The year 2000 saw the turn of the millennium and the founding of the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA) at a world summit of cultural officers and advocates hosted in Ottawa by the Canada Council for the Arts. Headquartered today in Australia, IFACCA is the global network of national arts funding agencies with member organizations in 78 countries. Among its services, IFACCA maintains a database of cultural policies on its web site (www.âifacca.âorg), regularly conducts policy research, and hosts world summits to enable networking, advocacy planning, and policy sharing among its members, cultural policy researchers, and arts advocates. The establishment of an international federation followed years of informal meetings by representatives of the first countries to establish arts councils, including the United Kingdom, where the Arts Council of Great Britain 1 was established in 1946, Ireland in 1951, Canada in 1957, New Zealand in 1964, the USA in 1965, and Australia in 1968. The establishment of IFACCA can be considered the culmination of a âmovementâ that sought recognition for culture and the arts as central to human life and society, a movement that had grown internationally since 1948 and the adoption by the United Nations General Assembly of the Universal Declaration of Human Rights. Consisting of 30 articles, the Declaration expressed the basic rights to which all human beings are inherently entitled, including Article 27, the right to participate in the cultural life of the community and to enjoy the arts. Indeed, in 2009, IFACCA found that 99 percent of the 201 countries in its policy database had a ministry or department with responsibility for culture; 90 percent of those departments had a mixed portfolio that included policy domains such as culture, sport, environment, communications, or tourism. Around 40 percent, or almost half, of those countries had both a ministry and an arts council agency (Madden 2009, p. 18). Thus, state patronage of the arts and culture was accepted by scores of national governments by the turn of the millennium, and the âarts councilâ was included among accepted policy models and institutional structures.
State patronage of the arts in Europe had a long history before the 1940s, when the Arts Council of Great Britain was established. Funding cultural heritage was an established policy of European governments where national museums existed, as were centralized and nationally sponsored programmes for art and design education in several countries. Ministries of culture on the European continent oversaw and supported museums, cultural centers, and national performing arts companies. However, what was new in the middle of the twentieth century was the emergence of a national arts policy model that, in line with concerns about freedom of speech and expression, sought to remove politicians from direct influence and involvement in the funding decisions that supported artistic creativity. Great Britain had long supported national museums and art and design schools, but the policy of providing state funding to living artists and performing arts organizations to produce and create art brought into focus the relationship between the artist and the state. These historical concerns and their implications for the new policy model are the subject of Chap. 5, which considers the beginnings of the Arts Council of Great Britain prior to its establishment in 1946.
The Arts Council of Great Britain was the first national funding body to insist so explicitly that its autonomy and independence from ministers and legislators was necessary to artistic freedom. Since that time, the words âarts councilâ in the name of the national funding organization have come to signal this idea of âdistanceâ, which has been named the âarmâs length principleâ by policy analysts. Indeed, the âarmâs length principleâ has been the subject of scrutiny and commentary by cultural policy researchers who debate and dispute its effectiveness in practice in arts policy (see Madden 2009 for an extensive review of this literature and its central themes; also Bell and Oakley 2015, pp. 123â126). However, this debate and an administrative analysis of the policy model are not the subject of this book. Rather, it is the history of the people involved in its establishment and the ideas and values embedded in the policy model in Great Britain and later in North America.
Just as the meaning and practice of the term âarmâs lengthâ has changed over time, so has the use and meaning of the title âarts councilâ. In the two decades after 1946, several former British colonies established national arts funding organizations, adopting the âarts councilâ name and model. While Ireland established an arts council in 1951, Canada was the first country outside the British Isles to adopt the model in 1957, which was modified there in its earliest years, for reasons of political expedience. Also in Canada, the term âarts councilâ gained an association with arts advocacy federations, rather than national funding bodies and policy, when the Arts Reconstruction Committee changed its name to the Canadian Arts Council in December 1945 (Tippett 1990, p. 174), a few months after the British governmentâs announcement that the Arts Council of Great Britain would continue the work of its wartime predecessor, the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts. Representing some 7000 artists and cultural advocates, the Canadian Arts Council was a federation of arts organizations with voluntary officers and directors that lobbied for provincial and national arts funding and advocated for arts education throughout the Canadian provinces. Supported by private funds contributed by its member organizations, this council lacked federal funding and prestige. Instead, the Canadian Arts Council was active in communities and provinces around the country, and in North America, the title, âarts councilâ, became associated with federations of arts and cultural organizations and with formal and informal advocacy activities. In 1947, two years after the Canadian Arts Council adopted its new name, the city of Vancouver, British Columbia, established the Community Arts Council of Vancouver, the first local arts council in North America. Thus, the term âarts councilâ is associated today with advocacy and funding for the arts at the national, regional or state, and local levels.
The following chapters examine the transatlantic movement of the term âarts councilâ and of the policy idea as it was adopted in the United Kingdom, then modified in Canada and in the United States. The book argues that alliances of philanthropists, intellectuals, and politicians organized during the 1940s in Great Britain and in Canada and successfully persuaded their national governments to assume responsibility for funding the arts using a policy model that they recommendedâthe arts council model. In the United States, arts advocates in the 1940s adopted the term âarts councilâ to name local federations and membership organizations that represented and raised funds for the arts, long before the establishment of a national grant-making agency. Indeed, the presence of arts philanthropy and of philanthropists as advocates and policy advisors is common to the policy histories of all three countries. âArts philanthropyâ is considered here to be funding provided by foundations, businesses, and individuals to support the arts, and philanthropists are the wealthy aesthetes whose foundations and private fortunes were donated to arts organizations and cultural causes.
This book contributes to the histories of cultural policy in the United Kingdom, Canada, and the United States, histories that are still somewhat fragmentary. However, this study demonstrates that primary sources exist in each country that provide greater detail, and the book draws upon these sources to contribute to a more nuanced account that traces the origins of the policy idea in three countries. A central concern of the book is the recognition and examination of policy actors whose roles have not been fully explored or acknowledged in the historiography of cultural policy, particularly the role of philanthropists, both individuals and foundations, and of women as arts advocates. Policy historians have explained the shift from private philanthropy to public sources for arts funding in Great Britain by arguing that as the welfare state expanded in the 1940s, it encompassed greater provision for the arts (Minihan 1977; O. Bennett 1995). This is, of course, what happened in broad historical terms. In Canada, historians have documented the post-war shift from arts funding that was provided by American foundations, to national funding provided by the Canada Council (Brison 2005; Litt 1992; Tippett 1990). In the US, histories have focused on the establishment of the National Endowment for the Arts (Binkiewicz 2004), and one influential case study examined urban elitesâ development of the nonprofit cultural organization as a model in Boston, Massachusetts in the nineteenth century (DiMaggio 1982).
This book intends to add to this literature by looking closely at policy formation, demonstrating that formal policy and legislative action were often the final steps in a long process of meetings, conversations, and informal exchanges among alliances of individuals through their social interactions and public service on voluntary boards and quasi-public advisory bodies. Rather than planning arts provision in the 1940s and 1950s, the British and Canadian governments instead responded to alliances of philanthropists, intellectuals, and politicians by instituting state support for the arts using a model and funding priorities that these alliances proposed. In the United States, local arts councils representing artists, volunteers, and businesses helped to establish a grassroots cultural infrastructure and a preference for locally based arts philanthropy over national funding that was later encouraged and enhanced by foundations and the national funding agency.
To understand the influence of these alliances on the histories of arts policy, the book identifies individuals and groups and explores their motivations, ideologies, and working methods. The first chapter sketches out brief biographies of two men and a woman, all of whom were arts philanthropists and offered formal policy recommendations for national funding agencies. The two men are the individuals most visibly associated with the establishment of the arts council model in their countries: John Maynard Keynes in Great Britain and Vincent Massey in Canada. The woman is Dorothy Elmhirst, an American heiress and arts philanthropist whose early work in womenâs voluntary organizations in the United States evolved to founding organizations and funding cultural policy research in the United Kingdom. These three individuals are selected for historical and conceptual reasons: Keynes represents the intellectual in a policy-making role, while Massey and Elmhirst demonstrate the role of the wealthy aesthete and philanthropist. Elmhirstâs inclusion here emphasizes the history of women and their role in arts policy, a theme which is developed in Chap. 7 about the United States.
The short biographies in Chap. 2 give necessary context to Chap. 3, which introduces to the cultural policy literature two central ideologies that characterized these individuals: the ideology of the intellectual and the concept of âthe clerisyâ as it evolved in England in the nineteenth and twentieth centuries and the ideology of philanthropy held by the wealthy that evolved over the same period. Intellectuals and philanthropists shared a sense of social responsibility drawn from these ideologies that motivated their cultural advocacy. The chapter argues that the theory of âthe clerisyâ shaped the identities of Keynes and men like him, who had the benefit of an education at Oxford or Cambridge, to attempt to use their intellectual training to find solutions for social problems. Massey and Elmhirst, as very wealthy philanthropists, shared a sense of social responsibility that motivated them to use their wealth to address social problems. The book argues that these ideologies motivated intellectuals and philanthropists to collaborate to create new institutions in the twentieth century that included national arts funding agencies, as well as private foundations, universities, libraries, and other cultural organizations. The chapter concludes by summarizing the beliefs and assumptions that they shared.
The four chapters that follow examine the arts policy histories of the three countries, tracing the public and private negotiations, policy recommendations, and the transatlantic transfer of ideas and values. The three national histories conclude with the founding of the national arts agency in that country; administrative analysis and institutional histories of the three agencies are beyond the scope of this book and have been referenced where appropriate.
Beginning with the United Kingdom, Chap. 4 examines specific alliances of arts advocates and their working methods during the second world war. Expanding on published research (see Upchurch 2007, 2013), the chapter includes previously unpublished archival research and identifies three wartime projects of an arts policy clique that included Keynes and Massey. Their three projects were the reform and reorganization of the British national art museums, the reopening of Covent Garden for opera and ballet, and the establishment of the Arts Council of Great Britain; they were successful in the latter two projects but not the first one. The chapter closes with a...