Local museums 'easy targets' for cuts

The predicament facing public museums and galleries as a result of government cuts is rousing angry feelings, aimed at local MPs and the ConDem coalition alike.

Local museums especially have become “easy targets” says Mark Taylor, Museums Association director. A report for the MA, based on responses from 114 museums across the UK, found that 22% had reduced public access and 49% increased prices for school visits.

Many outreach programmes are grinding to a halt. At least 10 smaller museums have already shut down around the country. This year alone has seen the closure of the Malton Museum in Ryedale, the Museum of Nottingham Life and the Church Farmhouse museum in Hendon. Others like the Tolsen Museum in West Yorkshire will be closed for several days a week.

The political class is not much bothered by the destruction of cultural life at local level. For example, Withington LibDem MP John Leech says that Manchester’s famous art gallery should sell off some of its 12,500 “hidden gems” to offset the impact of cuts

In fact it would be illegal for the council to do this, but the strength of feeling over the issue is emblematic of the predicament faced by museums and galleries around the country. Enraged local people responded in kind on the Manchester Evening News website 

“The Dodger, Yorks Manc” poked fun at Leech as “a man who knows the price of everything and the value of nothing. How much does he want for his Granny?”

Ray Media opined: “I wholeheartedly agree [with selling artworks].... I’m sure the city philanthropists who funded the collection would have wanted these works to be sold off so the council could squander the proceeds...”

Rob lee responded to “gangledorn of Bolton’s suggestion that “they will probably only be brought [sic] by the police....”, writing:

 “Yes, Greater Manchester Police are movers and shakers in the art market of course. They spent £100k on an art work for their new £64 mil headquarters in Newton Heath. £65k on a mural to hang in the staff entrance. It’s tough when your budgets are cut, but you have to get your priorities right. A few could be hung in the £1.2mil plus dog kennels that are being created for the 8 Border Force sniffer dogs at Manchester Airport. A bit of added luxury in their new pad.”

Probably the only positive thing that happened under New Labour’s rule was the abolition of museum charges in government-sponsored museums in January 2001. In pure numbers the success was astounding: visitor numbers shot up from seven to almost 18 million in ten years. Heritage Lottery Fund (aka public money) spending saw a golden era of arts venue building in culturally-deprived parts of the country such as Newcastle and Middlesbrough.

While admission charges for standing collections were abolished, arts institutions made up their loss of revenue in other ways. Special exhibitions are never free. Standard ticket prices for the Tate Modern’s Damien Hirst and the British Museum’s forthcoming Shakespeare shows are £14, for example.

The top venues claw back money by staging high profile blockbusters, but this is difficult if not impossible for more modest regional venues. That’s why the cuts aimed at smaller museums and galleries are proving so devastating.

But fear not, there is money out there for art and culture. When it comes to making a macho, business statement, like Anish Kapoor’s ArcelorMittal Orbit Tower for the London Olympics. London taxpayers have coughed up £3 million of the £22.7 million cost. And if you want to go up in the tower, that’ll be another £15 a head.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary

Death by a thousand cuts

When the Coalition announced its spending review, arts writers warned of a new dark age of philistinism that would follow in the wake of government cuts in arts funding. They were right.

The harsh reality of the triple attack on culture in Britain is now becoming clear: the £19 million cut (30%) in the Arts Council funding; a 26% cut in local government funds; and the targeting of humanities and arts courses in higher education funding.

Local councils are taking desperate measures to try and keep their museums and galleries open. Bolton council has admitted it plans to auction off two Picasso etchings and paintings by outstanding artists including Millais, Sickert, Burne Jones from its collection. The council hopes to raise £500,000 from this sale.

Meanwhile Leicester council has already done the dirty deed. In its wisdom, the council has already offloaded 124 paintings, including one by the Camden Town school colourist Frederick Gore, “for a very modest £148,000, and have earmarked another 100 worth, they reckon, £50,000”.

As Simon Tait of Arts Industry noted yesterday: “ The fact that Leicester’s pictures were all in store, having been bought to show in the city’s schools, doesn’t mean they weren’t important; just that the municipality didn’t know what it had got - nor, probably, what it's got rid of for small change.”

And that is just it – selling off precious public assets for “small change”, just as Bury council did a few years back when it sold a Lowry from its collection, is an expression of total moral and political bankruptcy. In North Yorkshire, the council is cutting arts spending by 89%. In Somerset and Moray council funding arts organisations are being cut 100%. Moray Council was the first Scottish local authority to propose cutting its entire arts budget.

The response of Labour’s shadow culture secretary Ivan Lewis to the looming cultural dark ages, bleated out at a State of the Arts conference in February, is that a “new covenant” was needed so the strongest would support the weakest.

Tristram Hunt, historian and Labour MP for Stoke on Trent Central, shares Lewis’ abject “divide and rule” strategy, pitting the major cultural centres against the regions. Now he is demanding that top museums and galleries should start charging. If “American tourists and continental mini-breakers have no problem paying” entry fees elsewhere in Europe , he opines, “why not a fiver for London’s great galleries”. This, he claims astonishingly, is a “truly equitable” policy.

So museums must introduce a nationality test before admitting anyone? Or will there be a means test? The mind shudders. And all because Hunt like his New Labour colleagues shares the Coalition’s “there is no alternative” to the corporate business, profit-driven economic model.

Others argue that the way forward for the arts is for closer ties with business and more philanthropy. But a February report by Art and Business shows that 80% of FTSE 100 companies give nothing at all to the arts. Philanthropic giving has fallen by 17%. Business investment has fallen by 11%.

Many artists and arts administrators have spoken out to express their horror at what is happening. Turner prize-winning artist Anish Kapoor last week warned that it would take decades to recover from the damage caused by current cuts.

We should reject the death by a thousand cuts being promoted not only by the Coalition government but its so-called Labour opposition. What is required is an alternative, not-for-profit approach to the economy, in which art and culture are not viewed as a luxury or an “add-on” but as central to what makes us truly human.

Corinna Lotz

A World to Win secretary