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Snipe | |||||||
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Snipe | |||||||
Dear Uncle Jackdaw, Smug and fulfilled, I am living the charitable idyll having left art dealing for good. On the Worthy to Sell-Out Scale, I am now officially a better person than all my bankolicitor friends. I work for an arts organisation, a charity. And it doesn’t only make me feel good, we benefit other people too. Every day I bring out trays full of artworks to the public, marking the end of exclusive art, the beginning of choice, the decline of meritocracy and probably the beginning of British Socialist Realism. My vocation is to follow in the footsteps of those historical rarities who shared art: William Morris, Sir J C Robinson, Prince Albert; they were all thinking the same as me. Or so I thought, until my inaugural day when first I landed in my Hoxtonian haven of worthiness and philanthropy. It turns out my charity is like a green space, overshadowed by a possessive council sign. This little park has so much potential, but its funding gets spent on aluminium signage not watering plants or weeding. The garden has lost its charm, leaving the council’s fanfare to highlight its own inadequacy. The induction was foreboding. I was introduced to the stationery cupboard and strongly advised on my chair height. The photocopier is dangerous and the big man in the corner has a highlighter fetish. In short, the job is a sham, and I have to play pretend offices to be taken seriously. The success of an arts organisation depends on the health and wellbeing of its stationery cupboard. Extra people get employed to make the extra Viking stationery orders to provide extra staples and hole punchers for the new employees to file away invoices for their new office equipment. This is funded by selling Pissarro prints. The trainee stationeers are then sent on courses to improve their telephone manner, to train them in new IT systems which record the number of recycled Rollerball pens and to qualify them in the health and safety of lifting the printer paper bought to print out all of the Viking invoices. Blinkered by the quantity of herbal teabags we can buy in bulk, the charity I work for have become sidetracked. This month we almost forgot to ‘bring art to the people’, not that they seemed that bothered. And all this costs us money we don’t have. So fundraising (albeit for new scanners) is an important part of the job. The Arts Council during its decline and fall is still doling out erratic sized grants, on receipt of the hundred page application form to which I dedicate a frustrating proportion of my daylight hours. It turns out that the Arts Council needs to judge your race, religion and sexuality before they fund you. Questions include: ìIf you cannot receive money from the National Lottery for religious reasons have you included a letter explaining this?î; and that all important percentage question ìwe define an organisation as being lesbian, gay or bisexual led if at least 51% of the senior managers, management committee, board, governing body or council define themselves as lesbian, gay or bi. Please give the number who identify themselves as having the following sexualities...î Excuse my ignorance, but in these times of love, internet and globalisation since when did sexuality affect funding? Does anyone care how the Arts Council chooses to define sexuality? Is it really important to the future of art what percentage of humans it takes to turn a charity bi? My charity and the Arts Council seem to have a distorted conviction that their priorities are appropriate. Colleagues, holier than thou, have created their own charitable purposes; blind to the absurdity of our chocolate teapot they obsess over sundries and side projects whilst forgetting why we exist. Give it two years, then I'll be Director and we can go back to bringing ‘pictures to the people’. Tell Auntie Jackdaw that I’m having a wonderful time in my new job. Love, Snipe | |||||||
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Snipe All of this site is | |||||||
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