Arts Council England and the low level of debate, you don't say

The Guardian today carries an interview with the departing chair of Arts Council England. In it he offers three things that his successor needs to concentrate on: sort out the Cultural Olympiad; focus on the relationship between ACE and the BBC and focus on "making the case for arts funding in forceful ways during a recession".

"People tend to talk in terms of art for art's sake on the one hand, or
art as a form of social engineering on the other. In fact the debate
about the arts should be much more sophisticated than this; it has been
going on since Plato's Republic, through Kant, the Enlightenment,
Orwell, Leavis, Eliot and Williams," he will say. "But it's all a bit
beer and skittles at the moment."

Of these, I can't comment much on the Cultural Olympiad except to ask what the fuck a Cultural Olympiad might be and why. As for the BBC, well, I'm sure ACE and the BBC should get on like a house on fire, but won't.
No, the key issue really really is making the case for arts funding. And that is really about making the case for the Arts Council itself.

Now, I've recently started a wiki and blog all about arts funding in my country. But what I'm realising quickly is it's not about the funding, it's about access to knowledge and information about that funding and what it does. And what quickly becomes clear is that the Arts Council has very little interest in engaging in the conversation that the rest of us are having or should be having about the arts in the UK (or England, as this is the Arts Council England we're talking about).

But I can tell Liz Forgan, who takes over from Frayling, what she really needs to do to take the conversation above "beer and skittles" (how patronising is that, anyway?). She needs to take a leaf out of the web 2.0 movement at its best.

1. The conversation is about transparency. So make your information free. At the moment the Arts Council has a really bad web site on which it is almost impossible to find anything, even when it does exist.

2. Put tools for analysis and understanding of what the Arts Council does into the hands of your uses. At the moment you can get spreadsheets of ACE funding, but you have to do any analysis yourself (which is what I'm looking at in my wiki). But the ACE should be leading the way in crunching data - or better still, give us some tools so that we can ask questions of it: how much money is spent in my county each year on visual art? how many individuals got grants of over £10,000 in 2007? stuff like that

3. Give us full data about the outcome of funded projects. Apart from giving out a big list of every grant they give, the ACE makes it a very hard job to find out what those projects are all about. Short of Googling thousands of projects, you really won't have much of a clue what they are all about. This is a huge missed opportunity. Every single funded project should be listed with full contact information including web sites. Organisations and individuals who are funded should see it as an opportunity to promote the project, not see the ACE leave it to the winds of fate.

4. Publish all funding applications and assessments. In addition to putting information about what all these projects are online, the ACE should publish the actual applications and subsequent assessments by ACE officers, whether good or bad. In theory all these are obtainable via the Freedom of Information act, but what a huge and pointless task this is. These should be publishe automatically, with sensitive information redacted. What a goldmine of information this would provide for artists, for funding applicants, for academics, for researchers.

5. All employees of the Arts Council should be encouraged to blog, twitter and social network for all they are worth. So far I can find precisely zero bloggers, twitterers etc from the ACE. But why? Either ACE employees have no interest at all in publicising its work, taking part in the conversation, engaging with its audience. Or the ACE has a stalinist PR department that has forbidden all engagement. Maybe someone inside the ACE could tell me? (Don't worry, I'm asking them, I'll find out what the view is).

So, there you have it. Time to drage the ACE into the 21st century. From now on my blogging on this subject will take place on my Arts Funding blog. And the results of my research will happen on my Arts Funding wiki. You can think of those as my policy and research departments. I might even ask the ACE to fund them.