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Philip Booth stated that ''those who buy a ticket are choosing to support the arts. But, our history shows that arts and culture can develop independently of the state.''

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Those who wish to cut government arts funding are often branded 'philistines'. But there is a difference between appreciating the arts and believing that the state should support the arts.

Economic arguments in favour of state funding often revolve round 'public good' or 'externality' effects. In other words, it may be difficult to exclude those who do not contribute to the arts from the benefits they provide; or there may be social benefits from the arts leading them to be under-provided. But, did the arts thrive before 1946 when state funding took off?

In fact, England's rich cultural tradition developed free of government funding and it often had a commercial edge, suggesting that the arts can thrive in a market economy. In the 16 th century we had commercially successful and popular English theatre, including Shakespeare. Although Shakespeare had the patronage of the monarch, this was much more like the royal warrant that a shop might receive rather than financial support. Shakespeare was commercial. Indeed, it is interesting to note that, even today, whilst the Royal Shakespeare Company is 50 per cent funded by the state, the Globe theatre stages Shakespeare plays with no subsidy. In 17 th century Britain, the public concert developed and 18 th century London was a hothouse of composers. The Hallé Orchestra, the Royal Albert Hall, Gilbert and Sullivan, and the Fitzwilliam are all great cultural creations from the era of subsidy-free culture. Elsewhere, Chopin, Bach and the Dutch masters all paid their own way.

There can be a thriving commercial arts scene without state funding. The economic arguments at best can be used to justify the position that certain types of arts might be 'under-provided'. But we should also consider that state provision of the arts might lead to problems.

Firstly, with state finance, we will often get the arts that the government wants and not the arts that the people want. This is especially problematic as culture is an important part of civil society which can be used for communicating all sorts of moral and political messages.

Secondly, arts funding can be captured by other interests - such as those leading big, high-profile projects centred on London or the administrators of the funding bodies. Much arts funding goes through the Arts Council. It has slimmed down its operation under much pressure from recent budget cuts but, until recently, the Arts Council spent about as much on administration as it did on arts in three of the nine main regions of England put together. 50 per cent of all funding went to London and the regions got the crumbs.

Furthermore, even after much resisted staff cuts, the Arts Council will have nearly one employee for every £1 million given out in grants; in 2008 it had 50 press and communications staff - effectively all paid advocates of state funding.

State funding also crowds out private funding, which is pitifully low in the UK compared with the US. The removal of user charges from museums not only removed an important source of revenue, but also has the effect of making museums less interested in their visitors and more interested in the bureaucracy that funds them. Few other European countries have totally removed admission charges from museums for good reason. State funding can also raise costs. Performers are highly 'inelastic' in their supply, just like footballers. When Sky TV pumps more money into football, footballers are paid more. The same happens to artists when the government pumps money into the arts: it can be the cost and not the supply that increases.

What might be the best solution? If there is to be state support for the arts at all, it is probably best provided at local level. This is less likely to lead to a monoculture in the arts and ensures greater variation in what is provided. Secondly, perhaps the lottery is a reasonable source of funding. This is voluntary: those who buy a ticket are choosing to support the arts. But, our history shows that arts and culture can develop independently of the state.

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Should the state support the arts? - Institute of Economic Affairs

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Those who wish to cut government arts funding are often branded 'philistines'. But there is a difference between appreciating the arts and believing that the state should support the arts. Economic arguments in favour of state funding often revolve round 'public good' or 'externality' effects.

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It might be ill-advised to reduce an artist's life and work to a single observation, the magic key that unlocks everything, but in the case of Robert Mapplethorpe there is a pronounced duality - in the themes and subjects depicted in his "icy", graphically stylized black-and-white photographs; in the dark-angel personae he cultivated; and in the controversies all of these facets wittingly or unwittingly sparked during his short lifetime.

Let's begin with the pictures. An exhibition at Sean Kelly Gallery in New York earlier this year, titled Saints and Sinners, paired works selected for certain contrasts and similarities: a dark shrouded figure next to a light shrouded figure; Frank Diaz holding a ram's horns to his head next to Lisa Lyon with a scorpion between her legs; a blond Amanda Lear next to a brunette Mapplethorpe in drag. The black-and-white of the photographs was emphasized by an installation featuring black stripes on white walls, the stark contrast of which undergirded a theater of light S&M play and religious irreverence. Mapplethorpe's tight orchestration of his photographs - arrangement, lighting, composition - lends a perpetual chilling effect to a full spectrum of erotic subjects.

As for the personae, Mapplethorpe by all accounts was a good boy harboring bad boy fantasies. A series of photographs taken by artist Judy Linn, Mapplethorpe's classmate at Pratt in the 1960s, shows a baby-faced Robert at the beach, his head framed in a dark cloud of soft curls contrasted against smooth white skin, incongruously lighting a cigarette and wearing chains, a cross, bangles, and a black leather bikini bathing suit held together by metal rings. As with Warhol, Mapplethorpe's artistic success came to rest as much on his provocative public image as on his art and he cultivated this from an early age.

Mapplethorpe's many alter egos, explored over the years in a variety of self-portraits, hardly signal a sloughing off of the constraints of the Catholic religion he was raised in, as one might assume. Rather, his various guises - militia man, gay sex fiend, femme fatale - reveal a committed exploration of Catholic themes familiar throughout art history: the debasement and transcendence of the flesh; transgression, punishment and confession; agony and ecstasy. As curator and art historian Germano Celant has observed, Mapplethorpe was deeply spiritual but he plunged headlong into the dark side of religion, courting something of a "Catholic inversion" characterised by an attraction to the demonic, the violent and the abject, all the while striving toward a vision of redemption, the conversion of suffering into grace through beauty, balance and stasis.

For Mapplethorpe, the greatest metaphor for this conversion was sex - more precisely, sadomasochistic sex, which he pursued most intensively as a voyeur and a participant during a three-year period in the late 1970s. The notorious X Portfolio resulting from this foray is often treated as an anomalous subset within the artist's larger body of work, consisting mostly of classical nudes, flower studies and celebrity portraits (select flowers would come to form a Y Portfolio, select black nudes a Z), usually for the purpose of minimizing the disruption to an otherwise robustly healthy artistic career.

But the "sex pictures", as Mapplethorpe called them, were essential to the whole, as demonstrated in his persistent attempts to bring them to the center of his artistic presentation. This he most emphatically proclaimed in his creation of the X, Y and Z Portfolios, a modern-day b oîte en valise, after Duchamp, a "suitcase" of the artist's most select wares. LACMA exhibited the portfolios in their entirety in 2012, something that never happened in the artist's lifetime, despite his persistent attempts at integration.

Leather Crotch (1980) by Robert Mapplethorpe. Photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

It should be noted that the S&M pictures, while involving models Mapplethorpe encountered in New York bars like the Mineshaft, depict not sex acts per se but re-enactments of sex acts, theatrically lit against spare backdrops within the tightly controlled environment of the artist's Bond Street studio. This stringent artistic process forged a common aesthetic within the total body of work, placing flowers and cocks - as the artist often insisted - on equal visual footing. More importantly, it highlights a taller totem of meaning: Mapplethorpe saw all social life as theatre. For him, the medieval rituals of S&M, with its strict behavioral codes and specialised equipment, was in no way different from the fashion rituals of modern women, attempting to make themselves attractive and powerful, or from the display of flowers or the arrangement of nude bodies. All appeared as actors on stage, performing the archetypal themes of lust, love and longing.

Mapplethorpe liked duality and he also liked controversy. His first career success with this dyad occurred in February of 1977, when twin shows of his work appeared in New York, one at the commercial Holly Solomon gallery, the other at a non-profit arts space called the Kitchen. Holly Solomon showed Mapplethorpe's portraits while the Kitchen showed selections from the X Portfolio, a separation declaring both mainstream acceptance and underground resistance. Marking the separation in the shows' shared announcement, Mapplethorpe created a double self-portrait, one showing the artist's hand wearing a dress shirt and Cartier watch, the other hand wearing a black leather glove and studded metal bracelet, both writing the word "pictures" - driving home the notion that respectability and perversion are often two sides of the same coin.

Later photographs, such as the audacious Man in Polyester Suit (1980), show a more sophisticated fusion of the same ideas. As noted in the forthcoming exhibition catalogue by Paul Martineau and Britt Salvesen, "Mapplethorpe enjoyed setting up provocative juxtapositions in order to insist on continuities." But sometimes continuities are too far a reach and it is in those devilish moments when Mapplethorpe's work achieves its most explosive and lasting impact.

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A demonstration against the decision to censor Mapplethorpe's work. Photograph: John Stamstad/Contemporary Arts Center

Mapplethorpe and the culture wars

Though one would hardly call Mapplethorpe's vision innocent, he could not have foreseen the specific political eruptions his artistic sensibilities activated. Two major retrospectives, both opening in 1988, just before the artist's death from Aids, became major skirmishes in the American culture wars. The Whitney Museum's show, titled Robert Mapplethorpe, comprised 110 photographs and did not travel outside of the artist's home turf of New York City. Robert Mapplethorpe: the Perfect Moment, comprised 125 photographs and was scheduled for an extended tour, ultimately to seven US cities: Philadelphia, Chicago, Washington DC, Hartford, Berkeley, Cincinnati and Boston. Both retrospectives presented selections from the X Portfolio.

The first round of trouble occurred in Washington. The Meese anti-pornography commission had been established in 1985 and conservative politicians, notably Jesse Helms and Alfonse D'Amato, were railing against various forms of arts funding. Specifically incensed over the National Endowment for the Arts's support for works such as Andreas Serrano's Piss Christ, they called for the elimination of the NEA and its sponsorship of art they deemed "morally reprehensible".

Folding under pressure, the Corcoran's director Christina Orr-Cahill canceled the Mapplethorpe exhibition three weeks before it was scheduled to open, sparking a cinematic protest rally outside the institution, where 10 of Mapplethorpe's photographs were projected onto the exterior wall of the building. The most striking among these were a tattered American flag and a self-portrait of the recently deceased artist, gazing quizzically out over the crowd. In a bold political move, the Washington Project for the Arts's director Jock Reynolds hung the show across town, attracting nearly 50,000 visitors.

Two interim venues later, The Perfect Moment hit a different political wall at the Contemporary Arts Center (CAC) in Cincinnati, where several national anti-pornography organisations were headquartered and local law enforcement was known for its vigorous prosecution of obscenity since the 1970s. Taking notice of the events in Washington, a local organisation called Citizens for Community Values (CCV) launched a letter-writing campaign to try to block the exhibition. In the weeks before the exhibition's opening, on 7 April 1990, protests were staged on both sides. The local media added a third ring to the circus, relaying not only events and public opinion but also educating viewers on the fine points of Ohio obscenity law, the first amendment, the nature of art, homosexuality, the Aids crisis and sex acts most viewers never dreamed existed.

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A gallery view of the Perfect Moment, Mapplethorpe's exhibition. Photograph: Rare books and archives library at the University of Cincinnati

The conflict came to a head on the day of the show's opening, as lawmakers issued indictments against the CAC and its director Dennis Barrie on charges of pandering obscenity for pictures of homoerotic acts and the illegal use of a minor in nudity-oriented material. Five photographs ultimately formed the basis of the trial, which occurred four months later, after the exhibition had completed its full run with record-breaking attendance of more than 80,000 visitors. (Two pictures of nude children were eventually thrown out when the mothers signed statements saying they had authorized the photographs and their use.)

In a twisted "what if", the CCV had ill-advisedly generated a mass mailing containing examples of the so-called pornographic works - among them, the artist's self-portrait with a bullwhip in his anus, a man urinating in another man's mouth and several pictures not even by Mapplethorpe. As WCPO TV reporter Stephen Hill pointed out, if the jury were to declare the works obscene, CCV could have faced similar charges for distributing obscene material through mail. Another mischievous journalist noted that the very same pictures in question were freely available for viewing in town at the public library and in numerous bookstores and those institutions were not being prosecuted.

The jury, selected because members had not seen the exhibition and had never visited an art gallery or museum, was asked to decide whether the photographs were obscene or art based on consideration of the five pictures alone, without any exposure to the other 120 photographs in the exhibition. (A legal footnote: the judge had thrown out arguments that the contested works must be considered as part of the whole, and that the exhibition itself was a total work of art; favouritism toward the prosecution was evident throughout the trial, excepting judge Carl Rubin's Easter Sunday decision to grant the museum immunity from harassment or seizure of works by local police during the run of the exhibition.)

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Police officers in CAC. Photograph: Rare books and archives library at the University of Cincinnati

In a court transcript ripe for comedy, expert witnesses on both sides testified for and against the artistic merits of the work. Judith Reisman, a "media specialist" and former songwriter for the children's television programme Captain Kangaroo, argued that the photographs were not art because no faces - and thus no emotions - were visible; in an article published the previous year, she had accused Mapplethorpe of being a Nazi and a child molester.

Almost as bizarre, Janet Kardon, the exhibition's original curator, discussed the artistic properties of the photographs strictly in terms of light, form and composition, evading any mention of their sexual content. Ohio obscenity law states that a work can only be considered obscene if, "taken as a whole, [it] lacks serious literary, artistic, political, or scientific value". An apple pie missing one of its ingredients - flour, butter, apples - is not an apple pie.

After less than two hours of deliberation, the jury acquitted Barrie and the CAC on all counts, determining that the photographs were indeed art and therefore not obscene. While Mapplethorpe's personal definition of art delighted in the duality of artistic merit and obscenity (he briskly referred to his work as "smut art"), luckily for the defendants, US law marks an absolute separation between the two.

A symposium on the 25th anniversary of the conflict, held last month at the CAC and organized by Cincinnati non-profit FotoFocus (a refrain will occur at the New Museum in New York on 19 November), revealed a city and institution in some ways still recovering from the polarities of 1990. One question that was frequently asked: has Cincinnati changed in 25 years?

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Mapplethorpe's 1985 self-portrait. Photograph: Robert Mapplethorpe Foundation

Certainly attitudes towards homosexuality and Aids have changed, both of which clearly hit nerves among certain members of the community. An undercurrent in the attacks against The Perfect Moment was fear of contagion from the works on view, a visceral and irrational response born out of a climate of national ignorance regarding the functions and capabilities of the disease, which was so little understood at that time: by simply looking at the X Portfolio - by being in the same room with it - one risked infection with the HIV virus. And it was widely understood that most or all of the men depicted in the photographs had died, or were dying, of the disease as a result of their behaviours.

If today the X Portfolio pictures are hard to look at (and they still are), it has more to do with the violence than the sexuality. The flinch one feels in response to an image such as Lou, NYC (1978) (a picture of a pinkie shoved into a urethra) is a spasm of physical empathy, not so different from seeing a razor blade slit an eyeball, as in Luis Bunuel's film Un Chien Andalou. But if the homosexual content has lost some of its sting, the child nudity has not. If anything, anxiety over the exploitation of children has only heightened in the last 25 years; curators today will tell you that Jessie McBride (1976) and Honey (1976) court more trouble - globally, not just in the US.

One has to ask if the exhibition was poorly calculated on the part of Kardon, Barrie, and others who supported it, a grave misjudgment in terms of what American audiences needed or were prepared to see. Was fisting something people really needed to know about? Or didn't they? Mapplethorpe was not an overtly political artist but his retrospectives occurred during a period of obdurate political and cultural conservatism. And, of course, The Perfect Moment ignited two enormous political controversies within that climate.

Mapplethorpe's work was intentionally provocative and, in some ways, that was just a device to get attention, a component of his career strategy. But provocation was also typical of art of the late 1970s and 1980s, as seen in work by performance artist Karen Finley and by Mapplethorpe's fellow photographers Serrano, Peter Hujar and Nan Goldin. Mapplethorpe had his own perspective, his religio-metaphorical vision of S&M as modern theatre, as has been noted. But his work also claimed its place among the art resistance of its time, expressing the urgency of a political climate in which cities were failing, lives were being lost to Aids, and government response was to turn a blind eye or to be openly antagonistic.

In that light,The Perfect Moment, and those who chose to stand in its defence, just might be one of the boldest and bravest art events of the 20th-century. Its provocation polarized communities but, in the end, a continuity of sorts was found - the moral universe gaped open and was imperfectly refastened.

Robert Mapplethorpe: The Perfect Moment, 25 Years Later is at the New Museum in New York on Thursday. Details here
Topics

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Whipping up a storm: how Robert Mapplethorpe shocked America

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It might be ill-advised to reduce an artist's life and work to a single observation, the magic key that unlocks everything, but in the case of Robert Mapplethorpe there is a pronounced duality - in the themes and subjects depicted in his "icy", graphically stylized black-and-white photographs; in the dark-angel personae he cultivated; and in the controversies all of these facets wittingly or unwittingly sparked during his short lifetime.

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Cash-strapped arts organisations and businesses are required to publicise a government campaign in order to access much needed rescue grants.

The money is part of the Culture Recovery Fund announced earlier this year after ministers were accused of abandoning the sector.

But confidential documents, seen by The Independent, show organisations were told that in receiving the cash they had agreed to credit the fund and mention the government's 'Here for Culture' campaign on social media.

One recipient lashed out at ministers, saying it was "somewhat galling to be forced to essentially thank the government for funds to bail us out of the situation they have put us into".

The documents say "we require you to welcome this funding on your social media accounts (using #HereForCulture)".

Arts groups were also told they would have to mention the grant on their website "using the Here For Culture logo".

They would be sent "useful wording to help you with this work".

The Here For Culture logo is branded "HM Government".

As the first tranche of grants from the fund were announced earlier this week culture secretary Oliver Dowden said they showed that the government was "here for culture ... with this massive support package ensuring our cultural sector can bounce back and be there for future generations".

Ministers announced more than £1.5bn in funding in July as anger mounted over the treatment of the arts, with many venues forced to remain closed even as much of society reopened.

A senior executive of one company which received money said: "Other sectors received appropriate funding before this, while we were left out to dry.

"The grant recipients have always been here for culture. It's hard to believe a government that has left our freelance colleagues high and dry feels the same."

He added that it was "odd that they insist we turn around this messaging immediately for their benefit - on the day of announcement - when we have been scrambling for an answer for months after the prospect of funding was announced in July.

"The funds won't arrive for another three weeks, so this impetus certainly doesn't sit well."

Shadow Culture Secretary Jo Stevens said: "It's deeply insulting for arts organisations to be forced to promote a government campaign in this way. It's taken more than 100 days for the government to confirm recipients with the actual money not likely to arrive for several weeks yet. A government confident in itself would not make this a requirement."

Jamie Stone, Liberal Democrat culture spokesman, said: "Boris Johnson and his Government's handling of this crisis is becoming ever more shameful and shambolic."

Labour MP Kevin Brennan, a member of the Commons Culture select committee, said: "To require them to pay homage in this way is a bit of an insult.

"There is something mildly sinister about it".

Mr Dowden said: "It is perfectly reasonable that organisations receiving money from the Culture Recovery Fund were asked to publicly accredit the government funding and alert local media."

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Arts groups forced to back government campaign on social media to secure vital funds

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Cash-strapped arts organisations and businesses are required to publicise a government campaign in order to access much needed rescue grants. The money is part of the Culture Recovery Fund announced earlier this year after ministers were accused of abandoning the sector.

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- The Public was intended to "revitalise the community"  of West Bromwich, with an innovative focus on interactive art.
-Costing £72 million to build, £30,000 a week for the council to run, and chronically underperforming, The Public was eventually shut in 2013; prompting the then government to call it "a gross waste of public money", and ACE to call it "not fit for purpose".

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The £72m Public arts centre in West Bromwich is to close.

Sandwell Council said it could not continue spending £30,000 a week to subsidise the attraction, which opened two years late in June 2008.

The Public's managing director Linda Saunders said the decision was "heartbreaking" and she was disappointed for the staff.

She said 120 paid apprentices and 60 workers would "immediately" lose their jobs when it closes on 30 November.

Recent proposals have been put forward to transform the building into a sixth-form college.

Council leader Darren Cooper said he knew the building "means a lot to many people" and it had "not been an easy decision to make".

He added: "The fact of the matter is the council cannot continue to subsidise The Public.

"The overall cost to the council is currently about £30,000 a week. That is nearly £1.6m a year.

"That is taxpayers' money. In the face of cuts from central government, this cannot carry on."

'Giant shoe box'

When designs for The Public were first put forward in 1994, the gallery was intended to revitalise the community.

Some residents, however, saw the building as an extravagance and a waste of money.

Criticism steadily grew as the project ran into difficulties, with debts rising and funding falling short.

The venue had to be rescued on more than one occasion by government grants or Arts Council funding.

Earlier this week Mr Cooper described the arts centre as a "giant shoe box" and said it should not have been built when it was by previous council leaders in his Labour group.

He said he had always had doubts privately about the building.

Since The Public opened, however, visitor numbers have steadily grown for theatre, music and comedy performances, as well as exhibitions.

'Really upset me'

Sandwell Arts Trust, which currently runs the centre, said more than 380,000 people visited in 2012-13, more than half of whom were from the Sandwell area.

Ms Saunders said the attraction had 52,000 visitors last month and said people came to The Public because it was "iconic".

She added: "People worked very hard in very difficult circumstances and that's what's driven us - to make a difference to Sandwell."

A petition calling for the centre to be saved has been signed by about 5,000 people.

Great-grandmother Catherine King has attended a knitting group every Friday at The Public and said she feared it would be unable to continue.

"It will be hard to find somewhere that can accommodate wheelchairs and scooters," she said.

"We're devastated. It has really upset me."

Ro Harris, from the LearnPlay Foundation, which provides an outreach service to schools, said: "We employ 150 staff at The Public.

"We will meet on Monday to discuss what will happen to us.

"At the moment we just do not know."

A total of 30 businesses are based in The Public.

'Nothing else like it'

Dennis Patel's IT recruitment company moved into the building in April.

He said: "The Public has had a rocky start but now it's right on the verge of achieving its potential.

"There are more and more artists and comedians coming here - there is nothing else like it."

However, mother-of-one and office worker Jenny Judge, from Mollin Street in Smethwick, said: "Thank God for that.

"It was a complete waste of money.

"You would not get me in there if you paid me. To think what they could have spent that money on."

Jean Groves, 77, from the Yew Tree estate on the border of West Bromwich and Walsall, said: "I think it's a shame.

"I have a lot of friends who use The Public.

"I like the cafe, I like the theatre. But I also understand Sandwell College needs more space."

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The Public arts centre in West Bromwich to close

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The £72m Public arts centre in West Bromwich is to close. Sandwell Council said it could not continue spending £30,000 a week to subsidise the attraction, which opened two years late in June 2008. The Public's managing director Linda Saunders said the decision was "heartbreaking" and she was disappointed for the staff.

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I dozed off a couple of times during Sunday night's BBC Four special Arts Question Time, chaired by Kirsty Wark. OK, I admit to be being dosed up against a stinking cold and imbibing a glass or two of wine, but the root cause of my sinking into the land of Nod was the tedium of a show (which promised to discuss "the challenges, opportunities, failings and future of the arts in the UK") almost primly determined not to disturb any piety or test any orthodoxy.

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Artists don't deserve tax breaks any more than street sweepers

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I dozed off a couple of times during Sunday night's BBC Four special Arts Question Time, chaired by Kirsty Wark.

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Anxious to know how you plan for organisations to explore and consolidate audiences without ongoing support from audience development agencies? For many, ticket revenue will become even more crucial, for example.
1.04pm
@adriennepye

We want to make sure more people experience and are inspired by the arts and we recognise the role that audience development agencies have played in building audiences, but National portfolio funding is probably not the best relationship for the Arts Council to have with audience development agencies. Remember they all have funding for next year and we'll be talking to them about how we can best work with them in the future, and on what. Getting more people to experience the arts is clearly a passion of ours, and is at the heart of everything we do.

How do you respond to the still valid criticisms that the Arts Council is still subsidising middle class entertainment for the wealthy who can well afford full prices rather than truly democratising the arts? And that there is still a disproportionate funding bias towards London ahead of other regions?
1.07pm
@interace

We fund all kinds of art forms and we're not ashamed of it. We fund everything from symphony orchestras, opera and the National Theatre to small local groups and ensembles, who are the life blood of the arts in this country. They all connect, they are all important, they are all about the integrity and excellence of the art form involved. And it is this ecology of national, local, small and large that we have tried to preserve. London is the home to many of our national arts institutions, whose reach extends to audiences across the whole country, but I agree we need to strike a balance and we have tried to do just that.

I would like to ask Alan Davey some questions posed anonymously by one of our leading orchestra managers on Norman Lebrecht's blog, Slipped Disc this morning.

The Arts Council promised not to salami slice, though that's exactly what it did to all the major Symphony orchestras.

1. Where's the evidence of any real orchestral strategy for the country?

2. Now that the Arts Council have set the grants for the next four years, what's the point of employing a Music Department? What's it going to DO?

3. How many more years of monitoring and assessing are there to be without any real change in structure of the orchestral scene which has been fundamentally the same for half a century?
1.12pm
@orchestralover

It's important to realise that there is more to our orchestra strategy than the eight symphony orchestras. In respect of them, we have had 8 strong bids from 8 orchestras performing really well at the moment. This hasn't always been the case. National Council debated this and decided that now was not the time to make major change in the number of orchestras we fund, particularly as they are all working at full capacity and on a very lean business model, that means we get a lot out of the money we put in. I do want to look, over the next four years, at how we realistically fund them to be the best they can be. Change for change's sake wouldn't be a good thing to do, as we would be in danger of wrecking a rich inheritance that forms the backbone of musical life in this country.

What strategy or framework will you adopt to ensure that all recipients of ACE funding design, deliver and maintain quality educational programmes to support of their wider work?

Thanks for the opportunity!
1.16pm
@jpjsavage

Work with children and young people was one of the goals we asked arts organisations to apply against, and this will be something we will talk to organisations about who mentioned this in their applications, as we discuss their funding agreements over the next few months. We have also given funding of around £10 million to a number of bridge organisations to connect arts organisations with children and young people in schools ad communities. And don't forget our Artsmark scheme that raises standards in schools who take the arts seriously and Arts Award - a really good Duke of Edinburgh-like scheme for the arts.

Alan - three questions:

1. Would you agree that while this NPF funding redistribution has been very transparent, fair and well thought out, ACE has missed an opportunity to think more radically about arts funding and answer the questions of what public money really should be used for?

2. Would you also agree that too much of your funding goes on buildings, the infrastructure of running arts companies, education/outreach/access programmes that are superficial and only produce statistics, and supporting work that is essentially commercial (though it may not be successfully so)?

3. Finally, if the arts really do bring in £3 for every £1 spent, then why are you subsidising this commercially successful operation? Either there are very viable parts that don't need funding at all, or for those that need the initial investment, you're missing an opportunity to use some of your funds as venture capital, take the return , and use that to fund what really is culturally valuable, but not economically viable: eg R&D for artists to do cutting edge work, nurturing and development of new artistic talent, and access schemes so those who can't afford it (and especially young people) are encouraged to experience the arts (as opposed to funding companies to do "education/outreach" work which, as we all know, is part of the "dance of deception" with funders to actually get money for core costs).
1.22pm
@Miasma

In answer to your three questions:

1. We set out a framework for our funding in October of last year. That was the framework we were funding against this time. And on our web site are explanations of what we are doing in each art form. We will be refining these over the next few months and coming up with a strong statement of what we are going to achieve in the next four years and how it contributes to the next ten years for the arts in this country. I think we have never been as clear as this before.

2. We do spend money on buildings but we spend more money on what goes on in them. We want to encourage better use of these buildings and we announced a Capital programme yesterday which we want to be more about sustainability of existing buildings that new builds. We need to make sure our infrastructure works as hard as it can.

3. Public funding makes the arts possible in many instances. It allows experiment; it drives developments that often have commercial spin-off. I don't apologise for that - that's a good mixed economy.

Are the big uplifts in visual arts to Local Authority galleries (MIMA, Towner) a response to reduction in local authority funding? Would be good to know that there isn't the moral hazard here of rewarding councils who reduce funding.
1.25pm
@walpole

No, we have always said we will not replace Local Authority funding. Some of the funding decisions we have made are conditional on Local Authority support. We will spend the next year in negotiations with some Local Authorities.

I am about to graduate with a Drama BA and throw myself into the world of theatre but I am highly concerned about how the cuts are going to affect my career. What advice would you give to those of us about to embark on artistic careers in the current economic climate?
1.27pm
@simhog1989

I think we have managed to protect, as far as we can, the network of regional producing theatres and also funded some really innovative theatre companies who are doing some remarkable things in all kinds of places. I believe British theatre is strong, and will continue to be strong over the next four years, and an inspiring place to work in. I think we're going to see the continuation of brilliant work even after the difficult decisions we made yesterday.

Mr Davey,

ACE pledged to support "great potential" in its new portfolio as well as "great track-records". A scan of the new members and knowledge of many non-RFOs who applied and were unsuccessful (including ourselves) suggests that ACE did not act on this. This is a portfolio for short-term gain, but that forgets to plant the seeds for the coming decade and beyond. What caused this crisis of confidence?
1.33pm
@theotherwayworks

I believe we have invested in potential with young organisations such as High Tide, who we believe have the ability to go on and develop in more remarkable ways, or the Aurora Ensemble, who present challenging music in new ways. Plus we've also freed up the Lottery funded Grants for the Arts fund, which is open application and which is where individual artists and small arts organisations who are truly innovative can apply. Big organisations who are in the new National portfolio can't apply to this fund, which is worth £48 million a year. So we have funded potential and we can fund still more applications as yet undreamed of.

Can you please explain the need to give huge increases of funding to so many similar type companies, and then cut 100% of funding to rural touring theatre companies, like Northumberland Theatre company, Forest Forge and Oxfordshire Theatre company? Why not share the funding, all taking a slight decrease and keep the companies that are producing fantastic work?

You have cut so many rural touring theatre companies - and yet you give them fantastic reports: it makes no sense. Why do you not value the work that they are taking out to the smaller communities? They are keeping a sense of community in this country and you have just destroyed that!
1.36pm
@emmaca

Funding for rural touring has actually been strengthened. We support a large number of rural touring circuits such as Rural Arts North Yorkshire, Take Art in Somerset and Live and Local in Warwickshire. The National Rural Touring Forum has had a big increase in funding to support rural touring across the country. So while we were unable to offer funding to some organisations, these examples - and there are many more - show that we have a strengthened commitment to touring in rural areas.

What can ACE do about improving the public perception of the subsidised arts sector? Many are questioning why the arts deserve public money at all, and we need ACE now more than ever to help us stand together as a sector to justify the work that we do.
1.44pm
@WomenandTheatre

Actually the public has a good perception of the arts but often they don't realise what is publicly funded. 76% of the public thinks funding the arts is a good thing. Politicians, however, don't feel as confident about speaking about their love of the arts as they do about, say, sport. I think we have a gap in public discourse of the arts in this country. That's something I want to change. We will be telling the story of our investment over the next four years in a clear way and we'll be looking for ways to enable public leaders and commentators to be able to talk about the arts in a way that isn't full of jargon; isn't full of figures that make no sense; but just talks about the arts and what they do for people and their lives. We've got to be more straight-talking about what we do, so that public leaders don't feel embarrassed about advocating for the arts

I appreciate the difficult decisions, but the process doesn't seem completely "transparent" to me, and nor does the "intellectual framework".

I wonder how "the best mix of organisations in terms of ... artform" can exclude animation - the artform that my (hitherto ACE funded) organisation specialises in.

Animation is interdisciplinary, cross-sectoral, something the UK is internationally respected for, award winning, digital, and has a predominantly young audience.

But I can't see any animation organisation on your list, and I'd like to ask at which stage of the process, and what part of the intellectual framework, was the decision to exclude an entire artform from the portfolio?
1.47pm
@garythomas

Animation is included in the funding decisions we announced yesterday. Yes, it's right that there is no single body dedicated to this work but galleries we fund, and moving image companies such as Film London, Lux and Film and Video Umbrella cover animation as part of their work. Remember the National portfolio isn't the only funding avenue. Grants for the arts is an open applications Lottery funded programme, through which we have recently made a large grant to a Animate, a specialist animation company.

How will you measure success?

After the scrapping of NI9 and NI11 what do you have in place to accurately assess the impact of this intervention (funding round).
1.54pm
@sanguinman

Having fought, while in my previous job in DCMS, for the NI11 measure, I would be the first to say that it wasn't sophisticated and was barely adequate in capturing anything about what the arts do. It was better than nothing but too crude to be of real use. We've got rid of the previous box-ticking approach. Now we have a more sophisticated approach based on peer assessment, self-assessment, funding agreements and a range of qualitative and quantitative research, that will give us a rounded picture of success. We've learned from experience that over mechanistic, usually instrumental, measurements do not begin to describe the true value of the arts.

Why, at a time of cuts, are institutions such as the Royal Opera House etc. paying vast sums of money for "star" performers? Surely the role of the arts council should be to nurture the arts, not subsidise the millionaire lifestyles of "star" singers, conductors, performers?
1.58pm
@mthephilosopher

Institutions like the Royal Opera House and the orchestras operate in an international market and there is pressure on publicly funded institutions all over the world to get best value for money in what they pay performers. The Arts Council can't compel organisations to operate in a closed market, as that would mean they would lose their international standing. I agree it is our role to nurture talent and up-and-coming performers and that is what we do through organisations like the National Opera Studio and others including English National Opera, who are credited with the development of many fine young singers in this country.

What was it like playing with Hawkwind ?
2.01pm
@HummDrumm

What was it like like playing with Hawkwind? It was all a dream ... and then I woke up.

Can we get some answers about Artsway, onedotzero, Kinetica Museum and digital media provision in this country which has been decimated by over half.

A no reply will just add to the harm done already.
2.06pm
@kw1330

I don't believe we have "decimated" digital media provision. We are supporting a huge range of organisations who focus on media arts and digital work - AV Festival, Watershed, Lighthouse, FACT, to name a few. Outside the portfolio, we announced a couple of weeks ago a partnership with the BBC that looks at building digital capacity across the arts sector. In respect of the organisations you mention, we had to make some extremely difficult decisions and many strong applications have had to be turned down. 2011-12 is a transitional year for Artsway and others and we'll work with them to explore other funding options available to them, such as Grant for the arts.

Nothing long winded from me.

What is art? And who gets to decide what's in and out?
2.09pm
@wesg

Art is the best way of expressing what it is to be human. Exactly what is art is the subject of a proper and profound debate; it's something we should have an open discussion about as a society and I hope we'll be doing that in the next few years.

Given that bookchain stores only offer anthologies, dead white male poets and Carol Ann Duffy while few independent bookstores will stock poetry (for fear of ending up with badly written self or vanity published poetry), how can you justify cutting funding to the Poetry Book Society without a proper, executable plan to assist poetry publishers in the distribution of poetry books to readers?

Who is going to fund and administer the T S Eliot prizes?
2.17pm
@audra19

We received a large number of strong applications from poetry organisations. The Poetry Book Society's application included good proposals which address our goals, including the TS Eliot Prize and the public readings by the shortlisted poets. However, in our judgment, it didn't seem to have the potential to reach as many people as other applicants. As I said yesterday if we turn someone down, it's not the end of their relationship with the Arts Council, and we want to talk to the PBS - especially about how we ensure the continuation of the TS Eliot prize. We are spending more on literature overall, and our support for poetry is, I think, really strong - supporting publishers and young poets, and enabling more people to be able to experience poetry.
2.19pm
I'm going to have to sign off now. Sorry I couldn't answer every question - as there were a lot! As I said, I think debate on the arts is healthy and thanks for joining in.

All the best,

Alan

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Arts council funding questions: the Q&A digested

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Anxious to know how you plan for organisations to explore and consolidate audiences without ongoing support from audience development agencies? For many, ticket revenue will become even more crucial, for example. Anxious to know how you plan for organisations to explore and consolidate audiences without ongoing support from audience development agencies?

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State subsidy is not the only way to cultural excellence, and often it only perpetuates mediocrity, says Simon Heffer.

There has been a long-running debate, at times quite heated, about public funding of the arts. One popular argument goes: why should bus drivers pay taxes to subsidise rich people to attend an opera at Covent Garden? (This assumes that no bus driver supports the opera; I prefer to believe that is not true.) The counter-argument runs something like this: putting on plays, art exhibitions, concerts, making films and, indeed, staging operas is so expensive that without public subsidy, it often wouldn't happen, and if it didn't, we would be a nation of boors (and, quite possibly, bores too). This assumes that such public funding as we have had since 1945, when the Arts Council's predecessor sprang into life, has done much to civilise us: as I look around, I have my doubts. What we have here is one of those exceptionally rare things - an argument to which there genuinely are two sides.

Next Sunday evening, some soloists of the London Philharmonic Orchestra are giving a chamber concert in Cambridge, at the Cambridge Union, with a programme of Mozart, Richard Strauss and Schubert. The concert is sponsored by the Telegraph Media Group, which also brings you this newspaper: details of how to get tickets are at the end of this article. It is one of a series of such concerts that the orchestra was keen to promote, in order to give more exposure to some of its finest players. In the same way that Test batsmen improve more by playing matches than by any amount of practice in the nets, so musicians become even better through the discipline of live performance. The LPO has been fortunate to find other businesses to sponsor other concerts in the series. Times are hard in the private sector; but many firms, such as the one I work for, realise the importance of contributing more widely to the community, and recognise such sponsorship as part of the social dimension that any modern business should have.

I have no doubt that, in all fields of the arts, this is the best way forward. We no longer live in the days when a wide selection of wealthy patrons could shower money on a playwright, painter or composer and effectively keep them in business for years, as happened with Shakespeare or Bach. But in a time of economic stringency, it is too much to expect a state that must provide hospital beds, school places, police and soldiers to pay for dance ensembles, theatre groups and "community projects". The arts are crucial to the development of our civilisation; but their development can begin from the community itself, from a combination of private individuals and corporations, rather than being some sort of extension of the welfare state.

When I heard the bleating and whining a few weeks ago from those whose enterprises had been cut off at the knees by reductions in Arts Council funding, I was extremely disheartened. The state is not the only body at whom the begging bowl can be directed, and if whatever these organisations are producing is of real merit and worth they will, like the LPO, find patrons in the private sector who are willing to support them, and link the reputation of their brands with that of the organisation.

To be fair, this happens widely already. Covent Garden has had a long-standing and highly successful fundraising programme, its worldwide prestige encouraging certain enormously wealthy people to give very substantial sums for the opera and the ballet. Impresarios in the West End take big financial risks themselves, or assemble teams of investors, to put on plays and musicals. Museums often have generations of benefactors behind them.

In a great city like London, such private benefactions can become clouded in anonymity; in smaller towns, where people struggle (and it often is a struggle) to keep theatres, galleries, concert halls or even small cinemas going, a serious sponsor can make the most enormous difference. Small orchestras, museums and theatre groups have become much more effective in the last 20 or 30 years at appealing to their patrons to recognise the economic realities of their existence.

This means, bluntly, saying to them that if you have enjoyed coming to this exhibition and looking at the sculptures or paintings, or you have enjoyed the concert, the play, the film or the ballet, then you may feel the need to volunteer your money or your time to ensure that such things continue to be provided. This is because, for the most part, the punter gets his or her ticket cheaply, however much it may seem to the contrary in some cases, and there has to be some element of subsidy if the thing is to be done at all. Spectacles are expensive.

The difficult part of the arts subsidy argument is one of quality control. One reason why the Arts Council has a dismal reputation in some quarters is that it has often given money to groups for what appear to be reasons of political or social engineering rather than to encourage quality. Nor is this confined to the Arts Council: the unlamented British Film Council had a hand in The King's Speech, but it also had a hand in a lot of unutterable rubbish, some of which barely got distributed or even made it to DVD. Much of what they produced was of the Left-wing, self-hating variety, whose existence reminds us of one of the reasons why the contemporary French cinema is so much better than our own. Too many second-rate "artists" - be they screenwriters, directors, choreographers, "installation artists" or composers - were enabled to make a living purely because the state chose to subsidise their profoundly second-rate outpourings.

How, some say, can what is commercially successful be equated with what is an artistic achievement? It can't. But after the age of great patrons, and before the era of state subsidy, writers, composers, painters and others developed their reputations while earning a living from teaching, or even (in T S Eliot's case) working as a director of a publishing company. Really first-rate creative types will always find clients - think of Benjamin Britten, who had people queuing up to have him compose for them when he was barely out of his teens. This is a provocative thing to say, but there are sufficient civilised types working in the private sector who know quality when they see it and who can, even in hard times, be prevailed upon to support it. And I would rather trust their judgment in these matters than that of the functionaries of the state.

Tickets for the LPO Cambridge Concert on May 15, sponsored by the Telegraph, are available from the Cambridge Corn Exchange, telephone 01233 357851.

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The arts can survive, and thrive, without public money

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State subsidy is not the only way to cultural excellence, and often it only perpetuates mediocrity, says Simon Heffer. There has been a long-running debate, at times quite heated, about public funding of the arts. One popular argument goes: why should bus drivers pay taxes to subsidise rich people to attend an opera at Covent Garden?

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Example of Kurzgesagt, How can a self-funded agency continue to deliver free & high quality content to everyone.  

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Example of Kurzgesagt, How can a self-funded agency continue to deliver free & high quality content to everyone.  

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We are an animation studio and a design agency. We create unique explanatory videos. But we also offer many graphic design services.

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We are an animation studio and a design agency. We create unique explanatory videos. But we also offer many graphic design services. We explain even the most complex topics in a witty and accessible way through intricate illustrations and elaborate animations. Custom music composition and sound design give our videos an exceptional high quality feeling.

# data[].attributes.attachment_link.readable_text
Only 9% of English adults think Government spending on the arts should be increased, compared with 45% who think it should be decreased, according to new research by consultants ComRes.

It also found that more than half know "nothing at all" about Arts Council England (ACE), and the vast majority (89%) don't think that it is good at communicating the value of arts and culture.

The figures come from two online surveys of 1,750 English adults in October 2015, funded by ACE. The data was weighted to be representative of all English adults.

Respondents were asked for their views on public spending on arts and culture, goals for government investment, and their attitudes towards ACE's work.

Consistent findings

The 2015 results are broadly in line with the survey results from 2014, noted in the report.

Generating tourism and providing education were once again selected as the overriding national benefits of arts and culture. The two most important goals for investment were 'using the arts and culture to attract tourism to the UK' and 'using arts and culture to grow the economy and create jobs'.

63% of respondents supported the principle of public funding of arts and culture through taxes - the highest proportion since 2011. Support for National Lottery funding remains higher than support for taxpayer funding, at 74%.

Re-enforced norms

The gap between the well-off and less well-off persists. 44% of people from the highest economic bracket say public funding of arts and culture benefits them or their family and friends, compared with 25% from the lower bracket.

This spills over into participation, with 30% of people from lower socio-economic grades having attended creative, artistic, theatrical or musical events in the past year, compared with 61% of those in the highest bracket.

People over the age of 65 are less likely than younger people to have participated in arts and culture, and less likely to feel personal benefits of arts and culture. But they are more likely to call for an even distribution of ACE funding across England: 51% of those aged 65 and over, compared with 34% for those aged 18-24.

Knowledge gap

One challenge for ACE is that the proportion of respondents saying it has a positive impact on artists and the arts has fallen from 30% in 2013 to 18% in 2015. Similarly, the proportion claiming ACE spends public money poorly and inefficiently has risen from 8% to 13% in the same period.

However, 44% of respondents said they didn't know or had no opinion about these statements, leading the researchers to conclude that the public may have "insufficient detailed knowledge" about ACE's beneficiaries, reputation, impact, expenditure and communications. Half of the people who said they didn't know came from a lower socio-economic grade.

This knowledge gap is reflected in the public's perception about arts spending's value for money. 34% agreed that public spending on the arts was good value for money, but when told that spending on arts and culture is only 0.1% of the Government's overall spend, this increased to almost half (48%).

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Public against an increase to arts funding, research finds

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Only 9% of English adults think Government spending on the arts should be increased, compared with 45% who think it should be decreased, according to new research by consultants ComRes. It also found that more than half know "nothing at all" about Arts Council England (ACE), and the vast majority (89%) don't think that it is good at communicating the value of arts and culture.

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David Wojnarowisz's 'A Fire In My Belly' was taken down from the Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery after complaints from the Catholic League and several politicans

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Youve read all about it. A national museum in Washington has been pressured to remove a work of art that religious groups found objectionable.
The work in question is A Fire in My Belly, by David Wojnarowicz, an artist who died of AIDS in 1992. 10 seconds of the video that mourns the suffering of those with HIV show ants swarming a crucifix.

Think of the surrealist film Andalusian Dog (1929) by Luis Bunuel - we have seen a lot of this before. All the more reason that conservatives are furious. They thought that they had silenced (could we say Mapplethorpe-ed?) supporters of this kind of art in national museums - but like the perennial creature from the Black Lagoon, the art is back.

When the Catholic League, a lay Catholic organization aligned with the Catholic Church, called the crucifix "hate speech," the incoming Speaker of the House of Representatives, John Boehner, demanded that the entire exhibition, "Hide/Seek, Difference and Desire in American Portraiture," devoted to homoerotic love, be yanked. The Smithsonian National Portrait Gallery (renovated elegantly by the architect Norman Foster) removed the video from the exhibition. The museums director, Martin Sullivan, defended the video as he removed it from the show. It makes you think of John Kerreys unforgettably pathetic line - "I voted for the bill before I voted against it."
Does this mean that paintings by Salvador Dali or prints of films by Bunuel must now be removed from the walls of museums that receive government funds? There are more than ants crawling on Dalis crucifixes. Will the picketers in Florida march from abortion clinics to the Salvador Dali Museum in St. Petersburg?

The dispute isnt over. The fires are probably just warming. There will be pressure to close the entire exhibition, which has been funded with an infusion of private money, much of it from gay philanthropies. Its already been linked to the defunding of NPR for its ham-handed dismissal of opinion journalist Juan Williams for expressing his opinion about fearing Muslims who get on airplanes.

Notice, however, that this attack on a few seconds of a video in a museum was preceded by years of an armistice in the war between the Religious right and the art world.

After tempers cooled from the denunciation of the Sensation exhibition - in which the Brooklyn Museum presented provocative work by Young British Artists to attract a hip crowd to its under-visited galleries, Conservatives won the white House. They had bigger fish to fry than contemporary artists. Why bother? The artists who had lived off government grants were starving to death anyway.

What followed seemed to be a kind of armistice. Art and its funders retreated to the private sector. Wasnt the Bush revolution supposed to be about privatization? And the Religious Rights constituencies stayed away from museums. It was the art worlds version of "dont ask, dont tell."

It was assumed that the conservative attack on contemporary art in the US was over. Conservatives had won bigger battles (the White House in 2000), and the amount of tax money spent on culture in the US was minimal. Beyond that, museums and state-supported institutions had been intimidated into avoiding showing work that might anger the Religious Right, even in New York.

Now that Republicans have won major victories in the recent November elections, they are emboldened, and arts organizations are afraid of triggering reactions that might result in being targeted for budget cuts. The move against the Smithsonian is a warning to institutions around the country. Will it work? Watch for pre-emptive capitulations, like martin Sullivans? Or could it threaten to separate libertarians from conservatives in the new Tea Party constituency? The jab at the Smithsonian could be a bone thrown to religious conservatives who felt neglected as the Republicans campaigned on the economic concerns of the Tea Party.

Is this attack on Smithsonian about art or sex? A little bit of both. Contemporary art is an easy target for conservatives, especially if tax money is paying for it, but if homosexuality is involved, a scandal can rally a greater number of opponents. The issue rose as the US celebrates National AIDS Awareness Day on December 1, and as the Defense Department "Dont Ask, Dont Tell" Policy on Homosexuality is debated in Congress.

The removal of the video from view at the Smithsonian coincided with the announcement of a judgment in a Delaware court that awarded $30 million to a man who had been abused by priests. No word from the Catholic League so far on that tragedy.

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David Wojnarowicz "A Fire In My Belly" Pulled from Smithsonian | AdobeAirstream

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Youve read all about it. A national museum in Washington has been pressured to remove a work of art that religious groups found objectionable. The work in question is A Fire in My Belly, by David Wojnarowicz, an artist who died of AIDS in 1992.

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Douglas McPherson: the best work comes out of self-supporting organisations

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Douglas McPherson: the best work comes out of self-supporting organisations

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Artist discusses the idea that the pandemic may result in the clearing of "deadwood". Article tone suggests a perceived attack on the industry, particularly front of house and education staff of nationally funded projects.

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Grayson Perry has drawn criticism from fellow artists after claiming the economic fallout of Covid-19 will clear galleries of "dead wood".

"I think every part of life has probably got a bit of fat that needs trimming" Perry told the Arts Society Magazine. "'It's awful that the culture sector has been decimated, but I think some things needed to go. Too often, the audience for culture is just the people making it - theatres with whole audiences of actors, or exhibitions only put on to impress other curators."

With new lockdown restrictions forcing museums and galleries to close again on Wednesday, the already bleak picture facing artists and staff at Britain's galleries and museums is set to get worse. The Southbank Centre is being forced to lose up to a third of its staff. The Victoria and Albert Museum and National Museums Liverpool have both announced plans to cut approximately 100 jobs. The National Trust is to cut 1,200 jobs. Many smaller institutions are also cutting positions, including the South London Gallery and the Chisenhale Gallery in east London.

The majority of redundancies are coming from front-of-house and education staff.

The Royal Academy is looking to lose over a hundred staff members. One artist, who preferred to remain anonymous given ongoing negotiations, but who works at the institution leading tours and education workshops, reacted angrily to Perry's comments.

"While Perry's views from his ivory tower may help the establishment and museum executives sleep at night it doesn't help the very real struggle of arts workers trying like everyone else to survive this pandemic. All workers need solidarity. Pre-Covid, the arts were thriving. It is disingenuous to diminish arts workers' contributions in the middle of a pandemic in which they are facing redundancy to gain cheap publicity and prop up the art elite."

Perry was made Royal Academician in 2011 and in 2018 curated the annual open submission summer show.

"With Covid, it's been like turning a computer off and on again, and seeing which files reappear. Some of them we don't really give a damn about. What's interesting is what might not re-emerge," Perry said.

Another casual member of staff at the RA pointed out "Those who lose out will be young, early career professionals; precisely the innovators and enactors of change that our industry badly needs. Sadly, I think the post-Covid the art scene will see white male household names at the fore again, because they make for reliable ticket receipts."

Perry emerged in the 1990s, a flamboyant figure who garnered as many column inches for his transvestite alter-ego Claire, as his ceramics. In 2003 he won the Turner Prize. More recently he has fronted a series of well-received documentaries for Channel 4.

"Grayson's work often pokes fun at the liberal elite that buy it, but perhaps he's just coming full circle as he's joined their ranks." Sarah McCrory, director of Goldsmiths Centre of Contemporary Art, said. "His timing is disgraceful ... I'm not sure why he's so out of touch and unempathetic - perhaps it's because he's become the mainstream."

Aaron Angell, who runs the Troy Town Pottery in London agrees Perry is disconnected from the reality of the impact of Covid-19.

"The people losing their jobs are not the gang of cheek-kissing curators, but the invigilators, educators and hospitality staff that exist to make the museum more accessible. They are there to make the audience tackle work a bit more complicated than the words 'hate speech' written on a teapot."

Perry's pots are typified by their ornate figurative decoration and pithy political and satirical slogans.

In 2008 Perry curated an exhibition titled Unpopular Culture at the De La Warr Pavilion, celebrating a moment when "modern art was an even more rarefied activity, practiced and appreciated by other-worldly bohemians and intellectuals". Rosie Cooper, the art centre's curator today, said the art world now is very different, with great strides made in diversity in audiences and those working within the sector. The pandemic threatens this progress however.

"The 'decimation' of culture has seen precarious workers hit hardest. As a result, many practitioners and artists will not be able to continue in their chosen careers without independent wealth. This will be an immense loss; these people are not 'dead wood'."

In the midst of the fury, Andrew Renton, who teaches curating at Goldsmiths College, called for a sense of solidarity in the sector. He agrees that the pandemic provides an opportunity to restock but also thinks Perry's viewpoint fundamentally wrong. "It's an opportunity to think about what art could and should do as a matter of urgency, right now, and in our anticipated recovery, rather than evoking the grim prospect of the survival of the fittest."

Perry didn't respond to requests for comment, but later tweeted: "My comments in an interview have been taken out of context. At this terrible time for the arts I'd like to clarify that I was CERTAINLY not referring to the loss of people's jobs and opportunities in the arts, or to art galleries having to close due to the virus. I hope my hard work in support of the arts has shown how much I believe art is for us all and brings joy to amateurs and professionals alike. In times of hardship we need the arts more than ever."

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Anger after Grayson Perry claims Covid will clear arts of 'dead wood'

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Grayson Perry has drawn criticism from fellow artists after claiming the economic fallout of Covid-19 will clear galleries of "dead wood". "I think every part of life has probably got a bit of fat that needs trimming" Perry told the Arts Society Magazine.

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BBC (2013) against public funding article

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BBC (2013) against public funding article

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The arts community has been getting to grips with the news of which theatres, galleries and other cultural organisations will receive funding from the Arts Council England in the future.

The Arts Council will distribute £310m of taxpayers' money in 2012/13 - down by £40m on the last financial year. But should the arts be subsidised at all - especially at a time when other public services are being cut?

I do not doubt that the arts are an essential part of any country's culture.

The issue that is being disputed is whether the arts should be funded through voluntary means or whether there should be a significant amount of funding taken from the pockets of taxpayers and then distributed by a quango.

If it is widely recognised that the arts are essential for our culture, then there should be no problem financing them from voluntary sources.

Those voluntary sources are many - the sale of tickets, donations, private subscription, corporate sponsorship, legacies and the National Lottery. The National Lottery - which is a form of voluntary tax - is the only legitimate form of state support.

Throughout history, and across countries, there is no evidence that subsidy brings about more spending on the arts in total. Government subsidies in the UK are a relatively recent development - before World War II, the arts flourished without them.

Indeed, Britain was, historically, a magnet for the arts and, to a greater degree than probably anywhere else in the world, the arts were provided to a wide audience. The equation was simple - no audience, no funding.

Subsidies can crowd out private funding, as comparisons with the United States seem to suggest. Indeed, in the UK over recent years, as government subsidies for the arts have declined in relative terms, private finance has increased.

If we look at the operations of Glyndebourne, the Royal Opera House and La Scala in Italy at various times in the recent past it seems that, as the extent of public subsidy rises, costs rise.

Furthermore, it also seems there is a negative relationship between public subsidy and these organisations' ability to raise money from private sources.

Evidence suggests that subsidies do, indeed, increase costs rather than supply of the arts.

It seems that ticket prices at subsidised and unsubsidised venues have not tended to differ significantly. This is not surprising.

When the government is not the paymaster, the key relationships are between the providers of the arts, those attending performances and those giving voluntary donations. Accountability is strong.

If the key relationship instead is with a government bureaucracy, accountability breaks down.

When people are voluntarily financing the arts, the provision of culture will be intrinsically linked to the community. But when the government is financing the arts, bureaucratic attitudes will dominate.

Indeed, it is not surprising to see the Arts Council publish an exceptionally glossy 162-page annual report, spend nearly £50m on administration and have a gold-plated staff pension scheme.

This does not look like an organisation that is strapped for cash.

The Institute of Economic Affairs is a free market think tank.

It has become stylish to imply that "receiving public funding" really means "stealing from innocent taxpayers in order to pay for the indulgences of the unworthy".

Civilised societies define it differently: as a collective contribution to the public good, made freely and targeted towards activities which are vital to our civic health and tend not to make a profit, even when done well.

I am convinced that the arts are a significant public good, that civic well-being is damaged when the arts are unsupported and, while they make an important economic contribution, their profitability is not a sufficient measure of their quality or their success.

I am increasingly uncomfortable with the economic argument, because it suggests that only activities which generate economic growth are deserving of public investment. Caring for the elderly, for instance, would fail this test.

However, it is worth repeating that public money spent on the arts has a proven tendency to turn into money spent elsewhere: on hotel rooms, restaurants, production supplies and, most importantly, jobs.

In Newcastle and Gateshead, every £1 of public investment in the 10 main cultural buildings results in £5 generated by the regional economy, according to the Treasury's own calculations, not least because between us we employ over 2000 people. Many of those jobs will be swiftly at risk if proposed cuts go ahead.

Not everyone in this country grows up thinking the arts are for them. Artists and educators are and should be obliged to create opportunities for people from all backgrounds to encounter the very best artistic experiences.

When we do this well, the results are staggering - individual confidence soars and life chances are radically improved.

One example: last year we made a show called Apples, an exhilarating account of growing up in Middlesbrough adapted from a novel by Richard Milward.

I'd like opponents of arts funding to ask themselves what it might feel like to be 15 in Middlesbrough and to find out there is a play on, in your home town, and it's about you.

The play toured all over the country and went on to win an award in Edinburgh. If our audience had had to pay all the costs of making the show (the modest £400 a week we pay our highly skilled actors, for instance) we would have had to charge £35 a ticket.

Could those young people have come at that price? The market says no. Should they make a contribution, appropriate to their income? I think so, yes.

So for around the price of a cinema ticket, they saw themselves represented on stage and were provoked, entertained and moved. They may even have been turned on to the theatre. They certainly felt less invisible, more significant, better understood.

The arts have always been able to make a society not just "Big" but cohesive, intelligent and better equipped to speak its mind. It is dangerous, ignorant and churlish to endanger them.

Erica Whyman is currently directing Who's Afraid of Virginia Woolf?, which is at the Sheffield Crucible until Thursday and transfers to Northern Stage, Newcastle, on 12 April.

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The arts community has been getting to grips with the news of which theatres, galleries and other cultural organisations will receive funding from the Arts Council England in the future. The Arts Council will distribute £310m of taxpayers' money in 2012/13 - down by £40m on the last financial year.

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social security as indirect arts funding?

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social security as indirect arts funding?

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What nobody likes to say about arts funding is that from the 60s to the 90s the UK had 3 amazing funding schemes for young artists and musicians. The dole, student grants, and no university fees.

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What nobody likes to say about arts funding is that from the 60s to the 90s the UK had 3 amazing funding schemes for young artists and musicians. The dole, student grants, and no university fees.
— Steve Bullock (@GuitarmoogMusic) October 12, 2020

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The first inhabited place on Earth to ring in the year 2000 was probably the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. As dancers on the beaches welcomed the dawn of the millennium, on the other side of the planet, in Greenwich, final preparations were underway for the opening ceremony of the Millennium Dome. This was the night when the first 10,000 specially invited people would finally see what was inside the big white tent in south-east London that had been the subject of intense speculation and scrutiny for the previous four years. It had to be perfect.

By 7pm in Greenwich, it was apparent that there was a problem. In the weeks before the event, because of a logistical cock-up, hundreds of guests had not received their tickets through the post. Ticketless guests had been instructed to pick them up on New Year's Eve at Stratford station, before hopping on the newly completed Jubilee line to the Dome for the festivities. But on the night, body scanners installed by police at Stratford weren't working, and before long, several hundred people were stuck in the station. When the prime minister, Tony Blair, arrived two hours later - while fireworks illuminated more than 1 million people gathered in Moscow's Red Square - angry invitees, including many of the UK's newspaper editors, were still no closer to boarding a train to Greenwich.

There was more trouble to come. At 10pm GMT, as Nelson Mandela marked the new year by lighting a single candle in his old prison cell on Robben Island, Jennie Page, the chief executive of the Dome company, had just received some further unwelcome news. Rushing to witness the Queen receiving the Millennium medal, a specially commissioned honour to mark the occasion, Page was stopped and, in her words, "told about the bomb". The police had received a call to inform them that there was an explosive device in the Blackwall tunnel, which ran beneath the Dome. Blair and the Queen were also informed.

About 15 minutes later, Peter Higgins, designer of one of the Dome's 14 "zones", was giving a tour to Blair, his wife Cherie and their children. "I just thought: this guy's not listening," recalled Higgins. "He was ashen-faced, and holding his family." During the tour, Blair, as well as the police and Page, had to decide whether or not to cancel the country's millennium celebration, the culmination of many years' work and £750m of investment. "It was a decision one would have preferred not to have to take," Page said, gravely.

They carried on. The call turned out to be a hoax, there was no explosion, and the stranded guests at Stratford did eventually make it to the Dome for the countdown, despite having missed the festivities beforehand. After four years of politicians and press forecasting the project's failure, by the time midnight reached Greenwich, just as 39 tonnes of fireworks were forming a "river of fire" down a four-mile stretch of the Thames in central London, it seemed as if the people behind the Dome had pulled it off.

The next morning, the headlines told a different story. "The Black Hole of Stratford East" read one. "The £758m disaster zone" read another. Michael Heseltine, who sat on the Millennium Commission, which had brought the Dome to life, blames the standstill at Stratford. "It was a PR disaster," he told me recently. "A lot of the people who didn't get there on time were the very people who were going to report the event."

But for the thousands of people involved in putting on the Millennium Experience, from government ministers to service staff, the worst was yet to come. For the duration of the year that the Dome was open, it was perceived as a catastrophe. Richard Rogers, one of the architects behind the building, said in 2015 that it "couldn't have had a worse reception if you'd worked hard to deliberately upset everybody". Twenty years later, it is still a byword for New Labour hubris, squandered resources and hideously bungled planning.

In fact, it was a byword for all of these things before it even opened. The urge to think of the Dome as something pitiable was apparent long before anybody actually saw what was inside. In the final paragraph of Elizabeth Wilhide's official book on the Millennium Dome, published in 1999, she writes that "its legacy, the Dome's true meaning, will only be known long after the moment has passed, when the children who are its visitors today grow up and look back". Now, doing just that, it is clear that the prevailing narrative that the Dome was a total failure is not - or at least not quite - the full story.

hen we met recently, in a country pub near her home, Jennie Page spoke of her time on the Dome with the same dignified forbearance you sometimes see in military veterans. "There are a lot of things I will not talk about," she told me. In 1995, she became head of the Millennium Commission, which had been established to distribute funds generated by the National Lottery. She now carried the daunting responsibility of deciding on a once-in-a-lifetime exhibition to mark the new millennium.

In February 1996, Greenwich was selected as the site for the Millennium Exhibition, not least because of the connection to Greenwich mean time, but it would be years before real progress was made in deciding what form the exhibition itself would take. At that point, the commission's most urgent task was coming up with the structure, or structures, to house the exhibition. Mike Davies, who went on to become the lead architect on the Dome in April 1996, knew that once the site was chosen, construction would need to start as soon as possible. Four years is not very long for big projects. John McElgunn, a partner at Davies's old firm Rogers Stirk Harbour, said: "It's like asking somebody to hurry through their pregnancy in four months."

The building would also need to solve the problem of the site's exposure to the elements. "In March, we were on the site, and it was minus four," Davies told me. Whatever else they did, the site was definitely going to need shelter. Standing there in the bitter wind on the peninsula, he had his eureka moment: "Let's do a mega cover."

Davies, who always dresses head to toe in red, is still clearly infatuated with the design of the Dome. For more than two hours, he spoke animatedly about it, showing me early drawings like a proud parent with an ultrasound picture. He was particularly enthused about the way the Dome embodied the concept of time. "Twelve months of the year, so 12 masts, 365 metres in diameter, and with 24 scallops, like 24 hours in a day," he explained. The concept fit the bill perfectly, and was phenomenally cheap at £42m. When plans for the building were released in June 1996, though, not everybody was impressed. Wonderbra ran an ad campaign with the slogan "Not all domes lack public support".

Over Christmas 1996, Page and her team settled on a budgetfor the whole Millennium Experience: £750m, pieced together from corporate sponsorship, National Lottery money and ticket revenue from 12 million visitors. But there was a potential iceberg on the horizon. Although there had been a Labour minister on the Millennium Commission, this was a Conservative government project, and Labour looked likely to win the general election in May 1997. If the new prime minister wasn't on board, the whole project would be axed. But if the building was going to be finished in time for 1 January 2000, they had to keep going regardless. "That was a terrible period," Page said briskly.

On 1 May, Labour won the election by a landslide, ending almost 20 years of Conservative rule. The mood of triumphant invulnerability in the Labour camp was one the Dome company could capitalise on. As media scrutiny of the project intensified, with the Sun running headlines like "Dump that Dome", Page's team put their plan to the government - a plan that emphasised New Labour-friendly aims. The Dome would, among other things, "raise the self-esteem of the individual" and "enhance the world's view of the nation".

Despite misgivings about the cost, the scale, and the London location for an event that was supposedly for the whole country, on 19 June 1997, Blair announced that Labour was on board. Here, perhaps, was a chance to make a physical monument to everything that New Labour Britain would be about: youthful exuberance, unashamed pleasure, looking with optimism to the future rather than clinging to tradition; a single amazing experience that could bring the country together. "New Labour really did think it was going to be some sort of quasi-political, sociological experience that would underpin everything that they were about," the exhibition designer Peter Higgins told me incredulously.

Speaking to his party about possible celebrations for the millennium at the 1995 Labour conference, Blair had announced that there were now "a thousand days to prepare for a thousand years". By mid-1997, time was already running out to get what was the largest construction project in Europe finished before the deadline to end all deadlines.

ow that the Dome had Labour's stamp of approval, the organisers were faced with a pressing question: what was the Dome actually going to be? There were nine ideas for "zones" - body, mind, spirit, work, rest, play, local, national, global - but beyond that, not much. Only now, two years into the project, was serious thought devoted to the contents of this exhibition, already being billed by the government as "the biggest, most thrilling, most entertaining, most thought-provoking experience anywhere on the planet".

Under the supervision of Peter Mandelson, the New Millennium Experience Company (NMEC), as the Dome company had been renamed, gave designers a brief that consisted mostly of open-ended questions. For the body zone, they included "Are we what we eat?" and "What about designer people?" Higgins, whose company, Land Design, ended up creating the Dome's play zone, told me "the brief was very thin, and we weren't given a budget at all". For Blair's part, he was on the lookout for content that had what he called "the Euan factor" - content cool enough that his 13-year-old son would want to see it.

In addition to the zones, a spectacular performance would take place in the Dome's central space. An initial proposal from the theatre impresario Cameron Mackintosh, involving an enormous stage and a huge cast including children, was rejected by Page. "It involved 42 horses," she told me, shaking her head. Instead, the rock show designer Mark Fisher took over. With singer-songwriter Peter Gabriel, he came up with a story inspired by Romeo and Juliet, which would be performed by more than 100 aerial gymnasts, who would be gathered from all over the country and trained for two years beforehand.

There were now 14 zones, each designed by a different company. In an attempt to try to give the visitor experience some kind of coherence, Stephen Bayley, a design consultant and critic who had worked with Terence Conran, was drafted in. Six months later, in December 1997, he parted ways with the Dome, after his proposals were deemed too highbrow. When we spoke last year, in his studios in Chelsea, Bayley lamented the "sub-Disney" plans for the zones. Higgins agreed that the project had needed a "master puppeteer", but smiled wryly when Bayley came up in our conversation. "He was so the wrong person. He sat in one of our meetings just reading Proust in French on a sofa."

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The Millennium Dome during construction. Photograph: Avalon/Alamy

Eventually, Page and her team came up with something they called the Litmus Group to oversee the content of the Dome, composed of cultural luminaries such as Alan Yentob and Michael Grade. Their suggestions were of varied quality, according to the zone designers. "God, the input was totally worthless," said Higgins.

Meanwhile, Peter Mandelson visited Disneyworld Florida in search of inspiration. According to Adam Nicolson's richly informative book on the Dome, Regeneration, Mandelson spent this trip breaking into a run to avoid being photographed in the same frame as Mickey Mouse. It was leapt on by the press, which ran headlines such as "Mandelson in a Disney about his Dome". "It was so predictable," Mandelson told me, "the press thought they were entitled to know everything, and anything that was held back, they'd punish you for it."

By February 1998, the Dome's contents were secure enough that prototypes of six of the zones - body, mind, spirit, rest, work and living island - were ready to be unveiled. The launch ceremony took place at the Royal Festival Hall on London's South Bank, once the site of the Festival of Britain, the much-revered 1951 exhibition that served as inspiration to many of the Dome's creators. "This is a chance to demonstrate that Britain will be a breeding ground for the most successful businesses of the 21st century," Blair told the audience. Mandelson spoke, too, telling the room that "if the Millennium Dome is a success, it will never be forgotten. If it is a failure, we will never be forgiven."

The launch did not go down well. Everybody found their own problem with it: it was too political, insufficiently historical, too populist, not populist enough. "The moment you have a big project in this country, the forces of darkness gather," Heseltine grumbled to me. Davies remembers how strongly people felt: "I would go home in a taxi, and this vituperation would pour out about what a scandalous waste of money the Dome was."

Since it was a government project, the government kept tight controls on what those involved could and could not say. Gez Sagar, an ex-Labour party press officer who was now doing press for the Dome, briefed everybody on what he called the line to take (LTT). It consisted of four central messages: "It's the people's show. It's the most exciting experience of the millennium. It's good for Britain. It's going well."

n June 1998, the final piece of the 10 hectares of fabric went up on the Dome's roof, and the people involved in the project stood awe-struck beneath its complete canopy for the first time. The Dome is huge; weather systems would form inside it if it wasn't for its Teflon roof, and the air it contains weighs more than the structure itself. "It just had this gorgeous sense of space when you walked into it," Chris Smith, then the culture secretary, told me. Charles Falconer, who later took over from Mandelson as Labour's Dome minister, recalled this feeling with evident pleasure: "I loved being inside it, I loved the whole physicality of the Dome. I absolutely loved it."

Beneath the roof, however, all was not well. Political advisers, who referred to themselves as "content editors", clashed with the zone designers, as they attempted to ensure it was New Labour-appropriate. If this was to be a flagship for Blair's vision of Britain, it needed to send the right messages: the content had to be popular, pro-business, future-oriented and, above all, optimistic. "Keeping the politicians' hands off it was a big struggle," Page told me.

With more than 30,000 visitors expected every day in 2000, one thing the Dome would need was extensive catering. There were to be two enormous branches of McDonald's, as well as a YO! Sushi and a cafe called Simply Internet. Twenty years on, Bayley still rues the catering. He proposed a farmer's market; he got fast food. "You could have had sourdough bread and goat's cheese," he told me. "Instead the public had to eat filth from McDonald's."

Pleasing the sponsors, of which McDonald's was one, was of paramount importance. Without sponsorship money of £12m per zone, the project was financially unviable. But what the zone designers wanted, what the politicians wanted and what the sponsors wanted were often incompatible. Higgins' play zone was initially paired with Sky. "It was hopeless," he told me. "They said to us, in a very aggressive way, the future of play is about digital television, because that's what they were launching at the time." Zaha Hadid's mind zone was sponsored by the arms manufacturers Marconi and BAE systems.

One of the designer Tim Pyne's four zones was work, previously titled Licensed to Skill, which was sponsored by the recruitment giant Manpower. He told me that his zone ended up reflecting the sponsor's very particular idea of what an exhibit about the future of work should be: "No job security, zero-hours contracts and moving from job to job as an agency worker." Pyne's initial plans for the zone had involved visitors "getting sacked" at the beginning, but Labour party advisers instructed him to scrap the idea because it was thought a recession might be coming.

No zone saw more interference than the faith zone. The triangular, non-denominational design for the space, by Eva Jiřičná, was met with outcry from religious leaders all over the country, who were also worried that the commercialised environment of the Dome would make a mockery of religion itself. "Is Rupert Murdoch's name going to appear on the manger at Bethlehem?" asked the Bishop of Woolwich. The government felt that the structure Jiřičná designed looked too much like a pyramid, which would evoke new-age spirituality rather than religion. Jiřičná's solution was simple: "I put a plastic blob hat on it," she told me. The hat did not pass muster, and the final design that the UK's religious leaders agreed to was all but disavowed by Jiřičná by the end.

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In October 1998, on the building site inside the Dome itself, the BBC held a televised debate about whether the Dome was going to be good or bad. All the participants wore hi-vis jackets and hard hats. While the children in the audience looked on nonplussed, the art critic Brian Sewell jabbed his finger at the Dome's director of operations, Ken Robinson, and demanded repeatedly: "Tell us what is in it." Robinson declined, and the rumour mill continued to turn. I remember that in the years before the opening, when I was about seven years old, my school playground in London was abuzz with talk of what might be inside. More than one person I know remembers hearing that there was going to be an anti-gravity chamber.

Six months before the grand opening, details of all 14 zones were finally made public. The money zone featured a tunnel made of £50 banknotes behind glass amounting to £1m, and an invitation to guests to "go on a million-pound spending spree" with virtual cash. At the "our town story" zone, schools from around the country were invited to put on performances about their local area. These were strictly limited to 20 minutes each. (Nicolson quotes Robert Warner, the head of the Dome's live events, as saying at the time that they didn't want "a three-hour opera about Grimsby".) The body zone would allow visitors to walk through the inside of a human body, complete with moving organs and animatronic pubic lice.

During the final months of preparations, the Dome attracted yet more sceptical comment. JG Ballard wrote in the New Statesman that the building resembled "a sinister abattoir disguised as a circus tent". According to Page, those months were "a frightful rush, and it was made much worse by the government changing the policy about ticketing, 10 months before we opened". She whispered "10 months" again and shook her hands at the ceiling in disbelief. Falconer had decided to give away 1 million free tickets to schoolchildren, an idea that was not in the business model. "But the Dome was the property of the nation," Falconer told me. "We wanted as many school children as possible to come."

As the Dome finally began to take shape, the conceptual weakness of the experience was becoming increasingly clear. It was, after all, pretty difficult to deliver an "experience" for "the nation" - a grand day out that could, in some way or other, delight every single person in Britain, while staying within budget, keeping the sponsors happy, pleasing the press and embodying the government's preferred vision for the future of the country. The Dome needed to be educational, but fun. Accessible yet challenging. Entertaining for children, stimulating for adults. It had to be "the greatest show on earth", but also serve as an advertisement for sponsors like Boots the chemist.

As with any big project, the final weeks were chaotic. With just a few weeks to go until opening night, Tim Pyne was working on the world's largest billboard - about as tall as a four storey house and as wide as a Boeing 747 - which would form the outside of the learn zone. It was a photograph of Richmond Park, which was being printed in a special facility in Iceland because of its enormous size. The printers called Pyne to ask whether the naked man in the woods, visible in the photograph at its full size, was a deliberate inclusion. Pyne had to make clear that the flasher was an unintentional feature, and that the whole billboard would need to be reprinted. Elsewhere, glass pillars for the faith zone languished in Paris, incomplete, and the dark brown paint on the pubic hairs for the body zone had been chipped off in transit.

I asked Ray Winkler, who worked on the Dome's central show, what the mood was like in those last few weeks. "Oh you know," he replied. "Mild panic? Sheer panic?"

"I think I probably had a breakdown," said Pyne.

n 1 January 2000, when the Dome finally threw open its doors to the public, what did the people involved think of what they saw? Some remember enjoying the exhibition, but Michael Heseltine paused before choosing his words: "I think that ... we could have done a better job." Chris Smith told me that the content was "worthy". Simon Jenkins, who was on the Millennium Commission, said it was "dull". Bayley noted that the Dome was, in a sense, quite impressive. He added: "You could spend £750m on a pile of horseshit and it would be impressive, but would it be worth the money?"

Soon reports were emerging that turnout was low. In certain parts of the Dome, though, the problem was too many visitors at once. Queues for the body zone spiralled up to two hours long. "In one sense, we'd overhyped it," Page admitted of that exhibit. In early February, it was announced that in the previous month, the Dome had welcomed less than half the number of visitors required to break even. Page was asked to resign, something that few people I spoke to think was fair. "I've never seen anybody so dedicated in my life," Mike Davies told me, "and I'm prepared to say in public that I think she was the scapegoat."

By aiming for 12 million visitors, the company behind the Dome created the impossible criteria by which its success would be judged. The combined number of tickets sold for Alton Towers, Madame Tussauds and the London Eye in 2000 was 8m. As the actual number of visitors began to look more like half their projection, the Dome team were forced back to the Millennium Commission to ask for emergency funding three separate times over the course of the year.

After Page's resignation, the man hired to rescue the Dome was PY Gerbeau, an infectiously optimistic ex-Eurodisney executive who wore suits slightly too big for him and rode around the Dome on a micro-scooter. Newspapers nicknamed him "the Gerbil". "I do not think," Falconer began to laugh, "and this is our fault, not his, that he quite had an understanding of the scale of the problem." Gerbeau seemed to have grasped it by the time he left in 2001, at least, when he told the New Yorker magazine that the 12 million visitors estimation "was one of the two or three stupidest things I have ever heard".

Gerbeau's main job was damage limitation. He reduced ticket prices, and brought in a funfair around the edge of the Dome in the summer, and a skating rink in the winter. In the face of adversity, the marketing team for the Dome gamely attempted to turn the ever-worsening reputation to its advantage. Adverts ran of disappointed children asking their parents why they never went to the Dome, with a voiceover saying "The Millennium Experience at the Dome is closing for ever. Maybe you'll love it - maybe you won't. Why not come and decide for yourself, while you still can?"

One set of visitors the Dome company could have done without was a gang of would-be thieves who drove a JCB digger into the side of the Dome one day in November, in a failed attempt to steal the Millennium Star, a large gemstone that the diamond company De Beers had contributed to the money zone. Adam Liversage, a press officer at the Dome, was asked about it by a journalist a few weeks later. "In any other press office, something like that would be the story of a lifetime," he replied. "But here it was just a question of, OK, I'll go and take a look." Shortly afterwards, JCB ran an advert featuring a picture of one of their diggers with the tag line "the only thing that worked to plan".

The Dome closed, with relatively little fanfare, at 6pm on 31 December 2000. Blair had appeared on BBC One's Breakfast with Frost a few months earlier, and admitted: "If I had known then what I know now about governments trying to run a visitor attraction - it was too ambitious." At the end of Nicolson's book, he describes the organisers, under constant attack and fighting an uphill battle to deliver the project, as "throwing a dance on Omaha beach". "It's an expression I've never forgotten," Page said.

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Peter Mandelson, John Prescott and Tony Blair attending the topping out ceremony at the Millennium Dome in 1998. Photograph: Trinity Mirror/Mirrorpix/Alamy

In February 2001, a public auction for the Dome's contents was held at the site. One of the most eye-catching lots, a six-foot plastic hamster, went for £3,700 to a man named Brent Pollard, to furnish a visitor attraction he ran in Kent. These days, Millie - short for millennium, as the local Kent schoolchildren named her - resides in a warehouse near the town of Sandwich, along with a large collection of military vehicles owned by Rex Cadman, a friend of Pollard's who accompanied him to the auction.

"She's just lovely," Cadman said proudly, as we stood in front of the slightly chipped fibre-glass figure a few weeks ago. The warehouse also contains a number of other Dome items that Cadman picked up at the auction, including a large oil painting of Blackadder, who featured in a specially commissioned film shown at the Dome. Having spent several months researching how these objects came into existence, I felt strangely humbled by seeing them preserved there, as if I was in the presence of artefacts from some once mighty civilisation. An alien, presented with only these objects as evidence, would have to assume that the civilisation that produced them was naively optimistic, concerned primarily with jolly novelties and with no coherent sense of style whatsoever.

Perhaps the most recognisable element of the Millennium Experience, the outer shell of the body zone, was too big to be sold in its entirety, although tiles from its surface were used as the bidding paddles at the auction. In the end, the body was eventually dumped in a hole near the Dome as landfill. Higgins told me that the feeling was "just get it done, and then line up the skips".

he Dome lay empty, a ruin before its time, for 18 months while the government struggled to find it a future. Proposals for the building's afterlife included a super casino, a business park and a stadium for Charlton Athletic. In May 2001, on the morning of Labour's manifesto launch, the leader of the Conservative party, William Hague, stood outside the Dome to deliver a short speech. This "Teflon tent," he said, "is the ultimate monument to Labour, and today they both stand empty."

It wasn't until a year later, in May 2002, that the US entertainment company AEG stepped in to purchase the building. The deal was that AEG would invest hundreds of millions of pounds into redeveloping the site as a music venue, later to be named the O2 Arena, and give the government 15% of its profits. The site itself was sold for £1.

"I guess they didn't really have any other alternative," Alex Hill, the present head of AEG Europe told me as he showed me around the O2 late last year, "but I think the vast majority of people did not believe that something would be created of this level of success." The O2 Arena opened its doors in 2007, and has been the most popular music venue in the world every year since.

Mike Davies's versatile building adapted well to its new purposes. Apart from the 20,000-seat live music and sports venue, the Dome now houses an outlet shopping centre, an indoor trampoline park and a bowling alley. There is also a pop-up football experience where you can play against a virtual goalie, just as you could in Higgins' play zone 20 years earlier.

The success of the O2 is the most obvious vestige of the Millennium Experience, and the one that people involved in the Dome are most keen to emphasise. It's "a brilliant success", Mandelson told me a number of times during our conversation. "I'm not going to look you in the eye and say that this is what we always intended," said Heseltine, "but we've taken a lot of stick and, well, I'm going to take a bit of credit."

It was undoubtedly an expensive way of doing it, but the Dome did give some badly needed new life to the Greenwich peninsula. By 1998, Greenwich had one of the highest levels of unemployment in the country. Regeneration was one of the Millennium Commission's key considerations when choosing the site. When I mentioned this to Heseltine, he suddenly lit up. "I was absolutely clear that we needed to use this as a regenerative process," he said. "I have no apologies for that."

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Was the Millennium Dome really so bad? The inside story of a (not so) total disaster

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The first inhabited place on Earth to ring in the year 2000 was probably the Pacific island nation of Kiribati. As dancers on the beaches welcomed the dawn of the millennium, on the other side of the planet, in Greenwich, final preparations were underway for the opening ceremony of the Millennium Dome.