On 28 June, 2023, 141 artists — covering various cultural disciplines from architecture to visual art — received an email from the Arts Council stating that they had been awarded the Next Generation Artists Award (25k max + prestige). Alas the content of the email was not for the 141, but for the exclusive handful who were the actual NGA awardees. At the time of writing this, there is no 411 on whether the actual awardees received a PFO. Probably not, as the winners take it all.

Receiving PFO’s in the post, or in more recent years by email — through which you don’t have the psychological cushion of the small envelope (PFO) vs the big envelope (cha-ching) — from the Arts Council after a failed award application is tough, especially in the arts sector, as you are being judged by your peers. The generic phraseology of the PFO doesn’t help, especially: “The applications we received were of a very high standard”. Translated: If the applications were of a lower standard, like yours, you might have had a chance.

I received two PFO’s from the Arts Council this month (June 2023): one for the Individual Artist Bursary (something I never apply to) and one for the Project Award (one I always apply to). I was disappointed, especially the kicked-when-down feeling of it all. But I rethought everything I had planned and committed to (in theory) and felt a little freer without those commitments to produce and realise projects within a specified deadline. All those theoretical partnerships fell away to leave a chalk rubble of institutions that vapourised before my very eyes. I choked a bit on the dust, even shed a tear in the petrified dryness. I would have to de-scab my stale inks, and prime over some older work, but at least I would be free to destroy to my heart’s contempt. I mean content.

The feeling of being awarded dulls in comparison to the feeling of being rejected. As a previous awardee and reject, I know the score, and the score keeps score on both counts. On being awarded you first get an almighty buzz. Then you realise you have signed a contract with a series of commitments that include public outcomes and institutional marriages that have to be honoured (generally speaking, successful Arts Council applications are fed back into the institutional network of galleries, curators and ‘mentors’).

On being awarded, the next year or more of your life will be dedicated to these outcomes and commitments, and the work you make will have to align with the things stated in your application. There is room to swerve off track in respect to such stated outcomes, and the Arts Council neither monitors nor interrogates the dirt roads that you take into the wilderness of procrastination and dead ends of art-making. That said, you feel obliged, ethically or morally or whatever, to not get lost on the Lost Highway. This is public money you have been awarded after all. So you feel civic guilt, even without a god watching.

Artists wouldn’t apply to such awards if they didn’t believe they could win the spoils. So with every PFO there is a shadow of disbelief and desperation. Even though artists have the hope of public funding on this island (unlike stateside where each individual artist receives $1 from the government’s public purse every year), such high hopes can crush when not realised.

I can’t imagine the wave, barrel, wipeout and injury these 141 individual artists experienced on 28 June. No doubt, this latest administrational error has broken hearts and minds. The dopamine dump of acceptance followed by the anger and depression of rejection minutes or hours later is real and unfathomable. The Arts Council’s next day Instagram post with an image of a generic apology was a desperate way to put out fires, but lit a larger one with the oxygenated comment box of hue and cry below.

The Instagram post was a wrong move on the part of the Arts Council. So big was the error that a more personal approach was needed, even direct phone calls to the artists affected, or at the very least more personalised emails, like the ones the NGA awardees surely received, or will receive in the coming days. The language used to respond to such fuck-ups cannot be self-serving or beurocatric or even typed. It has to be spoken, direct, explicit, emotive, like the words spoken directly after the email was sent, including the “fucks”, “shits”, and “oh my god’s”.

Hearts will mend, minds will repress, and artists will move on and survive. They always do. Survive. Some artists will be embittered forever; some artists will be better off without the pressures of realising institutional commitments. This is public money after all, awarded based on its potential to be recycled back into the public as cultural capital. The calls of nepotism and for people to lose their jobs at the Arts Council is a manifestation of the pressures that artists are under to survive in this world. 141 artists were going to be disappointed no matter what on 28 June. That disappointment was upgraded to devastation with this administrational error.

I’ve fucked-up many times in the past, and will fuck-up many times in the future (I’m probable fucking-up right now writing this text). The person who emailed the 141 is 411 not to blame. A series of missteps and near misses, institutional and personal, led to this mistake. Agreed, it was a royal fuck-up (and we know how fucked-up the royals are), but a fuck-up nonetheless, without malice or intent.

From now on, big brother eyes and administrational hand-holding will be Tarsier big and long at the Arts Council. And yet with all the paperwork institutions have to generate for the digital paper mill of bureaucratic optics these days, more mistakes will inevitably occur. Where there’s paperwork there is the potential for fire; where there’s digital paperwork there’s the potential for an inferno. —James Merrigan

IMAGES: Edward Ruscha, Various Small Fires and Milk, 1964, artist book.