Arts Council England - lessons learned?

Arts Council England (ACE) has published a "Review of Arts Council England’s regularly funded organisations investment strategy 2007-08 - Lessons learned" (pdf), a report by Baroness McIntosh into the funding cuts last year, along with a communications review and a response from the ACE chief executive, Alan Davey.

The report includes a series of recommendations and concludes that:

ACE...needs to recognise that while it must have its own strategic priorities, these should be based in a proper understanding of what artists want to create. As one witness remarked: “nobody makes art in response to Arts Council policy”. Such understanding can only be gained from placing the arts at the centre of everything ACE does, which may seem blindingly obvious, but needs restating nonetheless. This will require everyone involved, including senior officers and council members, to maintain a more direct and visible connection to the work they fund. Responsibility for reasserting this core purpose lies primarily with the national leadership team, both executive and non-executive.

In the report Alan Davey responds to each of Baroness McIntosh's recommendations in turn, as well as to the recommendations of a review of the organisation's communications. He concludes:

...if we are truly to have excellent publicly funded art in this country, we need to do our job with the highest levels of knowledge, skill and judgment we can, applying the same degree of rigour in our own processes as we expect of those arts organisations and artists we fund. We are an organisation that wants to learn and to improve: with the help of Baroness McIntosh's report, we can and will do so.