What has been the impact of “Let’s Create” on you and your work? 

In this week’s Blog, OAUK Director Sho introduces some of the debates on “Let’s Create” that has been going on around the governmental review of the Arts Council. Now that the General Election has put a pause on the review until after the summer, it has given us the chance to collect your views on the impact this new strategy has had on Outdoor Arts. 

The General Election

The General Election was called in May, and you may have heard that this has put a pause to the formal review of Arts Council England. Dame Mary Archer, who is leading the review, seemed to have been particularly focused on questioning if sufficient emphasis on artistic excellence was placed within “Let’s Create”, and this had created a lively debate on whether relevance and excellence are necessarily binary. You can get a sense of this through the open letter that was sent to Mary Archer, and an opinion piece by David Benedict in The Stage.

“Let’s Create”

“Let’s Create” does seem to prioritise making the arts more accessible to underserved individuals and communities, and Lyn Gardener also wrote on The Stage wrote:

“Who wouldn’t want to have greater access to the arts for people from all walks of life?”

“Let’s Create” is a call for us to be more inquisitive about the wider impact of the arts, so that we can collectively demonstrate why there is a fundamental need for a thriving community to have the arts woven into its fabric. There’s growing evidence of the arts improving wellbeing, education, the economy etc as a kind of positive side effect, so why not use these to our advantage?

How has “Let’s Create” impacted your creative decision making?

But I am curious to find out from our members how “Let’s Create” has impacted on your creative decision making. In the article, Lyn Gardner goes on to argue that co-created works or socially engaged works are just as artistically excellent and deserves to be recognised as such. But the debate about “Let’s Create” is not shining enough light on the pressure that artists, producers, and programmers might be feeling in terms of the kind of work they feel instructed to make and present.

Do we all feel as though we should only make co-created works, or works designed for specific underserved communities? Or are we all making work that are focused on making an impact on non-arts issues like health, the environment, or social cohesion? Of course, all these kinds of works should be supported for their own distinctive value and impact, but an industry that ends up doing largely the same thing doesn’t feel right either. Maybe reductive thinking about what relevant art looks like and where it can go, is part of the reason why arts colleagues are being pitted against each other.

Amongst all the debate, there has been a call for the wider sector to have their voice heard for the ACE review. The review into ACE is most likely to happen whichever Party forms the Government, so OAUK would like to represent your views on “Let’s Create” when the opportunity arises. Do let us know your views by contacting us.