The audience quota system of arts funding is over. Thank goodness, says katharine hibbert |
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Arts institutions should concentrate on putting on great shows, not getting quotas of ethnic minority and working-class bums on seats, new culture secretary James Purnell announced last month in a dazzling show of common sense.
His suggestion that people from all backgrounds could be trusted to make their way to good exhibitions and plays was greeted with relief by many in the arts world who had been forced for to court and count unwilling or non-existent audiences.
How did audience quotas ever start? They were imposed by Labour's then culture secretary Chris Smith in 1998, sweetened by his simultaneous announcement of a £100m-a-year arts funding boost.
When Smith was replaced by Tessa Jowell in 2001, she kept up the target-setting. Compliance was policed by the Arts Council, chaired until 2004 by businessman Sir Gerry
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Few would disagree that publicly funded institutions should appeal to
a wide audience |
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Robinson and since then by Sir Christopher Frayling, who is also the rector of the Royal College of Arts.
Few would disagree that publicly funded institutions should appeal to a wide audience, but the policy was applied thoughtlessly. In 2005, 1,100 arts organisations across the country were threatened with the loss of Arts Council funding if they could not prove that they were appealing to audiences of ethnic minorities and putting on shows which expressed black and Asian culture.
Even Cinderford Artspace in the Forest of Dean, where the population is almost 99 per cent white, and the Norwich Puppet Theatre, in a 97 per cent white city, had to devote several shows a year to such productions, which struggled to attract audiences.
Those set to lose their jobs following the abolition of quotas are the clipboard-wielding figures paid to check that audiences aren't too white or middle class, not the politicians and bureaucrats who imposed the rules.
But few in the arts world will miss the targets when they're gone.
FIRST POSTED AUGUST 7, 2007
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