Open letter to Scottish Culture Secretary, Fiona Hyslop

The recent RFO events are merely an example of the way in which Creative Scotland is disconnected from the sector it claims to represent. The decision to focus on 'arts professionals' and 'arts managers' pushes artists (the makers of culture) into further precarious professional and personal positions. We are expected to make work with little stability - and we are expected to make that work within an ever-increasing ideological framework that sees culture as a business, operating on corporate values. Aside from this being an inappropriate model for much arts practice, it also places the sector within an economic model that is deeply flawed, and often, in fact lacking in values. For me this is not just about arts people being involved in the conversations or decisions, CS have exhausted everyone with their constant consultations. This is about asking fundamental questions about what culture means to our society and how we develop a funding model that isn't pushing a specific economic ideology, and genuinely supports artists to push not just artistic but societal boundaries.

Freelance Stage Manager

Freelance lighting designer and production manager.

Freelance Designer and Prodcution Manager

Stephanie Knight Artist, Researcher and Writer in Theatre & Social Change It is an incredible shame that we find ourselves in this situation once again. This can be resolved by involving artists in the decisions and greater transparency.

Artist I have witnessed the stress and anxiety caused by the flawed RFO funding application process and would welcome a change

Involve artists in publicly funded projects

Creative Producer

Playwright/Translator

The lack of clarity in the CS requirements need to be addressed as a matter of urgency.

Musician, teacher and writer

Artist & Musician

Musician, researcher, lecturer.

Freelance musician /actor for 50 years.

It really is time to reassess how we help and support our arts and it needs a NATIONAL discussion

Dear Ms Hyslop, Please look at the way that film is and has been funded in Denmark in the last 20 years. Then look to see how many Oscars, award winning short film and Television programs have been made. Denmark produces and nurtures home grown talent. With a population not too dissimilar to ours, and creating content mostly in Danish, they are lightyears ahead of us in Scotland. Action must be taken.

Musician

Freelance arts educator, project co-ordinator

Spread the wealth fairly and transparently

Open funding is a poor replacement for Regular Funding; open funding has major issues (from personal experience; project submitted in the past was turned down twice, with polar opposite feedback each time and an unhealthy focus on commercialisation/expecting other non-arts charities to pick up the slack), and forcing large arts bodies into a competition with moving goalposts is eating away at the arts scene in Scotland. Minority groups have been sidelined via an untested push to have mainstream bodies provide "equalities" work i.e. LGBTQ groups have been defunded and CS response to the impact this will have on their equalities remit is to suggest that more mainstream arts bodies will deliver LGBTQ-focused work. This is, as yet, as unproven for LGBTQ arts as it is for disabilities-focused arts, BAME-focused arts and others, and it also has the effect of moving funds away from minority *artists* and organisations, who already have the skills and expertise to deliver this work, to generic, broad organisations who potentially lack both. Requiring more organisations, particularly those whose audience is a minority group, to rely on temporary open funding before becoming "sustainable" is a broad strokes attitude that is unrealistic in many cases: a national arts funding body should exist to help those organisations who may find it impossible to become sustainable in a commercial sense. It also shifts the burden of provision (particularly of equalities work) onto a shrinking number of individuals and small groups who should instead be focusing on artist-led work and provision of more diverse, experimental, progressive art.