Support for the Arts in England and Wales

Abstract

Despite the efflorescence of the Arts in England and over the last 30 years on a scale not experienced since the industrial revolution, we cannot be complacent about the future. This to me is the chief message of Lord Redcliffe-Maud's Report for the Arts in England and Wales to the Calouste Gulbenkian Foundation, U.K. & Commonwealth Branch. How has this flowering of the arts come about? The report puts this down to the development of public patronage through national and local government, in other words to some increase in the amount of money spent on the arts through taxes and rates. Rightly attention is drawn to the relatively minute proportion of public expenditure devoted to the Arts, and the highly contemporary statement is made that to reduce it would make no perceptible contribution towards the reduction of total public expenditure. Unless it is now steadily increased, at least to keep pace with inflation, much of the post-war investment in the arts will prove to have been wasted and we shall find ourselves unprepared to make progress when economic conditions make progress possible. The author selects out the new local authorities and the Arts Council/Regional Arts Associations as the chief vehicles for developing the Arts for the foreseeable future. Of course private and industrial patronage is not overlooked and certainly not ruled out, but these two sources are the chosen vessels from which patronage must be dispensed. How these vessels are fashioned and designed to dispense in the most generous and socially and aesthetically valuable way the finance necessary to develop the creative arts in their localities is a subject to which the author, rightly, devotes a great deal of space. The complementary nature of the national and local stakes in support for the Arts is deftly sketched. Local authorities need carrots as incentives to take a new direction in their work and the Arts Council and Regional Arts Associations are the natural vehicles to dispense incentives. I don't dispute the reality of this strategy for the immediate future, but I have two major reservations about its application in practice. First no one must underestimate the enormous and at times frustrating task of persuading the local authorities to co-operate without adequate financial incentives and support through the Rate Support Grant in particular, and secondly the uncertainties about the Regional Arts Associations' approach to the proportionate disbursement of help to local and regional activities: perhaps an illustration of what I mean in the latter context will help what proportion of support should go to major regional theatres, regional orchestras, regional art galleries and museums, as opposed to the development of concert series, exhibitions, community arts and so in the localities themselves? On this latter point, I see much to be said for some specific part of the Regional Arts Associations' budgets being earmarked by the Arts Council on a ?I-for-,i basis to encourage the development of county and district council level projects. Part of the infra-structure on which the success of the last 30 years has been built has been the increase in the number of local arts clubs and associations, societies, three arts societies, arts centres and the like. Small

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