The Arts Council and the erosion of artistic freedom and excellence

Christopher Coppock.  Art Consultant, Contemporary Art Curator and Community Activist

Chris Hodgkins, an accomplished jazz musician and veteran arts campaigner who runs Online Music Business Resource said recently: “Across seven decades of cultural policy, the arm’s length principle has been invoked as a constitutional safeguard — a mechanism designed to protect artistic freedom, ensure impartiality, and keep political interference at bay.

“Yet the evidence shows that the principle has steadily eroded to the point of collapse. What was once a defining feature of the post war settlement has become a rhetorical device masking a system shaped by ministerial instruction, bureaucratic convenience, and institutional inertia. There needs to be a seismic change in the funding system. The Arts Council has come to the end of the line.”

I wholeheartedly concur with him and, furthermore, I believe that in 2026 our Arts Councils have been completely captured by government instrumental decree.

I went to Art School a long, long, long time ago. It was a golden age. Fortunately it was before Margaret Thatcher began dismantling the Social Contract.

It was also a time when Modernism was morphing into Post-Modernism. And the arms length principle was still in rude health.

As far as the pre-Thatcher era was concerned, I received a decent grant and living expenses to go to art college because creative education was seen as a valuable asset in our so-called civilised society.

The commodification of almost all public assets and services, like health provision, utilities, public space, tertiary and higher education, that we see around us now hadn’t yet begun in earnest.

Similarly, studying Fine Art in the cusp between Modernism and Post-Modernism was highly instructive and intellectually stimulating. Modernism was based on ‘grand narratives’, universal truths and originality whereas Post-Modernism favoured scepticism, relativism and irony.

Modernism drew distinction between ‘high’ and ‘low’ art, while mass media, kitsch and popular culture were the touchstones of Post-Modernism. And so originality, notions of artistic excellence and creative
autonomy gave way to parody, revisionism and appropriation of whatever took your fancy.

It was a fantastic reflexive and contradictory space to operate in as a budding artist. It provided a rich dichotomy I could identify with: appreciating artistic value in its own right whilst at the same time understanding that much ‘rarefied’ art meant fuck all to so many people outside mainstream art echo chambers.

My own view is that this plurality – so important in terms of engaging with values, ideas and behaviours
that may be diametrically opposed to prevailing modes – offered a great environment in which to think laterally and creatively and, at the same time, not take Art too seriously.

Bearing in mind that in 1965 the first UK Minister for the Arts, Jennie Lee, had come up with an exemplary white paper that did, for me, three very wonderful things.

It provided the intellectual catalyst and political heft needed to increase the arts budget by 30%. A financial increase without parallel — before or since.

More importantly the white paper made no apology for endorsing the concept of autonomous artistic freedom and the seminal importance of creative experimentation.

At the same time the Arts Minister was unequivocal in offering a very powerful argument (and political directive) that Art had to mean a hell of a lot more to ‘ordinary’ people than it had done in the past.

This was truly groundbreaking stuff in a country where a particular privileged class dominated almost every aspect of public discourse and culture.

But thirdly, and perhaps most relevant in terms of the subject of this short polemic, the arms-length principle was to be enshrined in any decision-making in relation to how the money was divvied up.

In other words, politicians were statutorily required to keep their grubby hands off influencing the kind of arts programmes the independent Arts Councils within the UK — with their roster of specialist advisors — chose to support.

I came to Cymru in 1989. As a curator and gallery director I used to apply for annual revenue funding from the Arts Council of Wales. It was a simple process. I submitted my annual creative programme supporting local, national and international artists accompanied with a balanced budget to a Visual Arts Advisory Committee.

This committee was made up of a range of specialist expertise from the world of contemporary visuals arts. So far so good. It wasn’t perfect by any means as subjectivity always raised its ugly head, but at least you knew that your application would be scrutinised by people who had a developed understanding of the cultural discipline.

This committee reported to a specialist visual arts team, headed up, unsurprisingly, by a Director of Art.

Principled

This principled and artistic value-based approach for embedding specialist expertise in decision-making permeated across all departments within the Arts Council of Wales — as it did in England, Scotland and Northern Ireland. There were Directors of Drama, Music, Theatre and so on. Against this backdrop, the interests of the artist were centre stage.

This is emphatically no longer the case, and the designated posts of, say, Director of Deliverance, Head of Values or Director of Integrity — as per the satire, W1A — within our Arts Councils are not really an implausible stretch of the imagination anymore.

It is reasonable to suggest that the old prioritisation of art with a capital A and artists represented a big nod to elitist endeavour. However, even with this unequivocal allegiance to the makers of art, there were genuine attempts by Arts Councils across the board to embrace a more democratic understanding about the role of Art in society.

Places like Chapter in the Canton area of Cardiff did an amazing job early on to open up the arts arena to a whole host of groups and individuals who had not necessarily been touched by the Arts in earlier life.

Initially the mantra, as articulated by Jennie Lee, that everyone around the country should have access to high quality art was sacrosanct.

Cultural democracy 

This prescriptive understanding of what constituted high quality art soon shifted from a democratisation of (mainstream ‘high’ art) culture to one of cultural democracy, a completely different model that recognised that communities and individuals themselves had to be able to define what art they felt was important to their lives.

Some of the most politically active community arts bodies – as this new genre of practice became called – took hold in the 1980s and 1990s and did considerably shift notions of what constituted meaningful art, to profound effect. This legacy stills lives on today.

Anyway, back to the future.

We live in very different times now; where digital media — unheard of in the 1970s and early 1980s — has completely re-oriented, even re-hard-wired, the cultural landscape; the world wide web and social media have heralded the powerful representation of marginalised voices, disempowered communities, niche interest groups and the wholesale introduction of, and legally enshrined, protected characteristic categories.

This laudable shift in focus to embrace previously discriminated groups and individuals with little voice, advocacy or rights and — by implication —lack of power of self determination, has significantly increased the complexity of state patronage of the arts, its bureaucracy, the legal system needed to police it.

In turn, this has massively enhanced the propensity for febrile litigious dispute, confrontational
invective and, I would argue, self censorship.

This profound opening up of the Overton Window, or window of discourse, has huge implications for our fragile democracy. Not least at a time when there is no new money, the middle classes are loath to pay more tax and all our public services are creaking, or perhaps irrevocably broken, in the absence of
massive injections from, what is after all, the magic money tree.

Which brings me back to state-sponsored arts and culture at the current time.

Gatekeepers

Grant-in-aid has reduced dramatically for those public bodies that are the custodians or gatekeepers of our national culture. With a remit now from government, that completely eschews the arms-length principle, we find that the alleviation of poverty, the improvement of health and wellbeing, arts as social prescribing and an overly proscriptive demand for publicly funded arts bodies to prioritise protected
characteristics, is the order of the day.

As a result of this overt ‘instrumentalism’, the custodians of our culture have inevitably gone down the rabbit holes of even more granular identity politics.

Against the backdrop of no new money for publicly funded arts bodies to take on responsibility for a whole new set of performance indicators how do they maintain their existing creative enterprises with a massive reduction in income? Something has to give; especially when you think that to secure a grant from the Arts Council one now has to conform to a very new kind of outputs/outcomes analysis.

By way of example, in terms of impact, the Arts Council of Wales suggests that the bullet points below are key questions for all artists to consider when currently applying for grant aid.

If you were, say, an ‘old-school’ painter or a sculptor or even video artist in this day and age can you really offer credible answers to these overdetermined metrics?
o Who are you going to reach as a future audience or participants in your work, and how?
o How is access embedded into the work from an early stage?
o How will your project support us to meet one or more of our priorities around creativity, equalities and engagement, Welsh language, climate justice, developing talent and transforming the capability of the arts to be more dynamic and sustainable.

Moving on, the applicant is then asked:
What language/s you will be using to deliver your project? For percentage fields please enter a whole number – do not use decimal points. For example for 6.7 round up to 7. These should add up to 100.

This is followed by:

Please use a percentage to indicate the proportion of your project that relates to each activity type: business development · career development · commissions · workshops · exhibition (presentation) · festival (presentation) · performance (presentation) · production (presentation) · marketing · research & development

And then.

Please note the number of exhibitions, performances, workshops, or events in your project, and the total number of attendances you expect: proposed number of activities or events · proposed number of exhibition days · proposed number of performances · proposed number of workshop sessions · proposed number of exhibitions · proposed number of training sessions · proposed total attendance at exhibitions · proposed total attendance at exhibitions

Finally.

Roughly, what percentage of your activity has a specific focus on engaging the following groups? culturally and ethnically diverse people (30 categories) · age groups (6 categories) · disabled people (7 categories) · other protected characteristics (2 categories) · people who are pregnant · people who have undergone or are undergoing gender reassignment · religious beliefs (9 categories) · lesbian, gay,
bisexual people or people with other sexualities · NEETs, refugees, low Income, homelessness, arts & health, carers

Of course the Arts Council will argue that collecting this type of demographic data is important for government to understand the increasing reach of the arts in society. But the very act of demanding this kind of prescriptive information places significant and unreasonable pressure on the applicant to straightjacket their art into this framework.

By way of example of how the nature of the state funding paradigm has so fundamentally shifted, here is a recent extract from a press release circulated on the Arts Council of Wales website in the last month or so.

I leave you to make your own assessment of where the prioritisation of the actual art sits now.

Once again, the Immersive Arts team is encouraged to see that artists with a broad range of backgrounds and lived experiences chose to apply to the scheme. Over a quarter of applications and awarded artists in this round are from the global majority, over 55% identify as a woman, transgender, non-binary, genderqueer, agender, or other marginalised gender, and over 45% identify as disabled, D/deaf, neurodivergent or having a long-term physical or mental health condition or chronic illness.