When Creative Scotland announced
their regular funding decisions towards the end of last year, it
showed just how much Scotland’s arts funding quango hasn’t
changed since the appointment of a new set of administrators
following the departure of its previous incumbents at the end of
2012.
While the decisions highlighted
justified winners, including the likes of Vanishing Point and Grid
Iron theatre companies, as well as contemporary music producers
Arika, 28 organisations who received funding in 2014-15 were
declined regular funding for 2015-18. Those who missed out included
Scottish Youth Theatre and Untitled Productions, whose
show Paul Bright’s Confessions of A Justified Sinner has been
lauded at home and abroad. Untitled have announced that the company
is being left dormant for the foreseeable future, while Scottish
Youth Theatre is to receive funding directly from the Scottish
Government for the next three years, in the run-up to Scotland’s
Year of Young People in 2018.
Others who didn’t make the cut
included three major Edinburgh galleries – Stills, Talbot Rice and
Inverleith House – as well as Artlink, a vital community-based
body that provides access to arts for disabled individuals. Neither
Aberdeen’s pioneering sound festival of contemporary music nor
Live Music Now Scotland, which takes performances to vulnerable
people in the community, will receive funding from 2015. Both the
Royal Lyceum Theatre and Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh, meanwhile,
received substantial cuts that will affect future programming.
How these companies survive may
require some genuine creativity. It may result in a grassroots
culture that learns to operate outwith the institutions – and
which arguably already exists in lo-fi ventures such as Edinburgh’s
30-seat Discover 21 space, the Embassy and Rhubaba galleries, in
LeithLate and the Village Pub Theatre, all of which receive little
or no public subsidy, but which create increasingly vital work
despite this.
Nobody working in the arts is
under any illusion that an imposed austerity culture is the cause of
the current round of cuts, but Creative Scotland’s top-down
philosophy doesn’t help. This is something that needs to be
addressed by the organisation’s incoming chair Richard Findlay, a
man who, as former chair of bodies including the National Theatre of
Scotland, STV and the Royal Lyceum Theatre, arguably has more
experience in Scotland’s arts scene than Waverleygate’s tranche
of senior managers combined.
There are some eminently
qualified people working at the coalface of the organisation to
enable artists the best they can, but it still isn’t clear who
makes the decisions. Ultimately, instead of fostering a culture of
competition that creates a scenario of winners and losers as a
business might do, Creative Scotland needs to allow artists to lead
the way while they get on with the business of administrating,
enabling and serving those artists while arguing harder for extra
resources. That way, major organisations such as sound, Artlink and
Live Music Now and won’t be left struggling to survive.
The List, February 2015
ends
Comments