Ah, the mysteries, and indeed the vagaries of state funding. I've
always worked on the assumption that Arts Council funding was to be
avoided as I didn't want to toady to a bunch of know-nothing
administrators. My local AC office is about 5 minutes' walk from my
house and they don't know I exist. Or didn't until Monday when I tossed
them a funding request for the next three years. What happened? Well, I
got fed up seeing state funds going to third-rate enterprises that did
little but p*ss it away. Then I realised that the application forms
were actually quite simple if you know which buttons to press, and
(crucially) if you understand basic accounting and can make a forecast.
I have a suspicion that the AC won't know what to do with the
application I've made but, if I don't ask, I won't get. I've met a
number of artists (visual, that is) who were totally flummoxed by the
application process and could not understand any of the financial
aspects of it. It would be nice if there were some friendly
organisation that could help them put an application together, rather
than have them miss funding because they couldn't handle the forms.
(It's a common British policy, this: tell everyone they've a right to
something; then make the application forms hard for the majority to
understand; then you employ another army of bureaucrats to help them
understand the forms that were badly written by the other bureaucrats.
And so on.
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Tony Frazer
Shearsman Books Ltd
58 Velwell Road
Exeter EX4 4LD
England
Tel / Fax: (+44) (0) 1392-434511
http://www.shearsman.com/
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