A RESPONSE TO ‘ACHIEVING GREAT ART FOR EVERYONE’
Within the coming decade, the country’s BME population will have grown beyond 10%. This overall figure masks the disproportionate levels of changing demographics on our cities. By 2020, 40% of London is expected to be non-white. Birmingham is expected to reach 50% non-white – a figure already achieved by Leicester. Cities are – and have always been – the generators of great art. They are also the centres of faith. In England today, according to the last census figures, Africans, Caribbeans and South Asians are the most religious of our communities.
It seems remarkable that Arts Council England, in its Draft Strategy for the Arts, Achieving Great Art for Everyone appears to have taken little account of the consequences of these changing demographics on the nature and range of Arts provision it wishes to champion. As the Secretary of State for Culture at the time, James Purnell, wrote in his foreword to the 2008 McMaster Report, “Artists, practitioners, organisations and funders must have diversity at the core of their work.” ACE’s Draft Strategy fails to convince that diversity is “at the core” of its vision, because it appears to have dispensed with cultural diversity as a policy priority, putting excellence at risk.
The McMaster Report stated unequivocally that “nothing can be excellent without reflecting the society which produces and experiences it”. He went on to recommend “that funding bodies and arts organisations prioritise excellent, diverse work that truly grows out of and represents the Britain of the 21st Century.” The link made by McMaster between diversity and excellence is crucial. To disconnect diversity from excellence opens the way to the idea of diversity as a candidate for separate development – a slippery slope to cultural apartheid.
In uncoupling diversity from excellence, ACE is potentially creating a situation which could lead to a marginalisation of diversity from mainstream arts enterprise. Its Draft Strategy for the future appears to present cultural diversity in purely social terms: a more equal workforce, audience & participant access, and so on, effectively ‘ticking boxes’, where McMaster had offered ACE the tools for an inspiring vision.
ACE’s broad vision makes several references to ‘diverse’ and ‘diversity’ as a way of infusing the principle of diversity into the body of its Strategy. But in its primary long-term goal – described as ‘Talent and artistic excellence are thriving and celebrated’- ACE severs McMaster’s connection between excellence and cultural diversity by making no reference to the latter.
The change in emphasis fails to acknowledge the fact that new arts and artists have emerged in England as a result of its post-War population diversity and precisely because of the careful encouragement of diverse practitioners in this period. Exceptional artists such as Akram Khan, Kwame Kwei-Armah, Chris Ofili, Nitin Sawhney, Anish Kapoor are diverse and excellent and have benefitted from Arts Council foresight and its policy of prioritising diversity. This policy has enriched the contemporary arts scene with a wealth of new talent, much of it channelled through BME-led companies and artists.
In its Theatre Appendix, one of ACE’s primary ambitions for theatre artists is to “increase the diversity of theatre artists and the work that is produced.” A laudable ambition, particularly as it goes on, in setting out its second goal, to express a desire for “the leaders of our theatres to reflect the diversity of our communities”. Neither of these ambitions have yet been adequately realised while cultural diversity has been an Arts Council priority; how much more achievable will these ambitions prove to be without its policy of prioritising diversity?
The question of how ACE intends to realise its ambitions raises important issues of equity that the Draft Strategy does not deal with. In the 6 years up to and including 2010/11, total BME Theatre funding relative to the total Theatre spend, according to figures supplied by ACE under the Freedom of Information Act, fell from 4.68% in 2005-06 to 3.88% in 2010-11. In relation to total RFO spend, the fall was even more startling: from 1.40% in 2005-06 to 1.18% in 2010-11. These reductions are being made at a time when the BME population is rising beyond 10%. On the simple basis of equality of provision, this is surely wrong. ACE initiatives such as Eclipse, Decibel and Sustained Theatre have sought to redress this imbalance. These are time-constrained initiatives, however, with little lasting impact – let alone being burdened by the Sisyphean fate of repeating themselves. The BME sector is inundated with endless training and professional development initiatives – training for what? Development to get where? Has the Black Ceiling (cousin to the Glass ceiling) been breached?
To drop cultural diversity as an explicit priority in ACE’s ambitions for the future is to misapprehend the visionary import of McMaster’s key recommendation: artistic excellence will degrade if it is not intimately bound with cultural diversity. It also makes the possibility of redressing the inherent systemic inequity even more distant.
To make cultural diversity and excellence a clear priority would be an inspiring statement of intent for the future of Art in England. It is an artistic principle, and one worth enshrining in policy goals. Severing this principle in two, as it has done in its Draft Strategy, while at the same time intimating potential long-term funding agreements for the large national companies, risks the very real danger of creating a two-tier arts provision across the nation. Raising justifiable concerns that the less powerful, secondary tier will effectively be ghettoised.
Jatinder Verma
14 April 2010