David Shrigley has produced an animation, titled ‘An Important Message About the Arts’, as part of an artist-backed campaign opposing proposed 23 percent cuts to arts institutions in the UK:
To support the campaign, please sign this petition, which is aimed at the Secretary of State for Culture, Department of Culture, Media and Sport.
More information:
‘Radical cuts to current levels of arts funding will decimate what has been one of the UK’s chief success stories over the past 20 years, and will bring an end to the UK’s reign as a global capital for culture.
Arts organisations all accept the need to reduce their budgets. But while the arts can possibly sustain a ten percent funding cut, the 25-30% cuts that the government is currently considering would result in the closure of many smaller arts organizations and would also have a crippling effect on the functioning of the country’s leading arts venues.
The arts are a major employer, and they generate far more revenue than they cost to fund. In addition they are a major attraction for tourism in the UK. While cutting arts funding may save money in the short term, in the long run it risks undermining what has been one of the country’s most vibrant areas of growth over the past fifteen years, and destroying one of the national achievements that we should be most proud of.’
Tate Modern’s cavernous Turbine Hall on a rainy Saturday night is not what you’d call inviting. Even after repeated visits in the ten years since Tate Modern opened, the sheer, breathtaking scale of the space tends to make me feel like a small, pale dot floating inside a whale. How apt, then, that Michael Clark Company – for who the body, obviously, is the prime expressive tool, and whose performances have reiterated, again and again, that a dancer can electrify, respond to, grapple with, and even seemingly expand or contract any space they find themselves in – have been doing a residency there for the past seven weeks.
