Culture Ireland again / comment (July 8, 2008)
More data
compiled by Madeline Meehan
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| Updated from artnews #603: Culture Ireland: amount disbursed by funding round and artform; source of underlying figures here |
It would be hard to argue that Culture Ireland has run out of money (contrary to our previous suggestion – see here). They are scheduled to give away €419,750 in the upcoming months (what is essentially their summer budget). And despite the fact that €419,750 is less than they have given away in each the last four seasons, it is certainly quite a lot of money and it is quite a lot more than they have given away for a number of seasons since 2005, when Culture Ireland was founded.
That being said, their distribution of funds seems fairly random. In Dec 06, for example, music got almost €1m (!), but in other seasons it ranks somewhere in the middle. Theatre and Dance do seem to be doing the most consistently well with funding; they always have some programs that receive funding and they generally receive a majority of the funding dispersed.
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| Updated from artnews #603: Culture Ireland: % of total funds disbursed by funding round and artform; source of underlying figures here |
Culture Ireland seems to be funding travelers from Ireland with artistic intentions more than the general spread of Irish Culture - theatre and dance troupes that travel to do a production in a different country, artists who travel with an exhibit to a different country, authors who do live readings. But these are definitely not the most cost-efficient ways to spread Irish culture and they are certainly not the most common. Culture Ireland also focuses especially on specific countries, meaning that the same project occurring in two different countries could be distinctly more likely to get funding in one than the other; think China, say, rather than Tibet.
It would certainly help determine the fairness of their decisions if they made their process a little more transparent. How many people apply from each category for each season? Does the amount of funding they have available to distribute really vary that drastically from one season or year to another?
Comment
by Peter FitzGerald
(1)
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| Culture Ireland: number of recipients - artists or art groups - by artform and funding round; source of underlying figures here |
Ah, spin, where would we be without it? On the Culture Ireland website and in its press release, the text for the the June 08 round of grants starts thus:
Culture Ireland today announced details of its summer funding round: over €400,000 was awarded to 80 arts projects across Europe, USA, Asia, the Middle East, Africa and Australia.
A significant focus on the visual arts is evident, with 19 artists awarded funding to exhibit abroad, including Nick Miller (€6,000 towards his solo exhibition at the New York Studio School Gallery), Clare Langan (€5,000 towards her participation in the Singapore Biennale), Cló Ceardlann na gCnoc in Donegal (€10,000 for participation in the Art Caucasus exhibition in Tbilisi), and ongoing support for galleries to promote Irish artists at leading international art fairs.
Reading that, you would be a bit surprised, probably, to learn that there were 50% more recipients under the Music heading than under the Visual Arts heading. Music also got 50% more money. (See graphs and figures above.)
Could it be that Culture Ireland are sensitive about a certain visual-arts website looking into their funding habits? Hope so. But guys, spinning people just isn't nice.
(2)
Bear with me.
In his editorial in the latest edition of The Stinging Fly, Ireland's leading magazine for emerging writers, Declan Meade describes a recent argument made by poet Eavan Boland. She says that is is important not to lose sight of those poets who do not wish to or do not know how to or are temperamentally unable to 'play the system' (my phrase, not Meade's or Boland's). Not every poet wants to do a poetry reading or lecutre or fill out a grant application. What is true of the poet, Meade says, goes for writers more generally. And what goes for writers, I would argue, goes too for visual artists. Some physically and psychologically dread openings of their exhibitions; for some, the studio is where it all happens, the rest is a foreign land.
And what's true for artists applies to much of the arts in general. Some people create well, some play the system well, some do both. What has this to do with Culture Ireland? One of the criteria Culture Ireland applies is that the artists or their gallerists should be prepared to travel, to be there in person. Fair enough, perhaps, at first blush. Artists who know how to network can do very well in a new situation abroad. But art - painting, drawing, multimedia, etc - does not require the presence of the artist, it can travel alone. (And, perhaps even more blatantly, a book does not require the presence of its author to be consumed.)
Other artforms, most obviously theatre and dance, do require the presence of the artists. No-one seeks to be a stage actor who isn't going to be present - it's self-contradicting. And thus, wittingly or otherwise, Culture Ireland's penchant towards shipping artists of any artform to distant locations has a built-in bias towards those artforms that require the physical presence of the artist.
I can't argue with much coherence for other artforms, although I strongly suspect that it is sometimes better to send a new novel by a writer in Ireland to 500 critics abroad, than to send a shy, self-effecting writer to do a twenty-minute reading in one veune in a distant country. Or to send CDs of music to 500 radio stations than to require, in every case, that the musician(s) be present at some location - which may be a very low-impact location - abroad. Yet, I strongly suspect, you will not find Culture Ireland funding the sending of books or CDs (or, alas, art magazines any more).
I would love to see more money going to theatre and dance. I would love to see more money going to all artforms, but of course the visual arts in particular. I would love to see the visual arts get the same level of funding from Cutlure Ireland that theatre and dance get - the visual arts currently have a shortfall of €3.334 million (€3.334 million!) in that respect, relative to theatre and dance, over the past three years.
I would love, in short, to see Culture Ireland operate by criteria that are not inherently biased.
(3)
The Board of Culture Ireland (see http://www.cultureireland.gov.ie/aboutus/board.html) currently boasts three representative specific to Music, including the Chair, and none specific the visual arts. How fair is that? When the current Chief Executive of Culture Ireland was appointed, the press release ran:
Since 2000 Eugene Downes has run a consultancy advising Irish Government bodies on international arts strategy and managing cultural events abroad. He has programmed and produced showcase concerts in twenty countries across Europe, Asia and South America for State Visits and Trade Missions by the President and Taoiseach. Previously Eugene worked as an Irish diplomat, including a spell as Cultural Attaché in Russia, and as a music and opera broadcaster on RTÉ Lyric fm. He has served on the Boards of leading arts organisations in Ireland and abroad.
I would love music (and theatre and dance) to get all the funding they need from Culture Ireland. But I would equally love knowing that the visual arts are getting a proper look in with a Board - and CEO - that is so strong on music.
(4)
How about some transparency? How many applications has Culture Ireland received under each artform in the past, for a total of how much? Those figures would represent one way of knowing whether or not a bias does exist in the awarding of funds to the different artforms. Eg, if the visual arts had a success rate of 30% in terms of number of recipients or amount received, out of the applications under the visual-arts heading, and music, say, only 10% for all applications under the music heading, you'd certainly wonder what was going on. In the absence of figures, anything could be happening.
Some transparency would also help to explain, perhaps, why there is so much flip-flopping about in the number of recipients and amounts received from one funding round to the next. (Or transparency might bring less flip-flopping - the Board of Culture Ireland might be suprised by its own funding patterns, if the success rates were expressed in such percentages.)
(5) And finally: spin, to say it again, is not nice. No more, please.
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