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 Thursday Reemer and I were at Arts Council England national office in London to meet ACE Chief Executive, Alan Davey. We talked about last week’s seminar on ‘Excellence and the Voluntary Arts’ and the forthcoming VAE/ACE/DCMS joint conference on 2 July. We discussed how we might work better together to secure additional support for the voluntary arts from a range of Government departments. We also looked at the idea of a national campaign to increase participation, building on the experience of the VAE/Media Trust ‘Up for Arts’ campaign last summer. Finally we discussed how to address the need for capacity-building support for the voluntary arts in England. It increasingly feels like we are now past the stage of arguing about the importance of the voluntary arts and beginning to move into the details of how best to support the sector. Roll on 2 July …

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!!

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.

I was in London again on Tuesday to meet Richard Piper and Jake Eliot from the Performance team at NCVO. We had a fascinating and wide-ranging discussion about performance, effectiveness and impact in the voluntary arts. Richard was keen to explore the application of NCVO’s ‘Full Value’ model (see www.performancehub.org.uk/fullvalue) in a voluntary arts context. We talked in detail about the forthcoming government seminar on excellence and the voluntary arts (on 4 June) and looked at examples and learning from the wider voluntary and community sector that might prove helpful to this debate.

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!