British Council: These crass bureaucrats are placing the arts in real danger

The arts world is suddenly in turmoil. News that the British Council, which promotes the arts abroad, is to disband many of its specialist departments coincides with changes to the funding of projects in this country that have left those affected feeling dazed and confused.
Reports by Richard Dorment and Rupert Christiansen
If you are at all interested in the arts, sit up and pay attention, because this really is important. One of Britain's most successful and prestigious arts bodies is about to be destroyed - and wantonly, by crass bureaucrats who seem to be unable to grasp what is at stake.

At risk: Gilbert & George, in their artwork Hooded
This week, we learned that the British Council's executive board has decided to disband its departments in film, drama, dance, literature, design, and the visual arts. This is happening at a time in history when it has never been more important for Britain to strengthen its cultural ties with other countries. Tate director Nicholas Serota paid tribute to the "astonishing job the British Council, and particularly the visual arts department, has done over a 50-year period" in promoting British art abroad, and added: "It is a surprise to learn that the council should abort its work in the visual arts, apparently without external consultation."
The British Council's visual arts department is best-known for staging the British Pavilion at the Venice Biennale, where it has attracted international attention over the years with shows of, among many others, Henry Moore, Barbara Hepworth, Gilbert & George, Tony Cragg, Tracey Emin and Rachel Whiteread.
But it does much more than that. The number and the quality of exhibitions all around the world in which the council is involved are staggering. A display of antiquities from the British Museum on display in Delhi; a show of Stanley Spencer's paintings sent to Washington DC and Mexico City; an Anthony Caro retrospective in Tokyo; Henry Moore in Beijing - all were British Council projects.
When, in 1998, the council sent an exhibition of masterpieces of British art from the Tate Gallery to Japan, it was a conscious political gesture intended to strengthen cultural and commercial ties between our two countries. The exhibition attracted more than 500,000 visitors.
That's not all. The British Council is also renowned for showcasing emerging British artists abroad. Exhibitions drawn from its own prestigious art collection are often the first contact foreign art students have with Britain, and British culture. When so many people around the world have negative perceptions of our country, the freshness and vitality of new British art help to change minds.
Last month, when a group of journalists from the Islamic world came to Britain under a programme called "Engagement with the Islamic World", they spoke of the importance of receiving music, books, films and exhibitions from the council. Only a government led by Gordon Brown would choose this moment in history to throw something so precious away. And what does Foreign Secretary David Miliband think about it all?
Earlier this year the executive board abolished all the advisory panels - the writers, curators, museum directors and musicians who freely gave their professional advice and expertise to the council. Now the staff are being reorganised to focus on the following areas: "Progressive Facilitation", "Market Intelligence Network", "Knowledge Transfer Function" and "Modern Pioneer". If you have no idea what that gobbledygook management speak means, don't worry: neither does anyone else. All we do know is that the council will no longer deliver the arts internationally, and that this will happen when the thirst for British arts has never been greater. What an incalculable loss.
I can't begin to express my anger at the wanton destruction of something that has worked so well for so long. The British Council has helped artists, writers, musicians, theatre directors and filmmakers over the years. Now it's time for them to make their voices heard on its behalf.
And, if that doesn't work, then let leader writers, politicians and peers join together to state as clearly as possible the values and priorities we share in this country. If we don't speak up, then we deserve what we get. RD
· Richard Dorment served on the British Council visual arts advisory panel, 1997-2007.
WHAT HAPPENED TO JOIN-UP THINKING?
Talk about the right hand taking away what the left hand has just given! The succession of funding settlements that followed October’s comprehensive spending review has put the arts on a push-me-pull-you that leaves those affected feeling dazed and confused and the rest of us one wondering just how joined-up the strategic thinking is in this area.
First we are given to understand that the percentage of the National Lottery assigned to the arts has been slashed to plug the yawning gaps in the expenditure on the 2012 Olympics. Then, perhaps in response to the bad press this raid provoked, the Department of Culture, Media and Sport received a relatively generous slice of the cake from the Treasury, passed on to the Arts Council in the form of a £50 million increase, over the next three years, in the money it can allot to organisations for their day-to-day activities.
The sighs of relief all round – and pats on the back for the fresh-faced DCMS minister James Purnell – were next followed by positive whoops of delight when the DCMS went on to announce the grants that would be made available to museums and galleries between now and 2011 for capital projects and development.
With £191 million brimming out of the pot – a rise of 150 per cent over the previous allocation – the government’s largesse suddenly looked positively extravagant. On top of £22 million for the British Museum, £12 million for the National Gallery and £10 million for the Victoria & Albert and National Maritime Museums, came a thwacking £50 million for Tate Modern’s £215 million enlargement of its Bankside premises, to be designed by the swish Swiss architects Herzog and de Meuron and focusing on the creation of a vast ziggurat on the south of the site.
The merits of this scheme are controversial. There is a good case for improving aspects of Tate Modern’s facilities, and, for all its cathedral-like grandeur, it is short of usable wall and floor space. The immense underground tanks of the old power station, at present left empty, could certainly be transformed into a magnificent exhibition space. But wouldn’t a much smaller scheme have done the trick?
Does Tate Modern really cry out for what its supremo Nicholas Serota describes as “spaces for social engagement and relaxation”? Isn’t its problem a third-rate collection of 20th-century masterpieces rather than cramped premises?
The danger is that this project will end up looking like empire-building of a rather hollow and expensive kind.
Now comes a spate of bad news, first from the British Council (see left) then from the Arts Council, which leaked the grants it would be offering on the basis of its new settlement. These revealed a lot of losers as well as winners. Victims are said to include such prominent names as the Bristol Old Vic and the Northcott Theatre, Exeter (the closure of which would leave the South West distinctly short of live drama), the City of London Sinfonia and London Mozart Players, the National Student Drama Festival, as well as the Drill Hall and Windsor Arts Centre. They have until mid-January to appeal.
To be frank, some of these organisations may well merit the chop – the Arts Council has a brief to foster excellence, not to support mediocrity, and it is obviously right that strong performers are rewarded rather than poor ones. But the government has given the impression that there is a lot of money swilling around for the arts, and nobody is going to take their sentences lightly.
The other worry must be that, in order to reach its goal, the Tate project needs to siphon £150 million off from the private sector (more than £12 million has already been pledged). This could drain our limited supply of philanthropic giving, leaving nobody else with a chance, and focusing efforts and attention on a thumping great metropolitan project, of more glamour than substance, that goes against all the policies that propose a fairer spread of art across the country.
Think what else could have been done with that Tate £50 million – another chance for all those threatened organisations, a new theatre museum to replace the one that the V&A closed last year, perhaps £10 million towards a more modest Tate Modern development. Most important of all, that money could have made a significant contribution towards resolving a bigger and ever more pressing problem – the absence of a national endowment fund by which new works of art, or existing treasures threatened with export, can be bought for our museums and galleries. RC