Deep Cuts to UK Cultural Arts

Bloomberg is reporting the Arts Council England, the organization which channels government funding to the arts has seen its 2012 -2015 budget cut by $about $190 million.  The Council has had to make some hard decisions, with many cultural programs seeing reduced funding or no funding, with a few getting increased funding.  The Council has decided to fund fewer organizations, with 638 funding applications being refused and 695 organizations receiving Arts Council backing. Of those with approved funding, 110 organizations were new.

Bloomberg reports

Funding Pain

“Of course there’s pain, and there are some people we simply couldn’t fund,” Chief Executive Alan Davey said.

Explaining the Almeida Theatre’s 33 percent cut, Davey said it left the venue with a grant of 700,000 pounds by 2014-15. “They’re still getting an awful lot of money,” he said. “We believe quality can be upheld in that theater.”

The Almeida took the news in stride.

“There will be no cuts to our innovative artistic policy or to our ambitions,” Artistic Director Michael Attenborough and Executive Director James Bierman said in an e-mailed release. “In the coming years, we will take our work to more people than ever before, and continue to be a leading national cultural institution.”

At the briefing, Davey attributed the Serpentine’s 31.2 percent increase to its expansion into a new gallery, and said “we get quite a lot of value” out of the Serpentine grant.

The Serpentine -- which is getting 883,734 pounds in the current financial year -- will see that amount raised to 1.25 million pounds in the year ended April 1, 2015. That’s after beating rival bidder Damien Hirst to a nearby Hyde Park space: a former munitions depot known as the Magazine.
Bittersweet Boost

The gallery’s director Julia Peyton-Jones and co-director Hans Ulrich Obrist said in an e-mailed release that they were “very grateful for the uplift” from the Arts Council, “although it is bittersweet news at a time of swingeing cuts to the sector.”

As part of a nationwide austerity package, the U.K. government in October cut the Department for Culture’s budget to 1.1 billion pounds by 2015. As a result, grants to national museums will drop 15 percent by 2015, and those to Arts Council England, 29 percent. The Arts Council was asked to halve administrative costs and avoid cutting regular recipients’ grants by more than 15 percent.

To read the full Bloomberg report, click HERE.