大象传媒

Unlike the X Factor, the task of the Arts Council in settling funding for the next three years really matters. Very many talented and hard-working people are about to lose their livelihoods. The UK will lose the vital contribution their work makes to taxation. Tourists will go elsewhere; good films won't be made; novels that would have endured well beyond the life of this arrogant, foolish government will never be written.

Of course organisations are asking for the money they need in order to be viable. What would be the point of asking for an amount that would mean closure? Half-funding a theatre group, for example, which subsequently has to seek additional funding to continue, wastes public money in the administrative costs required to assess the further application. Better to get it right first time.

And it also makes sense to invite new applications to compete for the available resources alongside currently-funded groups. If a new group would do more with the cash, why lock them out? The point, after all, is to fund the very best whatever resources are there.

Alan Davey is relying on the Arts Council's art form administrators to make these choices. Calling them administrators makes them seem like dreary pen-pushing bureaucrats. But of course they are individuals who have all worked for years in their own areas of expertise; they care enormously about the actors, directors, theatres, musicians, artists, and writers whose work is about to be dismissed. And they too will shortly be threatened by redundancy given the absurd slashing of the Arts Council's administrative budget. These experts are the basis of fair decision making and of the 鈥渞ock-solid rationale鈥� that Will Gompertz rightly says is needed for each funding choice. If you cut them, you destroy the Arts Council's ability to administer public funds. And that, of course, would mean the beginning of the end of the Arts Council.

Not such a fair comparison as the X-Factor makes a huge profit. Not something that can seemingly be said about the groups looking for funding.

I wonder if they've thought of dropping funding for anything over a certain size and only funding grass roots organisations as it were?

This piece was working nicely until its inevitable self-deflation at the very end. In what sense is 'question[ing] the whole process' any kind of weapon? 'It wouldn't be good' isn't exactly helpful either. If the implied meaning is that too many complaints about the Arts Council's decisions may lead to its eventual abolition, you can bet that whatever body replaces it will have less power and less money to dish out. It's a crafty win-win situation for the pro-cuts lobby: either accept that there's less funding, or bring down the Arts Council and see its successor providing, er, less funding.

This exercise could oblige us to examine the idea of the state funding of the arts - but not in the simple terms of a public versus private model, or even in terms of the value of an Arts Council, but rather in terms of the vulnerability of client organisations to political and fiscal forces, and agendae set elsewhere, sometimes at several degrees remove. As clients of an arts council - any arts council - arts organisations are required to submit to that council's criteria for funding and are unable to define their own criteria, which will in turn affect and influence any creative trajectory. (Initiating or skewing projects to fit funding guidelines is a practice recognisable to anyone who has worked in the arts over the last thirty years.) This is no better within private models of funding. In almost all cases the capriciousness experienced by organisations is not significantly different from those experienced by Renaissance artists operating at the whim of popes.

Of course the public money involved requires an accountable system, and there will always be periods with either more or less funding available in relative terms, but I think concern about what is created is often lost in the present model. An examination of where and by whom the agenda is set would seem to be a more valuable exercise in the longer term.

There is a further complication for arts organisations too, Will. Many arts organisations draw some of their funding from local authorities in addition to the Arts Council. The company I work for, Ex Cathedra (a choir and early music ensemble), receives less than 20% of its income each year from public funding, but some of this comes from the Arts Council and some from Birmingham City Council, bodies which endeavour to work together to fund art in Birmingham.

However, this means that decisions announced by the Arts Council next week could be undermined by the further cuts in Birmingham City Council's arts budget which were ratified last week for 2012-13 and 2013-14.

Arts organisations which have already faced substantial cuts to their 2011-12 budgets might be wounded further with a reduced Arts Council funding settlement next week, only to face even more damaging local authority cuts later this year.

Arts Council Wales and Scotland are cutting the money available to core organisations by just 4%. England is really suffering. The real news story will be what gets cut and where it gets cut. Currently about a quarter of funded organisations are participatory but get less than a couple of percent of the funding. The weighting towards London is totally disproportionate to the population even with the 鈥榯ourism鈥� argument accounted for. I know that once or twice Mr Gompertz has ventured out of the capital but I鈥檝e never seen a report on the really vital grass roots work being done in the participatory arts sector. When the announcement is made on Wednesday it will be really disappointing to hear from the RSC, the ROH and the Tate without hearing from Charnwood Arts, Spare Tyre, Cheshire Dance, Access Space or mailout to name but a tiny few.

Then in walked the magnificent seven and everything went straight to HD.

If only it were the X Factor at least then the views of our patrons and participants may have carried some weight. This has been a tortuous process where many national companies are through to the final without singing a note. While smaller and emerging companies have been given a dodgy song choice. I hope there are surprises and some of the favourites fail to hit the top "C". But as usual it will be the provinces that loose out. That beating heart music is getting louder and some of us will be going home. Remember its not the value of our work its the cost that matters