Waving or drowning?

The Guardian recently published a provocative piece by the playwright Mark Ravenhill, in which he suggested that funding cuts could be best deployed on the marketing and development areas of arts organisations. His view being, that “administrative costs” left too little for the artists themselves. In the resulting comments there was widespread agreement that we were headed towards a funding iceberg, but how we would manage the impending cash freeze was not resolved.
 

CUT BUREAUCRACY, NOT CORNERS
One contributor to the debate made a very interesting suggestion and one that I thought the most positive, in particular to what is understood about community arts. It suggested that artists should be salaried to teach workshops in return for time and space to do their own work; in essence, a formalised artist-in-residence system that would do away with a lot of the time and effort artists are currently investing as they chase various quangos and funding agencies for income so that they may continue simply to survive.
If forthcoming cuts sever all but a few of the funding arteries, the arts across all of Britain will slowly bleed to death. In the areas or artforms where no private sponsors can be found – community arts being the most obvious target – it may cease to exist completely. This is already starting to happen and, to me, it seems that most arts organisations seem unprepared for the scale and severity of what lies ahead.

WHY REGULATE COMMUNITY ARTS?
Most community arts projects do not in themselves create worthwhile art because they are not intended to; they create opportunities for people who would otherwise not get them to have therapy, fun and maybe enlightenment. This work has for too long been an unregulated, snout-in-trough mess where predominantly well-meaning and usually middle-class do-gooders have poured millions down the drain through sheer unprofessionalism and lack of regulation. I, as an artist, have had first-hand experience of mismanagement, unprofessional behaviour and downright nepotism. Going by comments from fellow artists, I am not alone and it is not a local problem. Having been funded by government to take a teaching qualification, I see no reason why the same funding and concomitant stringency should not apply to the community arts sector too.
I believe it’s always been an open secret in the sector that a fair proportion of funding was as likely to go to ‘artistic’ friends who are short of cash, rather than those most able to deliver. However, whilst the previous government was only starting to pull hard on the reins, it now looks as though the Con Dem alliance may go a lot further – and indeed, may actually remove the saddle and put the nag out to pasture altogether.
An objective audit of community arts, with final outcomes assessed, truly would show where we have been, and where we might possibly be going. We regulate schools, further and higher education to a high degree. Surely, the community arts sector should be regulated too? And by doing so, one could expect that artists, values, performance and outputs would rise together. If this means training artists properly to deliver those outcomes, so be it. I believe that attempts in this direction have been lacklustre to date, and perhaps warped by social output targets – where substantial grants went to individual artists/organisations higher up the tick-boxing ‘hit list’ ahead of their innate ability to deliver professional outcomes.
So yes to regulating and training the whole sector, with an independent body to administer it. But there’s the rub: where does one find the money to create community arts training nationwide in the same way PGCE courses are organised? If a fraction of the money spent on the sector in the past 15 years had been used to set up such a system, it might not be in such a vulnerable position now. Regulation could have bolstered those (including myself) who argue that the community arts sector can do great good and should not be dismantled. In a sector already beginning to nose-dive, this still might be the only way to save it.