FUNDING CCI USING THE PUBLIC PURSE

FUNDING CCI USING THE PUBLIC PURSE

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Introduction

As political entities in England and entire Britain strive to attain a comprehensive and coherent arts policy, outlining the significance and rightness of funding and subsidising creativity is imperative. While funding arts in the country has been an area of controversies in mainstream political debates waiting in the wings as administrative echelons continue to negotiate and dispute government spending cuts, it is undoubted that arts are a noteworthy public good. In other words, arts are an indispensable part of civic wellbeing and culture, which matter as much as national defence, social security, education, and other elements of public continuity do. If arts are unsupported financially, this civic wellbeing is damaged, and the power of arts as agents of essential contribution to economic development is undermined. For this reason, arts should be funded, although a divide is visible as regards the source of funds. While some argue that the government should invest a portion of taxpayers’ pounds in supporting arts, others are convinced that the private sector should pick up the costs because financing arts using public funds is a misplaced priority. Considering these views, this essay seeks to shed more light on the importance of funding arts publicly. The essay has two sections the first of which focuses on why arts should receive funding from the public purse. The second section addresses the implications of reduced local or central government funding on visual arts, which is the art chosen for this particular context.

Arguments for Funding Arts Using the Public Purse

The class studies on leadership and management of creative and cultural industries appreciate the importance of the government in funding, delivering, supporting, hosting, and promoting the arts and cultural heritage of local communities. What this means is that funding of arts is an essential policy area in government initiatives. In the context of civilised societies in the UK, arts are a joint contribution to the public good because it has important educational, aesthetic, economic, cultural heritage, and social influences (Bolstad 2010; OMC Working Group, 2014). In essence, the arguments for the funding of arts using public money presented in this essay draw on these influences of arts.

Important Economic Contributions

While arts are made freely and aimed at activities that are crucial to the civic health of society, they mostly appear not to generate profits even when done well. This means that the profitability of art is not a satisfactory measure of their quality. Even so, arts have been found to produce direct economic benefits to the national treasury because they drive the economics a community. This statement means that funding arts using public funds will ultimately pay for itself. Proof for the economic value of subsidising arts from the public purse is well documented. For instance, Alexander (2007) admits that the arts sector has a direct economic value realised in terms of job establishment, tourism, and the creation of national, regional, and local wealth. Aquino, Phillips, and Sung (2012) and Bolstad (2010) outline the indirect, direct, and public-good economic benefits of arts, which include but not limited to individual satisfaction, spending for local communities, the global attraction of people, and tax revenues, among others.

Further, Holmes (2010) provides statistical evidence of why arts have been a major financial success story in the United Kingdom, thereby justifying the need to finance arts using public funds. This author confirms that creative industries generate revenues of approximately 112.5 billion pounds while creating employment for over 1.3 million people, contributing to 5% of the UK’s total employed workforce. Further, Holmes provides evidence that the exportation of arts contribute to 10.3 billion pounds to the UK’s balance of trade, with creative industries accounting for more than 5% of the nation’s GDP. Further statistical evidence by Holmes (2010) affirms that the UK theatre received 54 million pounds in subsidy back in 2008, which paid back about 75 million pounds in value-added tax in London alone.

Whyman (2010) established from treasury calculations that in Gateshead and Newcastle, 1 pound of public investment in 10 major cultural buildings generates 5 pounds in the regional economy while creating employment for over 2000 persons. Essentially, these factual figures reveal that the value of arts and creative industries in the UK’s gross domestic product is comparatively higher than the value contributed by individual manufacturing industries, Mikić (2012) subscribes. All these figures of economic returns and employment evince why arts need funding from the public purse as funding arts using public money does not only have big economic payoffs but also safeguards the people’s employment. If other industries are funded and subsidised, there are no justifiable reasons for not funding the arts industry that has such significant economic contributions. Looking at these figures, the financial support for the arts using public funds should indeed be seen as an investment rather than a subsidy.

Educational Value of Arts

Arts should also receive public money because of their invaluable contribution to education. The society expects local, city, and central governments to provided services such as education for the community’s benefit through taxation. Arts have proven to be a unique, productive, and effective approach to educating the community. The reason is that the government has no concern for the public’s hobbies, interests, and preferences as these aspects vary differently. An individual’s interests and hobbies are a private affair requiring one to pays for them to benefit from them. Holmes (2010) suggests that funding arts publicly provides a forum for the government to effectively take money from persons without an active interest in arts to educate those who do have such an interest. Arts are also valuable in educational settings because they are an approach to classroom instruction delivery, cultural learning, empowering schools to deliver learning services, and promoting civic education (Gilmore 2014). Furthermore, arts are important instruments that can be integrated into education to teach community cohesion, capacity building, gender roles, community regeneration, cultures of voluntary contribution, and quality innovation (Keaney et al. 2007). Also, arts in schools contribute to aesthetic and instrumental learning outcomes, learners’ identity, ingenuity, capacity for self-expression, and transmission of cultural values and heritage (Bolstad 2010). Earlier scholarly work by O’Hagan and Duffy (1987) suggests that using arts in education provides exceptional learning experiences for personal development, learning active participation, and social education among young people. All these elements of the educational value of arts support the belief for funding arts publicly. Here, government spending should target objectively beneficial educational policies that benefit all people.

Empowerment of the Cultural Expression of Local Communities

Federation Council (2019) established that local councils and central governments are crucial players in enabling local communities to participate in artistic and cultural expression while serving as the bedrock of the creative and cultural industry ecosystem in the United Kingdom. This means that by funding art publicly, governments allow communities to exercises greater expressions of their cultural heritage. In agreement, OMC Working Group (2014) suggests that funding arts using public funds is the most effective way to ensure that a nation’s wealth of cultural expression does not disappear under the supremacy of economic and political issues and prevailing cultural paradigms. Knell and Taylor (2011) contend that the public funding of arts is essential because it improves cultural infrastructure, enhances outstanding cultural output and confidence, and drives intercultural discourses and interactions necessary for generating collective cultural and aesthetic expressions. So, funding arts publicly provides the fundamental impetus for cultural expression, which forms the groundwork for social justice and political transformation in the country as Crossik and Kaszynska (2016) advocate.

Arts and Identity

Art should be funded from the public purse because it is vital to people’s historical heritage, identity, collective memory, sense of belonging, civic capacity, national feeling, and self-esteem, besides being part of what drives, inspires, motivates them (Keaney et al. 2007; O’Hagan and Duffy 1987). According to Scott (2010), arts play a crucial role in establishing inclusive and resilient communities, building their identity, engaging young people in such communities, and creating and retaining their wellbeing. Art is pragmatically an indispensable element of identity in contemporary civilisation, meaning that engaging in it is not a frolicsome waste of valuable time. Since time in the modern era is money, arts need to be funded publicly to provide artists with utility for their time, a concept that Holmes (2010) advocates.

The Quality of Life Perspective

Arts give people life in the era of modernism because they provide a balance to people’s hectic lifestyles even as this modernity makes life tiring, stressing, and fast-paced. Arts give people the vigour to move forward and enjoy their existence amidst the strain, stress, and exhaustion emanating from modernity, along with allowing them to pursue more in life. What these statements mean is that arts improve people’s quality of life. Arts affect the quality of people’s lives in that they relate to micro-level associations, processes, and relationships in everyday life in the contexts of family networks, communities, homes, private domains, friends, and public-funded institutions (Gilmore 2014). Arts also create intrinsic, instrumental, and extrinsic value that contributes to augmenting the quality of people’s lives (Crossik and Kaszynska 2016; Gilmore 2014; Knell and Taylor, 2011). Examples of this value include the development of affective and cognitive abilities, excellence, and artistic quality (Bolstad 2010; Keaney et al. 2007). Given the fact that arts are significant contributors to the improvement of the quality of life, public funds should be invested in ameliorating arts to ensure that they continue to enhance life’s quality.

Urban Regeneration

Arts should be publicly funded because they enable urban regeneration together with social inclusion, community sustainment and cohesion, and health (Alexander 2007; Aquino, Phillips, and Sung 2012; Crossik and Kaszynska 2016; Gilmore 2014). The Symphony Hall in Birmingham serves as evidence that arts are at the core of urban regeneration as the arts there breathed life into the centre of Birmingham. This is by stimulating an explosion of service and local retail industries such as restaurants, bars, construction, and others, along with enhancing and enriching local educational opportunities to pupils by exposing them to a vast variety of cultures (Holmes 2010). So, the fact that arts help in reinventing all major cities in the UK justifies that arts should be publicly funded.

Implications of Reduced Government Funding On Visual Arts

Reduced local/city or central government funding on culture has several implications for the arts sector. In this section, six implications relating to visual arts are discussed.

Career Opportunity Diminishment

The primary implication of cuts to local and central government culture budgets is the loss and diminishment of career opportunities for people in visual arts. Comunian, Faggian, and Jewell (2011) acknowledge that many career opportunities are found in different arts. However, cuts to government spending on visual arts impede these opportunities. The cuts can be in the form of cuts to educational expenditure that relates to these arts. O’Hagan and Duffy (1987) acknowledge that these cuts can occur in two principal areas. The first is reduced spending on education and training for people wishing to make careers in visual arts while the second is reduced spending in tutelage for school children and communities who appreciate visual arts at large. Keaney et al. (2007) argue that funding of arts provides people with hands-on arts experiences, offer them with relevant and engaging experiences, allow them to freely access the arts, and enable them to pursue professional careers in arts of their choice. What this means is that reduced government funding on visual arts at the local and national level causes career opportunity impediments right at the grassroots.

It is ridiculous that a government can spend about 100 million pounds to make one jet fighter and forfeit investing 150 million pounds to finance art programmes for a whole year. These figures show that arts funding only takes a minute fraction of government expenditure yet the arts industry creates many jobs and career opportunities. This observation implies that reduced government spending on visual arts is unjustifiable as it only serves to diminish career opportunities for many people and groups and damage their employment sustainability. In essence, it is senseless to hack grassroots public provisions that culminate in discovering and cultivating expressive abilities and talents that translate to lucrative careers.

The Weakening of Visual Arts Heritage Ecosystem

Cuts to local and central government culture budgets also weaken the visual arts’ heritage ecosystem in the country. Open innovation hubs provide a creative ecosystem within which a broad gamut of cultural, creative, and commercial constituents are realised. An example of such hubs is Watershed in Bristol, which represents a ground-breaking business model emerging within the cultural sector to hurl creative networks in a transforming setting (Crossik and Kaszynska 2016). When government funding to culture is reduced, the establishment of such open innovation hubs that deal with exemplary visual arts is debilitated. Consequently, the heritage ecosystem of visual arts weakens. Also, such cuts disrupt the United Kingdom’s cultural heritage derived from visual arts by limiting people’s intellectual capacities and artistic services needed for the maintenance of the visual arts’ cultural heritage ecosystem.

Erosion of Cultural, Economic, Human, and Social Capital

The third implication of reducing local and central government funding on visual arts is the erosion of the nation’s cultural, economic, human, and social capital. According to Aquino, Phillips, and Sung (2012), arts and creative and cultural industries play a momentous role in building social capital and social networks that assist in increasing the quality of people’s lives. Bolstad (2010) adds that art programmes are indispensable building blocks in the creation of both cultural and social capital within communities. Community-based arts play an important role in creating social, economic, and human capital needed in overcoming societal inequalities by buttressing friendships, enabling the resolution of complex social problems, and facilitating the comprehension and celebration of cultural heritage (Crossik and Kaszynska 2016; Knell and Taylor 2011). So, when government funding of visual arts is lessened, this stock of capital that includes cultural, economic, human, and social capital is eroded gradually until it is entirely lost. When this stock of capital is lost, the instrumental, intrinsic, and institutional utility of visual arts vanishes, leading to the loss of overall community capacity (Scott 2010). It is worth recalling that erosion of society’s stock of cultural, economic, social, and human capital translates to reductions in local government’s capabilities to support cultural, commercial, and social life and social wellbeing.

Closure of Facilities and Services

The reduction of local and central government funding on visual arts also causes the closure of services and facilities that deal with these arts. Visual art theatres need maintenance, renovation, and face-lifting. If the government cuts funding on visual arts, search services end up not being offered, subjecting these theatres to risks of closure. O’Hagan and Duffy (1987) suggest that financial pressures threaten the closure of major theatre companies, with these pressures stemming from criticism against imbalances in art funding decisions and disparities in government subsidies for different types of arts. In a case study example, the Theatre Trust has expressed concerns that numerous theatre buildings in North England are facing the risk of closure and demolition by local authorities because maintaining them has become an issue (House of Commons, Culture Media, and Sports Committee 2011). The main reason cited by the Arts Council for such closures and demolition possibilities and the refusal of the Council to support residents’ efforts to save these theatre buildings is a lack of funding for such operations (UK Parliament 2010). This is sufficient evidence that lessened government funding of visual arts can trigger the closure of services and demolition of facilities used for these arts.

Loss of Cultural Expertise

Another implication of reduced government funding on visual arts is the significant loss of culture expertise in this sector. Crossik and Kaszynska (2016) suggest that arts create a space where scientific expertise can engage an amateur public on ethical, environmental, and political matters. In other words, art is a collective endeavour in which successful innovations draw on technical collaboration, shareable intercultural expertise, and active involvement of people. This helps in establishing synergies between multiple experts while encouraging their cooperative ambitions, openness, optimism, and innovative enthusiasm (Crossik and Kaszynska 2016; Mikić 2012; OMC Working Group 2014). When government funding on visual arts is reduced, such cultural expertise diminishes and eventually vanishes to the detriment of the cultural creativity of society. Also, cultural expertise relating to arts defines the intrinsic properties that form the basis for an individual’s cultural work to be considered a work of art (Verdaasdonk, Smelser, and Baltes 2001). What this means is that the loss of cultural expertise due to reduced government financing means a loss of the intrinsic cultural value attached to visual arts.

Weakening Of Future Audience Growth

The last implication of lessened local and central government funding on visual arts is the weakening and eventual disappearance of the growth of future audiences in this sector. When the government cuts its funding on arts, visual art centres and venues are closed down or demolished and their heritage ecosystem is weakened, causing audience engagement with them to diminish. Research by Keaney et al. (2007) established that arts empower their audiences by offering some space where these audiences congregate for economic, political, and social equality and the socially segregated and disenfranchised air their voices. Also, arts provide forums for heightened audience participation where audiences are more open to participation and responsiveness (O’Hagan and Duffy 1987). So, when government funding for visual arts is cut, audiences will be denied such experiences, and they will reduce their frequencies of visiting the art venues and centres. This will culminate in weak audience growth in this sector in the future.

Conclusion

This essay has focused on providing arguments for funding arts from the public purse and the implications of reducing government funding on arts. It has confirmed that arts should be publicly funded because of their economic and educational value and their contributions to cultural identity, quality of life, urban regeneration, and cultural expression. Further, the essay has indicated that the reduction of local and government funding on visual arts has serious implications. These implications include weakened heritage ecosystems, closure of art facilities, loss of career opportunities and cultural, social, economic, and human capital, and debilitated audience growth. While funding of arts is currently an area of serious political controversy and debate, this essay provides profound arguments that justify why arts should receive public funds and why current funding for visual arts should not be reduced.

Reference List

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