Artists Running: Fifty Years of Scottish Cultural Devolution

Abstract

It is just over fifty years since the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB) devolved the governance and subsidy of Scotland’s arts from London to Edinburgh. Dan Brown, Deborah Jackson and Neil Mulholland discuss how artists, curators, arts administrators and the Scottish Arts Council (SAC) learned to cohabit. They examine the tensions between the SAC’s Keynesian values, Scotland’s emerging artist-run organizational culture and its long-established Unionist-nationalist arts institutions. What changes and challenges did the cultural devolution of the late 1960s precipitate in Scotland’s contemporary art and what impact did this have upon the political devolution that followed in 1999?