Cover Stories: Andrew Motion; Tara Palmer-Tomkinson; Community-based reading project
17th Nov 2006, 01:55 GMT
*Poet Laureate Andrew Motion pulled no punches (and spoke for countless writers) when he called Gary McKeone's departure from the Arts Council "intensely stupid, wasteful and just plain wrong" at the farewell bash for the literature director - and his colleagues Jill Bellamy and Abigail Campbell - this week. Motion saluted McKeone - the casualty, along with his counterparts in other art forms, of yet another opaque strategic makeover - as "the only begetter of so much that has been brightest and best in literature over the past decade". As for the ex-director himself, he warned that the Council's search for a uniform corporate identity has meant an "inevitable slide into spin". McKeone called for more more vision, and less process, in the way our money is spent: "It's high time that the Arts Council stopped tinkering with the window and started paying full and proper attention to the view."
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