Abolish the Arts Council?
“Abolish the Arts Council” is a statement of defiance against the status quo on behalf of artists who have nothing left to lose.
This weekend we publish the pamphlet “Abolish the Arts Council” written by David Lee and me. David Lee is the editor of The Jackdaw, an independent arts newsletter that has been chronicling the incompetence, corruption, elitism and overspending in the publicly funded arts for twenty years.
For twenty years, Lee, The Jackdaw and a handful of journalists and newspaper columnists have been covering these issues and made almost no progress. Until the (effective) sacking of the director of the ICA last year (see my book Artivism for details), we had nothing to show for our appeals to reason, prudence and legality. We know that taking down a handful of high-profile figures will not effect systemic change. More is needed.
Not that we realistically expected anything else. The Arts Council (ACE) is made in the image of its master the Department for Digital, Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS). There is no will at the top to reform ACE. DCMS civil servants have the same mindset as ACE staff and share their aims. DCMS is effectively rudderless, with an average turnover of one Culture Secretary per eighteen months for the last twenty years. Not that the Conservative Party would dare do anything the BBC and The Guardian would call philistine. If reform – never mind abolition – of ACE were ever proposed by DCMS, you’d never hear the end of it from every major arts venue in the country. Once you roll out the entitlements, they are considered permanent.
What has changed? Well, in a way not much. The Conservative Party are still part of the progressive-consensus uniparty, DCMS is still staffed by leftists and head-down careerists, the Charities Commission of England will still never reprimand political activism arts organisations that are Registered Charities (something that is illegal)…
In another way, things are moving. A dissident art movement is gathering simply because the artists excluded from progressivist and leftist-identity-political patronage need to exhibit and are not scared of being slurred as “far right”. They have nothing left to lose. The tokenism of ACE is out of control and major institutions such as the National Gallery now programme according to race without the veil of merit. British artists whose work would have entered the Tate collection twenty years ago are now blacklisted because of political dissent or for having the wrong skin colour.
“Abolish the Arts Council” is a statement of defiance against the status quo on behalf of artists who have nothing left to lose. Read the case against ACE. Show your support for dissident speech. Make your voice heard.
Purchase your copy of “Abolish the Arts Council” here.
