Trends in public and private support for government – owned cultural institutions in Nigeria: The Oyo State Council for Arts and Culture in focus

Abstract

An Arts Council is established for the purpose of ―preserving, promoting, propagating and fostering the arts and culture of their various  states‖. Other aims of an Arts Council are to improve the knowledge, understanding and practice of the arts, and to make them more  accessible to the public. Paradoxically, the Arts Council has been widely criticized by critics as the citadel of bureaucratic establishment  art, whose objectives are too ill- defined to make evaluation possible. Most charges are those of being unrepresentative, undemocratic  and irresponsible. The questions evolving from these are: how accessible is the arts to the public? Who does the Arts Council serve? Why  do we have an Arts Council? In an attempt to answer these questions and others, the paper examines the trends in public and private  support for government-owned cultural institutions. Particular reference is made to the Oyo State Council for Arts and Culture as a   prototypical example of a government-owned cultural institution.