The Stage

Culture minister Russell pledges to put artists at the centre of Scottish arts policy

Published Wednesday 18 February 2009 at 16:05 by Thom Dibdin

Creative Scotland will still go ahead and creatives will be at the heart of government arts policy, according to Scotland’s recently appointed culture minister Mike Russell.

Russell was addressing a meeting of more than 100 leading members of the Scottish cultural community at the Traverse Theatre in Edinburgh on Wednesday, just a week after taking over the role from Linda Fabiani.

“It is too late to turn back from where we are in terms of the establishment of Creative Scotland - and we are not turning back,” Russell said of the troubled project to merge the Scottish Arts Council and Scottish Screen into one arts body, which Fabiani failed to get through the Scottish parliament last June.

However, he added: “It is not business as usual. Creative Scotland needs to be a product of this entire sector. It is a work in progress and it needs goodwill and assistance to emerge as the responsive servant of Scottish culture.”

Adding that he wants “to see artists making decisions about the arts,” he announced he would be seeking to appoint two new board members to the interim company Creative Scotland 2009 Ltd who have a background in the arts. He also promised that when the new organisation is fully constituted in 2010, its board would contain practising artists.

The key theme of the meeting, which involved an hour-long question and answer session, was Russell’s commitment to putting the role of the artist at the heart of the SNP government’s policy on the arts.

He said: “Structures in the arts are necessary evils - the way in which we enable policy in the arts to be carried out. We need to establish the government’s role and the duty of the creative artist.

“Our policy must support creators. It must give access to creations, and it must involve everyone in creativity. The heart of government policy has to be to support the artists.

“You can’t have an arts policy without artists, any more than you can have a railway without trains. So the arts community should be at the heart of everything we do and we need to resource artists and creatives to ensure that they can do it.”