Written evidence submitted by Marc Sidwell
(arts 230)
Addressing the following issues from the Committee's
invitation:
— What level of public subsidy for the
arts and heritage is necessary and sustainable.
— Whether businesses and philanthropists
can play a long-term role in funding arts at a national and local
level.
— Whether there need to be more Government
incentives to encourage private donations.
SUMMARY
— Arts funding from government is a recent
invention in Britain and was not intended to last.
— By its own terms, this experiment with
funding has failed, as it has not built the popular audience to
sustain the arts at their current level without funding.
— Britain's history, and the liberal tradition,
reminds us of another possibility that can be rediscovered, offering
a more sustainable alternative.
— New technologies have in many cases achieved
the goals of greater access that state subisdy has claimed as
its motivation.
— Government incentives to encourage private
donations must be handled with the greatest of care—too
often they act to pick winners and dampen competitive investment
in challenging and innovative art.
THE ARTS
NEED TO
BE FREE
AS IN
SPEECH, NOT
AS IN
BEER
1. While the current scheme of government
funding of the arts is now so established as to seem almost inevitable,
it is of relatively recent date, a post-war creation that was
never intended to last. As Keynes himself wrote when introducing
the Arts Council to the nation, it was intended: "to offer
a stimulus to such purpose that the artist and the publican each
sustain and live on the other".
When therefore it is argued that government
funding of the arts is necessary because the arts would not survive
without the funding, that is in fact a clear argument that this
stimulus programme has failed. The questionable merits of its
continuation should then be judged as for any government programme
which is failing to meet its targets. The encouragement of arts
through central funding has not pump-primed sufficient demand
to be confident that it can be safely withdrawn; rather, in the
manner of many well-meaning government interventions, it has led
to a culture of dependency. In this light, current cuts to arts
funding, while substantial, are somewhat irrelevant. If the committee
is not prepared to consider the possibility that rather than tinkering
at the edges, it may need to scrap the entire machine, it is failing
to face a truth that shifting supplementary justifications for
arts funding over the years merely paper over.
It is essential, in considering the future of
arts funding, to recall both that the arts have a long and proud
history in Britain without state funding and that, by its own
explicitly laid-out original purpose, arts funding as currently
constituted is a failure. It is not an achievement to create an
audience for free art that cannot be sustained; nor can such an
audience be said to value that art profoundly if they would not
pay to experience it.
Many artists have been opposed to government
art programmes, including Duke Ellington, W H Auden and Edward
Hopper. Classical liberals have also traditionally opposed this
form of subsidy, feeling that government involvement in an area
so deeply associated with the formation of human identity and
human meaning should not be under central control, however benign.
By contrast, involvement in the arts has always had a strong appeal
to authoritarian rulers who follow Stalin in seeing artists as
"the engineers of human souls" and believe that such
engineers should be in state employ.
Indeed, the greatest classically liberal statement
on this subject is also a recognition of the creative achievements
of Britain without state subsidy. Frederic Bastiat's 1850 pamphlet,
That Which Is Seen and Not Seen, was published the year
before the Great Exhibition and he draws on Britain as an example
to the world. I quote the relevant passages below:
"I am, I confess, one of those who think
that choice and impulse ought to come from below and not from
above, from the citizen and not from the legislator; and the opposite
doctrine appears to me to tend to the destruction of liberty and
human dignity."
"But, by a deduction as false as it is unjust,
do you know what economists are accused of? It is, that when we
disapprove of government support, we are supposed to disapprove
of the thing itself, whose support is discussed; and to be the
enemies of every kind of activity, because we desire to see those
activities, on the one hand free, and on the other seeking their
own reward in themselves."
"Our adversaries consider that an activity
which is neither aided by supplies, nor regulated by government,
is an activity destroyed. We think just the contrary. Their faith
is in the legislator, not in mankind; ours is in mankind, not
in the legislator."
"… the grandest and noblest of exhibitions,
one which has been conceived in the most liberal and universal
spirit—and I might even make use of the term humanitary,
for it is no exaggeration—is the exhibition now preparing
in London; the only one in which no government is taking any part,
and which is being paid for by no tax."
The historical evidence gives the lie to the
idea that a thriving artistic scene would not exist without state
subventions, and the liberal case for the state withdrawing from
this area entirely, even taking into consideration such tattered
and, in practice, near-fictitious devices as the arms-length principle,
I find compelling. It is true that without state funding the arts
would take a different form, but the idea that they would vanish
is evidently absurd; what we can say for certain is that the state
subsidy of unpopular entertainment, which is what a permanent
art subsidy, rather than a short-term stimulus scheme, amounts
to, need not continue.
In this light it is also important to consider
the contribution of new technologies to this debate. Much is often
made of the need to increase access to art, but in truth the internet
and wide access to inexpensive published books have together done
more to achieve this than any access scheme ever could. When the
treasures of the world's galleries and performance from the great
theatres and opera houses can be streamed to every computer, the
case for providing other more elaborate means to achieve that
access become moot. Equally, technologies of dissemination are
also technologies of association, lowering the barriers to collective
fundraising and opening up new avenues to fund the arts not previously
available.
2. In this context it is also important
to address the much-vaunted idea that Britain has a triple-pillared
arts funding system: government, ticket sales and philanthropy.
The problem with this model is that it narrows artistic possibilities
rather than opening them up—the government's chosen experts
act to pick winners, and draw philanthropic funders nominally
outside the government—and indeed paying arts enthusiasts—to
commit their resources in the same direction. But clearly it would
be far healthier if the different pillars were in a position to
support different aesthetic choices, to permit creators to explore
more completely the space of artistic possibility and promise,
rather than being locked in to back a state-determined template
of what art should mean. The chilling effect the state's judgement
must exert on those areas that do not meet with its approval are
inescapable. For this reason it is also worthy of note that while
tax deductions on the American model are attractive and far more
liberal as a means for government to give support to the arts
than subsidy, any introduction of them would require great care
not to leave the government still determining the nature of approved
art by setting the criteria on which donations were judged to
be tax deductible.
Britain has much to be proud of in its arts.
But it has not historically made use of government subsidies to
support them, for reasons both philosophical and practical. The
current experiment must, on its own terms, be judged a failure.
While those who have grown into dependency on the state as a result
will clearly find it hard to contemplate the alternatives, art
will survive and is likely to thrive and grow in variety outside
state control. While legislators must always be tempted by the
power of their office to believe that they can do more by intervening
than by standing back, and while the arts industry is a powerful
lobby that will be hard to gainsay, the arts in Britain will be
most sustainable outside a system that can impose 64% cuts overnight,
and in a healthier relationship with the British public when they
do not tell them that they must pay for what they cannot be trusted
to want.
October 2010
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