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It's fitting that in the same week that we welcome the 'HuffPo' to the UK, I've been busy talking about how other big American ideas could help us improve arts funding.
From the National Theatre's 'War Horse' to the Neil MacGregor's 'A History of the World in 100 Objects', there have been some incredible highlights in the British art calendar over the past year. But it has also been an incredibly challenging year for everyone who cares about British arts and culture.
Sadly, we have had to make difficult decisions, and while the Government has tried to limit the impact on frontline budgets, I know these have been painful months for many of us.
The basic dilemma is that arts organisations are fragile. They're often led by brilliant, passionate people who quite rightly think that art matters more than money. Yet without financial security, this fragility becomes vulnerability.
So if we want to nurture great art and strengthen the institutions that sustain it, then we need a stable, long term financial base - one that will insulate the sector from the boom and bust pattern of public sector funding.
Of course we're fortunate in this country to have plenty of individuals ready to give generously to the arts.
Over the last 12 months, we've seen some breath taking examples of individual philanthropy: Terence Conran, Lloyd Dorfman, Dame Vivien Duffield and Sara Miller McCune, to name but a few.
But it's clear there's a lot more we can do to professionalise and develop fundraising capacity and nurture a more widespread philanthropic spirit more widely across the country.
In fact, I see this as my number one priority as Culture Secretary.
Financial independence is the oxygen for great art. It's how we can make sure great British creations, like the Tony-award winning Jerusalem, triumph on an international stage.
So what have we done? In December I launched a 10 point plan for philanthropy, which includes a new £100 million matched-fund to encourage fundraising. I also designated 2011 as the year of corporate philanthropy.
In his budget the Chancellor has also announced measures to simplify gift aid and published a consultation on making gifts of art tax deductible.
And perhaps most significantly, he cut inheritance tax for those pledging 10 per cent or more of their legacy to charity.
When you combine that with the other ideas Francis Maude has put forward to boost charitable giving as a whole, we aim to create a very positive environment for arts fundraising.
As the inspirational Michael Kaiser wrote, UK arts organisations have traditionally had "a reticence to talk about money, let alone ask for it."
That's changing too, with a new willingness to embrace major development programmes, and to build up skills and expertise - something we asked Michael to help us with last month.
Clearly, philanthropy and corporate sponsorship are major pillars, but this also includes membership schemes, commercial income from shops and restaurants and credit card donation programmes too.
There is another missing piece - a vital financial cushion for when times get tough.
Endowments are commonplace in the US, but still quite rare in the UK.
Yet if we want to compete on an international stage, we need to give our cultural institutions the same protection and resilience.
So I believe that 2011 should be the start of a century of British cultural endowments to help us build a firmer investment base for the arts.
The Government can help stimulate this - so this week I have announced plans for a new endowment fund of £55 million, which we hope will trigger a further £130 million in private sector investment through matched funding.
But we also need cultural institutions to embrace the ideas and build up the capacity to attract and manage these funds more effectively.
For me, that's the challenge for the years ahead.
Shakespeare wrote of art and beauty threatened by the 'wrackful siege of battering days'.
Nobody can predict how and when the next siege will come.
It's our job to make sure we're ready and that great art is always protected and sustained.
Jonathan Naymark: The Emergence of a Canadian Culture War
Andrea Carson: Government Art Grants: Preaching to the Choir?
You're right, there. I feel the same regarding the Olympics, but I think we've past the point of no return on that. Or maybe we should get out now while we're still behind.
The Arts should rise or fall by economic forces and not be subject to tax-payer largesse. We oiks have more pressing concerns and will not turn bolshy if denied Rigoletto.
Aside from the objections to some of your other decisions, you raise a good point. An obvious question to ask next, especially during 2011, the year of corporate philanthropy, is why don't we (and I include corporations as none corporeal beings) give as much to the arts as we perceive our cousins across the pond do? When looked at as a percentage of income, (and here corporations are decidedly separate) it's about the same, hovering around 2 percent. UK Corporations sadly much less. In looking for reasons, its a cultural thing and sadly hard to change. Lack of recognition, and an very different attitude to philanthropy are to blame.
If during your tenure you could encourage corporations to become bigger and more recognized philanthropists you may help the rest of us see that it is much more important how money is spent, than how it is earned.
Furthermore, even if the National could have funded the development of War Horse solely from private giving, Mr Hunt must realise that, while major private donors are a conceivable partial source of support for major national 'flagship' institutions, smaller organisations (especially those outside London) are hugely less able to attract the same level of donations. Travelex – and its head Lloyd Dorfman – have been fantastic for the National. Great. Private donors have (twice!) provided a name to grace the ROH's Floral Hall. Great. But will enough equally rich donors be found to keep the absolutely brilliant, conceivably 'less glamorous', but still expensive Nottingham Playhouse, West Yorkshire Playhouse, Theatre Royal Plymouth, Royal & Derngate, Bolton Octagon and Liverpool Everyman going without public subsidy? And that's just a handful of building-based theatres. What about non-building based ones? Music? Arts galleries? Dance?
So what is the rational bases for the existence of "smaller organisations"?
"Absolutely brilliant." By what/whose criterion?
As Andrew Carnegie said "a man who dies rich, dies disgraced". That philosophy might work in America but I can't see it working here. We love to die rich.
The answer is not simply to replace public funding with private funding.
Private funding is great -- I am a member of the ROH and the Tate and it is well worth the money. it should be encouraged, but as a supplement to public funding.
If somewhere down the line it turns out institutions have accrued huge endowments and member bases, then it might be possible to look at reducing their public funding -- but to think you can make this switch over night is the exact same mistake that the government have made with tuition fees.
You can't cut the funding and up the entry costs thinking one will replace the other. It wont, instead the sector you have cut will shrink.
and to further verygoodyear's sentiments -- relying on private funding would mean a bad year for business is a bad year for arts. We can't have that -- we need consistently good arts to get us through the bad years.
financial base - one that will insulate
the sector from the boom and bust
pattern of public sector funding."
And that's the private sector? Seriously? With all due respect Mr. Hunt I'm pretty sure it wasn't the private sector which caused the economic turmoil.
The private sector is even more volatile, with its inherent drive being self interest. The government's role is to do the things that we can't rely on the private sector for. Leaving our (yes, ours) arts sector to the whim of corporations and millionaires seems like short-termism directed by a all-encompassing ideology to shrink the state.
"while you allow NewsCorp's takeover of BSkyB to go through." Quid pro quo, possibly.
I'm dismayed, but not surprised, by Cameron's unwillingness to call for a halt to the takeover, nearly as much as I am dismayed at Jeremy Hunt's approval for it in the first place. How on Earth can people ally themselves with such a media despot AND sleep at night?