“I do not believe it is yet realised what an important thing has happened,” the economist John Maynard Keynes wrote in The Listener in July 1945. “Patronage of the arts has crept in. It has happened in a very English, informal, unostentatious way – half baked if you like.” He was referring to the wartime Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (Cema), which would become the Arts Council of Great Britain. Keynes died a few months before it was granted a royal charter on 9 August 1946. A body to secure and distribute government cultural investment was created – an important thing, indeed.
The Arts Council initially funded 46 institutions, including the Royal Opera House and Bristol Old Vic, the first publicly funded regional theatre in the UK. Over eight decades it has contributed to the making of world-renowned treasures such as the Southbank Centre and Royal Shakespeare Company. Today it supports nearly 1,000 organisations from the Proms to Glastonbury, local libraries, comedy venues and community arts centres, as well as individual artists. In 1994 it was devolved into national councils. This week Dawn Airey, the former head of Channel 5, took over as chair of Arts Council England (ACE) from Sir Nicholas Serota.
Given the Arts Council’s fundamental dependence on the economy and political will, it is no surprise that his nearly decade-long tenure was turbulent. Under the Conservatives, ACE’s budget was reduced by about 30%. As Sir Nicholas put it in an introduction to Made in England, a collection of essays marking its 80th anniversary, the health of the culture sector relies on “one sobering, practical reality … money”.
In recent years, ACE has been accused of crippling bureaucracy, favouring grassroots organisations over prestigious establishments, and straying from Keynes’s foundational “arm’s length” principle. “The Arts Council is not altogether on our side,” John Gilhooly, the director of the Wigmore Hall, told the BBC. It pulled out of the Arts Council last year. English National Opera and other classical music organisations suffered major budget cuts in 2022. Contrary to ACE’s promise to take high-quality culture to “every corner of the country”, cuts to Glyndebourne resulted in the cancellation of its 2023 tour.
Let’s Create, the controversial strategy set up in 2020 to diversify and redistribute funds outside London, was blamed for many of these problems. It was scrapped in response to last year’s critical Arts Council review by the former Labour arts minister Lady Margaret Hodge, who accused it of stifling “innovation and creativity”. But inclusive ambitions should not be abandoned with the red tape. Access and excellence are not mutually exclusive.
For all its shortcomings, Lady Hodge concluded that the Arts Council “remains a vital national body”. It is even more important in times of austerity: without public funding, many institutions would not survive. With a new chair – and a new prime minister – this is a moment of hope for a weary creative sector. A petition by Campaign for the Arts urges Andy Burnham to follow the example of Clement Attlee’s Labour government, which established the Arts Council “from the rubble of the second world war”, to make “arts and culture an integral part of their plan to rebuild the nation”. There is much to be done before the Arts Council celebrates its 100th birthday. Without Keynes’s “half baked” scheme, England would be much poorer, in every sense.
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