NOTE: This post is to introduce you to the 53rd episode of François Matarasso’s and my monthly podcast, “A Culture of Possibility.” It will be available starting 20 June 2025. You can find it and all episodes at Stitcher, iTunes, and wherever you get your podcasts, along with miaaw.net‘s other podcasts by Owen Kelly, Sophie Hope, and many guests, focusing on cultural democracy and related topics. You can also listen on Soundcloud and find links to accompany the podcasts.
The second issue of The Miaaw Review will be out soon. The first edition included an essay by me and shorter pieces by Owen Kelly and François Matarasso. You have to subscribe to receive it. It’s free, you won’t be spammed, nor will your email be shared with anyone. Just enter your email here.
Episodes 51 and 52 of A Culture of Possibility were about the work of two small foundations, the Baring Foundation based in London, and the First Peoples Fund based in Rapid City, South Dakota. Both impressed us with their exemplary integrity and responsiveness. We hope they will be an inspiration to other funders. We noted that when we looked at their boards and advisors, it was clear each was rooted in and of the communities they exist to help, which highlights the difference, as François said, “between the ones who open their doors to the participation of the people that they aim to to help and the ones that actually keep them at a distance.” We thought it would be a good idea to use this episode to discuss the field as a whole, the context from which these exemplars stand out.
I had to start the episode by describing the challenge that presented. “I was saying to François before we came on that this subject presents an existential dilemma for me, because the funding situation for community-based arts work—for projects that advance cultural democracy, pluralism, participation, belonging—has been terrible from the start compared to what it should be. In previous podcast episodes we’ve proposed a guaranteed annual wage as a fair, equitable solution. We’ve talked a lot about public service employment. There are many excellent sounding ideas for taxing commercial media to support nonprofit creation and dissemination and so forth. There’s no shortage of good ideas. The existential dilemma is that, sadly, we live in the actual existing worlds of the United States and Europe at this time, and our good ideas are worth exactly nothing to the powers that be. So we’re going to talk to you about some things that seem good and possible, some things that seem depressing but everyone ought to be aware of so that if we have an opportunity to respond, we can. And we hope to leave you with some ideas to think about.”
Circumstances in the US are disturbing, I explained. “Here in the States, the situation is getting worse and worse because the MAGA regime has decided that culture is one of the sectors that they want to have a lot of involvement in. The other day, Trump fired the director of the National Portrait Gallery, which is part of the Smithsonian Institution, her crime being supporting diversity, equity and inclusion. Trump has pretty much gone through all of these institutions, destroying leadership at the Kennedy Center, canceling National Endowment for Humanities grants to documentary filmmakers, which is a central, important support source for that type of work. Many, many people have had their National Endowment for the Arts grants rescinded. In both these cases, sometimes after the money’s been promised and spent, pushing them toward financial ruin.
“There’s opposition, sternly worded letters being written by the organizations that ostensibly exist to support cultural development in the United States. But not as much as I would imagine or hope. Whether that’s because of despair that people are inured to what’s happening and they feel there’s no choice but to be bystanders and watch it happen; whether they think it’s because they are powerless in that situation, since this is a regime that isn’t actually responsive to public opinion unless you give them $250 million; or because it feels hopeless to go to Congress, since the legislative branch, which normally has control over these things, has just laid down and shown Trump their tummy and asked to be scratched, and he’s obliging them, so they’re saying yes to everything that he wants to do. Well, those are all powerful reasons not to protest very much. But from where I’m sitting right now, it feels very tough to watch all of these things being dismantled without opposition that’s capable of stopping the process.”
“We don’t have the same political interference in the in the public art funding system in Europe,” François explained, “although the last Conservative government showed itself quite ready to interfere. We were going through a period of of public political turmoil in the UK for much of the last 15 years. Under the conservative governments, in power for 14 of those years, I think there were 13 different Secretaries of State for Culture, Media and Sport, but it didn’t stop one of them from ordering the Arts Council to divert 25% of funding out of London, which is supposed to cause the relocation of an opera company from London to the north and so on. It’s all fairly chaotic, but the there’s been a change of government, and things are settling down a little.
“The problems here are slightly different. Partly there is a problem in many European countries of budget constraints, precisely because so much money was spent in responding to the COVID pandemic that public finances are in a bad way, and the arts and culture are not exempt from measures to try and redress the public purse. But I’m more concerned with something else, given we’ve both known and been involved in public and foundation funding for many decades now, both as applicants and from another perspective, as for instance, when I was trustee of the Baring Foundation.
“The work that we care about, community-based arts work, has always lived on the crumbs from the funding cake. When I was young and working as a community artist, we were trusted to do our work. We were we weren’t given much money, but we were given money essentially to do art with people who didn’t have access to the arts. That was the the extent of the agreement. The irony is, we were sometimes accused in the 1970s and 1980s of wanting to use arts money to do social work. I don’t think the work of community arts in those days was social work in any sense. So it was more people expressing their frustration at having to take account of the interests of other than middle class audiences. But that was a common enough gibe. The irony is that increasingly in the last 15 years, the arts funding system is being used consciously to do social work in the sense that participatory and community arts organizations are being funded as much on the social outcomes of their work as on the cultural or artistic outcomes of their work.
“Now that brings a whole viper’s nest of moral and political and practical problems, because I don’t believe for a minute that artists are capable of delivering the outcomes that are expected of them. The one thing about art is that you cannot guarantee how anybody is going to respond to it. So if you can’t say that they’ll like your show or your record or your book, how can you be confident that you can have profound social changes? It has tied up the funding system in concepts and degrees of accountability and systems of accountability and evaluation that are profoundly restrictive. Although more funding comes to the community sector than ever did in the 70s And 80s, it comes tied up in such complexities and expectations that I seriously question now whether we don’t trade too much of our independence and too much of our autonomy in return for that funding. So that’s the big problem that we have in in Europe, and particularly in the UK, in Germany, in the Netherlands, and in Scandinavia. I’ve seen similar problems less in what you might call the Latin European countries.”
Well, you can see why we’re crabby.
We talked about a wide range of things in this episode. I’d read a recent Arts Council report from the UK called Leading the Crowd, which relies heavily on the unproveable argument that public funding attracts private money (wouldn’t you have to eliminate all the public funding to test if the private money is still there?). That gave us an opportunity to examine some of the weak advocacy arguments that seem to be evergreen, and to explore some of the strong ones that seem neglected or perhaps not understood.
We talked about alternatives to current systems that tend to get a laugh when proposed, but could be very helpful. For instance, a lottery. “In my more radical moments,” François said, “I’ve sometimes argued that it would be better if it was a lottery. If you as an artist were able to meet certain entry criteria, to show a certain standard of work, after that you could just enter a lottery. It would save a huge amount of time of everybody writing applications, and other people reading and assessing applications. Crucially, the people who got funded would not be able to go around saying, ‘Oh, look at me. I’m a great artist because I got funded.’ They would just have to say, ‘I’m a lucky artist because I got funded.’ Equally, the people who got turned down wouldn’t be sent into a spiral of depression, because somehow their work was judged not good enough. They would just know, ‘Ah, shit, I didn’t win the lottery this time. I’ll put it in again next year.’ I honestly don’t believe that it’s any more absurd than the system that we currently have, which is making enormous amounts of paperwork and a great deal of angst for everybody who’s involved in it.”
We took a breath and thanked all the people who’ve been on the podcast and despite so many roadblocks and so much discouragement, have persevered. François noted that he’d “been in countries in Central Asia, in Latin America, in certain parts of Europe where there is not available funding and young artists, it doesn’t stop them from doing the work that they believe in, that they want to do. They will always find strategies. It’s a difficult thing to say, but I think we may need to look at systems of self help again.” That led to an interesting discussion of past examples of mutual and community support and new possibilities to create that, from the Salford Lyceum to community-supported art experiments mimicking farmers’ markets; from Welfare State to the Pickle Family Circus.
Please listen to the episode and let us know the possibilities that you see emerging!
“Time is on My Side,” Irma Thomas and the Rolling Stones.