Nicholas Serota - Director of Tate Modern
Since the creation of the Department of National Heritage in 1992, the arts have been able to claim a place at the cabinet table in No 10, and this has led to a fundamental change in the way they have been treated by government. This is especially true since Labour took office in 1997 and the subsequent increases in funding for both the arts and the museums and galleries sector. The arts do now have a voice in government. What concerns me is that this voice should not only be loud, but also be heard by more powerful cabinet colleagues, such as the Treasury.
The fact remains that the public's enthusiasm for the arts seems to be running some way ahead of the appetite of politicians to embrace culture as a fundamental part of the fabric of society. I hope politicians will recognise that, for young people especially, the arts are not something foreign or distant, but very much a part of life, in London and beyond. I would hope the government might recognise that Britain plays a leading role in the world in the field of culture.
David Hare - Playwright
My play The Permanent Way is about the curse of management culture. This ascendant cult of bureaucracy is nowhere more virulent than at the BBC and at the Arts Council. Once artists were given money and told to get on with fulfilling the true purpose of art: simply put, the creation of beauty and meaning. Now management moonies blizzard theatres and orchestras with meaningless demands. Good people, in response, waste hours "defining their objectives" and peddling palliative crap in the hope of wheedling the small amounts of cash that make the difference between extinction and survival.
There is currently no hope of cleaning the fouled gutter that is the Arts Council, because we are being forced to work to a false model. Governments of both stripes demanded the deadly apparatus of business-friendly philanthropy - top-heavy development departments, PR staff, executive directors, donor lists - without noticing that the habit of generosity which marks out the United States barely obtains in this country.
As so often, we have seized from the US all the worst aspects of its culture without adopting the best. Here, business and the ruling class take their cue from the monarch, who has never, as far as I know, reached into her pocket to endow a single hospital, school or arts centre. Theatres, opera houses and orchestras are now groaning with staff charged to chase the illusion that the same free-spending sense of civic duty that marks out the self-made in the US will one day begin to take hold here. Little sign of it yet.
As with the railways, the government needs to reassert the vital principle that public funding involves public responsibility. It would be exhilarating to turn from the time-wasting effort of trying to shake out the pockets of the champagne-belching stony-hearted to the rather more rewarding task of putting on plays for the non-dinner-suited public at large. My experience is, when they're allowed to see them, they seem to like them.
Richard Eyre - Theatre and film director
Not long after the general election in 1997, Tony Blair held a meeting to discuss the arts. He listened patiently to the case for raising the priority of the arts in funding terms, in education and in the public's perception. I should have taken seriously the barely concealed glare of disdain that Alastair Campbell gave us, but Blair said that "the arts will be put at the core of the government's thinking" and I - sentimental softie that I am - believed him.
Four years later, the arts were finally given a substantial increase in Treasury grant and the Creative Partnerships initiative was set up in an attempt to dissolve the apartheid between those who enjoy the benefits of the arts and those who feel disenfranchised from them.
But there are also reasons to be miserable. First, there has been no initiative from the Department for Education. If the government believes in funding the arts and in "fairness" and "accessibility", it should be putting the arts in the core curriculum and expanding subsidy to allow cheaper tickets. Second, there has been no recognition that attitudes can be changed by the Prime Minister making it clear that it's acceptable to like Riverdance and classical ballet, Blur and Beethoven, Ben Elton and Samuel Beckett. Third, there is clear intent (and opportunity) to erode the power of the most important arts organisation in Britain: the BBC.
Government members should write these words of Ruskin's on their hearts: "Great nations write their autobiographies in three manuscripts: the book of their deeds, the book of their words and the book of their art. Not one of these books can be understood unless we read the two others, but of the three the only trustworthy one is the last."
Finally, the Arts Council should concern itself more with art and its standards and less with social initiatives; and artists should be wary of becoming too dependent on government. Their aims are, and always should be, incompatible.
Julia Peyton-Jones - Director of the Serpentine Gallery
Funding for the arts in France still comes mainly from public subsidy or its equivalent. In Germany, public subsidy is on the decline, and in Italy it is scarce. The American model of little or no government subsidy for public sector arts organisations has crept up on us in Britain over the past ten to 15 years. The consequence of this erosion is such that government subsidy doesn't even cover the running costs of some organisations, let alone touch their programmes.
The US art world relies on philanthropic donations made by individuals, usually collectors, who have unparalleled power over institutions and can sometimes be ruthless in wielding it. Although the ethos of individual giving is nothing like as generous or sophisticated in the UK, sponsorship and donations now fulfil the core funding of many institutions.
Most directors of successful publicly funded arts organisations are now, in effect, entrepreneurs, creating financial stability against the odds rather than concentrating on the nurture of art and the public who see it.
Charles Saumarez Smith - Director of the National Gallery
When the Dep-artment of National Heritage was founded, museums and galleries thought that it was good for the cultural sector to be represented in cabinet. This remains the case, although it too often appears that the Department for Culture is treated as a junior branch of Whitehall, for ministers on their way up (David Mellor) or out (most of them since, apart from Stephen Dorrell). It is hard to imagine Britain following the example of New Zealand, where the cultural brief comes directly under the prime minister because of its importance, or of Spain, where the leader has lunch with artists and poets every Friday to keep himself in touch with what is going on in the arts.
The department is inclined to underplay the importance of major institutions in the arts and their core funding. Museums and galleries have become increasingly significant as emblems of national cultural identity throughout Europe. Look at what the Spanish government is doing in developing its museum mile in Madrid, including new exhibition galleries at the Prado. Look at how the German government is developing the Museum Island in Berlin, with David Chipperfield producing brave designs for the redevelopment of the Neues Museum. Look at how the French government has supported the Louvre over the past two decades. Or, for that matter, look at the effect of the National Gallery's Titian exhibition or the opening of Tate Modern in terms of international cultural prestige. The development of national museums and galleries is not marginal, but influences the way Britain is perceived throughout the world.
Philip Dodd - Director of the ICA
We live in strange times - so much government activity around the arts, so many funding bodies, so many arts institutions, so much media coverage, yet so little serious argument over why the arts matter and how they are developing.
The Department for Culture needs to recognise a number of things. First, the narcissistic belief that Britain is the centre of the world ("Cool Britannia", "Young British Artists") is bad for art. There needs to be a strategy to make Britain more porous, more welcoming to culture made from outside the EU and North America and Japan. Second, subsidised arts institutions are not necessarily better defenders of arts and culture than private ones. Literature, film and popular music - not to mention design, architecture and fashion - live largely beyond the world of public subsidy. It is small private film distribution companies that ensure that the UK is fed something other than a diet of Hollywood movies - that the glories of cinema history are available in the local HMV.
Third, all funding bodies ought to provide intellectual defences of their decisions, not bureaucratic ones. Fourth, one day each year, all arts institutions should throw open their doors for free to attract people who have not previously entered them. Access matters because new art forms are inseparable from the development of new audiences (just think of the rise of the novel or landscape painting). It was that arch-conservative T S Eliot who said that any minority culture would finally shrivel. And he was right.
Fifth, science ought to shelter under the umbrella of the Department for Culture. There may even be a good argument for saying that science is now providing the radical cultural visions that we once expected of the arts.
Sally Greene - Owner of the Old Vic and Criterion theatres
''The Ministry of Fun" is as pejoratively honest and dismissive a term as any government has ever coined for a department that has historically been considered an encumbrance in the con-text of the serious business of running the country. The deeply ingrained government attitude that the arts are a frivolity is as prevalent as ever and is reflected, if further indication were needed, in the appointments of ministers (with one recent exception) whose cultural ineptitude would render them ineligible for top-level jobs in an industry that is a hugely undervalued national resource. Nicholas Serota has inspired us all and, with Tate Modern, shown what can be achieved. We need people of similar vision, understanding and commitment representing our government.
