply? That it was a local decision – he couldn’t possibly interfere.

This is not only maddening and cruel (the human cost has been mounting since councils started to warn their music staffs of potential redundancies many months ago), but also illogical in the extreme. Michael Gove wants all children to ‘have the opportunity to learn a musical instrument and to sing’. He has welcomed Henley’s recommendations. Where councils are cutting their music services, these outcomes are less and less likely to happen. He is a cabinet minister, for goodness’ sake. It should not be beyond him to start some sort of dialogue with local authorities to prevent the destruction of services which have taken decades to build up and will take ten years or more to restore to their current level.

And why are these services being cut? At the risk of sounding like a broken record, it’s because councils have suffered swift and draconian cuts, which have been unneccesarily front-loaded. They need to make savings fast. It’s not possible to make efficiency savings on that scale in such a short space of time – instead, the non-statutory services fall under the axe. That is not the councils’ fault – it is not even their wish. It is because of Government policy.

It reminds me of the process of editing and article for a magazine. Say you’re cutting 100 words from a 900-word piece. If you’ve got time, you can pore over the piece, take out a word here or there, re-phrase someting so it’s six words long instead of ten, and so on. You preserve, you prune, you shape – the author may not even be able to see what you’ve done. However, if you’ve got a deadline thundering towards you at sixty seconds a minute, you look for the sentence or the paragraph that can go wholesale. Chop, chop – and Robert’s yer mother’s brother.

What’s happening to our music services now is that whole swathes – swathes of excellent quality and high achievement – are simply being edited out. What’s most galling of all is that the people who are causing it may – unless we are very vigilant – escape the blame.

Credit where it’s due…

As regular readers know, I’ve crossed swords with Ed Vaizey from time to time and I’ve not been entirely polite about Michael Gove. I am doing my best to enjoy the feeling that I really ought to be eating at least some of my words.

I’ve never doubted the love of the arts that both these gentlemen have – I’ve either said or written as much to both. However, I have had concerns, some of which remain.

Yet the publication of the Henley Report and Gove’s sensible response to it calls for magnanimity.

One concern is that they haven’t listened to expert opinion in the past – they are clearly listeningto Henley, who in turn had listened very hard to a lot of people in the music education world. I hope this trend will continue, and that these listening skills will be applied more widely.

Gove’s decision to adopt Henley’s recommendation to continue funding music services for a further year while working out a plan for the future shows another quality – leadership. One of the main lessons I learnt from the Clore Leadership Programme course I went on years is ago is something Roy Clare said about the things leaders do. One of them was ‘Buy Time’. If you can buy time to enable you to do a better job than you would have done by just jumping in, everyone will be better off in the long run.

What’s important is what is done with that time – and I hope that all music educators will continue to have a voice in that process.

Lest anyone out there might think I’m going soft – don’t worry. We should all continue to scrutinise what’s going on, and I shall certainly be doing so.

Pip-pip!

 

Comedy rape and pillage

I’m struggling not to start this post with the familiar trope ‘maybe I’m being a bit humourless, but…’. Then I decided that my feminist principles needed airing.

Yesterday I saw an ad in the Tube for the East Coast railway line. They’ve been running a rather charming and clever set of ads for quite some time, featuring model stations and little plastic figures. Normally they make me smile. Yesterday, they didn’t.

Lady of letters

A lady called Claire Wake wrote in the Times today:

“Sir, The closure of music services is to be welcomed, provided the money goes to the schools. Too much money for music education is spent on administration, or one-off big gestures. The rise in the numbers of children learning an instrument is largely down to the Wider Opportunities scheme, where the children learn for one year only. After that either the parent pays, and some can, or the school pays, but can’t as the council has kept too much money.

“The solution? Put music specialists into primary schools, where they can teach their own instrument and curriculum music to a far higher standard than often found at present.”

I’ve replied:

Dear Sir,

The name’s Bond – social investment bond

I was fascinated by an item on the Today programme on BBC Radio 4 the other day, about using social investment bonds to finance early intervention in the lives of unfortunate children. This was a bit of a holy grail for the Labour Government – there has been a  ’Measuring Social Value consortium’ in the cabinet office (isn’t that lovely?) for the past few years now, whose basic aim is to monetise social outcomes. The coalition is keen too – they can’t otherwise find the money for early intervention, even though they rightly attach a great deal of importance to it.

The idea is that investors including charitable trusts and ‘high net worth individuals’ (hereafter ‘HiNWIs’) could put up the cash to fund a scheme

Select company

I’m very proud to report that my sister, Rosalind Riley, gave evidence at the Select Committee on Funding the Arts and Heritage at the House of Commons today. She was talking about philanthropy, with a particular emphasis on smaller arts organisations and the difficulties they face in attracting philanthropy. Here’s a link.

I’ve also had a message from Ed Vaizey, who was also giving evidence today. He is very cross with me as he thinks my previous blog (below) is ‘completely unfair’ and that he didn’t bugger off but had to go and chair a meeting of another committee. Fair enough – I did however think we were going to be given the chance to question him at the Big Link-Up, and clearly so did others in the audience. He also said that if I thought he didn’t know about the threat to music services, ‘why the hell do you think I commissioned the Henley Review?’