Two leading figures in the arts have written a book calling for Arts Council England (ACE) to be abolished, arguing it has been taken over by “highly-politicised staff” whose “woke agenda” is failing to support “art of real consequence”. The Telegraph has more.
Alexander Adams, artist and art historian, and David Lee, editor of the Jackdaw magazine, say that the funding body’s priorities are “now political, not artistic”, while “hostile to the taste and values of the majority population”.
They describe ACE’s ethos as “rotten with politicisation and disregard for taxpayers”, adding that ACE-funded venues “allow creators resentful of native British people, their history and their majority demographic status”.
Their damning criticisms fill a new pamphlet, titled Abolish the Arts Council, published this weekend.
Mr Adams told the Telegraph: “Good artists have given up patience because they have been shut out of the system for not conforming to ACE’s Left-wing agenda. So, ACE has become an obstacle to the arts in this country.”
The pamphlet’s authors condemn a “suffocating political monoculture in the public arts”, where administrators are “disproportionately” Left-wing, anti-Brexit and anti-monarchy, and in which ACE “presents no genuine political diversity”.
ACE, alongside its regional sister organisations covering Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland, is the U.K.’s largest arts funding organisation.
The pamphlet’s authors note that ACE’s annual budget for 2020-21 was £690 million, including £149 million from the Culture Recovery Fund, and employs as many as 639 full-time staff.
The authors despair that the current model of arts funding is “imperilled” by “politically-orientated staff”: “We are being denied art of real consequence because of the political agenda of ACE.”
Mr. Adams said: “Staff are expected to agree with the Left-wing identity-politics views of ACE regarding racial bias and historical injustice.”
In the pamphlet, the authors argue that the organisation “has been captured and degraded by activists” and that local communities, charities and donors would rescue really deserving arts groups: “Abolition of ACE is a first step to reducing the surplus of creators who exist on public funds and contribute little excellent, memorable or serious physical culture.”
Worth reading in full.
You can by Abolish the Arts Council here.
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Yes, abolish it and almost every other institution in the UK and probably other countries too, and most large private firms which are also following woke agenda. But who is going to abolish them? The government and the judiciary are in on it too.
Those turds won’t gild themselves you know. Pop “culture” industry makes degraded street chaos sexy, and maybe it is sexy, but it takes extra effort to make it really classy. I didn’t know it was half a billion of effort though.
And then it can meet degraded tax avoidance money and a spiritually degraded ruling.. err.. class on an equal level.
I think the real problem – not only with the Arts Council but basically with all public non-government institutions – is a recruiting process which enables loads of self-styled left wing bedbugs to take them over to suck taxpayer blood to further their political pet projects which are typically just fairly poor imitations of political pet projects of the US democrats.
State funding to support “the Arts” or other worthy sounding causes is one of those things that are quite easy to sell to woolly liberals (of which I’m one by nature) but I now tend to think is a terrible idea.
In general the state should be limited to providing only those services where performance can be measured meaningfully. How would you judge if the Arts Council was doing a good job?
A sizable part of what we know as classic music (and art from the same period) came into being because of patronage by the nobility. This doesn’t happen anymore nowadays. Further, the state, which already spends a lot of (taxpayer) money on all kinds of random crap can as well spend some on art and culture. Just not Net Zero art, building an sustaining a diverse workforce etc, ie not just another vehicle to channel taxpayer money into the usual woke polit projects.
But hard to stop it being politicised if it’s taxpayer funded. Who should decide what to find and by what criteria? At least with private funding there’s a chance of some diversity.
We seem to live in an age where the general drift is towards values I deplore. I doubt there’s much to be done about that but would prefer that it didn’t come out of my tax ££££s.
This is really little more than a not-so-tacit admission of defeat: Enemy forces have occupied the cathedral. Because we can never beat them, we must burn it down instead! I’m no fan of this suicidal defeatism and of the sorched earth policies it advocates for want of anything resembling a plan for winning.
Large numbers of NGOs, “charities” etc fiunded by the UK taxpayer should not be funded. They are a part of most problems and a solution to very few of them.
HMG departments should have to certify tghery are not spending on the woke issue. Since when did their budgets include such expenditure and if not why are they allowed to change their busget without Ministerial and Parliamentary authority.
Budgets shoule be enforced line nby line and theyt would help reduce costs and the deficit.
Given that this country is falling apart by the day I fail to see how any taxpayers monies can justifiably be used to support NGO’s.
Close the lot of them down.
You can probably add Arts Council Wales.
Most of these institutions need abolition. We know a faction of left wing extremists is operating a system of ‘institutional capture’, so we need to get rid of the institutions and find a way to put in a new system of checks to ensure any future organisations are immune to it.
The fundamental problem is that the Tories refuse to engage in the culture war and, in many ways, have been captured by the woke ideology themselves. On a basic level, for example, if someone has a job title of ‘Chair’, they’re using woke language. A chair is something you sit on. A ‘Chairman’ is a human being (‘man’ in this case being a neuter term from the era when a male human was a ‘wereman’ and a woman was a ‘wifman’, with ‘man’ referring to both sexes) who sits on the chair at the top of the boardroom table. Using the term ‘Chair’ is thus a denial of objective reality. A human being patently cannot be a ‘chair.’ We’re in ‘your truth’ territory. If you even give an inch to postmodern, reality-denying leftist beliefs, everything else crumbles. And the Tories have utterly accepted the left’s postmodern immorality as their own morality.
Ayn Rand spent a great deal of time going into the morality that lies at the heart of real capitalism, but few Tories seem to bother: they evidently think capitalism is a sin and allowing leftist ‘morality’ to rule is some sort of atonement.