TAITMAIL An ACE tiff with quite a nice concert hall attached
A world-renowned arts organisation announcing it was washing its hands of Arts Council England could hardly have come at a worse time for ACE, just as Baroness Margaret Hodge was getting to the meaty part of her independent inquiry.
Wigmore Hall in central London declared that it would no longer seek ACE funding as a National Portfolio organisation (NPO), having raised £10m from donations for a new Director’s Fund, and in just in 18 months.
This should be good news for ACE, more money in a stretched budget to distribute elsewhere and a bold lesson in self-reliance for the rest of the sector. But ACE’s response, posted on its own website, was hardly positive, just as arts figures were stepping forward to give evidence to Hodge whose report is expected on time in September.
It was in the form of a letter signed by 64 members of ACE’s regional national council – note “regional” - which hints at the Wigmore being able to raise the money because its fundraising was “in a wealthy part of London” (Marylebone); that Wigmore’s decision “should not be seen as an argument against public funding”; that with public funding removed, many world-beating arts organisations would not survive; that the move was an attack on ACE’s Let’s Create strategy which is centred on community arts; that “everyone in this country, no matter what their background or where they come from, deserves access to the very best of creativity and culture in the places where they live and work”, implying that the Wigmore’s critical stance is therefore against diversity, inclusion and outreach. On the contrary, says John Gilhooly, the Wigmore’s director: they not only want to do that, they could do it better without ACE.
It comes at an unprecedentedly worrying time with the Chancellor announcing in the June Spending Review that arts funding will be cut by 5% in the next three years, and ACE deciding on a last-minute cancellation of its new funding round with the present National Portfolio, worth £446m, extended to 2028.
John Gilhooly
For ACE the old three-legged funding stool of subsidy, earned and donated income in roughly equal measure has become a “golden triangle” of very much unequal measures: ACE’s own recent Private Investment in Culture survey reports that 79% of income among its portfolio of 990 organisations now is earned. The fact is, arts funding is reshaping itself once again.
Gilhooly, who this month celebrates 25 years at Wigmore Hall, 20 of them as director, says he has received “hundreds, thousands” of messages supporting him and thanking him for opening the issue; that for a couple of weeks that ACE letter was Wigmore Hall’s biggest fundraiser with new donations worth £200,000 coming in as a direct result.
The issue is not merely funding, it is the costly and time-consuming reporting back procedure that is built into an ACE grant. “Onerous”, Gilhooly calls it.
But far from ACE being abolished, he says, we must have an arm’s length body siphoning government subsidy, but one that is better aware of the work that’s being carried out in arts organisations and with a better regard for artists. There is no proforma for the way different organisations raise and spend their money, or for the outreach work they do. What they all specialise in, though, is excellence. “We should get back to that” he says.
There’s no sign yet of other NPOs following suit, and that’s because in a volatile national economy all income is critical. They’re scared. “I think it's impossible for anybody who's more than 10% funded by the Arts Council (the Wigmore’s grant was about 2% of its income) to do it”.
But this is not about money. The Wigmore’s ACE grant of £344,000 a year could easily be made up by the interest on the £10m the Director’s Fund has raised. Other arts organisations are not so well placed.
When Gilhooly was first appointed 20 years ago he was told to look towards independence from ACE. “At the beginning it was about self-sufficiency, and then, actually, we didn't like some of the language around the Arts Council and two or three years ago we decided ‘Let's actually go for it, let's make this a reality, we've been talking about it long enough’.”
The language was in ACE’s demand for reporting back to show that the Let’s Create criteria were being met. Gilhooly reckons that the staff hours entailed in the requirements was costing the organisation £120,000 a year. He concedes that since the Wigmore’s decision ACE has relaxed the administrative burden on organisations receiving less than £400,000 a year.
A medium-scale concert hall of 545 seats, Wigmore Hall opened in 1901 and was originally called the Bechstein Hall after the German piano manufacturer that commissioned it. The hall was designed by Thomas Collcutt (Savoy Hotel, the Palace Theatre at Cambridge Circus) and opened in 1901, changing its name after Bechstein ceased trading in the First World War, and quickly built a reputation for having one of the finest acoustics in Europe, especially for chamber music. It built associations with Prokoviev, Hindemith, Britten and Poulenc and its legendary director of 37 years William Lyne compounded the Wigmore’s international standing.
Limerick-born John Gilhooly was trained as a classical singer but went into arts administration and after working in concert management became executive director at the Wigmore. After the brief interregnum of Paul Kildea Gilhooly took over from his mentor Lyne in 2005 and set about building on the hall’s profile, notably with commissions of new music from young composers. His 2013 OBE was raised to a CBE in 2022.
Education and the lack of creative and arts subject matter in the classroom is where the problems starts, he says, and while ACE is focussing on the fine detail of how its NPOs are spending its money, Gilhooly says, “nobody is taking a national view.
“For instance, anything we do which is related to the key stages in the curriculum could be built into every classroom in the country, if somebody would only look at it” he says. “That’s where I think strategy really fails – we all do wonderful work in schools, but where’s the rest of it?” meaning national co-ordination.
“There’s no hope of having the properly diverse audiences (that ACE craves) unless we fix the systemic failure in schools” he tells me. “Perhaps the Arts Council has been forced by government to fix that systemic problem, but it can't and neither can we because we're all limited in the number of people we can reach.”
London-based arts institutions are often criticised for not sharing more with the regions, but the Wigmore shares programmes around the country, its diaries open to all, and in the autumn it will be expanded and become more overt in a new branding exercise. “So we're already contributing to the regions quietly, we don't talk about it - this is the first time I've mentioned it in public, actually”. As for cash, a more tax efficient system for giving to the arts would be part of the answer.
He intends to grow the Director’s Fund to £30m by 2035, partly as endowment and partly as a creative fund. As well as schools outreach in London the Wigmore does particularly valuable work with those with dementia, which the new money and time now freed up will allow them to expand.
ACE describes itself as “the national development agency for creativity and culture” but, says Gilhooly, “my argument is that it really doesn't do that anymore because it's too fussed about whether it's going to get enough money to meet its requirements. We don’t feel like stakeholders anymore”.
Fundraising in the arts has become unrecognisably sophisticated since the days when a future-ensuring £10m endowment was an impossible dream. Now, Tate has just announced it has raised £43m towards a £150m endowment. Meanwhile the work goes on, in and out of the concert hall.
“Given the freedom to act as we know we can” Gilhooly says “we can do exactly what the Arts Council wants us to do - but do it better because we’re not using up valuable time reporting back on what we’re doing.”