Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Ministers risk curbing \u201cliberty of thought\u201d and stoking culture wars if they scrap the arm\u2019s-length body for arts funding in England as part of their crackdown on quangos, the agency\u2019s chair has warned.\u00a0Sir Nicholas Serota told the Financial Times that the Arts Council England was a \u201cbuffer\u201d between artists and the government and that ending the arm\u2019s-length model of backing theatres, museums and music groups would make it \u201ceasier for politicians to interfere\u201d.\u00a0\u201cThe role of the Arts Council is to act as a protector of artistic freedom, and if we don\u2019t have that freedom then we move towards living in a country where liberty of both thought and voice is constrained,\u201d he said.\u201cWe see plenty of places \u2014 look at the US now \u2014 where direct funding can be withdrawn as a result of a change of government. I think it\u2019s pretty self-evident that that doesn\u2019t benefit the arts or debate and dialogue within a society. It would sharpen divisions.\u201dSerota\u2019s intervention comes as the UK government prepares to abolish or merge some of the more than 300 quangos \u2014 or quasi-autonomous non-governmental organisations \u2014 in a bid to save money and restore ministerial control over some areas of policy.\u00a0\u00a0A separate review by Baroness Margaret Hodge, announced in December and due out next year, is examining the work, efficiency and governance of Arts Council England (ACE) but not whether the agency should exist.In the US, President Donald Trump installed himself in February as chair of the Kennedy Center after purging the Washington arts venue\u2019s board and vowing to end \u201canti-American propaganda\u201d.His administration has also moved to slash funding for museums and libraries and restricted which projects can win grants from the National Endowment for the Arts, an independent government agency.\u00a0Serota \u2014 who became ACE chair in 2017 and was reappointed for 18 months in January \u2014 said he expected Hodge\u2019s review to be \u201ctough but fair\u201d and that the \u201cstrengths of the [current] British system\u201d meant individual politicians could not influence which organisations received funding in the same way as in the US.\u00a0Founded in 1994 when the Arts Council of Great Britain disbanded, ACE received income of \u00a3797mn in the year to March 2024, about 70 per cent of which came from the government. In the same period it invested \u00a3716mn through multiple funding streams, with just under half going to the flagship \u201cnational portfolio\u201d programme.\u00a0\u00a0Launched in 2023, the 990-strong portfolio comprises renowned organisations such as the Royal Opera House, Royal Shakespeare Company and Ballet Black, as well as smaller ones including The Postal Museum, Midlands Arts Centre and Ledbury Poetry Festival.\u00a0Analysis published on Friday by consultancy Cebr on behalf of ACE set out nine \u201cspillover effects\u201d from public arts funding, including stimulating regional growth and the \u201ccrowding in\u201d of private and overseas investment for new projects such as Aviva Studios in Manchester. The cultural space, which opened two years ago on the former site of Granada Studios, expects to create 1,500 direct and indirect jobs over a decade.Citing the government\u2019s upcoming Spending Review, Serota said chancellor Rachel Reeves had an \u201copportunity to raise Britain\u2019s cultural profile\u201d and pointed to \u201cplenty of examples, particularly on capital projects, where early investment by the public sector has given confidence\u201d to the private sector.\u00a0\u201cBy Treasury terms it\u2019s small scale, but a regional theatre or new gallery like the Hepworth Wakefield does have a big impact\u201d on local communities, he added.As arts funding comes under pressure from squeezed budgets, Serota, who was director of Tate between 1988 and 2017, said the UK should follow France in offering tax breaks to businesses that sponsor arts venues.\u00a0Introduced in 2003, France\u2019s Aillagon law offers 60 per cent tax relief on donations, capped at 0.5 per cent of a company\u2019s annual turnover. \u201cGiven our rates of corporation tax [the UK main rate is 25 per cent], it would be a powerful incentive to companies,\u201d Serota said, adding that Britain had not \u201cplayed its soft power anything like as strongly as it could\u201d in recent years.\u00a0\u00a0ACE came under fire in 2022 when the agency slashed its grant to English National Opera and told the opera company to move outside the capital, after the then Conservative government ordered that \u00a324mn a year be shifted away from London institutions as part of its \u201clevelling-up\u201d agenda.\u00a0Last month Wigmore Hall, the classical music venue in central London, hit out at red tape as it quit ACE\u2019s national portfolio, having raised \u00a310mn privately.\u00a0Culture secretary Lisa Nandy has pledged to ensure \u201carts and cultural institutions truly are for everyone, everywhere\u201d, and London now receives one-third of ACE national portfolio funding, down from 41 per cent in 2018-23. But while the agency wanted \u201caccess to the best in places that haven\u2019t previously had it\u201d, Serota cautioned that there was \u201ca limit to how much [money] you can take out [of London] and expect the whole ecology to continue to function\u201d.\u00a0Asked if the quango engaged well enough with the sector, Serota said ACE needed to \u201cbuild trust\u201d and was preparing to ease paperwork for grant holders.\u00a0\u00a0\u201cACE does listen, but you can never listen enough. A really effective Arts Council would be seen by organisations as their voice, and there are times when we\u2019re not sufficiently in tune with their concerns,\u201d he said. \u201cI\u2019m not saying the Arts Council always gets it right\u2009.\u2009.\u2009.\u2009but I don\u2019t think it has lost its appetite for advocacy.\u201d<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
Summarize this content to 2000 words in 6 paragraphs in Arabic Ministers risk curbing \u201cliberty of thought\u201d and stoking culture wars if they scrap the arm\u2019s-length body for arts funding in England as part of their crackdown on quangos, the agency\u2019s chair has warned.\u00a0Sir Nicholas Serota told the Financial Times that the Arts Council England<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":280657,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[65],"tags":[],"class_list":{"0":"post-280656","1":"post","2":"type-post","3":"status-publish","4":"format-standard","5":"has-post-thumbnail","7":"category-culture"},"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280656","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=280656"}],"version-history":[{"count":1,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280656\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":280658,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/280656\/revisions\/280658"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/280657"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=280656"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=280656"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/globetimeline.com\/ar\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=280656"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}