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Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee 30 May 2019

30 May 2019 · S5 · Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee

Item of business

Arts Funding

Harry Josephine Giles Watch on SPTV

I will touch on both of the previous questions, which were about the role of long-term support and how to approach the need to prioritise if funding is restricted. We have heard some good points about the problems in Creative Scotland in relation to long-term support. It is vital to broaden the answer to both questions beyond Creative Scotland. That single public body should not be the only way in which the arts are supported, and it is not the only provider of long-term support. The two major forms of long-term support that have more or less entirely gone in Scotland are local authority funding, which Rhona Matheson mentioned, and the benefits system or social security. It might seem a bit strange to say that, but it is clear from talking to folk who are 20 or 30 years older than I am that many of our major organisations have been built on people working as artists while being on the dole. I have done that, too—I built the beginning of my career on the dole. I know that I was not supposed to do that, but that is what I did, because there was no other way of doing so much unpaid work without a basic amount of financial support. For decades—as has been mentioned, this was part of the post-war settlement—the ability of people to have some level of social security while they began building an arts career enabled a flourishing of the arts in the post-war period. That was a form of long-term support. Local authorities such as the Greater London Authority also had a role in that and were huge funders of the arts. To pick up on Raymond Vilakazi’s points, both those forms of long-term social support were also ways to diversify the arts, because the entry barriers were lower. Those of us from marginalised groups, whether people of colour, women or disabled people—let us remember that it was the defunding of disability arts organisations that led to the massive stramash that occurred a couple of years ago—are the people who most need such support and who are most obstructed from accessing it through Creative Scotland. As has been pointed out, that is a major barrier. For me, prioritisation is a strategic and a political question: what do we want arts funding to do? In my view, the function of any collective project—government, like arts funding, is a collective project—is to further equality, justice and quality of life. In the arts, quality of life is also quality of art. We want everyone to be able to participate in the arts as much as they want to and to get access to good art. The more diversity there is, the better the art is. The more people from different backgrounds that we have doing art, the more interesting, exciting and new the art is. That is what is being obstructed. On prioritisation, the question to ask is what we can do with arts funding to lower the entry barriers, to diversify the arts and to enable those who are marginalised to participate more fully. In my view, that is how prioritisation should be addressed.

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Culture, Tourism, Europe and External Affairs Committee 30 May 2019

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