In a blistering attack on the Arts Council, David Lee calls for the abolition of its ‘monotonous domination’.
Arnold Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council from 1965 to 1972, observed: ‘It is not the job of an unelected body to make cultural policy.’ Implicit here is an understanding that the Arts Council, whose members are unelected and minutes for whose meetings are not published because they are not taken, must respond to what artists produce and not presume to impose conditions upon them. Goodman’s common sense might have been true of the Arts Council in those innocent days, but it couldn’t be further from the case now.
Today, in the visual arts, not only has the Council arrived at a hard-line policy uncompromisingly enforced by true believers, but they are also apparently unconcerned that their chosen protocol excludes the majority of artists whose needs the Council was originally set up to meet. Unfortunately, all other major institutions responsible for contemporary art’s organization subscribe equally ardently to the same prescriptive credo. This divisive policy was not the creation of any one of these bodies alone, but—as we shall discover later—the result of coinciding attitudes occurring in all of them at more or less the same time... Keep reading on The Jackdaw.
Arnold Goodman, Chairman of the Arts Council from 1965 to 1972, observed: ‘It is not the job of an unelected body to make cultural policy.’ Implicit here is an understanding that the Arts Council, whose members are unelected and minutes for whose meetings are not published because they are not taken, must respond to what artists produce and not presume to impose conditions upon them. Goodman’s common sense might have been true of the Arts Council in those innocent days, but it couldn’t be further from the case now.
Today, in the visual arts, not only has the Council arrived at a hard-line policy uncompromisingly enforced by true believers, but they are also apparently unconcerned that their chosen protocol excludes the majority of artists whose needs the Council was originally set up to meet. Unfortunately, all other major institutions responsible for contemporary art’s organization subscribe equally ardently to the same prescriptive credo. This divisive policy was not the creation of any one of these bodies alone, but—as we shall discover later—the result of coinciding attitudes occurring in all of them at more or less the same time... Keep reading on The Jackdaw.