The Routledge Companion to Arts Management

William Byrnes, Aleksandar Brkić, William J. Byrnes, Aleksandar Brkić

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2019
• ISBN:
  9781351030847
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Commerce
• Subtopic: Commerce Général

The Routledge Companion to Arts Management contains perspectives from international scholars, educators, consultants, and practitioners sharing opinions, exploring important questions, and raising concerns about the field. The book will stimulate conversations, foster curiosity, and open pathways to different cultural, philosophical, ideological, political, national, and generational insights.

Four broad thematic areas are used to organize current topics in the field of arts and culture management. Part I introduces a mixture of perspectives about the history and evolution of the practice and study of arts management, the role of arts managers, and how arts management is being impacted by the digital age. Part II focuses on the dynamics of entrepreneurship, change processes, and leadership practices. Part III includes globally focused topics on cultural policy, cultural rights, and community building. Part IV examines a sampling of topics related to functional activities that are common to arts and culture organizations around the world such as marketing, planning, increasing diversity, hiring, fundraising, and sustainability.

This book builds a comprehensive understanding of what arts management can mean in an international context creating an essential resource for students, scholars and reflective practitioners involved at the intersection of business and the arts.

Part I

The evolving field of arts management and the expanding roles of arts managers

1
Arts management and its contradictions

Justin Macdonnell and Ruth Bereson

Some pre-history

All too often in today’s world subjects such as arts management are presented as if they have emerged fully baked and are universally understood. This chapter will examine some of the meanings and the concepts which underpin the term and make recommendations concerning current modes of education. It will ask the reader to consider in-depth, and against various contexts, the complexities inherent in this field of practice and study.

The study of arts management is a relatively new concept, but the practice goes back as far as any organised society. The moment a work is introduced to an audience by a third party, the practice of arts management occurs. In the Western World we might first describe the practice as having been undertaken by the Greeks where the Archons understood that it was their duty to finance and present theatrical work to the citizens of the state. This role has been undertaken in many forms since then, from philanthropic gesture, to royal patronage, governmental subvention, and various commercial modes through to contemporary crowd sourcing. The term itself in the Western World came into parlance in the latter part of the twentieth century where the study of arts administration initially observed the practices of governmental subvention post-WWII. It was also associated with only the virtues of the arts, Mathew Arnold’s 19th century influential concept of Sweetness and Light (Arnold, 1865), whereas the arts do not only channel good as witnessed by the way in which they have been used in totalitarian regimes.

In the 1980s the new obsession with managerialism which affected English-speaking countries slowly saw the term ‘administration’ replaced by that catch-all ‘management’ (Protherough and Pick, 2003). Indeed, the term ‘arts management’ suggests an engagement with the notion of ‘progress’ – a way forward, a process of doing things, of ‘managing the arts’. However we will argue that what we used to think of as the Western World has over the last half century constructed the concept and practice of arts management not from need but from a loss of nerve. We have built it out of the demands of our regulators, not out of the wants of the activity itself. And where all that was needed was skill, we have elevated it to a science based on a belief in how the arts needed to be shaped and financed rather than how they might emerge and grow. It is a classic case of form follows funding.

Odd obsessions

These are obsessions oddly of the English-speaking world and for a long time almost exclusively of the English-speaking world. Most of the structures that this managerialism has put in place have ensured that we only speak to each other within very confined circles, and for the most part in code, without looking to engage with what the rest of the world may have to offer. They emanate from a post-war Britain whereas even that country has moved on (Keynes, 1946; Tusa, 2014; Williams, 1989). Little by little that plague spread to other climes and now infects many nations and cultures that once knew better. Because of that imagined construct in which we have enmeshed ourselves a body of practice and a methodology has grown up and is ever more outdated. Today it verges on irrelevant to creating, producing and delivering the arts and thereby of ascribing value to them.

Yet the need to administer the circumstances in which art is made and in which we aim to support its practitioners and help them to thrive is not idle. It will not vanish merely because our current methods are starting to fail. What might we learn if we looked a little further afield beyond the holy family of the Anglosphere? What might we discover about our current dilemmas if we thought back to a time before John Maynard Keynes (1946) was deemed to have invented how we now administer the arts? Or how might those who want to join our ranks as producers and managers escape the sheltered workshop of the self-repeating academy as the preferred path to management training in the arts? Why have we paid so little attention to the role artists might play in designing both their own self-managed environment and management required from others? Above all, how in these circumstances, do we keep alive a healthy sense of critique in order to make fine and useful distinctions about who we are and what we aim to do? How do we shape a language that can more accurately describe what the arts represent at their best rather than one that just determines what we are expected to see and, in that unlovely usage, consume?

We would all agree that the arts aren’t goods and services in any traditional sense and that their impact in society and upon society cannot be measured merely with the conventional social and economic criteria. Surely too much ink has already been spilt on that topic to need any more discussion. That ‘the arts’ – as generally if generously understood – are critical to humanity is also a view that presumably we would all share. Yet, ‘management’ especially as expressed as management of the arts, however broadly or narrowly defined, implies a kind of commodification. So, however tiresome it might seem, we need to make a distinction yet again between what ‘the arts’ are and how they are ‘used’ in various circumstances or societies. Policy about the arts, both public and private, more often than not focuses on how the arts intersect with agendas which go far beyond their specific domain. As a consequence, they progressively constrict the very arts they seek to support. But at the same time, we would argue that to emerge and prosper, artists and the arts demand maximum freedom. Yet every day they are subjected to bureaucratic processes that achieve the very opposite.

For instance, many of the systems we hold dear (arms-length distribution of funding, for example) are relatively new and anchored in political and economic times in which they arose. Yet for that very reason they are dated, and their datedness too often strangles invention and initiative. So conditioned have we been by these systems that we have come to accept that they are the only way management, governance and public oversight can be. Even thoughtful commentators such as David Throsby (2018) continue to argue, like Winston Churchill (UK House of Commons, 1947), that it’s the best of a bad lot. Of course, his reference refers to the Australia Council for the Arts, but he and many others would make a similar claim for sibling bodies in other countries. Thus, we mistake the end for the means. But the ways in which arts meet their audiences have pre-dated and will outlive these rubrics and if we are bold, perhaps we can help them on their way.

A conundrum

Perhaps the notion we can manage the arts at all is philosophically problematic. It is undoubtedly a complex issue and the way we have chosen to do it over the decades may even have been destructive at some level. Part of the problem is that the boundaries keep shifting and the one between arts and culture is the most permeable of all.

So, at the outset it is important to frame what we are talking about. The arts has become a catch-all phrase invoked by various pundits to take on a variety of meanings; it has also been used interchangeably with that closely aligned word ‘culture’. We are used to an invocation of Raymond Williams’ (1976) now famous dictum ‘culture is one of the three most complex words in the English language’ and then conflating that complexity to refer to the arts. But in order to make fast a very big distinction we should perhaps go back in time, revert to Kluckhohn and Kelly’s (1945) seventy-year old landmark anthropological definition: ‘By culture we mean all those historically created designs for living, explicit and implicit, rational, irrational, and non-rational, which exist at any given time as potential guides for the behaviour of men’. However, the arts, and by extension their management, are something else. In particular, what can we ever mean by ‘the arts’ – to be managed or otherwise – assuming there is a collective usage to begin with?

We would distinguish the arts as consciously and formally constructed artefacts in whatever medium, having value independent of their symbolic significance, and able to be exchanged or traded in and across society. Their management (be it production or distribution) thereby becomes a specialised activity with its own value but not of itself having greater social worth than similar activities in other economic spheres.

We would also distinguish the arts as different from cultural expressions which may result in artefacts of equal aesthetic quality, but which lack the formal intention in their creation. We would claim too that everywhere and in every age the arts – in the preceding sense – are a product of the surplus economy and thus may, strictly speaking, only arise in urban society. Only cities can produce and sustain the arts.

While non-urban societies may produce and benefit from surplus, with rare exceptions they have not historically provided the division of labour necessary to support the making of art (artists in our understanding) as a conscious, independent social activity. Accordingly, whereas ceremony, in whatever sense one cares to consider it, may occur anywhere, only the city could transform it into theater and so on.

In managing all of this we are then talking about a modern urban phenomenon. Of course, there is artistic practice throughout urban and non-urban environments but the places where the arts are managed are the festivals, houses of performance, galleries, museums and institutions which have been the prime features of the metropolis on and off since Maecenas held a salon and Caracalla built his Baths.

Industrial action

There has more recently been the notion that something had emerged called an industry about the arts rather than a profession or indeed a vocation. In adopting that usage, we consider that we downgraded and ultimately deceived ourselves. In that curious commodifying description, practitioners of the arts tried to persuade the powers that be, and maybe even themselves, that there was something bigger, more significant than the mere historical practice of music, theater, literature, painting and sculpture that could be taken seriously and needed to be reckoned with. Strength in numbers perhaps? Size matters after all? To go further: it is strange, when one considers it, that the term ‘hybrid’ arts is now widely used, as though the concept of the arts was not already hybrid. We have, of course, progressed of late to the even more jejeune usage of the ‘creative industries’ and thus from inventing such categories have evolved into patterns of official categorising and judgment about them resulting in a vicious cycle of self-delusion that it all somehow means something. We do well to remind ourselves of Hans Christian Anderson’s (1837) parable about the emperor.

That observation brings us by slow degrees to the way in which policy and ultimately subvention occurs and is linked to the ways in which states perceive the arts. It draws attention also to how we have allowed those perceptions to shape and reshape awareness of what we in the arts do and why. For example, much emphasis has conventionally been placed on Keynesian thought and the post-war language of the Welfare State, roughly translated in our small terrain into the concept of the ‘Arts Council arms-length distribution model’. This is a view seen almost always through the antique lens of a faded British oikoumene, i.e. United Kingdom, Australia, Canada, New Zealand (Keynes, 1946). How – if at all – did the American world catch the same bug and all the administrative and attitudinal paraphernalia that accompanied it? But so it did and not only catch it but propagate it into a host of post-graduate taught degrees with associated organising bodies to provide accreditation for the tertiary education market and to distribute the low communion of its managerial cult before returning it to its British originators purified and elevated into Holy Writ (Protherough and Pick, 2003).

All this was, in turn, weighted down by the idea of a non-profit ethos in which many if not most of the arts have been trapped as though not-for-profit somehow was or ought to be an end in itself, the wonder of our age and glory of our priesthood. Or worse, it has grown the notion that ‘profit’ could be construed solely in financial terms. Certainly, we aim for ‘profit’ in the sense of the realisation of the dreams of artists and how that dreaming profits us all. We do or should distribute our profit (or dividends) to those shareholders (our audiences) across the country or the world. But please let us have no more talk of non-profit because that implies we are for loss. Yet loss metaphorically is the very thing which our modern arts management has largely settled for and has done so step by step: loss of self-worth; loss of status; loss of an ability to imagine any other reality; loss of integrity; and finally loss of face before the world we hoped to persuade.

Why manage?

Of course, the question is not so much is there such a beast as arts management or even should there be, but rather: is it worthwhile? Since society first moved beyond a subsistence economy and specialised division of labour became possible, most tasks have required something that the modern world would recognise as management. The marketplace, literally in the Neolithic era and long after, to the ‘markets’ figuratively in the present day, have always required a degree of organisation and even regulation. Religion too rapidly transformed itself from ritual to elaborate administration whether of belief or tithes. After priesthood and pottery, prostitution was an early starter in the field of economic specialisation and arguably one of the most enduring. Whether by barter or buying and selling, all of these services involved a product and a consumer and all in varying degrees offered an aspect of entertainment. As the product (or production) become more elaborate someone or something was needed to mediate between it and its customer or, if one prefers, the audience. Someone had to spruik the wares, collect the dues and pay the piper, and someone had to promise that a good time could or even would be had by all. It might be the finest food and drink, exotic dancers, a fight to the death, the most lyrical teller of tales, a human sacrifice or merely eternal life. You paid your money and you took your chance. But there had to be a go-between – a promoter, or if you will, a pimp.

For the best part of ten thousand years no one thought there was anything remarkable about this. Indeed, as late as the nineteenth century nothing much had changed. In that respect, art or entertainment was no different from other commodities. Some of those providing the intermediary functions were now called impresarios, though instead of gladiators or dancing girls they now offered recitals by superstars of the day like Franz Liszt and Jenny Lind or lecture tours by Charles Dickens. After all, impresario was once only Italian for businessman; not much different from the chap who sold dress material or later, the horseless carriage. The Uffizi was likewise once just some banker’s offices.

The crucial part of all this was that each and every one aimed to make a buck. From the man who supplied the lions for the Colosseum to Salomon bringing Haydn...