Art Of The Matter

A change is in the air over at The Arts Council. After one of the stormiest periods in its 49-year history, (culminating in the resignation of its chair, Brian Farrell a couple of months ago), the Council s hell-bent on keeping the spotlight firmly focused on the work rather than the personalities. Even Pat Murphy, the Council s ebullient new Chair, is keeping his head down, steering clear of the media, and getting on with the day s business.

Patricia Quinn, the Council s Director, has stood firmly behind a radical action plan which has seen massive changes in the way arts funding is dispensed and in the relationships which artists develop with the Council. Having succeeded where none of her predecessors had done, in securing funding for an unprecedented three-year period (with the obvious knock on effect of being able to engage in long term planning with artists and arts organisations), and having coaxed no less than #100million from government coffers, Quinn now finds herself at the helm of a ship that can, for the first time, steer a course well beyond the next storm front it encounters.
The recent shenanigans within the Council notwithstanding, Quinn is resolute in her pursuit of a workable and fruitful relationship with artists.
It said in the arts plan that we were transforming our operations, that it was time for a radical new approach, she says. You can t use words like transform and radical and then work on, business as usual. And I think, fairly obviously, some people stubbed their toes and yelped ouch . But I really do think we ve moved on from that, and we re hearing that from artists themselves.
Quinn is referring to the many come-all-ye s, or monster meetings which were held throughout the country in preparation for the 1999-2001 Arts Plan. The labyrinthine funding application process, with artists waiting interminably for a funding decision, and the sheer inevitability of the entire cycle having to be repeated annually was enough to put fire in most participants bellies. The bureaucracy was equally suffocating for Quinn and her colleagues.
It s such a different mindset now, she says. I think in the past, we were so starved and had such a sense of failure, failure to achieve any of our potential. I m not saying there was no art made. We have always, in Ireland, been blessed to have a huge prolixity of artists, but we were so weighed down by a sense of lost opportunity. And what we have now is a sense that it s our job to create a climate of opportunity, rather than to help compensate for the failure to achieve.
Ireland s recent economic success has played no small part in broadening the way in which the arts are perceived, not just by the public, but by artists themselves, Quinn maintains. Her previous position in Temple Bar Properties, a decidedly commercial organisation, helped mould her views on what s possible when you bring disparate ingredients to the pot.
Quinn is unequivocal about the potential for two-way learning between the Arts and Commerce.
One thing I learned from Temple Bar Properties was that because there were accountants, engineers, and the rest of us, it was amazing to find, as people got to know one another, that there was more to this person than met the eye. It s amazing how much we dismiss people who are not like ourselves. We tend to think: I don t rate that person s skills or abilities because they re not the ones I value in myself . Prior to that I had always worked in a fairly precious arts environment with people who cared passionately about what they did. But these people cared passionately about buildings and architecture and so on, too.
Things are changing among the public also, Quinn maintains. Art is no longer confined to galleries, so a wider audience is finally getting a chance to make its own mind up about it.
People are curious, she insists, and they will respond to a stimulus from an artist, or from an arts organisation, if they re not given a sense that they re to be excluded or put down by