A few years ago the arts department of British Council was in a sorry state, its policies ridiculed and staff morale at an all-time low. Now some key appointments have turned the situation round and promise an artistic renaissance. Simon Tait reports
Classical Music, 14/1/2012
The British Council’s arts programme is back on full throttle with a new director and a bold global strategy that, he hopes, will reinstate the organisation’s dulled international reputation and create a unique universal network.
Graham Sheffield succeeding Rebecca Walton as director of arts seems the most logical gambit in chess history, a checkmate for the arts against bureaucracy.
She, an old BC hand, had been drafted in after the debacle of 2007-8 when the council’s famed arts operations were to be decimated in favour of ‘cultural diplomacy’. Graham Devlin was commissioned to report on the whole mess when the council’s chief executive, Martin Davidson, had made a spectacular u-turn following the intervention of the then Foreign Secretary, and his recommendations were almost wholly acted on.
They included the secondment of a ‘specialist advisor’ to help her put ‘the arts back into the main bloodstream of the organisation’, and who more logical than the arts director of the Barbican? It is his, Sheffield’s, phrase about returning the arts to the bloodstream from which, implicitly, it had been extracted.
In 2009 Sheffield had very much a full time job at the Barbican bedding in with the new managing director there, Nicholas Kenyon, and steering the City’s response to the Olympic challenge, but he accepted Walton’s brief with enthusiasm. ‘
She brought pragmatism and a listening ear, restored morale to what had been a renowned arts department, reinstated programmes and rebuilt budgets, all of which she had worked on with Sheffield. Together they devised a five point schdeme of showcasing British art, promoting cultural leadership in areas of interest, the development of a creative economy network, building creative capacity and the introduction of a relevant arts element into all of the BC’s existing programmes. He is it moving it on.
Fifteen months ago Walton was promoted to the executive board in the key role of director of partnerships and business development, and at this point, the autumn of 2010, you would think the obvious replacement would be Graham Sheffield.
The symmetry collapsed, however, because he was no longer here, having left the Barbican to pursue the “job of a lifetime” building a new cultural quarter in West Kowloon, Hong Kong.
As it happened, miserably for Sheffield at the time but happily for the British Council eventually, he found himself caught in a political and bureaucratic firefight in the former British colony, defenceless and unable to manoeuvre his cultural proposals past a battery of special interests and private agendas, and he was forced to resign on medical advice. He arrived back in the UK for Christmas, and found that Rebecca Walton had still not been replaced. Symmetry restored, he started as the British Council’s director of arts in May 2011.
‘I’m really building on what we started together,’ he says modestly. ‘Staff morale was not at its greatest, to put it mildly, and she gave people a sense of belonging again, and that was extremely important.
‘We’d lost touch with artists so our specialists disappeared,’ he says. ‘We’re reinstating them. One of the first things I said I wanted to do was to keep things very simple, and make sure we had the right people in the right places.’
To say that Sheffield belongs in the arts is like saying an apple belongs in a fruit bowl. He started as a classical musician, playing piano and conducting, and his first ambition was to be an opera director. He went to the BBC and by the age of 25 was working on the music output of Radio 3, Radio 4 and the World Service. In 1990 he went to the Southbank Centre as music director, and in 1995 he took on the new post of arts director at the Barbican. A preview of the situation he was to encounter at the British Council, the Barbican was trembling from the effects of a small earthquake when managing director Detta O’Cathain was forced to leave after her commodification programme aliented resident arts organisations and art form heads. Her successor, John Tusa, and Sheffield transformed the institution. The Royal Shakespeare Company left and was replaced by the innovatory Bite season, a proper art gallery was carved out of the heart of the brutalist building, the theatre and concert hall were upgraded. Sheffield introduced international festivals and appointed new associate directors and ensembles.
‘Each job I’ve done somebody has taken me on trust,’ he said then. ‘Before I went to the BBC I’d never been in a studio before, I’d never worked in a concert hall until I went to the SBC, and here they took a risk on me and theatre.’
How much risk the British Council is taking on with him remains to be seen, but at 59 he is seen as a safe pair of hands, albeit hands that are never still.
He has spent his first six months in post identifying the regions of the world that will best benefit from his attention, and that will best benefit British artists, and identifying the people take on these brand new posts.
‘The corporate line is that we’re a cultural relations organisation, and the arts clearly has a very big role to play as part of that, ’ he says. ‘End of corporate statement.’
There cannot be a feasible policy that fits every situation, as had been believed: each region has its own history, capability and culture, each will need to be treated differently. So he has appointed six regional cultural leaders, half found internally, half from outside, who Sheffield says are critical in linking what is happening around the world into the specialist teams in London – forensically, not superficially.
The regions are the Americas, based in Colombia; wider Europe in Istanbul; wider South Asia in Dacca; the Middle East and North Africa in Cairo; Sub-Saharan Africa in Johannesburg; and EU Europe, which is split between Paris and Bucharest. Joining up the dots, Sheffield calls it, but that includes not only learning the terrain but affirming – or establishing – vital ambassadorial and political contacts. Gregory Nash, founder of The Point at Eastleigh, is bound for Istanbul; Shreela Ghosh, most recently director of the Free Word Centre, goes to Dacca; Steve Stenning, festival producer, heads for Cairo. There are already leaders established in Vietnam for East Asia, Beijing for China and New Delhi for India.
‘It’s very much a mutual agenda now, it’s no longer about just sending the RSC to far-flung colonies. Those new positions are really at the start of a new global network,’ he says.
Three years ago Russia was a major headache for the British Council, with 15 of their 16 offices closed amid accusations of subversive activities. The attitude towards British culture has thawed dramatically since, and though the offices are still closed, electronic communications have meant there is no hindrance to a startling upgrade of activity, particularly in the visual arts.
Here, the Gagarin statue was unveiled in July outside the British Council’s London offices by the Russian ambassador; he also went to the London Book Fair for the first time in five years, where Russia was the focus. There, President Medvedev deliberately mentioned the arts in a communiqué marking David Cameron’s visit (Cameron did not), and there are Gormley, Henry Moore and William Blake exhibitions going out there in 2012, as well as a Britten centenary project in 2013. It is traditional cultural diplomacy, where the arts take the lead over politics. ‘We’re not going to change the world single-handed, but it certainly helps to create a space where two countries can talk together in a more civilized way,’ Sheffield says.
At home, Graham Devlin’s charge that the BC’s commitment to the arts community had been weak struck a nerve, and there has been a concentrated effort to engage the sector. ‘A lot of my job is rebuilding confidence in the British Council, not only with the big institutions like the Tate and the National Theatre but with young talent too. We’ve got to cover the spectrum,’ Sheffield says. ‘The teams are now very heavily engaged in talking to the sector and trying to be partners, and we can be better partners if we’re got a strong network abroad’. He is working closely with the UK arts councils, and there will be a stronger BC profile at home, particularly at arts festivals.
The big effort for 2012 is the Dickens Project. Over 50 countries taking readings, film showings and performances. ‘We don’t realise in this country how universal a figure Dickens is,’ Sheffield says. ‘It’s rather taken me by surprise”. The list of those that have asked for Dickens in his bicentenary year goes from Armenia to Zimbabwe, with Germany, Brazil and Vietnam in between
‘They want to benefit from some of our skills and knowledge of the creative cultural economy, and we see ourselves as a kind of managing centre. The UK is one of the strongest providers as well as a mover and shaker in the field, and we’re coming up with a more coherent arts story that you will see emerge in 2012.’
Brakes off for music’s global journey
The new regime ‘has put the wind back in my sails,’ says the British Council’s head of music, Cathy Graham. Because the new regional leaders can immerse themselves in their areas, however large, they will be able to create a strategic overview ‘so that we can provide exactly what’s needed for that region,’ she says’.
‘For instance, classical music is not necessarily the right thing for the young people of Tanzania, where hip-hop and rap, so we are working on that’.
Classical music, though, has the major part to play in every global region, and sometimes the market place is in the UK. A growing partnership with the Huddersfield Contemporary Music Festival to which producers from abroad are brought has seen the festival itself morph from a receiving event into a producer. ‘We have a freedom now that comes with deeper knowledge of the regions, and it means we’ve been able to take the brakes off. So much is happening, when four years ago everything had almost ground to a halt.’
A major project is the Britten Bicentenary in Moscow in 2013, on which Graham is working with a new partner, the Britten Pears Foundation. It will involve high profile performances, an exhibition, the translation of a biography into Russian, and anon-line project with young composers, Brazilian as well as Russian, which it is hoped will be available world-wide.
‘We’re learning how to make new partnerships which are not only about money but ideas and experience,’ she says. ‘We’re also creating higher profile kin Britain for what we do.’
Just under way is a programme of composer residences in China, with the Performing Right Society for Music Foundation.
Simon Tait investigates whee the arts sector finds itself in relation to business sponsorship and philanthropy, following the government’s Year of Corporate Philanthropy in 2011
The Stage, 12/1/2012
Ian Duncan Smith’s think tank, the Centre of Social Justice, has come up with a “Big Society” idea that the DCMS should be hugging to its breast as a tax break that could have been tailor-made for arts organisations. It isn’t.
The proposal is for a programme in which business employees volunteer to work in registered charities in their spare time, and it could be worth over £1 billion a year for charities in unpaid labour. The CSJ’s chief executive Gavin Poole says we need such strokes of genius to tackle our deep-seated problems, “such as educational failure and welfare dependency”, by “mobilising the third sector” – volunteers.
No mention of the arts in the announcement, but since most subsidised cultural organisations are charities and many operate outside office hours the C-Volunteers, as the scheme would call them, ought to be queuing outside our theatres, galleries, museums and arts centres. They aren’t.
The realno could be that the scheme looks suspiciously like unpaid internships without the advantage of the volunteers’ experience being of any use to their CVs. It betrays a fundamental misunderstanding of how corporate sponsorship works, and another confusion of “sponsorship” and “philanthropy”. The fallacy is that it is the staff members who are the philanthropists, doing the volunteering in their evenings and weekends, while the employers are the business sponsors, getting the tax relief on their enlightened flexibility. It simply has not been thought through. Where it could work would be if the employees were given time in the working day to do their volunteering, which would show the company’s commitment to the arts as well as the volunteer staff member’s, but this is not yet in the proposal.
In December 2010 the culture secretary, Jeremy Hunt, launched a Year of Corporate Philanthropy and its anniversary passed unnoticed. As Colin Tweedy, the now former chief executive of Arts & Business, said in November, “It’s a misnomer because there is no such thing as ‘corporate philanthropy’ – there is philanthropy and there is corporate sponsorship, you cannot conflate the two”.
Arts & Business, a charity, has now moved to new premises and under the wing of Business in the Community, a charity created in 1982 in response to the Brixton and Toxteth riots to encourage urban regeneration through corporate social responsibility among businesses. The Prince of Wales, who is president of both charities, masterminded the move when A&B, with its government grant removed, had been expecting to close completely.
Moving A&B into BITC means the former’s staff being reduced from 100 to 22 and losing its responsibility for training arts organisations in fundraising as well as its £7m a year grant, and instead acting as a broker between the arts and business while retaining its charitable status. “We are going back to our roots, as a campaigning organisation in the business community, and the Prince of Wales will take a high profile in that campaign,” Tweedy said.
Part of the agreement is that Tweedy stands down as chief executive and becomes a vice-president with more of an ambassadorial role, to persuade businesses that investing in the arts is good for them.
He will also have to persuade them not to be put off by the protests by cultural workers at BP’s new portfolio of arts sponsorship that commits £10m to four national arts institutions, as the Arts Council encourages arts organisations to be pragmatic about accepting corporate money. Meanwhile, the government continues playing its long game, pursuing philanthropy as the next big thing in cultural funding.
The culture secretary would like to encourage more ordinary individuals to give money to the arts, but although the Art Fund recently announced a 15% increase in membership – helping them to help public galleries and museums to acquire art – the auguries are not good or arts philanthropy at the moment.
Recent figures from the Charities Aid Foundation show that average donations from the ordinary public were down last year from £12 to £11, having already gone down in the previous three years by 13%. The Art Fund upsurge is due, says its director Stephen Deuchar, to a new National Art Pass that gives members more free admissions and discounts than before, not necessarily that more people have been seized by an attack of cultural generosity.
Tax beaks are seen by A&B to be the way forward, a message Colin Tweedy believes the Chancellor, George Osborne, got loud and clear in his four years as a member of A&B’s board before the 2010 general election. “Unfortunately the government no longer listens to us, but we think they are right to be looking at this as more of an alternative than philanthropy in the shorter term,” Tweedy said. “It needs to be thought through properly, though, because there will be no increase in arts subsidy for at least five years.”
The influence of Arts & Business on its new foster parent, Business in the Community, is already becoming apparent, too. BITC has a prestigious annual corporate responsibility Awards for Excellence event attended by 3,000 business people. This year’s will have a new category: the BITC Arts & Business Award, for companies that have developed sustained partnerships with cultural organisations that demonstrate significant benefit and engagement with local communities and its own employees. “We think this is where the future of arts funding and of Arts & Business lies,” Tweedy said.
Simon Tait
The Times, 3/12/2011
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery is out of place on its corner of Queen Street and St Andrew Street. Built in 1889, this flamboyant red sandstone Victorian Gothic building is a sore thumb in the orderly neo-classical grey sandstone of the New Town, “a Ruskinian rebuke to Georgian Edinburgh” says its director, James Holloway.
The gallery, which reopens on December 1 after a £17.6m recasting, has until now never been allowed to live up to its promise. There had been a high level campaign for it, led by the historian Thomas Carlyle, but the government was only convinced when the proprietor of The Scotsman, John Ritchie Findlay, promised £10,000 towards the costs and ended up bankrolling almost the entire project for more than £60,000.
Designed by Robert Rowand Anderson as the first purpose-built portrait gallery in the world, the national collection was found to be as yet too modest to fill it and much of the building was given over to the Scottish Society of Antiquaries and their museum. It has taken 120 years for them to leave and they are now incorporated in the National Museum of Scotland in Chambers Street.
More recently, in 1994, the trustees of the National Galleries of Scotland of which the portrait gallery is a part had even decided to close it and to transfer the pictures to Glasgow. There was public outrage and the decision was reversed after a debate in the House of Lords. Even then, the gallery had to defer to the £30m Playfair Project to transform the National Gallery of Scotland and Royal Scottish Academy on the city’s Mound.
It opened in 2004 clearing the way for the portrait gallery’s turn, and it closed in April 2009 for the work, by the Glasgow-based architects Page/Park. “For the first time Rowand Anderson’s vision has actually been made reality,” said Holloway.
The gallery had been an awkward mish-mash of boarded-off rooms, false ceilings and large spaces given over to storage. Most of the ground floor was inaccessible to the public, and was otherwise occupied by a small cafeteria and three temporary exhibition rooms. Even though the collection had expanded to more than 3,000 pictures, the principal portrait displays with its Ramsays, Wilkies and Raeburns were on the top floor, accessible only by a two-person lift for which too few cared to queue. Where there were three galleries, Holloway said, there are now ten.
The entrance used to be into a dark vestibule closed to right and left, but now is open on one side to a new restaurant and on the other to an exhibitions gallery which trumpets “Hot Scots!”, specially commissioned photographs of contemporary celebrities from Sean Connery to the Dr Who actress Karen Gillan. Beckoning from Rowand Anderson’s restored Great Hall, however, is a bust of Robert Burns, flanked by Walter Scott and Robert Louis Stevenson. Above them is William Hole’s Arts & Crafts style frieze of characters tracing Scots from the Stone Age to J Y Simpson, Livingstone and Carlyle.
A large new glass lift whisks visitors to the top level with views of the passing mezzanine and second floor displays, where the Scottish portrait story begins with the Renaissance and James IV, presided over by the 1578 anonymous portrait of Mary Queen of Scots. The recasting has opened up areas of the building never before accessible to the public, and there is now 60% more display space so that important pictures that have never before been on lengthy show can now be seen, such as the portrait of Anne Hyde, wife of James II and, here in Scotland, VII, which Pepys remarks on having seen in Lely’s studio, “very like”. Here, Holloway explained, the larger portrait of Scotland’s influence throughout Europe begins to be seen.
A gallery is devoted to the Jacobite rebellions, where a colonnade has been recreated in which five large portraits of plaid-wearing Scots show the development of the importance of tartan in Scottish culture. Next is a display for the Scottish Enlightenment, in which for the first time the famous twin Raeburn portraits of David Hume and Jean Jacques Rousseau, once friends then bitter enemies, hang next to eachother.
The large collection of landscape paintings is also done justice to. “We started collecting in the 1930s, the landscape being an important part of the portrait of Scotland,” Holloway explained.
These spaces had been largely occupied by the Antquaries’ 19th century library, which has now been relocated to a mezzanine as a Victorian drawing room where visitors can, by appointment, examine documents, prints and books brought from nearby storage equipped for the 21st century. Or they can simply relax on the 1890s furniture, or examine the plaster face masks of the famous, such as Mendelssohn, Coleridge and Haydn, and the infamous body-snatchers Burke and Hare.
The gallery has also built a large collection of photographs in the last two decades, with the Hill & Adamson archive of the mid-19th century at its core, and the current temporary exhibition from this section is of Thomas Annan’s images of the Glasgow slum tenements of the 1860s.
On the ground floor, beyond the restaurant, a Victorian tearoom has been made in which portraits which do not particularly fit with the gallery hangs are seen. “Where else can you have tea with Charles Rennie Mackintosh, J M Barrie and R L Stevenson?” said Holloway.
“What we can now do with the space we have been starved of is show not just a narrative of a portrait of Scotland, but a series of narratives which we will change, some over years and some over months, historical and contemporary” he said. But fate has still had a discouraging word to add to the triumph. “We were to reopen on November 30th, St Andrew’s Day, so that we could give the Scottish people their family album on their saint’s day,” he said. “But the public service strike set for that day has meant we’ve had to put it back 24 hours – we couldn’t have pictures of the First Minister negotiating picket lines to get here.”
The Scottish National Portrait Gallery, 1 Queen Street, Edinburgh, EH2 1JD, opens on December 1. Admission free.
Leonardo deserves better than the National Gallery’s basement, says Simon Tait
The Independent, 6/12/2011
Last week the national museums and galleries were celebrating ten years of free admission, hard fought for by some. The trustees of the National Gallery, however, had been aloof from that debate. They had never charged, and when in the 70s Edward Heath suggested they might like to be able to, they not only eschewed the idea of charging, they said they did not want the power to do so at any time in the future. Their public should never have to pay to see the pictures they already owned.
It makes a kind of ironic obscenity of tickets for the National Gallery’s record-breaking loan exhibition Leonardo da Vinci: Painter at the Court of Milan tickets circulating on the black market for 16 times the already swollen cover price of £16. What is far worse, though, is that those lucky enough to be able to get into the “once in a lifetime show” have to see it in dingy, cramped rooms two floors below ground level, space that was never meant for exhibitions, let alone blockbusters like the Leonardo.
This exhibition has been many years in the making, and these pictures garnered from public and private collections around the world will never be seen together again. Millions ought to be able to enjoy them, and as it is 250,000 might be able to count themselves lucky to have done so by the time the exhibition ends on February 9. The logistics of handling a three hour daily queue of the hopefuls are a nightmare for gallery staff, and the constant confrontations with angry and disappointed art lovers must make them long for the day it closes.
It need not have been like this. The Sainsbury Wing, opened in 1993, was built without a proper temporary exhibition space, but provision was made later that could have put this glaring omission right. Towards the end of the 1990s a hotel behind the National Gallery came on the market and the trustees bought it as an income source and a capital asset. Five or so years later, with staff complaining that there were wonderful exhibitions touring the world that they could not have because of the lack space, the administration drew up detailed proposals for converting the hotel into a multi-storey exhibitions centre capable of doing justice to any blockbuster. Ambitious plans were developed by Jeremy Dixon and Edward Jones, architects of the extended Royal Opera House and more recently of King’s Place.
But for reasons that have remained obscure, the trustees threw the plans out. There were more urgent priorities, such as the £17m East Wing development for the permanent collection, and the saving of a Raphael for the nation. It may be significant that shortly after that the director, Charles Saumarez Smith, left after reported but unspecified disagreements with the chairman of the trustees, and is now chief executive of the un-subsidised Royal Academy. He has never publicly commented.
The truth is that the needs and wants of the transitory exhibition-going public as opposed to the more reliable gallery-familiar art lovers have never been a major concern for the subsidised national art institutions. The British Museum built its £100m Millennium Court without a temporary exhibition space, and has had to make the best of the Round Reading Room, unneeded since the departure of the British Library. The Tate Gallery at Millbank only addressed the question with the latest extension that opened in 2001. The V&A, despite its £150m ten year development programme, will not have a proper gallery for passing shows until its new courtyard development is completed in 2015.
Meanwhile the Royal Academy, the only major visual art venue in London that isn’t subsidised and has no permanent collection to speak of, was more in touch with their audience for whom stunning shows and up-to-date display facilities were the first priority, before restaurants and interesting staircases, and went for it with blockbusters of their own like the current Degas and the Ballet: Picturing Movement (admission £14), the success of the autumn season until Leonardo.
The truth is that the National Gallery and other subsidised national museums and galleries, as they rejoice in their free admission to the permanent collections, have never understood the science of popular temporary exhibitions. They are still in an age when theatres were designed without ladies’ toilets and passing shows were the business of the commercial market.
Independent on Sunday, 27/11/11
Merger of funding agency with business charity will make up for ~£3m government spending cut
By Simon Tait
The Prince of Wales has personally intervened in a growing row over arts funding by taking the doomed sponsorship agency, Arts & Business (A&B), under his wing.
A&B had been funded by the government through the Arts Council but lost its entire grant earlier this year. It was preparing for closure.
Instead, on Prince Charles’s own initiative, the organisation will merge with the charity Business in the Community of which he is president. “The Prince of Wales personally urged this as an alternaive solution and convinced me that it was the right one”, said A&B’s chief executive Colin Tweedy, whose own resignation after 28 years in the post is part of the arrrangement.
The merger is in effect a takeover by Business in the Community (BITC), created in 1982 in response to the Brixton and Toxteth riots to encourage urban regeneration through corporate social responsibility among businesses.
It will be formally announced at the BITC annual meeting on December 1, but Prince Charles himself revealed it on Thursday at a private ceremony at Clarence House to present his annual medals for arts philanthropy, a scheme he devised four years ago with A&B of which he is also president.
His intervention will fuel a disagreement over arts funding between the government, which has slashed its cultural subsidy by 33% and believes a revival of arts funding lies in philanthropy, and those who are convinced with A&B and the prince that the business community’s contribution can be more effective sooner. He is expected to strike a much higher profile in promoting business sponsorship of the arts.
“People don’t realise Prince Charles’s understanding of the zeitgeist, he has the ability to get people to listen and his brand is a very powerful one,” Tweedy said. “The business community respects it enormously.”
Arts & Business was founded in 1976 under the chairmanship of the late Lord Goodman, a former Arts Council chairman, to introduce the concept of business sponsorship of the arts when it registered an annual corporate contribution of £600,000. A&B established the “mixed arts economy” for the arts whereby funding is roughly a third earned income, a third public subsidy and a third private sector support. By 2007 the private contribution had risen to £700m a year, but since then it has fallen back to around £600m.
In 1984 the organisation developed the idea of matched funding, whereby business contributions would be matched from a government fund run by A&B. Between then and 2008 £90m of public investment was matched by £1 billion from the private sector, but that year the scheme was scrapped and A&B’s government grant cut from £7m to £4m.
A&B had been highly respected in government circles, with George Osborne on its board for four years before last year’s general election, and its research was the basis for much of the current cultural policy. This year, howeve, it learned that all its subsidy was to go and its official responsibilities taken over by the Arts Council.
Tweedy was called to a private meeting with Prince Charles who urged him not to close but to join BITC, now a global operation. A&B’s operations in Scotland, Wales and Northern Ireland have become independent, though still funded by their regional governments.
Ironically, it was Arts & Business that revealed the unsuspected significance and potential of private giving to the arts in 2004 when research showed that an astonishing £236m a year was coming from individual giving compared with £111m in business sponsorship, and the figure continued to grow over the next five years. It has since faltered and is dwindling at a rate of 7% year.
The govenment, however, believes private philanthropy is most likely to help arts funding to recover, and last December Culture Secretary Jeremy Hunt launched a campaign to encourage more private giving, declaring 2011 to be the Year of Corporate Philanthropy.
“I sense the Year of Corporate Philanthropy has been written off,” Tweedy said. “It’s a misnomer because there is no such thing as ‘corporate philanthropy’ – there is philanthropy and there is corporate sponsorship, you cannot conflate the two – and nothing can be done in a year. The government was right not to exclude the arts from subsidy cuts, but we believe the government has a fundamental misunderstanding of the reasons why people give. Philanthrophy will kick in again but it will take much longer than the government thinks, and most people who give privately in this country earn less than £50,000 a year and go largely unrecognised”. Subsidy will take at least a generation to recover, he said, but the business community’s contribution is already recovering.
Moving A&B into BITC will mean the former’s staff being reduced from 100 to 22 and losing its responsibility for training arts organisations in fundraising and acting as a broker between the arts and business, though retaining its charitable status. “We are going back to our roots, as a campaiging organisation in the business community, and the Prince of Wales will take a high profile in that campaign,” Tweedy said.
Tweedy, 58, who was made a Lieutenant of the Royal Victorian Order, the personal gift of the Queen, in 2003, will to be replaced by a campaign director who will report to the BITC chief executive, Stephen Howard. Tweedy will become a fund-raising vice-president alongside celebrity supporters Stephen Fry, Lord Mandelson, Joanna Lumley, Dame Diana Rigg, former Arts Council chairman Sir Gerry Robinson and Lord Puttnam.
