Now, the good thing about writing this twelve hours after today’s announcement is that everyone else has summarised, pontificated and moved on. I can just link to what they’ve written. Blogging is ace. Anyway, onward…

Here’s the Arts Council’s announcement. Fair play to them for getting this out in reasonably good time following the spending review.

Audiences Central have summarised things and the Birmingham Post has calculated the cuts the region’s orgs are going to face from April 2011.

To skip through the announcement:

• Most regularly funded organisations will have their funding cut by 6.9% in 2011/2012
• By 2014/15 cuts will have risen to 14.9% in real terms (ie. ignoring inflation)
• Arts and Business and Creativity, Culture and Education will have their public funding halved next year and taken away completely the year after that. That’s very bad news for them
• The Arts Council will have to halve its admin costs
• There’ll be a new system for funding from 2012 onwards (arrangements to be announced 4 November 2010). Everyone will have to reapply – some existing orgs won’t be successful, some new ones will
• The budget for budget for ‘strategic opportunities for artistic work’ such as touring, large events and the Cultural Leadership Programme is being knocked down by 64%

Next year will be a ‘transition year’, hence the lower-than-expected cuts, the stay of execution for A&B and CCE and the Guardian describing arts groups as ‘relieved’. So expect things to get worse. Oh, and don’t forget the local authority funding that’s disappearing.

In A&B’s ‘defence’ Colin Tweedy has released an utterly unimpressive statement quoting an easily-swatted away question in Parliament and referring to the generalised views of unnamed ‘private sector partners’. Go get em, tiger.

Still, it’s not all bad news in the arts. Working at the top at the Royal Opera House can net you £630,000 a year.

Here’s the bunny vid: