Arts Plan 2012-2016 - Offaly County Council

The creative individual36offaly county councilThe creative individual in this context is theprofessional arts practitioner, such as visualartists, musicians, filmmakers, theatrepractitioners, writers, performers, dancers; asindividuals, collaboratives or companies.Supporting their practice underpins all othercreativity in the county. Many artists teach,facilitate, volunteer and are at the fore of culturaldevelopment in the county and participateenergetically in communities.In our last arts plan we laid down clear supportsto enable artists to expand and develop theirpractice, which has led to the sector becomingmore professional, confident, articulate andopen to broadening their practice. We need toacknowledge the concern of some artists thattheir work is being funded for the prestige of anorganisation or a region and not appreciated inits own right. As a public body we seek qualityand integrity in arts production, and recognisethat a formulaic approach or a ‘safe bet’ is ofneither benefit to artists or to patrons.Funding for the arts has to date used thelanguage of ‘grants’ or ‘support’, denoting thatthe arts are still periphery and that artists arereceiving ‘hand-outs’. We need to recognisewhat it means to ‘invest’ in the arts; investingdenotes faith, belief, hope, optimism and value.Therefore we acknowledge that by investing inthe arts or the artist, there may be risk takingand unpredictable outcomes, but this is thespace where exciting and innovative creativitywill emerge, not just a predeterminedoutcome/policy.