Criticism
The Council attracted criticism from the Parliamentary select committee responsible for its oversight for supporting a Lottery funded programme to subsidise UK film production that resulted in a series of films that failed to find distribution. There was also a series of costly capital projects such as the Royal Opera House and the Lowry Centre that required additional funding. In the case of the Royal Opera House the select committee found the Arts Council had broken its own procedures. In 2005 it was announced that the Arts Council England's budget was capped resulting in an effective £30m reduction in its budget.
The Arts Council of England funds a controversial cultural festival, the Festival of Muslim Cultures.
In March 2006, the Arts Council announced a review of its National Office that would "enhance efficiency and delivery while continuing to provide respected and focused arts leadership and drive", whilst proposing to lose 42 posts, mainly arts specialists, so that the organisation will no longer have dedicated national leads for areas including contemporary music, interdisciplinary art, moving image, architecture, broadcasting, opera, social inclusion, disability, and so on.
Arts Council England's music policy is controversial with jazz enthusiasts. It spends more than 90% of its music budget on opera. Jazz has an equivalent audience size but receives less than 1%. This point was raised in Chris Hodgkins's 1998 paper Jazz in the UK. More recently it was raised in the House of Lords by Lord Colwyn on 11 May 2006 as documented in the Lords Hansard Columns (1058 to 1060).
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Famous quotes containing the word criticism:
“People try so hard to believe in leaders now, pitifully hard. But we no sooner get a popular reformer or politician or soldier or writer or philosopher—a Roosevelt, a Tolstoy, a Wood, a Shaw, a Nietzsche, than the cross-currents of criticism wash him away. My Lord, no man can stand prominence these days. It’s the surest path to obscurity. People get sick of hearing the same name over and over.”
—F. Scott Fitzgerald (1896–1940)
“The aim of all commentary on art now should be to make works of art—and, by analogy, our own experience—more, rather than less, real to us. The function of criticism should be to show how it is what it is, even that it is what it is, rather than to show what it means.”
—Susan Sontag (b. 1933)
“Homoeopathy is insignificant as an art of healing, but of great value as criticism on the hygeia or medical practice of the time.”
—Ralph Waldo Emerson (1803–1882)