30% off? Bargain!

The cuts have arrived. On Wednesday, the government's spending review was announced and arts organisations learned their fate, more or less.

I won't try to go into a detailed discussion of the whole thing as a) I don't think I could if I tried and b) there is plenty of good discussion to be found about the impact the cuts will have to be found elsewhere. In broad strokes, the Arts Council of England (ACE) has been asked to absorb a 30% cut while passing on no more than 15% cuts to the bodies it supports. This is a tragedy for ACE as they had already cut their costs by 20%. Being asked to effectively cut their costs by 70% over the space of five years means that there'll be nothing left but bone and grissle! They certainly won't have the capacity to support the many organisations and initiatives they currently support even as said organisations go through a very rough patch themselves.

What I found interesting was the way in which these cuts brought the old 'what good are the arts?' debate onto the television screens and into the newspapers. And that people whom you would think would be sticking up for the arts at such a time had some fairly unuseful things to say. Check out Richard Brooks in the last ten minutes of The Culture Show that aired last night on the BBC (I was having a night off from theatre!). His argument is that the arts thrive in times of scarcity and that this environment will help those art forms that 'audiences want to see' 'like contemporary dance' rise to the surface. Has he just completely missed the point of funding and the arts as a public good? Crikey.

Other not very useful comments came from certain Artistic Directors of certain theatres, who spoke to the Telegraph (for the Aussies: yes, it is just like the Australian newspaper of the same name and I'm sure his comments would have satisfied that readership just as well).

For the conversation to have turned so quickly to talk of 'well it's not like we're running a hospital or a school or anything vital', is pretty disturbing for a country with such a rich cultural life. It's a shame that the arts aren't viewed as being more intrinsic to the social fabric.

Not everyone thinks this way of course. Here's a fantastic animation stating the case for the arts: http://www.youtube.com/watch?v=T6rYDaORe3k