The report into the Arts Council's handling of the last arts funding round has now been published, and I report on it here. All involved - including its author Genista McIntosh and Alan Davey, the chief executive of ACE - agree that the events of the winter were deeply damaging to the reputation of the organisation. Both McIntosh and Davey argue that the decisions ACE made were on the whole right - but badly handled and communicated. ACE ended up with, according to McIntosh, "some of the most damaging publicity in its 60-year history". It ended up exposed to the "collective wrath" of the arts world; and itself exacerbated problems that had been visited on it by bad luck and bad timing.
McIntosh urges that ACE implements peer review as quickly as possible - meaning that artists will be involved in the judgements of the merits or demerits of arts organisations. Unsurprisingly, she also advises a clearer relationship between regional offices of ACE and the national office. And, inter plurima alia, the most intangible piece of advice: "I recommend that [ACE] takes urgent steps to repair and renew those relationships which have been damaged as a result of the Investment Strategy Process."
This seems to me to be the crucial thing. If ACE is going to make judgements about the relative quality of different arts organisations - and not expect a furore like the one it has just created - it is going to have to be trusted. To do that, it is going to have to prove that is qualified to make these judgements. At the moment, ACE as a whole comes across very successfully as a bunch of jargon-dominated bureaucrats often more interested in their own "legacy" than in the arts themselves. They seem to be locked into an over large, confusing, inward-looking organisation that thinks and speaks an entirely different language from artists. And they have shown that they are bunglers. Can they claw back their credibility?
