Arts & International Affairs Volume 5, Number 1, Summer 2020 | Page 25

ARTS & INTERNATIONAL AFFAIRS
3. Arts Council England: Public Engagement,
Relevance, and Diversity
In this world and era, public engagement, relevance, and diversity are prerequisites to
any successful application to ACE and its funding streams. The concept of diversity in
the arts became popular during New Labour, after Tony Blair’s election in 1997. It was
anticipated by the Macpherson report, which made seventy recommendations for eradicating
institutional racism within the police. In the arts, the movement for diversity
inspired the creation of bodies such as the UK film Council (2000) or Cultural Diversity
Network (2000) that were intended to uphold diversity within television. As Clive
Nwonka (2019) notes in The Guardian, “The vision was of arts and culture having a
therapeutic effect on marginalized communities.”
The theme of public engagement and relevance is intertwined with the vision for diversity,
as detailed in the Creative Case for Diversity, launched in 2011. ACE is focused on “engaging
the arts and culture sector nationwide to reinforce the importance of diversity in
art, arts leadership and audiences” (Unlimited 2016). Funded artists must therefore pay
increased attention to ACE’s programme of radical inclusiveness and diversity so that
their work reflects the incredible diversity of contemporary British society. That means
that every cultural/artistic event funded by ACE should demonstrate its response to the
diversities, histories, opportunities, and provocations of the specific local communities
in which the funded project is produced and/or performed. Similarly, any cultural/artistic
activity funded should be faithful to the principle of including minorities and socially
marginalised people as participants and ideally as co-creators of the artistic project. ACE
motivates its requirements for public engagement and diversity with the fact that the
organisation is put in charge of public money. The British state (through successive governments)
has assumed a discourse of greater inclusivity, diversity, and relevance of the
arts and by way of consequence, all funded projects must submit to the aforementioned
principles, as ACE’s Cate Canniffe eloquently explained:
ACE is a subcontractor for the government, so they simply need to respect
certain procedures and require certain information to report it to
the government. [ ... ] ACE has the duty to hold to account on diversity
and inclusion, so they intervene to make sure this has been abided by.
(Shishkova 2019:2)
Whilst the aims of diversity and public engagement are laudable, the language that articulates
them may appear (to a paranoid interpreter such as myself) particularly utopian.
The problem is that ACE’s targets of diversity and inclusivity belong to the realm of the
theoretical discourse and not to the realm of praxis: these aims seem conceived not by
artists/practitioners but by managers and administrators of money and language. In a
certain sense, the language employed by the Romanian Communist Party with regards
to arts does not differ very much�in its power to articulate politically motivated dis-
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