Creative Scotland has launched a strong defence of its practice and policies, but its chief executive said more could be done to communicate with artists and cultural companies.
Andrew Dixon, leader of the arts funding body which has been under sustained criticism – including a strongly worded attack from leading poet Don Paterson in The Herald – told MSPs he "put his hands up" and said more could be done to communicate with the cultural sector.
In a 90-minute session at the Scottish Parliament's culture committee, Mr Dixon said he was confident the body's plans would come to fruition. He said its controversial commissioning role was only 20% of its work, and was used to address weaknesses or enhance strengths.
The committee also heard from Francis McKee, director of the Centre for Contemporary Arts in Glasgow, who said: "Trust is being lost at the moment, and that's dangerous."
Creative Scotland's removal of fixed-term funding for more than 40 com-panies has caused great controversy.
Mr Dixon told the committee: "We've not been good enough about getting information out about change. "
Marco Biagi, MSP, asked about the balance between Creative Scotland's role of funding art and artists, and taking an active commissioning role.
Mr Dixon said: "The reality is that 80% of what we do is invest in cultural organisations and artists and 20% is to identify gaps and build on our strengths."
He said using Lottery money instead of Government funds was not breaking any rules on Lottery "additionality" that is directly replacing Government funds.
MSP Joan McAlpine asked whether putting arts companies on project funding was "interfering in their artistic freedom".
Mr Dixon said: "What we are doing is trying to devolve money to cultural organisations to take decisions themselves."
Last week Mr Paterson, one of Scotland's leading writers, said in an article that Creative Scotland was a "dysfunctional ant-heap" and should be abolished.
Why are you making commenting on The Herald only available to subscribers?
It should have been a safe space for informed debate, somewhere for readers to discuss issues around the biggest stories of the day, but all too often the below the line comments on most websites have become bogged down by off-topic discussions and abuse.
heraldscotland.com is tackling this problem by allowing only subscribers to comment.
We are doing this to improve the experience for our loyal readers and we believe it will reduce the ability of trolls and troublemakers, who occasionally find their way onto our site, to abuse our journalists and readers. We also hope it will help the comments section fulfil its promise as a part of Scotland's conversation with itself.
We are lucky at The Herald. We are read by an informed, educated readership who can add their knowledge and insights to our stories.
That is invaluable.
We are making the subscriber-only change to support our valued readers, who tell us they don't want the site cluttered up with irrelevant comments, untruths and abuse.
In the past, the journalist’s job was to collect and distribute information to the audience. Technology means that readers can shape a discussion. We look forward to hearing from you on heraldscotland.com
Comments & Moderation
Readers’ comments: You are personally liable for the content of any comments you upload to this website, so please act responsibly. We do not pre-moderate or monitor readers’ comments appearing on our websites, but we do post-moderate in response to complaints we receive or otherwise when a potential problem comes to our attention. You can make a complaint by using the ‘report this post’ link . We may then apply our discretion under the user terms to amend or delete comments.
Post moderation is undertaken full-time 9am-6pm on weekdays, and on a part-time basis outwith those hours.
Read the rules hereComments are closed on this article