Arts Bypass; The Scottish arts scene is a mess, with disciplines

0 Comments | Sunday Herald, The, Apr 11, 2004 | by IAN BELL

IS James Boyle a happy man? I think we are entitled to assume that he is. You do not accept another three-year term on the bed of nails that is the chairmanship of the Scottish Arts Council without believing that the future will be tolerably rosy. What is puzzling a lot of people, however, is the reason why Boyle could have arrived at that opinion.

What does he see when he looks around him? Scottish Opera in financial crisis (again); theatre folk less than gruntled by some recent funding decisions; writers who want an organisation of their own; the National Galleries facing cuts; an impending spending review that is unlikely to be generous; and a cultural review that seems to be being composed in invisible ink in a darkened room. These are not reasons to be cheerful.

Of the lot, the review of culture, of who does what, where, why and for how much, looks the most ominous. The Scottish Executive, having postponed a presentation repeatedly, claims merely to be "getting it right". That has done nothing to quell rumours that mergers and/or big changes within the SAC are being planned. Nor has it made the council's job any easier: you can't hand out money to the arts with any confidence until you understand the politicians' wishes. Nor, for that matter, can you second-guess a review until a process that is fast becoming a simple consultation exercise is complete.

Boyle, we can presume, knows as much. Does he also know what the government is minded to do? His reappointment suggests that he and Frank McAveety, culture minister when he isn't looking after - deep breath - tourism, sport, the built heritage, architecture, Historic Scotland and the lottery, get along together. There were also some clues in the ambitious speech given by Jack McConnell, the First Minister, last St Andrew's Day. Whatever the institutional arrangements, the top man wants to see arts for all, as a human right, Catalan-style, without spending too much. Does that suit the SAC's chairman?

In theory, no doubt, it does. After all, he has been able to persuade McAveety to find relatively sizeable funds for the establishment of a National Theatre and for youth music tuition. The campaign to have Edinburgh named as a UNESCO World City of Literature is also very much new Labour's style (though none the worse, of course, for that). Even the state cash for the purchase of the Murray Archive for the National Library does the SAC chairman no harm.

These, though, are specific projects, not what is known in the bureaucrats' jargon as "core funding". The lifeblood of arts subsidy is thinning; some organisations may even face real cuts. With McAveety reduced to lobbying his fellow ministers in the hope that their departments will follow McConnell's suggestion and devote parts of their budgets to the arts, there are difficult times ahead for whoever chairs the arts council.

Who, in any case, would want to be in that chair if the review concludes that enough is enough as far as Scottish Opera is concerned? Scotland's writers, arguably our biggest international cultural success, are never done comparing the (pounds) 2 million or so granted to literature by the SAC and the (pounds) 7.5 million granted to Scottish Opera. Nevertheless, the reaction in certain quarters to any suggestion that the company should simply be broken up will be deafening.

So what does Boyle know about the government's thinking? What can he possibly know when arts organisations are still talking to the politicians? Public knowledge amounts to nothing more, after all, than the fact that ministers have three priorities for the arts: access, financial discipline and, if it's not too much trouble on a shoestring, work of international quality. Ideally, it seems, they would like genius on the cheap.

To some extent, that's what they and we already get. You can damn Scottish Opera for profligacy all you like, but the truth is that its subsidy does not begin to compare with the sums received by major European companies. The SAC's budget for 2004/2005 may look substantial at (pounds) 67 million, but (pounds) 20 million of that comes from the lottery's shrinking revenue - never to be used for core funding, so we were once promised - and the rest is a tiny fraction of the Executive's own budget, devoted to an industry that earns the country vastly more than it costs. Does Boyle, by renewing his contract, propose to accept a review that fails to address this state of affairs?

And what of McAveety? His delays begin to look like a serious case of dithering, as though - could it be possible? - the minister doesn't actually know what he wants. A draft document is said to exist, but it has failed to win the support of McConnell and his cabinet. Rumours that the SAC itself could be dismantled continue to do the rounds, yet Boyle accepts another three-year contract while McAveety says nothing. The review is supposed to be about arts policy and funding. At present we have no policy to speak of and miserly funding that will not be improved by the government's comprehensive spending review, due in September, whatever the cultural review has to say.