Serota must breathe life into Arts Council

The body is overstretched by stifling targets. It needs its new chairman to be a visionary, not a patsy

Some 40 years ago, I worked through university vacations in a lowly capacity for the Arts Council. Among many inspirational figures in the ranks was a young lion in the exhibitions department: the tall, lean and Jesuitically dedicated Nicholas Serota. His head boy promise was fulfilled when, in 1988, he was appointed director of the Tate Gallery – a sleepy institution he would expand into a brilliantly administered empire that revolutionised the national taste for contemporary art.

Serota has now abdicated this throne and returned to the organisation that nurtured him. On Monday he gave his inaugural speech as chairman of Arts Council England, opening another chapter in the organisation’s history.

Back in the pre-Thatcherite Seventies, the Arts Council’s mission seemed simple. Acting for the entire UK (now it is responsible only for England), it could operate on the belief of its founding father, John Maynard Keynes, that the “high” arts enriched everyone’s lives as an intrinsic part of civilisation. Government supplied a modest grant, which could be distributed and managed by a cultured elite trusted to make specific decisions.

By today’s standards it was a rather gentlemanly if not mandarin affair; but its ideals were shining, its mission clearly stated, and it did a fine job of making the best available to the many.

All the assumptions underlying this rhetoric have crumbled now. What is the best, who are the many? Civilisation is a contested term, fragmented by the ideology of multiculturalism, and public spending can no longer unaccountably sponsor activities of minority interest.

The Arts Council has had to change its tune accordingly. Loathed in many quarters as a haven of leftist slobber, it has survived shelling by a whisker. Treasury wonks and newspaper pundits have repeatedly questioned the justification for taxpayers subsidising grand operas or exhibitions of dirty washing. Polls confirm that the public would rather leave the Royal Ballet or National Theatre to fend for itself and divert their grants to school playing-fields or dialysis machines. Art isn’t a vote winner.

But government has held back from pulling the plug. If we want a spread of the arts on a par with all other advanced nations, no better way of ensuring its foundations has ever been proposed than a base layer of state investment. The Treasury has grudgingly accepted that proposition, acknowledging that the arts drive economic regeneration in cities and towns by increasing rents, VAT receipts and discretionary spending.

What has been ceded, however, is independence. There is no more carte blanche. The Arts Council has been fastened tightly to the apron strings of a bossy mummy, the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS). A “management agreement”, said to be 30 pages long, requires it to align with government policy, specifically on diversity, but also in relation to mental health, education and prison services. The arts, and the Arts Council, consequently twist themselves into knots with claims that they can reform criminals, heal the sick and bring light to those who live in darkness. They can no longer be good in themselves, but only as far as they are instrumental in stimulating spending, making us better citizens and “promoting well being”.

Protected by the shrewd chairmanship of Nicholas Serota’s predecessor (and George Osborne’s chum) Peter Bazalgette, the sector was therefore treated relatively leniently in recent austerity budgets – the pay-off being a punitive cut in the Council’s internal budget and extra responsibility for museums and libraries. This has resulted in fewer staff and, some would say, insufficient expertise. Advisory panels are certainly weighted towards cultural bureaucrats rather than practitioners, and a customer-service mentality has resulted in the adoption of an Australian box-ticking system of assessment known as quality metrics. The Arts Council of Serota’s youth was a place of rich experience and sophisticated judgment; the one he inherits is an overstretched machine.

Serota’s first speech emphasised that the arts must be “proactive as a development agency” and announced a commission to examine – yawn – the arts in education. This is what the DCMS wants to hear: he is playing the patsy. Had he wanted to challenge his masters, Serota should have sounded a strong alarm about the catastrophic effects of cuts in local government funding and the chronic shortage of fundraisers. But first of all he needs to bring fresh air and vision into the Council itself. He pulled such a trick off magnificently at the Tate – can he repeat it here?