Dan Ashton - Arts Funding: Three-legged Stools and Grey Application Forms Seminar

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Launched by Arts Council England (ACE) in 2016 as their online portal for funding applications, Grantium has been the focus of considerable debate and discussion. This has included the production of a wide range of texts, including: several iterations of guidance documents; cheatsheets shared online; and journalistic and social media commentary. Set within the context of debates on arts funding (Miller, 2000; O’Brien and Oakley, 2015; Warwick Commission, 2015), this paper draws on research with arts organisations to examine how arts funding application forms operate in the mediation of artistic work. Firstly, ACE funding application forms are located within what Power (1994) terms the “audit explosion”, and secondly, they are analysed through Lisa Gitelman’s concept of “epistemological objects” and Matthew Fuller and Andrew Goffey’s examination of “gray media”. This paper proposes that close examination of arts funding application forms and the material conditions of formal communication is central to understanding how arts funding agendas are communicated, made sense of, and responded to.