Cultural Playing Field

On Monday I was in London to chair a meeting of the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations (acevo) Arts, Culture & Heritage Special Interest Group. Gail Robinson from the Department for Culture, Media and Sport joined us to discuss the department’s Third Sector Strategy. The new version of the strategy is going to focus on six themes: recognition, voice, the compact, accessing support, social enterprise and local authorities. We agreed that voluntary and community sector organisations in the arts, culture and heritage are often not perceived as part of the third sector but also tend not to see themselves as part of the third sector, thereby missing out on substantial available support. We also discussed mechanisms for DCMS to engage with the acevo Special Interest Group on a regular basis and talked again about the Charity Commission consultation on fee charging. Finally I reported back to the group about the DCMS/Arts Council England seminar on Excellence and the Voluntary Arts on 4 June, which had arisen as a result of the Special Interest Group’s meeting with Culture Minister Margaret Hodge in January.

On Wednesday afternoon Reemer and I met the Culture Minister, Margaret Hodge, in her office in the House of Commons. With the debate on 42-day detention going on in the background, we discussed last week’s seminar on ‘Excellence and the Voluntary Arts’ and the forthcoming joint VAE/ACE/DCMS conference, ‘Our Creative Talent’ on 2 July. We focused, in particular, on the need for more explicit recognition by the Government of the voluntary arts sector as an essential part of the wider arts continuum. Margaret Hodge was very keen to ensure that the sector realises it is now highly valued and appreciated by the Government and we agreed a number of ways to get this message across - both on 2 July and beyond. Exciting times ahead - please Gordon, no reshuffles in the next three weeks!!

On Monday I was at Cecil Sharp House - the magnificent home of the English Folk Dance and Song Society - for the inaugural consultation event to develop a Participation Manifesto. Around 50 people from a wide range of arts organisations (including voluntary arts umbrella bodies, local authorities and institutions such as the Royal Shakespeare Company and English National Opera) spent an intense day discussing a vision for arts participation over the next 10 years.

It was fascinating how, over 5 hours on Monday, this large group more or less recreated all the ups and downs of the discussions the small manifesto development group has had over the past 12 months. Starting with the easy-to-agree premise that, if all those organisations involved in getting people to participate in the arts and crafts were able to work together and unite in a single clear message, we would be able to substantially increase and widen participation, the consensus quickly began to fall apart as we argued about definitions of ‘participation’ and whether what we were discussing was truly a ‘manifesto’. By lunchtime it felt like we had definitively established that the dream of agreeing a Participation Manifesto was completely impossible. (And anyone who left the event at this point must have gone away feeling incredibly frustrated.) But in the afternoon, through a combination of working in small groups and then sharing and combining ideas on a wall of post-it notes, a consensus gradually began to emerge. By the end of the afternoon we had agreed the key goals for the manifesto and a series of ways in which these might be met. We had also discussed the process for continuing the development of the manifesto and establishing a steering group.

There is clearly a long way to go - but this event was always intended to be just the start of a thorough participative process. It’s going to be hard work but it feels like we have made a very good start - which is great credit to all those who contributed to Monday’s event. It was an exhausting but absorbing day. And it felt wonderfully counter intuitive, at the home of English folk music, for the day to include a wonderful lunchtime performance of Indian classical music by ‘Ragarasa’.

This morning I was at Arts Council England in London to take part in the seminar ‘Excellence and the Voluntary Arts’ which looked at the applicability and implications for the voluntary arts sector of Sir Brian McMaster’s report ‘Supporting excellence in the arts - from measurement to judgement’.

Culture Minister, Margaret Hodge, introduced the seminar, describing how it had come about as a result of her meeting with the acevo Arts, Culture & Heritage Special Interest Group in January. She revealed that the research DCMS and ACE had commissioned to scope the voluntary arts sector in England would show an incredible capacity which the Government wants to nurture and grow. She said that a lot of ‘excellence’ in the arts funded by ACE comes up from that voluntary arts activity on the ground. She was particularly interested in the role of culture in strengthening communities and defining place. The Minister challenged the seminar to address how the Government could better recognise the contribution of the voluntary arts sector.

We had a fascinating and wide ranging discussion lasting just over two hours which covered definitions of excellence, the relationship between diversity and excellence in the amateur arts, where amateurs sit with innovation and risk-taking, how new technology and digital media help, the relationship between excellence and the promotion of audience development, how the amateur arts and professional sector support each other and much more.

Some of the key points raised included:

• for art to be excellent it has to be relevant, rooted in the community in which it is operating
• the diversity of society is not fully reflected in the publicly funded arts
• in some cases the amateur performer can be better than the professional
• the amateur sector tends to judge itself against a variety of factors including engaging with its community – as well as artistic excellence
• diversity is a key driver of the voluntary arts
• McMaster’s definition of excellence as that which affects and changes individuals is absolutely what happens in participatory arts
• McMaster provides the opportunity for joining up – embedding the concept of creativity across every aspect of our lives
• innovation, risk-taking and excellence are relative not absolute terms
• DCMS, ACE and local authorities need to look at support for the voluntary arts rather than direct funding
• we all need to play a leadership role in encouraging innovation and risk-taking in the voluntary arts
• there is an important role for ACE to play in joining up relevant agendas across Government departments
• technology has driven the need for the creativity agenda: the skills needed to succeed in life today are creative
• DCMS and ACE could help to broker a relationship for the voluntary arts with local authorities

(This is just a short extract from a long and detailed debate.)

Summing up, Alan Davey (Chief Executive of Arts Council England, who chaired the seminar) said there is relevance to McMaster for the voluntary arts and it is very clear. He said we need to work together to articulate this more strongly. Alan said the DCMS/ACE voluntary arts research will give a strong research-based platform to develop working plans. Beginning with more explicit recognition for the sector is very important. He concluded by saying that the voluntary arts sector is very important: it goes to the heart of what Arts Council England is about – getting people participating and deepening their interest and engagement.

It felt to me like this seminar represented a very significant milestone in the growing recognition and involvement of the voluntary arts sector by the Government and Arts Council England. Many thanks to everyone involved – and particularly to Robin Osterley for his extensive work in developing and preparing the seminar.

You can read further comments on ‘excellence and the voluntary arts’ and continue the debate by clicking here.

Thanks to everyone who has posted comments on excellence and the voluntary arts ahead of the DCMS seminar on Wednesday 4 June. There is still time to join the debate - click here to read the latest comments and add your own thoughts.

On Monday I was in London for a meeting of the Participation Manifesto initial development group. This was our first chance to meet Hardin Tibbs, the consultant who is going to facilitate the first major Participation Manifesto consultation event in London on 9 June. We discussed the format of the day in detail and looked at how to focus on how the 170 organisations that have already expressed an interest in the development of a manifesto might be able to support each other to increase and widen participation – rather than risk the message of the manifesto becoming simply about the need for more funding. Hardin grasped the issues quickly and had some inventive ideas about making the most effective use of the consultation event. I’m really looking forward to 9 June …

The post above gives some background to the seminar that DCMS is hosting on June 4th. The purpose of this post is to start a debate about the kinds of discussions that might take place at the seminar.

A few years ago, Francois Matarasso defined quality in the arts in the following way. I hope he doesn’t mind me recycling this material: hopefully he will contribute to this blog if he has changed or refined any of his views:

• Firstly, technical competence. Not brilliance, note, nor virtuosic extravagance, but competence, in other words the ability to translate accurately the creator’s wishes into a performance.
• Secondly, originality. Something about the performance needs to be different from what has gone before.
• Thirdly, ambition. The performers must have a need to improve their performance and to constantly aspire to something better.
• Fourthly, a quality performance requires relevance. It must be something that has a shared meaning with its audience – he sometimes refers to this as resonance.
• And fifthly, which he admits is a bit of a cop-out, he requires “magic” – self-explanatory I guess.

OK these are by no means perfect, but might be a interesting place to start. How can voluntary arts be excellent (we all know it can be) without the degree of technical excellence displayed by professional artists? What does this mean? Is it simply about contextualising artistic activities within their community or is it about something else? Can we have excellent art without technical excellence? If so how? Does technical excellence always mean excellence (not many would subscribe to that one I suspect)? Indeed should we be debating this at all, or simply say that there are enough examples of technical excellence in the voluntary arts for this not to be a problem? These are the issues we want to explore - let’s get the debate going now.

The DCMS is hosting a seminar on the subject of excellence in the Voluntary Arts on June 4th. This post is to give some background to the seminar and to kick off a debate amongst delegates to inform the seminar’s discussions.

The background is that some of us having been thinking for a while about the issues of quality and excellence as they apply to the Voluntary Arts. The publication of the McMaster report has been widely accepted as a vitally important contribution to the debate about how the arts should be regarded in terms of excellence; and yet a search of the report yields no instances of the words “voluntary” or “amateur”. Thus our concern that excellence could simply be construed as the province of the professional arts sector was only exacerbated by reading McMaster, and our fears grew as it became clear that DCMS was taking McMaster very much to heart.

At a meeting of the arts, culture and heritage special interest group of ACEVO (the Association of Chief Executives of Voluntary Organisations) some of us mentioned this point to Margaret Hodge. She seemed quite taken with the thought and suggested creating a seminar on the subject. Since this time, Robin Simpson and I have been working with Paul Blaker, Head of Arts Development at the DCMS, to make the seminar happen and it promises to be an interesting occasion. My next post gives some ideas about how we might proceed - please comment widely, frankly and interestingly!

On Wednesday afternoon I was at the National Association of Local Government Arts Officers Executive meeting. There was a lot of discussion of the new local authority cultural services improvement strategy, ‘A Passion for Excellence’, which had been launched at the Local Government Association conference. Not sure I completely understood all this but the most important thing seemed to be to strive to get the arts included in Local Area Agreements. Around 2000 national indicators for local government in England have been reduced to just 198 but these do include an indicator around engagement with the arts (NI11 – which is currently the 70th most popular in terms of take-up by local authorities). Local authorities were urged, however, not to “disappear into the vortex of indicators” – cultural services improvement is much more than just targets.