"Under ACE’s Let’s Create strategy, social outreach, diversity and the rest of the DEI mantra appear to be far more important than artistic output"
Spectator: 28th March 2025: Stephen Pollard praises Wigmore Hall for stepping away from taxpayer funding in protest at the quango's DEI obsessions.
"...The Arts Council England (ACE) was the successor to the wartime Committee for Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), set up to organise artistic and cultural activities for the general population. As CEMA’s chair, John Maynard Keynes, put it, its task was: ‘Not to teach or to censor, but to give courage, confidence and opportunity…(and to provide) a universal opportunity for contact with traditional and contemporary arts in their noblest forms"...
...But today’s successor body, ACE, is as far removed from Keynes’ vision...Its 2020 ‘mission statement’, Let’s Create, is a perfect parody of what you would imagine a quango captured by DEI ideology would come up with...
...ACE really does suggest that the problem with opera is that it is a form of classical music...Under ACE’s Let’s Create strategy, social outreach, diversity and the rest of the DEI mantra appear to be far more important than artistic output. Any organisation which receives taxpayer funding must produce quarterly reports (based on a 60-page instruction manual) on their investment principles, finances and ‘activities’ – which mean the likes of community outreach projects, work towards Net Zero and diversity programmes...
That’s why ACE is now such a perversion not only of Keynes’ original idea but of arts subsidy itself. It no longer subsidises art for art’s sake – and for excellence’s sake. It subsidises bodies on the basis of whether or not they conform to a set of ideological views about the role of art and the function of taxpayer subsidy..."
You can can also read "Just like Mozart, Wigmore Hall has chosen freedom" by PopCon's Andrew Allison... Extract:"...Taxpayers funding the arts through arm’s length bodies, with meddling woke bureaucrats (who care more about DEI than performances which make the hairs stand up on the back of the neck) dictating performances, is slavery, not freedom. And as Margaret Thatcher once said, “When people are free to choose, they choose freedom.” That’s exactly what Wigmore Hall has done. Bravo! "