The Arts Management Handbook

New Directions for Students and Practitioners

Meg Brindle, Constance DeVereaux

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2015
• ISBN:
  9781317458265
• Edition: 1
• Topic: Sozialwissenschaften
• Subtopic: Medienwissenschaften

Whether the art form is theater, dance, music, festival, or the visual arts and galleries, the arts manager is the liaison between the artists and their audience. Bringing together the insights of educators and practitioners, this groundbreaker links the fields of management and organizational management with the ongoing evolution in arts management education. It especially focuses on the new directions in arts management as education and practice merge. It uses cases studies as both a pedagogical tool and an integrating device. Separate sections cover Performing and Visual Arts Management, Arts Management Education and Careers, and Arts Management: Government, Nonprofits, and Evaluation. The book also includes a chapter on grants and raising money in the arts.

Introduction The Field of Arts Management: Challenges and New Directions

Meg Brindle and Constance DeVereaux

DOI: 10.4324/9781315700243-1

Artists have been arts managers for a long time—long before they were called arts managers, long before their training became a field unto itself, and long before academic programs in that field came into existence. Consider William Shakespeare. Not only did he write the plays his actors performed; he also ran rehearsals, wrote playbills to promote his productions and distributed them throughout London, designed his theater, and recruited and contracted actors. In short, he managed or was otherwise involved in almost every aspect of his theater’s existence. Consider also the entrepreneurial know-how of Michelangelo, which has been the subject of scholarly study (Wallace, 1994) demonstrating that a great artist can also be a great manager.

The eighteenth-century poet William Blake owned his own printing press, which he operated in his home. Blake produced the printing plates, cranked out the pages of his manuscripts, and sold the resulting volumes. The management of his craft occupied more of his time than the creative writing.

In the twentieth century, Charlie Chaplin, emerging from the poverty of a London workhouse, had an acting career that began on a vaudeville stage and moved very quickly to Hollywood. There the first director he worked under was Mack Sennett. With the proceeds that his success brought him, he purchased his own movie studio and by the age of thirty had become a millionaire. When asked why he gave up a secure and lucrative career working for Sennett, Chaplin is reputed to have said that he wanted to run his own show. Shakespeare, Michelangelo, Blake, Chaplin—these men had in common an interest in overseeing the production and distribution or sale of their art. While they may not have called themselves managers, managers they were.

In the twenty-first century, it has become common to think of artists and managers as operating in different spheres. Contemporary psychologists have categorized people as “right-brained” or “left-brained,” suggesting that artists (the creative ones) would be ever at odds with managers, for whom organization and accountability are essential tasks. The comment that we educators of arts managers frequently hear is, “Arts management? It’s an oxymoron, right?”

The Arts Management Handbook: New Directions for Students and Practitioners takes a different approach. On the assumption that arts and management are not opposing concepts, it will show students how to bring resources into alignment, to oversee, and to handle the complexities of creating, producing, and presenting great art. Consider that artists create something out of little or nothing: they fill the blank page, put images on canvas, fill silence with music, and bring movement out of stasis. Similarly arts managers create performances and exhibits that did not exist until they sat down to make a plan; they organize events that gather people together in circumstances that can be singularly satisfying.

Arts management as an academic discipline is relatively young. Only since the late twentieth century has the field received the concentrated focus of research and formalized training. There are, nevertheless, a good number of established principles and practices that can inform a future arts manager looking to develop a career in this field. The Arts Management Handbook: New Directions for Students and Practitioners reflects the ongoing interplay of established principles, historical lessons, and new trends. Students, teachers, researchers, and practitioners will find in these pages practical guidance, expert advice from practitioners and scholars, background information about the field, and a look to the demands and realities of tomorrow.

Arts and Management: Creating an Academic Field

Students of arts management will find it useful to understand something about the emergence of arts management as an academic field. Unlike other disciplines—history, literature, astronomy, philosophy—that today have established traditions, arts management devised its own set of curricular requirements by drawing from a variety of other disciplines, similar to the way that many new fields emerged in the twentieth century by combining two or more areas of study and inquiry. One example is social history, a trend of the late 1960s that derived from history and sociology.

New fields may develop when scholars in a given field find themselves working at the peripheries of another. Biology and chemistry merged in the interdisciplinary work of biochemistry. Similar processes created the fields of decision science, policy history, music therapy, nursing administration, strategic marketing, and organization science, to name just a few.

A “Borrower's Field”

Historically, arts managers have learned via apprenticeships. In a study performed by one of the editors of this book, over a hundred present-day arts managers were surveyed and interviewed to assess, among other things, their educational backgrounds to determine whether or not an arts management degree was needed as a point of entry for professional arts management positions. More than 75 percent lacked a formal degree in arts management and had gained their skills on the job (Brindle, 2006).

Reviewing arts management programs is a good way to understand the state of the field. Programs tend to have core courses in common, but there is variation in length of study, in degree requirements, and in where the programs are academically housed.

While arts management has been labeled interdisciplinary and multidisciplinary, it can also be seen as an amalgam of principles and practices adopted—without full integration—from other fields and disciplines. Some scholars are concerned that as a borrower’s field, arts management has failed to develop its own set of theories and methods. As a formal field, it is considered to be emerging rather than established. There is a division, therefore, as frequently happens in emerging fields, between practitioners and academics. For this reason, we have involved artists and practitioners as contributors to this work along with academics, and we have structured the book to include a dose of theory and practice.

Growing Pains and Lessons Learned

While MBA and undergraduate business management programs and schools are now in positions of dominance in American universities, they faced many of the same challenges that arts management programs currently experience and thus can be a source of lessons for the emergent borrower’s field.

In 1881, when the first undergraduate business program was put into the curriculum at the Wharton School of the University of Pennsylvania, it was heavily criticized by business as being too academic. Even its founder, Joseph Wharton, argued that a college education was not a prerequisite to success in business. It was another seventeen years before undergraduate programs emerged at the universities of Chicago and California, followed rapidly by fifty-nine others, all of which modeled their skills-based education after business practitioners.

If undergraduate business programs faced an uphill battle for legitimacy, graduate programs had even greater challenges. Harvard established the na-tion’s first MBA in 1908. University faculty fought to dismantle the program, housed originally in the school of arts and sciences, and the business community, which scoffed at the idea of undergraduate-trained business practitioners, laughed derisively at the very idea of the MBA. It was about seventeen years before Harvard’s model was adopted by Stanford and Wharton. Management as a graduate field is, of course, now well established and highly regarded.

Lessons for Arts Management

That business management programs were originally disdained both by the academy and by practicing business managers, who preferred the on-the-job-training model, is just one lesson worth recalling. Another is that the first twenty-five years saw faculty who were predominantly businessmen because the academy did not yet have degree-conferring programs. The same pattern may be seen in arts management, where practitioners dominate faculty ranks. Given the importance to the field of practical knowledge, this is not a negative. The embrace of the pattern, though, has not been without tensions, as academics sometimes disdain practitioners and vice versa. In addition, because of the academy’s limited capacity to offer courses providing adequate skills training, many successful arts management programs have incorporated the apprenticeship or internship model, a matter discussed in Chapter 8.

Overcoming obstacles of perception by practitioner and academic alike, management moved forward largely because it established a body of serious academic knowledge that required the academy to convey it. We also observe that respect for the practitioner has survived the academic placement of business management; academic programs include instruction by practitioners as well as professors. This lesson should not be lost on arts management educators. Finally, the management profession established institutional measures such as accreditation alongside standards for curricular rigor. It is our hope that the rich historical trajectory of management as an acceptable field of study, and the challenges our predecessors overcame to make it so, offers lessons to arts management as an emergent field.

The Chapters

In preparing this volume, the editors have aimed to achieve an appropriate balance of well-established theoretical constructs with practical application and a sense of new directions. To accomplish this task, we have included both academics and practitioners among our authors and included a range of subject matter that covers the many skills—from day-to-day management to internships to policymaking and evaluation—that form the core of an arts manager’s repertoire. Each chapter begins with a case scenario incorporating challenges commonly faced by new managers, followed by a review of important issues new managers must be aware of in order to achieve effectiveness and success. With an eye to providing readers with solid skills-based information in each topic area, chapters cover current practices and also look to the future. Pedagogical material at the end of each chapter provides reflective study questions, key terms, and a list of additional resources for further study.

Our first chapter, “Facilities Management: Arts Facilities—Schedules, Agreements, and Ownership,” is by Patrick Donnelly, who writes about the structures around which performances take place. While at first glance one might assume that facilities are about the bricks and mortar, Donnelly demonstrates that the physical space is first and foremost about the audience and the art form. An effective facilities manager needs to understand everything from performance space to audience interaction and the larger public context. Donnelly’s chapter shows that what takes place offstage is as vital as what goes on in front of the audience. A facilities manager needs to be a master of audience development, a negotiator of contracts, and a juggler of schedules and timing, as well as a skilled diplomat when it comes to facilities that are part and parcel of other, wider enterprises such as university-based arts facilities or those that are housed in entertainment complexes. While it would be fair to say that no two arts facilities are alike, Donnelly draws on his own wide experience to identify the common practices and issues that any facilities manager will confront from day to day.

Kevin Murray brings his experience as an actor, theater and festival director, and playwright to his chapter, “Theater Production Management Guidebook.” One might easily imagine the process he describes as a dynamic, aesthetic experience: managing donors, patrons, established and new audiences, the stage, and the players in the context of necessary financial and artistic accountability. Murray’s scheduling charts and sample budgets provide readers with handy templates—guides for beginners and experienced practitioners alike.

Many organizations, through necessity or design, do not own their own facilities and must, instead, take their productions on the road. In “’Doing It All’: The New Arts Manager’s Guide to Presenting Performances in a Public Venue,” Kira Hoffmann writes about the challenges of taking a production outside a permanent venue. Here, too, the commitment to audience and artist is central. Hoffmann brings over twenty years of experience in lighting and production to bear to demonstrate that commitment to artistic expression is paramount. If attention is not paid to logistics, planning, schedules, equipment, lighting, space, and a myriad of other details, no performance will succeed. Managers of performance companies who depend on rental of facilities have special challenges in bringing successful performances to audiences. Hoff-mann augments practical advice with useful schematics for stage set-up, and her detailed budgets can serve as aids that are equally useful for performance managers who rent facilities and those whose organizations own venues.

Arts festivals have seen rapid growth in recent years, both in the United States and internationally. Juha Iso-Aho, an expert in festival management in his native Finland, provides an international perspective in “An Introduction to Festival Management: Old Ways, New Directions.” His chapter is both broadly theoretical and thoroughly practical in its coverage of the history of festivals and the motivations of festivalgoers and organizers. He explains for readers interested in both the hows and whys of management in this sphere the variety of methodologies available to them. While his chapter is useful for arts managers pursuing careers in established festival organizations, it also provides an entertaining guide to creating new niche festivals and a recipe for designing them for future stability and success.

In the arena of visual arts, Trudi Van Dyke—who provides advice for managing galleries of all types, as well as important career advice for aspiring gallery managers—brings to bear her experience as director of several large and small art galleries in the Washington, DC, area. “Gallery Management” provides information on common practices among commercial, nonprofit, and public galleries, as well as specifics pertaining to gallery management in each of these sectors. She shows how to deal not only with artists but also with communities and other local governments; patrons, both new and emerging; and established donors. These groups form a large “audience of participants,” whose needs must be considered. Her chapter also provides new arts managers a means for evaluating their own career interests and skills when considering the type of gallery management job that might suit them best.

“Through, With, and In: The Arts and Education,” by James E. Modrick, concerns the place of the arts in early education and the special requirements for arts managers who aspire to work in the context of the K-12 environment. Modrick, speaking from a lifetime of experience, covers the history of the arts as a core subject in schools and examines U.S. legislation that has supported arts education for young people—and sometimes made it difficult. He encourages collaboration, planning, respect, and broad knowledge as essential skills for successful negotiation of the territory where the interests of arts organizations and schools intersect: their mutual benefit and the education of children.

Those in arts management have long regarded on-the-job training as the paramount variable in career success. Underscoring this work’s commitment to advancing the field by providing both theoretical concepts and a focused practicality, the chapter “Careers and Internships in Arts Management” presents the budding arts manager and the student of arts management with a practical guide to internships as a critical part of the career spectrum. Brindle, as founding director of George Mason University’s arts management program, has created an internship-focused program that includes yearlong and study-abroad graduate internship courses. She demonstrates how coursework and practical work can be integrated. Examining short-term and full-year apprenticeship models, the chapter builds on Brindle’s work with hundreds of arts management, MBA, public-policy, and international students to show how internships can be most effective by integrating the values and goals of organizations, the academy, and the student.

The importance of public policy to arts management is still not as widely recognized as it should be. Public policies—rules and regulations at all levels of government—specify a wide range of requirements for arts managers doing their jobs. Far from an esoteric exercise, acquiring an understanding of policy is highly practical. This is the message behind “Arts and Cultural Policy: What Governments Do (and Don’t Do) to Make Arts Happen,” by Constance DeVereaux. A policy educator and consultant, DeVereaux has participated in the arts and cultural-policy spheres internationally at a variety of levels. She brings her experience to bear to explain the historical and theoretical underpinnings of these spheres in the U.S. context. Her chapter also provides a practical guide for arts managers to become more involved with policy processes in support of their own organizations and of the arts in general.

Kathryn Calafato draws on her dual areas of expert knowledge—management and finance—to provide concrete advice for fiscally effective, ethical, and legally responsible creation and management of nonprofit arts organizations...