One of the only constants at Creative Scotland, the national arts funding body, seems to be change.
The body's latest annual plan has been published, only a day before it was announced that its director of creative industries, Caroline Parkinson, is to leave. Creative industries are an important part of the quango's remit, and indeed it is due to publish one of its strategies on the topic by December. Ms Parkinson leaves in September, so the new director will not have a lot of time to get her or his vision in place. The job is to be advertised shortly.
The annual plan speaks of many things that the body aims to do in the coming year: a new desire to investigate what it can do for Scots language and culture, a film strategy - although no new money, apart from what can be perhaps levered out of Europe - to be published this month, and several funding measures.
From October there will be a new way of funding artists and companies outside the Regular Funding regime (for which many companies are applying at the moment). Open Funding will provide grants of between £1000 and £150,000 for projects of up to two years in length. This will be where individual artists, including those who have been applying for the very popular Artist Bursaries (which are to be discontinued), will be encouraged to seek funds. In a chat with me this week, chief executive Janet Archer said: "Individuals will be able to apply for that fund and be taken every bit as seriously as companies. It's a new programme and we will monitor it quite carefully. I think Artist Bursaries have been fantastic for those that have got them, but the reality is we have only been able to fund a tiny proportion of the number of applications we've had, because it's a finite amount of money. You could argue that if we get enough strong applications from individuals into the Open Project fund, we have more artists funded than through bursaries."
How does Creative Scotland judge the artistic worth of what it funds? It is an old and vexed question, and I remember similar questions being asked of the Scottish Arts Council.
Perhaps surprisingly, Creative Scotland's boss does not believe it has a coherent system in place. Ms Archer said: "I am hoping by the end of this year we have pinned that down. Obviously it's a hot topic of conversation." She said that judging quality was of course subjective and complicated, especially when artists take risks "on the way to excellence" that don't quite work. She said the Framework for Artistic Assessment, as it will be called, would be a "robust, fair and transparent base for discussions about artistic quality and audience engagement" and would be formulated by the end of July.
"We haven't really got a system at the moment, to be honest," she said. "We have an approach, and of course we do evaluate things on an artistic level and we go and see work and report on it, but what I want is a much more coherent system that everyone understands. I think we can do that fairly quickly. I don't think it is difficult to do, but we need to share our ideas with the sector and generate as much consensual agreement as we can."
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