ARTSCAPE: WHO CAN PREDICT anything? Certainly not the Arts Council (AC), which has no idea what its budget will be next year.
And therefore none of its clients – theatre companies, musical ensembles, artists and festivals – knows what the next year holds on any front, and so cannot plan or commit to anything. In a bid to nail something down, it seems, the AC has offered a small level of investment to its clients for early next year: basically, companies which were funded this year have a commitment to State investment for the first quarter of 2010, at a level of just two-thirds of their present funding. There are all sorts of provisos indicating this shouldn’t be construed as signalling the AC will continue to fund companies after April. This is a holding operation: after the Budget, when the council knows its own funding, it will make final investment decisions for the cultural sector.
Still, next week the big guns, or at least an Emmy winner, are coming out to make a case for the arts. Both the AC and Theatre Forum are before the Oireachtas Joint Committee on Arts, Sports, Tourism, Community, Rural and Gaeltacht Affairs – and the AC is bringing along Emmy winner, fine actor, impassioned speaker and all-round good guy Brendan Gleeson (as well as director Mary Cloake and chairwoman Pat Moylan). Theatre Forum’s heavy gang will include Sebastian Barry, Garry Hynes and Fiach MacConghail.
And while the sector is finally getting its act together, with Facebook action and the National Campaign for the Arts, no one knows what way the knives will fall for AC funding, or how it will fare with the Department of Arts, Sport and Tourism.
An Bord Snip recommended a €6.1m cut in AC funding. But it has already effectively spent €2.35m of next year's money. How could that be? In the seemingly ever-fluctuating AC funding, its Budget allocation was €73.35m this year, taking into account a cut, in April's supplementary budget, of 2.35m (down from €75.7m for 2009 allocated in the October 2008 budget). But the council decided to honour the funding commitments it had made at the beginning of the year, as it would be more expensive for companies to row back on arrangements that they had already made. So in fact it spent €77.6m, including €1.9m of savings and €2.35 from 2010, this year. If the Department of Finance decides to go with the Snip proposal to cut the AC €6.1m further, it will feellike a cut from €77.6m to €64.9m – in which case things could be even worse than AC deputy chairman Maurice Foley's prediction a year ago: the public can expect "fewer festivals, fewer exhibitions, less theatre and less music. Individual artists can expect fewer bursaries.... also likely to be job losses".
But on the plus side, announcing a new project to improve fundraising skills in the cultural sector seems like a fitting good news story to announce during the Ulster Bank Dublin Theatre Festival, which seems like a model of how to run a business partnership. Engaging sponsors and building and managing good, mutually beneficial relationships with them is a tricky business, which many arts and culture organisations find challenging. Enter New Stream, a three-year programme run by Business to Arts and supported by Bank of America Merrill Lynch to the tune of about €400,000 over three years, announced by the Minister for Arts, Martin Cullen, on Thursday. The scheme has been in the works for the past couple of years, over which time the entire landscape has changed. Allen Blevins, art and heritage programmes director for Bank of America Merrill Lynch, came to Dublin for the announcement of the project, which he hopes will later be used elsewhere in Europe.
Designed to support organisations from large national institutions to local, volunteer-run organisations, it involves a programme of specialist training and consultancy, information, peer support networks and professional advice for arts organisations. And it’ll all be available online on the Business to Arts website for wider access; the first task (and cost) of the programme is to set the site up for this; about 30 per cent of the funding will be channelled through Business to Arts directly.
The aim is to use the considerable sum for a greater impact than funding an individual company or event, and to benefit a much larger number of cultural organisations. The Minister stressed that such private funding “is not to replace, but to enhance public funding”.
One might well imagine that this is a most unlikely time to be able to drum up business support for cultural projects; but Stuart McLaughlin of Business to Arts points out some significant partnerships have been set up over the past year (such as the Absolut sponsorship of the Dublin Fringe and the Galway Arts Festival visual art), and that businesses are positioning themselves for recovery.
Bank of America Merrill Lynch, as Blevins pointed out, is one of the leading corporate investors in the US, and that’s because it firmly believes that it is good business and that the investment pays dividends.
* Therewon't be a chance to hear pianist Alfred Brendel perform live again, as he retired from public performance last December, at the age of 75. But he's in Dublin tonight giving a public lecture, "Does all classical music have to be entirely serious?". And as part of the lecture, which he presents occasionally internationally, Brendel will play to illustrate it. The RIAM lecture is tonight at 8pm at the National Gallery of Ireland, Merrion Square.
* NCADgraduate Natasha Conway made the shortlist of 20 artists for this year's New Sensations exhibition of works by fine arts graduates in the UK and Ireland. She was the only Irish graduate to make it into the final 20 from 400 entrants. She didn't make it into the final four, from which one winner will be selected, but she impressed at her graduation show with a series of low-key, meticulously made paintings which gained her a first-class degree and the NUI Purchase Award. The New Sensations exhibition, organised by the Saatchi Gallery and Channel 4 television, is at the A Foundation at the Rochelle School in London E2 until Oct 19th. All 20 artists will have a Channel 4 Three Minute Wonderfilm made about them and shown in November.