Norman Lebrecht

Council of despair

Bringing back the human factor is the main challenge facing the new chairman Nicholas Serota

Amid the general political turmoil, a flutter of hope has greeted the arrival of Sir Nicholas Serota as chairman of Arts Council England, an organisation of fading relevance. Sir Nick, grand impresario of the Tate galleries, started life as an Arts Council gofer in 1969, taught to hang pictures by the flamboyant David Sylvester, friend of Lucian Freud, Bacon and Giacometti. Sylvester was one of many outsized brains that fuelled the quango in its heyday. Think Stuart Hampshire, Alan Bullock, Marghanita Laski, Richard Hoggart. No one like that left now. Might Serota signal a revival?

The omens are not auspicious. In the past 20 years, the Arts Council has shed most of its ethos. The rot began in 1997 when the incoming Blair regime demanded social reform in exchange for state cash. Arts organisations were ordered to expand education. Subsidy was pegged to compliance. Orchestras had to demonstrate that they and their audiences matched the national demographic in gender, race and sexual orientation. Proof was demanded in triplicate. A request for state funding grew from one sheet of paper to a fat sheaf of boxes, all of which have to be ticked. Managers tell me it can now take three days to complete a repeat application for musical subsidy.

Politics polluted the process. Under Blair, dosh was pumped into Labour’s north-east heartland and drained from the south-west. Gerry Robinson, a Labour donor who had trashed ITV’s best drama department, was made ACE chairman. The Keynesian imperative of nurturing art at grass roots gave way to corporate speak. Expert panels that once doled out grants after case-by-case debate were dissolved. John Major’s Lottery bonanza, intended for arts and sports, was divvied up by Blairites to education, environment, health, heritage and charities.

Amid these Whitehall assaults, old-timers clung with brave tenacity to Maynard Keynes’s ‘arm’s-length’ principle of independence from government.

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