The Arts Council wastes money – and is bad news for art

‘You’re gay.’ That was the first tip I got from a friend who writes applications for Arts Council grants. He was helping me bid for £15,000 to fund my new play on the London fringe. ‘I’m not gay,’ I said. ‘So what?’ he told me. ‘The Arts Council wants you gay. So be gay.’ 

My dealings with the Arts Council introduced me to the crazy world of bureaucratic salesmanship and I was amazed by what I learned. My friend charges £250 a day to help people like me snaffle free dosh. And he’s not unique. Thousands of freelancers like him are busy angling for a slice of the £116.8 million given out annually to fund one-off arts projects (‘open access grants,’ as they call them). For failing artists who can’t get work in the commercial sector, the rewards can be great: grants can total £100,000.

The Arts Council, being an arm of the state, appears to look favourably on the sick, the frail, the poor and the marginalised, or anyone claiming those disadvantages. It uses code and talks of ‘a more equitable distribution’ that looks kindly on those with ‘under-represented protected characteristics’. Fair enough. But it’s a bit patronising to assume that those from minority backgrounds need help to create art as if they can’t celebrate their own culture without cadging money off others to pay for it.

To produce my play, I was advised to charge £9,176 for the script and an additional £199.95 a week for attending auditions and rehearsals. That’s £10,000 in all. For hauling a script out of my bottom drawer and forwarding it to the government. Imagine if a film company did the same and paid writers for emailing scripts to the studio. Are the scripts even read by the Arts Council? I wasn’t asked to send so much as a synopsis of my play. They seemed more interested in the health problems and sexual proclivities of the cast. No one in the history of art has ever behaved like this, apart from Richard Wagner’s sponsor, Ludwig II of Bavaria, who sank his personal fortune into the composer’s projects. At least Ludwig backed Wagner with his own cash. The Arts Council gets others to support their pet-projects. Ask yourself this: do you want to invest in pretentious garbage made by talentless wasters? Given that a big chunk of the money the Arts Council dishes out comes from the National Lottery, there’s a chance you already do.

The Arts Council is a fussy patron and it likes saccharine projects that make people ‘feel included and welcomed’. But art isn’t like that. It’s not a comfort blanket or a strawberry lollipop. Real art challenges people and invites them to confront difficult thoughts and troublesome emotions. Art that makes people ‘feel included’ belongs in a nursery school. And by suggesting that art should welcome everyone, the Arts Council assumes that everyone feels unwelcome already. Alienated and excluded. Fearful of unfamiliar habits and customs. But most of us are glad to explore other cultures, to travel, to read history, to learn languages, to visit museums, to try new foodstuffs. Alternative customs fascinate us but the Arts Council appears to imagine that we live in a country haunted by suspicion and resentment, where fretful losers peer at their neighbours from behind the walls of isolated ghettos.

In my own sphere, the theatre, a typical state-funded drama will feature a noisy misfit who trumpets his cultural prejudices at top volume in order to compensate for his personal inadequacies. And, yes, there are truculent losers everywhere but they should be ignored, not given money to shriek from the rooftops and disturb the peace of the community. 

That’s how the Arts Council rots the society it purports to serve – by paying malcontents to broadcast their grievances in the name of art. Self-pity is turned into a commodity. It becomes a lucrative asset. The Arts Council rewards aggressive, unhappy characters who are good at creating problems but useless at solving them.

‘I’m angry,’ they say, ‘now pay up.’ Eventually we all become victims-for-hire. We can’t help joining in. The people who feel slightly oppressed say they feel deeply oppressed. And the people who aren’t oppressed at all say that they’re more oppressed than anyone. The Arts Council is a kind of slot-machine where anyone can shove in a forged token, ‘I’m neglected,’ and hit the jackpot. That’s why I identified as a gay man, to tilt the system in my favour. I was playing the game. And I was learning a new language as well. The question ‘are you gay?’ wasn’t put to me outright, but I could tell from the jargon that it helps to be ‘diverse’, (that is BAME, disabled, LGBT or female.) And you can claim membership of a ‘diverse’ group without proper evidence: ‘Organisations are able to self-define as diverse-led based on the person involved in making the key strategic decisions,’ the Arts Council says.

The Arts Council seems remarkably curious about the sex-lives of their audiences as well but they can’t get their hands on the info. Here’s their Investment Programme report for 2023-2026: ‘As there is a lack of evidence in this area, there is a need to support LGBT audience data-collection in arts and culture.’

Another form of woe that excites them is being working class or, in their terms, ‘from a lower socio-economic background’. Here I was in luck. One yardstick assesses your circumstances at the age of 14, and in those days, back in 1977, I attended a state school and lived with my divorced mother who earned very little as a typist. Her low salary qualified me as ‘working class.’ Bingo. Three cherries in a row. 

The Arts Council is also keen on backing those who might be mentally ill. It says: ‘To prevent the onset of mental health conditions we also need to support high quality creative work which supports individuals and communities who display ‘risk factors’ for mental ill-health’. Perhaps as a result, I was asked about the mental health of my actors, but I had no access to their case-notes and no desire to share their private data with bureaucrats. So I ignored that part of the form. But it’s strange that the Arts Council seems interested in people’s sex-lives and psychiatric history.

To maximise my chances of winning the jackpot, I attended several Zoom conferences where Arts Council staff share tips about the process. One issue puzzled me deeply. Is the grant a donation or a loan? ‘The money is yours,’ said an Arts Council member in reply to my question. Incredible, isn’t it? They hand out cash and what do they expect in return? Funding flops: that’s the goal apparently. Box-office poison is their holy grail. Another guideline spells it out: 

‘If a project makes an unexpected profit…some or all of this money could be deducted from the final grant amount.’

How odd to see ‘profit’ treated as an undesirable anomaly. In the commercial theatre, ‘an unexpected profit’ is the prize everyone strives for, but the Arts Council seems to regard it as a nuisance to be stamped on.

The budget for my play included a lighting designer, a sound technician, an associate producer, and so on. And the Arts Council wanted to know how much I would pay them, so I consulted the Independent Theatre Council (or luvvies’ trade union) whose wages are pretty steep. They ask for £573 per week per actor, which is close to West End rates. And more money is demanded in certain circumstances. A freelance producer should get £173 per day unless special ‘rates of pay’ apply. ‘Minimum Daily Rate to be used for funding applications £289.’ There it is. A special rip-off rate for when others are footing the bill. 

But what’s wrong with actors getting paid handsomely? Nothing, except this: high wages kill small productions. A new producer won’t go near the theatre if he believes that every actor expects £600 a week. In fact, many actors will work for £300 because they enjoy their job but their trade union puts out fantasy figures which will catch out unwary producers.

This threatens the future of drama. The truth is that paying everyone top dollar is inflexible and unrealistic. No theatre company is filled with world-class professionals who deserve international fees. Room needs to be found for juniors and apprentices working cheaply to gain experience. But the Arts Council seems to look down on the idea of lower wages. And it appears to despise am-dram producers who get their own box to tick on the form. ‘You confirm that there are no people being paid and no people volunteering as part of this project.’ No people volunteering? That means no students or teenagers working alongside professionals for a lower rate. This stance stops the community from behaving as it should, like an extended family, where wisdom teaches youth and where the past hands on knowledge to the future. 

Once I’d completed my application I sent it in, and nine weeks later I got my answer: sorry, chum – not this time. I received helpful notes about where my application had gone wrong because the Arts Council is glad to look at revamped and redrafted bids. I immediately sat down to plot my next raid on the piggy-bank. 

My eye was drawn to the ‘Developing Your Creative Practice’ grants which exist to ‘support creative practitioners who want to take time to focus on their creative development.’ That sounded suitably woolly. Grants between £2,000 and £12,000 are available. Total budget: £14.4 million. There are lots of opportunities to waste cash or claim it unnecessarily. Applicants who can’t read or write can apply for ‘access support’ and a ‘note-taker or a specialist tutor for admin.’ In plain English, they’ll hire you a secretary. They’ll find you someone who can add up, if you can’t count. And they’ll lay on a helper to sort out your documents if you struggle with paperwork.

The Arts Council, which says it supports ‘high-quality, cultural work that caters to (a) wide range of different tastes’, is proud of these grants and it publicises successful bids on its website. But perhaps readers should make their own minds up. Nina Clarke, a musician, used the money to produce her third album, ALPHA. ‘Queer artist’ Charmian Childs was paid for experimental work as a ‘Strong Lady.’ Désirée Reynolds ‘a grandchild of the African diaspora’ attended courses, festivals and conferences. ‘Imposter syndrome is alive and flourishing,’ she said. Poet Romalyn Ante enjoyed a ‘research and writing’ trip to the Philippines where she was born. Rosie Heafford, a Dream Artist at Pavilion Dance South West, visited Philadelphia for a performing arts conference. Great. Lucky them. But what are these jaunts really about? They look like holidays for people with hobbies. 

It reminded me of a ruse to conceal unemployment figures dreamed up in the dying days of Margaret Thatcher’s reign. The Enterprise Allowance Scheme was created in the late 1980s to help idlers like me create ‘a business’ and attend seminars about entrepreneurship hosted by expert speakers. I joined in 1988 and my business was ‘novel writing.’ I got my benefits paid, as normal, but my name was struck from the employment register and although I was still sponging off the state, the Tory government called me a ‘wealth-creator.’ I attended just one business seminar where I learned nothing about making money or selling products. For a very obvious reason: the speakers were all bankrupts and losers. That’s when I realised that successful businessmen run businesses and failed businessmen become ‘business leaders.’ The government naturally turned to these ‘leaders’ to train the next generation of duds. 

The Arts Council fulfils a similar function and it serves the bureaucracy not the arts. To create art, you don’t need money. You need the hunger to create art. But people who need money will create art if there’s cash available. The result is bad art. You may call this a ‘philistine’ view from someone who is ‘against the arts.’ But I’m not against the arts. The Arts Council is against the arts. People were making art long before the Arts Council was created in 1946. Since then, Britain has created two brand new art forms without a penny of Arts Council money. TV comedy. And rock music. 

Art exists without the Arts Council. And inevitably it’s better art. It seems that people create art naturally until they join a government department that subsidises art – at which point they begin to destroy art, corrupt art and ruin art. To save art we need to kill the Arts Council.