Tougher times ahead for the arts
WHEN I was a youth my father had a friend who was somewhat of an activist. On her wall (this was the early 1980s) she had a poster that has stuck withme:“BeforeThatchercameto power, the UK stood at the edge of a precipice. Since then, we have taken a giant leap forward,” it read. It came to mind again this week.
The fiscal cliff, a phrase that was new to me when utilised in the second Thundering Hooves report in May 2015, was evoked again this week. That report warned of the long-term effects of a severe downturn in public funds for the arts. Back then, in spring 2015, it seemed like a relatively distant phenomenon. Well, we are taking a leap forward.
In the past two weeks, that cliff, and its precipitous implications for the arts, culture, and heritage, has loomed large. Edinburgh City Council, which runs morethanonedozenmuseumsand galleries, has decided to close them more often, including the City Arts Centre on Mondays and Tuesdays, as part of the £85 million in cuts that the city needs to somehow find for 2016/17.
This has been dubbed the “transformation plan”. No doubt more actions of this type, by councils across Scotland, are to come. The £66m revamp of the Burrell Collection, half ofitscostbackedbyGlasgowCity Council, may be a dramatic outlier in the cultural funding landscape to come.
The fiscal cliff played its part, to what extent is hard to judge, in the closureofInverleithHouseasanart gallery, too. Inverleith House was, of course,turneddownforregular funding by Creative Scotland (CS). Whether that decision was correct is, of course, debatable. But part of the reasoning behind that decision was thattherewasonlysomuchmoneyfor CS to distribute, and other companies/ galleries did not have the “umbrella” of a major institution such as the Royal Botanic Gardens of Edinburgh (RBGE)behind them.
As it turned out, that was not as much as a safe haven as CS assumed. On a standstill grant, RBGE certainly wanttomakethehouseintoa money-maker.
CS itself, which took a cut to its funding last year, will find out in December how much money it has to spend. It seems a foregone conclusion more cuts will come. But as one insider ruefully told me: “Culture funding really doesn’t have that much of a cliff to fall off.” CS’s grant-in-aid budget is currently less than 0.5 per cent of the overall Scottish Government budget.
And then there are the unknowable costs and hurdles of Brexit. Already, the drop in the value of the pound has caused Celtic Connections to cut back on some of the American acts it wanted to stage because of the increased cost.
Donald Shaw, its director, also expressed concerns for the future of visas, travel permits and other logistical issues in the new dispensation.
Artists, companies, galleries and many others in the cultural world look set, in the next two years and beyond, to be in a kind of Edgar Allan Poe story, teetering between the pit of public funding cuts and the pendulum of the ramifications of Brexit. That was a horror story, too.
‘‘ As one insider ruefully told me: ‘Culture funding really doesn’t have that much of a cliff to fall off’