ABSTRACT
Policy making for the arts began in the 1940s for Great Britain and in the early 1950s for Ireland. This chapter focuses on these early years as many contemporary problems have their roots in this era. Arts policies began at an inopportune time and as a result, were automatically doomed. Tracing the alleged contemporary crisis back to source, one sees that arts policies emerged at a time when making decisions about the future of the arts and how they should be brought inside the domain of governmental responsibility seems truly bizarre. In modern times, arts policy is seen as 'a fact of life in British government policy and the creation of that policy is both a conscious act of government and one which will remain firmly under the control of the Executive'. The contents of the Royai Charter of 1946 which incorporated the Arts Council were bare bones and the structures introduced remarkably vague.
