STREET ARTISTS IN EUROPE - Fondazione Fitzcarraldo

Street Artists in Europe
produced in the United Kingdom makes little contribution to artform development. Inevitably,
as this work forms the bulk of the sector, it is what most audiences have experienced’ 197 .
Today, the Arts Council sees street arts as a political priority: ‘The Arts Council values street
arts in all its diversity. It is one of the artforms we have identified to focus on, and we will
continue to work with partners to help develop outdoor work in this country’ 198 . Although it has
been accused of boasting of its street arts policy yet not taking the necessary funding measures,
the Arts Council wants to take a cross-arts approach to this issue: ‘Because street arts connects
with several Arts Council departments, it is especially important that we talk across the
organisation about the significance of this work and further develop a genuinely cross-arts and
inter-regional approach to street arts in England’ 199 .
With regard to UK cultural policy, let us remember that the Culture/State relationship in the
United Kingdom is situated within a practical and pragmatic socio-economic context. One of the
first institutions responsible for culture was the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the
Arts, set up in 1942 by the economist John Maynard Keynes.
Since then, culture has consistently been regarded as a social matter and support for the arts has
depended on their ‘social utility’. Robert Lacombe notes that even today, artistic quality only
rates seventh (after educational value, cultural diversity, social inclusion, etc.) in Arts Council
England’s list of priorities for the grant of subsidies. 200 That approach, which was also to
influence the Nordic countries, does not yet work in favour of street arts: ‘the government
culture dept funds the Arts Council, and social inclusion is an important issue to them, so I
suppose they “support” street arts”, but not directly at all […]’ 201 . Moreover, culture is also a
private matter, as embodied by the arm’s length principle used when setting up arts councils, to
avoid the propaganda risks of a State-controlled culture.
After Jennie Lee, Minister for the Arts, pointed cultural policy in a new direction during the
1960s, giving more support to artistic practice, the Thatcher years brought cuts in public
spending on culture. Live performances, unlike cultural heritage, which had a more obvious
symbolic impact, suffered severely. With the changes in the political scene in the 1980s, cultural
funding shifted from the public to the private sector. That dealt a blow to the British alternative
scene, which was very active at the time, and led to the predominance of more commercial
productions in the street arts sector, leading to poorer quality and less inventiveness. In the early
1990s, the proportion of the total budget allocated to culture stagnated at around 0.22%, which
obviously had an impact on creative and artistic dynamism. In the face of dwindling audiences,
the number of ‘sure-value’ productions rose at the cost of innovation and quality 202 . In 1992 it
was decided to set up a ministry for culture: the Department for National Heritage, replaced in
1997 by the Department for Culture, Media and Sport. However, it was to be the Arts Councils
of England, Scotland, Northern Ireland and Wales that were to assume responsibility for artistic
policy, including live performance and the visual arts.
The broad lines of Arts Council England’s policy are similar to those of the ministry. It gives
special priority to artists and their funding and equipment needs, as well as to professional
197 Ibid., p. 8.
198 Ibid., p. 4.
199 Ibid., p. 5.
200 Lacombe, Robert, Le spectacle vivant en Europe: modèle d’organisation et politiques de soutien, op. cit. p. 210.
201 Tucker, Anne, UK Street Arts and Mainland Europe: Opportunities and barriers to exploiting work from
England in the rest of Europe, op. cit.
202 Lacombe, Robert, Le spectacle vivant en Europe: modèle d’organisation et politiques de soutien, op. cit. p. 211.
131
PE 375.307