TAITMAIL Breaking ACE’s Bloomsbury idyll
The appointment of Dawn Airey as the 17th chair of Arts Council England (formerly Arts Council of Great Britain) came as a surprise. It shouldn’t have.
Chairmanship of the Arts Council is unpaid and, up to the early 90s, had no office to go with the office. But the job gets an honorarium of £60,000 a year for two days a week; the appointment is for four years but that seems to be pretty flexible, and with notable exceptions the incumbent rarely comes from an arts background.
These appointments used to be done in a nod and wink across the bar of the Athenaeum, Old Etonian to Old Etonian, but these days it’s a more scientific head-hunting trawl carried out by DCMS, the owners of the heads hunted then receiving the culture secretary’s nod and the PM’s imprimatur.
And they are not, or seldom, figure-heads. They get into the mix, and in the last ten turbulent years it has been the retiring chairman, Nicholas Serota, who has issued the definitive quote in response to… whatever the current issue. Others have been more sub fusc. We’ve forgotten most of the secretary generals/chief executives, but the chairmen ring down through cultural history.
So before we get into who Dawn Airey (only the second woman in the job) is and perhaps needs to be, who were these culture tsars over the last eight decades?
John Maynard Keynes (image courtesy of Wikimedia), the economist who was part of the Bloomsbury Group of writers and painters, compiled a large collection of contemporary art, adored opera and married a Russian ballerina, set up the Arts Council’s prototype, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts during the war. He is credited as ACGB’s first chairman, though he died a few months before the charter was granted in 1946, having got the structure ready to roll. Within it he established the crucial arm’s length principle of subsidy to protect it from political interference, inviolable ever since despite unsuccessful attempts.
He was succeeded by a safe-pair-of-hands lawyer called Ernest Pooley, and then by Kenneth Clark, director of the National Gallery, who nailed the council’s future to the Festival of Britain, luckily a fabulous success. Then Lord Cottesloe, an aristocratic ex-soldier, was followed by the “Lawyer to the Great and Good” Arnold Goodman. Goodman seemed to sit on most prestigious arts boards and used his seven years in post to establish the Southbank Centre as well as spreading Arts Council funding to the regions.
Then came a publisher, Patrick Gibson, followed by a Labour politician, the ex-health minister Kenneth Robinson, before the former Times editor William Rees-Mogg whose “Glory of the Garden” strategy in 1984 slashed grants to arts organisations by half (later he threatened to cut the Royal Opera House’s entire grant for daring to budget for a deficit in protest at cash cuts).
He was followed by the property developer Peter Palumbo whose main contribution was to buy a building in Westminster and lease it to the Arts Council, incorporating the first actual chairman’s office with a balcony from which he could watch comings and goings at the Palace of Westminster. In a Keynsian echo, when the short lease expired the organisation found itself transplanted to its present residence - in Bloomsbury.
Then came Grey Gowrie, the poet and art dealer, who had been the arts minister but resigned because the pay wasn’t good enough, and it was under his aegis the ACGB was split into four national bodies, the biggest and most significant being Arts Council England.
After Gowrie’s four years came Gerry Robinson, a businessman and TV presenter (programmes like “Can Gerry Robinson Fix the NHS?”) who tried to run ACE as a business, abolishing the regional arts boards – “ridiculous layers of bureaucracy” - giving them six weeks to abandon their individual charitable status and hand over their assets. The current race for “levelling up” and “regional place-making”, see below, is ironic.
Then came the gentle and accommodating former rector of the Royal College of Art – described by the Observer’s’ arts editor Gillian Widdicombe as “like a teddy bear on speed” – who offered to give up the honorarium in exchange for a chauffeured car.
And then the first female chair, the journalist Liz Forgan, who was appointed by the Brown government but was in post when Jeremy Hunt became culture secretary. He imposed a 30% funding cut and ordered ACE to cut its staff by half, over which Forgan dug in her heals. She had been expected to have her tenure renewed; Hunt refused, effectively sacking her.
He put the TV entrepreneur Peter Bazalgett - “the most influential man in British television” said The Independent - in her place, and his chief achievement was to incorporate a new system of tax credits, a godsend in a time of austerity.
Nick Serota came from Tate where, over nearly 30 years, he had reinvented the organisation and driven the creation of our first national contemporary art gallery, simultaneously reviving a forlorn part of Thames Bankside.
At ACE he had to deal with the worst threat so far to the arm’s length principle when the culture secretary Nadine Dorries ordered him to cut £50m of funding to London organisations and spend it in the regions. He negotiated what may turn out to be a brilliant solution, with London-based ENO creating a branch in Manchester in a partnership with Factory. Serota’s ACE term was extended to eight years and then another two to allow hm to deal with Margaret Hodge’s independent review of ACE which was potentially the latest in a series of existential threats to the Arts Council. What came out of Hodge was in fact a resounding support for ACE and an affirmation of arm’s length.
But Hodge also required a complete rethink of how ACE operates, abandoning its ten year strategy halfway through and making it more Gerry Robinson by recommending a business approach to its fund raising. It will be Dawn Airey’s task to implement it.
Airey (above) is 65 so probably starting her last new job, maybe a defining one, but once again she doesn’t come from an arts hinterland. A founder of Channel 5, she’s been a TV executive al her working life with a reputation for uncompromising toughness.
She has never before worked in the public sector and has a commercial instinct. When she ran Channel 5 her programming watchwords were said to be “films, football and fucking”. She has been known variously by her admirers as “Scary Airy” and “Zulu Dawn”.
The Hodge blueprint of “politics out, business in” could have been drawn by Airey. She doesn’t start till August but already has identified AI as an immediate challenge. She uses the word “championing” to describe ACE’s relationship with the arts – not “funding”. That’s yesterday’s pattern.
“She’s the best thing that can happen to the arts in England” said a former colleague. “She’ll move slowly and break things that need to be broken”.
But beware. Breakages will be paid for.