How women lost the vote again at Creative Scotland

SIGH. Another week, another heap of trouble for Creative Scotland. “It’s been a tough month,” chief executive Andrew Dixon, above, acknowledged in his latest blog, published yesterday. “I’ve taken my share of brickbats both in the press and in person.” You earn £120,000 a year, Andrew, you’ll cope.

How long can this continue? A while longer, I fear. After months of serious criticism over its funding policy from leading figures such as playwright David Greig, jazz musician Tommy Smith, National Theatre of Scotland boss Vicky Featherstone, theatre director Matthew Lenton, poet Don Paterson and then, well, everyone (over 400 signatures on that artists’ open letter to CS now, including many, many high-profile names), Creative Scotland’s next tough task is to defend the glossy, black-tie awards ceremony it is holding at Kelvingrove next month, in association with the Daily Record. So far it’s not doing terribly well.

I wrote a pretty despairing piece about the Creative Scotland Awards in the diary a few weeks ago, criticising – among other things – the way it acts as if the sole job of this country’s writers, musicians, theatre-makers, artists etc is to tell the whole world how pure dead brilliant it is to be Scottish.

I mention this because, in my ten years working for this newspaper, I have never had so many people tweeting, e-mailing, phoning, and approaching me personally to thank me for something I wrote. If these people are anything like a representative sample, the whole tone of this awards ceremony may have alienated and insulted almost as many people in the Scottish arts world as any change in funding policy.

In public, at least, the criticism so far has focused on the fact that all seven members of the judging panel are men – a lamentable lapse in judgement from an organisation which claims it is committed to promoting equality and diversity.

Creative Scotland has apologised for this, sort of. A dozen women were approached, it has said, but none was able to do it. “Several judges, including women, pulled out at a late stage,” said Andrew Dixon at the weekend (hmm, I wonder why?). Given that one of the male judges has admitted he voted in absentia and didn’t know who the other judges were, this seems a little feeble, and no steps are being taken to fix the situation – those seven men will choose the winners, whether we like it or not.

There are, however, a few other questions that spring to mind about this awards ceremony – and I am not the only person asking them. For example, Creative Scotland has invested £30,000 of public money in an event to which members of the public can only go if they can afford a £110 ticket. CS has been awkwardly backtracking from this decision for some time now, first removing the price from the website, then emphasising that “the vast majority” of tickets will be given to nominees and their guests – who will now apparently include “the people and communities who nominated them”.

OK, but what if you’re an ordinary arts lover (or an artist) with no personal connection to the nominees, who just wants to go but can’t afford a £110 ticket? On this question they are conspicuously silent.

If you can’t go to the ceremony, at least you could vote. There were, Creative Scotland says, 350 nominations from the public. But the shortlist, according to Saturday’s Daily Record, was “whittled down” by the judges. The winners will be chosen by the judges too. So in what sense does the public’s voice actually count in this? Was the shortlist based on who got the most public votes? Evidently not, or why bother with a panel of judges at all?

Effectively, then, we have a major national awards ceremony in which seven men pick and choose whatever winners they like from a list of hundreds of names, without, it seems, feeling the need to be in the same room as each other while doing it.

The result feels like something of a fudge – neither a public vote (for which votes would be counted and winners announced, pure and simple) nor a jury decision (for which the members of the jury would be expected to sit in a room together for some time, deliberating, having all personally seen everything that is being put forward – which seems very unlikely in this case). It doesn’t exactly inspire confidence in the openness, fairness or credibility of the whole process.

In Creative Scotland’s defence, it has finally shown some humility in recent weeks. In a reply to a fellow journalist’s queries on Facebook, the organisation emphasised that is “very keen to re-establish positive, constructive and collaborative relationships with the arts and culture sector as soon as possible”.

This was, however, after failing to offer responses to simple questions for several days while, presumably, PRs and their bosses wrangled over how many mistakes it was possible to admit to without doing any further damage.

Despite my opinions of these awards, I hope it is possible to establish that positive, constructive and collaborative relationship. But it will help if Creative Scotland can manage to stop shooting itself in the foot.