Arts Council

Arts Council. An organization established in 1945 and incorporated by Royal Charter in 1946 ‘to preserve and improve standards of performance in the various arts’. It was a successor to the Council for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts (CEMA), a wartime organization that had operated from 1940 to 1945. Originally it was called the Arts Council of Great Britain, with separate committees for Scotland and Wales, but in 1994 the Scottish and Welsh Arts Councils became autonomous bodies and the main organization was renamed the Arts Council of England. There is also an Arts Council of Northern Ireland (likewise a successor to CEMA), and the Republic of Ireland has its own Arts Council, founded in 1951. In the visual arts, the main activity of the Arts Council consists of the organization of exhibitions, many of which are accompanied by scholarly catalogues. It has two galleries in London for such exhibitions: the Hayward Gallery, part of the South Bank arts complex alongside the Thames—a large, rather grim concrete building opened in 1968; and the much smaller and prettier Serpentine Gallery in Kensington Gardens, which was originally an Edwardian tea-house and was opened as a gallery in 1970. Many exhibitions travel to other venues in Britain. The Arts Council inherited from CEMA the policy of purchasing works by living artists and it has built up a large collection of 20th-century British art. In 2003 the sculpture it owns was moved to the Yorkshire Sculpture Park, near Wakefield. The rest of the collection does not have a permanent home, but works are often loaned to public institutions. The Arts Council also makes grants directly to artists and galleries. It is one of the most important sources of art patronage in Britain, but it is frequently attacked for alleged shortcomings, including too much bureaucracy and too little vision.