Whether we know it or not we are all involved in the moral, intellectual, political, ideological, sexual and artistic issues that constitute cultural change, but most of us do not take an active role in the creation of cultural policy.
        The two important groups who need to consult and work together to create cultural policy are those with the power to advance the arts, and those who are doing the job.
        Together they need to develop:

 * The ability for creative thought and action in individuals
 * The ability for creative thought and action in communities
 * The education of feeling and sensibility
 * The exploration of values
 * Understanding cultural change and difference
 * Critical faculties

        Through participation in the arts individuals and communities can become empowered to mutual understanding and greater social harmony. The arts are sometimes outpourings of emotion, but their absence disempowers communities and individuals. Feelings are connected with moral issues and the exploration of values and the arts should be concerned with helping people to investigate their own values and those of others. Throughout the world the arts can make an important contribution to inter-cultural and inter-racial understanding. The more society becomes subject to consumer and media pressures, the more it is necessary to discriminate between the worthwhile and the meretricious. The arts require critical discrimination while making choice and decision. Direct involvement at a local level is an important factor in developing these attributes, and therefore development in the arts cannot be regarded as optional.

        I am convinced that the forms of creative thinking and doing are fundamental to the health of society, the harmony of communities and the well being of individuals. Social and political concern has always been part of the arts  , what is now needed is a wider definition of the arts and a significant place for the arts in national strategy. Indigenous cultures, migrant cultures and local ways of doing things lie at the heart of arts in the community, whether on a national scale, at regional levels or in local communities. Arts work within communities is the basis of local culture. This area is always under-resourced and therefore always struggling to be effective. To create a more dynamic society both participation and partnership are necessary.

        The processes of arts in the community raise major questions about national arts policy and funding. The arts often play a key role in bringing communities together, sometimes by reviving or sustaining local traditions, sometimes by experimenting in new activities. This includes festivals and celebrations, reaching out to children and new audiences, taking the arts to rural areas, supporting those with disabilities, giving opportunities to minority social groups and introducing the arts of other cultures.

        A growing role for the arts in communities is the creation of jobs and this development needs recognition not only in national arts strategy, but also in policies embracing education and professional arts training, leisure, health, libraries, transport, buildings and the social services. The arts are integral to a quality of life undergoing rapid change in rural as well as urban areas, but the absence of a statutory requirement to provide arts facilities makes it difficult to identify a firm foundation on which arts and cultural foundations can build. The basis for a strategy would be to make it possible for more people to choose to use the arts, either as consumers or practitioners, as a natural and valued part of their lives. But where authorities have grant-giving powers problems can arise about the allocation of money. Along with the potential to become a voice for local arts there is the risk of becoming dominated by cliques representing only a particular art form or section of the community. Another potential dilemma for a new national strategy is the potential clash between diversity of interest without an overview. National strategies throughout the world need to undergo major cultural change in order to ensure that those with the power and those that ‘do’ are in partnership to provide quality provision, but, authorities should be warned that there is great danger in concentrating the most powerful means of communication in few hands.

        As the arts cannot exist commercially, governments ought to subsidise the arts, and you can tell how decent and civilised a government is by the size of its annual grant to the arts world. Governments should recognise that social and economic importance of the arts with regard to strategic social planning and the fact that they stimulate employment and high tourist spending within an economy. The private sector for the same reasons should also in part help to fund what are now known as the ‘creative industries’. However, this is not necessarily an entirely true picture. For example, in Britain virtually all publishing, most of the music industry, most crafts, the majority of the design industries, the largest part of the theatre, most of the visual arts world, the film industry and all that we call entertainment exists commercially. Hungry artists and power-hungry governments conveniently try to pretend that this is not the case; the former for the good reason that there may well be a gap between worthwhile production of art and public taste catching up sufficiently for it to have a market to sustain it, the latter for the rather less glorious reason that government subsidies are a good way of controlling artists and art via enlarged beaurocratic practices. However, the danger of basing arts policies on the acceptance of the new beaurocratic definition of art, and basing policies on the glib assumption that there is something called the ‘creative industries’ is that ‘policy making’ will boil down to being a simple question of how the ‘creative industries’ are to be funded. If this is the case, all questions about creativity, interpretation and criticism, freedom and complexity, diversity and choice, value and excellence will all take second place to the supposed higher truths of economics. Beaurocrats cannot recognise or control genius or creativity, and they fear criticism, but they can control economic forces.

        So ‘arts policies’ are often at best political constructs, thinly disguised control systems that rely on the persuasive redefinition of many art terms to make them seem benign and credible. So are arts policies desirable or even possible? Is there such a thing as a government-inspired policy?  The amount of money governments give to the arts is on its own no indication at all of the true nature of that government nor of the culture it represents; the most liberal
And democratic of governments in the 20th century have given little and had no arts policies; the most vicious and inhuman have had arts policies, regional strategies, arts officers in post and have been extremely generous towards their opera houses, museums, galleries and their concert halls.

        To be successful an arts policy must look at the history that has formed the national cultures, the legislative and fiscal frameworks within each of the various arts, must look at the history of the language to inquire what is actually meant by the culture, the arts, the arts markets, arts education (when it comes to arts education policy the bureaucrats really show their ignorance by simply referring to training, they adopt an arrogant and bullying tone in the hope of avoiding criticism and being given an excuse to hang on to their funds), cultural diplomacy, tourism, development, progress, excellence, provision, access, wants, needs and all the things needed to argue the case. It must be recognised that an arts policy can be a policy of control, can throw out a disguised system of censorship or standardisation or can be meaningless claptrap disguising an official vacuity ? an ignorance about the answer to the question which seemed to the Greeks self-evident to be at the heart of any policy discussion; how should the state so organise itself that each person can live well?
 

        The production of art itself has been increasingly complimented by the production of all the paraphernalia of policy making  - discussion documents, reports, assessments, position papers, strategies, inquiries and investigation ? which has at times threatened either to suffocate the actual art which it purports to describe, or has excited such general interest that it has in a curious way sometimes itself seemed to be a substitute for art. Policy statements are often smoke screens to cover up some political or financial problem always of the bureaucrats’ own making. In the classical civilisations the artists were prized and at its height, Athenian civilisation held in balance the two great purposes of the arts, inspiration and criticism.
 

        Patronage has been replaced by sponsorship and state funding which in turn has increased beaurocracy and complex systems of control while the actual constituency of the arts has shrunk. The danger is always that the commercial organisation, which finds itself in competition with state subsidised activities, will when finally forced to apply for subsidy, have so organised itself over a long period of time that it will not fit any of the bureaucratic criteria for support and so its life will be abruptly terminated. It is salutary just to take a look at an example of a grant application. 28 pages of instructions followed by an equal number of forms to fill in such detail that there can be no room for flexibility.

        It is also interesting to look at the expenditure in US performing arts companies: between 1974 and 1983 artistic salaries dropped by 9%, administrative salaries increased by 38%, technical salaries in creased by 30% and non salary expenditure dropped by 13%.

        Indeed it is possible to argue that in many cases the entirety of government subvention in the arts goes to the bureaucrats and the bureaucratic systems concerned with subsidy, and that when governments increase the ‘grant’, bureaucracy expands to take up the slack. The arts world needs to recognise its communality with government, its necessary contribution to debates about how life should be lived, and governments in their turn need to recognise that their artists are neither goods nor services, but citizens with particular and important functions. Governments of advanced countries are usually described as offering support to the arts through subsidies, but more often than not these subsidies because of the bureaucracy attached are simply other means of control.

        A growing 20th century phenomenon is the artists in exile, a person who choose to work outside their own country because the artist’s climate there is stifling. One cause for complaint is the taxation system. In general, three types of taxation crucially affect the operation of arts markets: the taxation upon artists, the taxation on the public at large and the taxation on the various organisations that provide a service for the arts, including the selling of tickets.
The reason that artists should not be taxed as other mortals is that they generally do not earn wages at a steady rate, they fluctuate wildly with good years following bad and so on, not to mention the earnings in kind.

        ‘If you look it up in the largest dictionary of quotations you find this simply message - ‘Policy; see Cunning’. Under Cunning it adds ‘see also Deceit and Hypocrisy’. What it shows is the older meaning of the word ? a policy: device, expedient, stratagem or trick. Now, however, politicians have chosen to make the word respectable. Policy is thought to be a good thing and parties must have lots of it. So ‘Policy’ has tended to become a catch-all phrase, with a spread of different meanings that run into each other: descriptions, high minded ideals, axioms etc. To take one example from the annuls of the Australian Liberal Party, these were its main aims:

* To maintain and develop cultural activity and diversity throughout Australia
* To ensure that the Arts are accessible to the broadest range of geographic and income groups
* To recognise the importance of both private and public sector patronage and to create a climate encouraging to private sector support
* To ensure that support is given to both traditional and innovative activity
* To facilitate the widest possible participation in the Arts by all sectors of the Australian community

        This would have pleased the Athenians, but it would require massive restructuring of the Australian governmental infrastructure to achieve and of course was never actually put into practice. ‘Putting into practice’ is another phrase from government bureaucracy intended to refer to ‘policy’. Another is the kind of policy that seeks to achieve no more than a change in definition.
        However, what most formulated arts policies suffer from is simple confusion: confusion over subject matter; confusion over scale; confusion over how to achieve their grandiose schemes with tiny grants; confusion in style of so many arts policies, badly written and consequently impossible to understand.
        A policy may be said to be prescriptive when it seeks to define the parameters of art, control all means of artistic creation and control all the means by which the arts may be publicly or privately enjoyed. A policy may be said to be descriptive when it disseminates knowledge about existing practice. A reactive policy is the opposite of a prescriptive one.

        Here is an example of how governments and other bodies cover themselves. I quote from a document, which for the purposes of this paper shall be fictitious:

        It should be noted that all organisations which qualify either for an Enterprise Grant or for support from the Progress Fund may not receive assistance when they apply. …………….. Enterprise and Progress Funds are extremely limited and many worthwhile applications may have to be rejected or deferred for a future year.
The Funds are controlled by an Enterprise and Progress Board; this is chaired by the Chairman of the ………….and its members include the Chairman of……………, the…………..and the …………… arts organisations. The Board has the right to agree variations to the rules governing the Enterprise and Progress Funds in certain cases.

        The descriptive openness is therefore a sham. A body that is accountable only to itself and meets in secret to decide outcomes is a policy which serves only to hide the real and secret one. Beneath this reactive behaviour is a prescriptive product. It is a curious fact that governments of advanced nations are not expected to have concern for their national cultures except where there are reasons for support other than the simple beauty and goodness of art. National Glory is one such reason, votes is another and of course education where they really mean training.

        In 1986 there was a conference that put forward the following:

* That arts organisations were increasingly turning to the private sector for ‘funds’
* That the emphasis in public funding was moving from central government to regional
* There was now ‘assessment’ of ‘value for money’; and
* A realisation that new arguments were needed to stimulate ‘support’, the economic case being particularly ‘relevant’.

        This is a good summary of what governments think of as key issues of common concern. However, there is a warning that the economic impact of the arts must not be overstated five areas where the arts may seem to score high:

* They have a very high value added
* They are labour intensive in relation to many other ‘industries’
* They provoke a large level of ancillary expenditure which stimulates allied activity
* They have high linkage effects into the local economy
* They have high additionality and low dead-weight expenditure

        It can also be useful to summarise the chief characteristics of bad or useless arts policies as follows:

* The aims and purposes of the policy have nothing to do with the creation and enjoyment of art
* The resources offered to implement policies are plainly inadequate to the task
* The language used to describe the policy implies that economics matters more than art
* The policy constantly alludes to arts management practices as if they are an entire substitute for art
* In support of immediate political ends, the policy takes a highly selective view of the past

        When they are full of faults such as these, arts policies are not ‘better than nothing’. There are innumerable instances if one does a little research where nothing would have been infinitely preferable to some of the policies that have been perpetrated.

        To be coherent arts policies have to pay attention to the following categories:
* They must acknowledge the entirety of the traditions which give all of the arts meaning
* They must fully describe the resources needed

        A true arts policy exists because it is wanted, not because some state organisation decides that it is useful to review management practice. It expresses something of the spirit of the times and of the character of artists and people. No arts policy can be of the remotest use if it is too diffuse and bland, nor can a policy be coherent if it concentrates upon too narrow an aspect of the complex arts world.

        I leave you with a quote from DH Lawrence with the thought that it is perhaps to much to expect bureaucrats to feel and think in this way.

        Now though perhaps nobody knew it, it was ugliness which betrayed the spirit of man, in the 19th century. The great crime which the moneyed classes and promoters of industry committed in the palmy Victorian days was the condemning of the workers to ugliness, ugliness, ugliness; meanness and formless and ugly surroundings, ugly ideals, ugly religion, ugly hope, ugly love, ugly clothes, ugly furniture, ugly houses, ugly relationships between workers and employers. The human soul needs actual beauty even more than bread.