Memorandum submitted by the National Art
Collections Fund
1. The National Art Collections Fund (Art
Fund) welcomes the opportunity to respond to the inquiry by the
Culture, Media and Sport Select Committee into "The Market
for Art".
2. The Art Fund is the UK's largest independent
art charity, with 80,000 members. The Art Fund exists to make
great art available for everyone to enjoy, through enriching museum
and gallery collections - in 2004, it offered £4.3 million
in grants to museums across the UK. The Art Fund also champions
the interests of museum visitors, and was at the forefront of
the successful campaign for free admission.
3. The Art Fund will restrict its comments
to the most relevant areas of the Committee's inquiry, as below.
The terms "museum" and "museums" are used
to denote both museums and galleries.
WAYS OF
SUPPORTING AND
ENCOURAGING LIVING
ARTISTS
4. The Art Fund believes that living artists
need more opportunities for their work to be seen and more opportunities
to sell, both in the UK and abroad.
More opportunities to be seen
5. Museums and galleries play a key role
in the art market, and in supporting living artists. The acquisition
and display of contemporary art by public institutions has a direct
impact upon an artist's profile and reputation, and provides a
stimulus to a healthy market and the production of new work and
ideas.
6. There is at present little money available
for acquisitions of any kind by museums—but especially explicit
funding for contemporary acquisitions. The Contemporary Art Society
(CAS) is the only source of funding dedicated to contemporary
collecting, distributing £100,000 annually. The CAS also
manages two lottery funded schemes in England and Scotland, which
enable participating museums to develop challenging and distinctive
contemporary collections, and also provides money for travel and
research. However, the Special Collection Scheme in England has
now come to an end and funding for the Scottish scheme will run
out in March 2006. The programmes have provided a model of good
practice in contemporary collecting. Both the Arts Council England
and Scottish Arts Council should be encouraged to invest again
in similar programmes for contemporary art.
7. Additionally, the Art Fund has markedly
increased its support for contemporary art in recent years. 32%
of grants given by the Art Fund in 2004 were for contemporary
acquisitions, for a total of 49 works—including contributions
towards Julian Opie's Sara Walking, Sparkly Top and Jeans (for
Aberdeen Art Gallery and Museums) and Bill Viola's Observance
(for The Walker, Liverpool).
8. But public collections should not be
reliant on grants from private charities or Lottery funding (which,
in the case of the Heritage Lottery Fund, operates under the 10
year rule). More government grant-in-aid is needed to enable public
institutions to acquire contemporary art, and to facilitate more
and better public exhibitions of living artists' works.
More opportunities to sell
9. A buoyant art market is self-evidently
essential. There is a need to encourage collecting, both by public
institutions and private UK collectors.
10. European Directive 2001/84/EC (droit
de suite) is likely to have an adverse impact upon the British
art market, in terms of driving the sale of modern and contemporary
art out of Europe. The Art Fund is concerned that this may make
it more difficult for both public museums and private UK collectors
to collect in this area. Droit de suite legislation could, in
practice, actively discourage contemporary collecting in the UK.
11. We need more incentives to encourage
both collecting and giving, and to promote relationships between
private collectors and public institutions. The Government should
create a climate of private giving through greater tax incentives,
including an extension of Gift Aid. This would allow donors to
set gifts of works of art to the nation against income tax bills,
as is already possible with land and shares. Such an incentive
would encourage the development of ongoing relationships between
private owners and museums, and would help to enrich national
and regional collections with objects of all kinds - including
contemporary works - at little additional cost.
10 February 2005
| 
