Cultural Playing Field

Last weekend I attended the ‘Amateo’ conference in Ljubljana, Slovenia, where we agreed the constitution for a ‘European network for active participation in cultural activities’ and elected the first Board for the new organisation. VAN is the UK representative amongst the seven founding members of ‘Amateo’. In launching the network, its first President, Villy Dall from Denmark, emphasised that the idea was not to duplicate what other European organisations already do: the main idea was to convince politicians and bureaucrats in Brussels and Strasbourg that the application procedures for European funding schemes need to be made more accessible to amateur cultural groups. Amateo will press for an opening up of European funding to the amateur sector and will then develop support to help groups with the application process. Amateo aims to encompass not just the 27 countries of the European Union but all 47 members of the Council of Europe. Villy said that the most essential argument is that the amateur arts need to be recognised as part of the arts across Europe.

The conference was small but friendly and constructive. There were around 40 delegates with Robin Osterley from Making Music and me the only representatives from the UK or the Republic of Ireland. As well as the business of the conference we enjoyed a reception hosted by the Mayor of Ljubljana, a fantastic concert in the medieval coastal town of Piran, featuring choral groups from Slovenia, Estonia, Croatia, Hungary, Romania and the Czech Republic, and the 39^th annual Slovenian Outdoor Choral Festival in the village of Sendvit.

This festival consisted of massed choirs involving nearly 4000 singers from across Slovenia as well as Portugal, Germany, Belgium and Argentina. An amazing event at which we were introduced to the Prime Minister of Slovenia. A very enjoyable conference and hopefully the start of a new chapter for the amateur arts across Europe. For more details see www.amateo.info

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.

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!

At my regular meeting with our informal voluntary cultural sector alliance partners Heritage Link and the Central Council for Physical Recreation, we were joined by Pete Moorey from NCVO who worked with us on our joint campaign over the diversion of Lottery funds to the 2012 Olympics. We talked about the latest select committee reports on the funding of the Olympics and agreed to write a joint letter to the Secretary of State, Andy Burnham, to remind the Government of the commitments that it made to us at the beginning of the year. We also discussed the Cultural Olympiad, the draft Heritage Protection Bill, the development of a European voluntary sector ‘compact’ and much more.

This morning I presented a session on the 2012 Cultural Olympiad at the Volunteering England Convention in Gateshead at which I launched the second VAN ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Briefing – available shortly at: http://www.voluntaryarts.org/2012 – which explains how to develop and submit project ideas for the UK-wide cultural festival. It was good to hear Sarah Benioff (Deputy Director of the Office of the Third Sector at the Cabinet Office) later in the morning referring to the importance of the Cultural Olympiad in helping to develop a sustainable legacy of increased volunteering. Sarah took a fair bit of flak from delegates – particularly about the lack of sustainable funding for local volunteer centres. Someone made the point that, welcome though the Government’s new Access to Volunteering fund to encourage more disabled volunteers is, this £4M investment compares poorly with the £117M recently allocated to youth volunteering. But I think the Office of the Third Sector gains credibility and respect by regularly being willing to put up senior civil servants to listen to the sector at conferences and seminars.

On Wednesday afternoon I met Leonie Sakey at Arts Council England for a catch-up on the Cultural Olympiad. Following the 11 March launch of the application process for groups wishing to have their projects included in the Olympiad, there has been a slow start with plenty of enquiries but few actual submissions. LOCOG is looking again at its communications and thinking about engaging an agency to help get its messages out. Meanwhile I told Leonie that Ginny has been working on the second VAN ‘Once in a Lifetime’ Briefing which will spell out exactly how voluntary arts groups can get involved in the Cultural Olympiad. This should be available by the end of April. Leonie commented on how helpful our first Briefing had been in simplifying and clarifying the mysteries of the Olympiad and said she had used it herself on many occasions. She emphasised that very few organisations were being endorsed by LOCOG to issue information about the Olympiad and, although LOCOG was not able formally to make VAN an official Olympic partner, we were as close as anyone to such a position. I raised again the idea of a small grants fund to encourage voluntary arts groups to develop projects for the Olympiad and Leonie agreed there was a need for this but could not see where the funding might come from.

On Monday afternoon I was at Tate Modern to attend a National Campaign for the Arts advocacy seminar. Representatives of a wide range of arts organisations discussed topics including the recent Arts Council England funding changes, the McMaster report on ‘excellence’, ‘Find your talent’ and the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. There were some interesting points made but it’s a shame that any gathering of arts organisations always seems to end up spending more time talking about money than anything else. Still it was lovely to see Philip Hedley in fine form: from when I started working in the arts (and I suspect many years before that) no gathering of arts organisations has ever seemed complete without the passionate, entertaining and often mischievous interventions of the former Artistic Director of the Theatre Royal, Stratford East.

We clearly need a small grants fund to inspire local community groups across the UK to dream up projects that fit the criteria for the 2012 Cultural Olympiad. The idea of a four-year UK-wide festival needs small local groups if it is to work. At present there is little motivation for the Cultural Olympiad amongst these groups because of the disillusion created by the transfer of Lottery funds to pay for the Olympic venues. I have been using the phrase “ambition deficit” to describe this which a few people have picked up.

LOCOG is adamant that the Olympiad won’t just ‘badge’ things that were already going to happen - they want all Olympiad projects to be truly reflective of the Olympic ideals and the values and themes of the Olympiad. I think voluntary arts groups are the ideal people to rise to this challenge and would undoubtedly dream up some fantastic creative solutions to reflect these values within their local community - if they were not completely switched off by the whole thing!

We know from plenty of experience with small grants funds that the presence of the fund acts as a catalyst to get people devising projects - many of which will then happen whether or not they get a grant from the fund. But without a fund few groups are going to even start thinking about devising projects. Also it is important that the small grants fund is UK-wide if we are to counter the commonly-held impression that the Olympics (and the Olympiad) is just for London and the South East.