Arts Management

Derrick Chong

• Publisher: Routledge
• Year: 2009
• Print ISBN: 9780415423908
• eBook ISBN: 9781135263355
• Topic: Business
• Subtopic: Business General
• Index: Business

The second edition of Arts Management has been thoroughly revised to provide an updated, comprehensive overview of this fast-changing subject. Arts managers and students alike are offered a lively, sophisticated insight into the artistic, managerial and social responsibilities necessary for those working in the field.

With new cases studies and several new chapters, Derrick Chong takes an interdisciplinary approach in examining some of the main impulses informing discussions on the management of arts and cultural organizations. These are highly charged debates, since arts managers are expected to reconcile managerial, economic and aesthetic objectives. Topics include:

• arts and the State, with reference to the instrumentalism of the arts and culture
• business and the arts
• ownership and control of arts organizations
• arts consumption and consumers, including audience development and arts marketing
• managing for excellence and artistic integrity
• financial investing in the arts, namely fine arts funds and theatre angels
• philosophies of philanthropy

Incorporating a deliberately diverse range of sources, Arts Management is essential reading for students on arts management courses and provides valuable insights for managers already facing the management challenges of this field.

Chapter 1
INTRODUCTION

Arts management, since its emergence in the 1960s, is a more complex term than one first imagines. The original attention on supporting prominent not-for-profit arts organizations, often in receipt of public subsidy, now includes complementary commercial organizations operating in the creative industries. Thus an art market system includes public art museums and intermediaries such as art dealers and auction houses. Opera houses, which rely on public subsides, and commercial music companies represent different business models. This introductory chapter is organized into six sections with attention devoted to how conventional boundaries defining arts organizations – public/private and not-for-profit/for-profit – are being challenged. Charged debates as arts managers need to reconcile managerial, economic, and aesthetic objectives are raised.

What is the proper role of arts management? In the first instance, our task is drawn to several disciplines including management (e.g. Henry Mintzberg and the Harvard Business School), sociology (e.g. Pierre Bourdieu and Paul DiMaggio), and critical theory (e.g. the Frankfurt School). Engaged contemporary artists such as Hans Haacke, Andrea Fraser, the Guerrilla Girls, and Carey Young – offering institutional critiques in advance of new institutionalism – have been astute in drawing attention to the closer links between business and the arts.

The foundations of arts management as a sub-discipline with reference to developments in the USA and the UK are broached in the first section. Various definitions of arts management, essentially attempts at defining its parameters, are considered in the second section. This is developed in the third section, with reference to Raymond Williams’s keywords project, by looking at the constituent parts of arts management, namely art and culture, management, creativity, culture industry, and consumerism, which need to be disentangled and investigated. The fourth section considers how all sorts of organizations in non-commercial sectors of the economy have had to address the encroachment of managerialism. Performing and visual arts and cultural institutions have not been exempt, though there are signs of resistance in some quarters of arts management. Given the complexities faced by arts organizations and those charged with governing and managing them, several arts management systems are presented in the fifth section. First, the classical three-stage industrial model of production, distribution, and consumption highlights the importance of process and the interconnectedness of players – both cooperation and competition – at distinct stages of artistic development. Moreover, it helps to demythologize romantic notions of lone creative genius as normal. Second, challenging commitments applicable to different types of arts organizations – to excellence and artistic integrity; to accessibility and audience development; and to accountability and cost effectiveness – highlight the complexity associated with their management. Third, management with key stakeholders – owners, customers, employees, suppliers, and society – has taken on greater relevance during the first decade of the twenty-first century. As indicative of the approach to arts management adopted in this text, the sixth and final section of the introductory chapter presents Gareth Morgan’s work on organizational metaphors by drawing on narratives of arts organizations presented by artists, historians, and curators.

FOUNDATIONS OF ARTS MANAGEMENT

There is some attraction in the thesis that arts management, as formalized within higher education, is an outgrowth of the experiences of arts organizations in the United States during the 1960s. The assumption of a monolithic and universal arts management is based on American hegemony in commercial spheres near the end of the so-called American Century. The logic of industrialization assumes that the goals of arts organizations converge like those of business corporations, with deviations from the one best way eliminated by a process of social Darwinism. But do the facts bear out this Americanization thesis? Once arts management had developed in the USA, was it inevitable that other countries would go through the same process? Do various environmental and institutional factors suggest otherwise? What are the international repercussions of the American model of arts management? Has an American ethos altered the terms of reference by which issues are defined, relationships maintained, and contentions resolved?

Though the USA of the 1960s has been pegged as a starting point for arts management, it is instructive to move the historical marker to developments around 1945, namely the creation of the Arts Council of Great Britain (ACGB).¹ The ACGB was incorporated in 1946 as an outgrowth of the Committee for the Encouragement of Music and the Arts, which formed in 1939 as a wartime programme to bolster morale. Prominent features of the ACGB, including an arm’s length relationship with government and peer review as a method of adjudication for awarding funds, served as a model for arts councils that emerged in other industrialized Commonwealth countries (Canada, Australia, and New Zealand) and the USA. Moreover, the ACGB played a leading role in initiating arts management courses and encouraging greater business involvement in the arts. The health of arts councils and the debates in which they are involved serve as barometers of wider cultural concerns.²

Two other institutional players in the USA, along with the National Endowment for the Arts (NEA), showed an interest in the arts during the 1960s: prominent foundations including Ford, Rockefeller, and Carnegie funded arts research; and the largest business corporations such as IBM, Exxon, Chase Manhattan, and Mobil helped to establish the Business Committee for the Arts (BCA). One impetus was a desire to address an imbalance: the USA’s arts and culture record did not match the country’s leading geopolitical and economic position. Social unrest forced business corporations to think about the communities in which they operated and how they might contribute to society; likewise, arts and cultural institutions started to examine programming objectives and decision-making processes to encourage wider participation. The USA has helped to advance a nexus between business and the arts, including business sponsorship and the art and culture as subjects of economic inquiry, which other countries have adopted.

There was an attempt in the USA to learn from the European experiences of arts patronage. This is illustrated in Frederick Dorian’s Commitment to Culture (1964), which sought to find out what Americans could learn from European patterns of arts patronage. It was recognized that ‘private patronage has already been established in our country’, but that it ‘alone cannot carry the burden’ (Dorian 1964: 457, 459). The case for government allocations (or subsidies) to the arts at all levels (federal, state, and local) to complement private sponsorship never established a strong following in the USA. The NEA, which did not exist at the time of Dorian’s study, has been subjected to criticisms concerning liberty under government patronage; the notable absence of a so-called secretary of state for culture in the USA is a direct consequence of a distrust of a closer relationship between art and politics (except when seeking to promote American cultural interests abroad).

A dominant motif since the 1960s has been the rise of managerial imperatives. For example, Thomas Raymond and Stephen Greyser, both at the Harvard Business School, and Douglas Schwalbe, an arts administrator at Harvard, founded the Arts Administration Research Institute in 1966; and, in 1970, the trio established the Harvard Summer School Institute in Arts Administration. Yet the emergence of a new breed of arts manager has been depicted as pernicious and regressive, according to visual artist Hans Haacke (in Wallis 1986: 60–61):

Trained by prestigious business schools, they are convinced that art can and should be sold like the production and marketing of other goods. They make no apologies and have few romantic hang-ups.

It is expected that the lack of delusions and aspirations among new arts administrators will have a noticeable impact on the state of the industry. Being trained primarily as technocrats, they are less likely to have an emotional attachment to the peculiar nature of the product they are promoting. And this attitude, in turn, will have an effect on the type of products we will soon begin to see.

Haacke was concerned that the commercial language of management would become naturalized in the discourse and practice of managing arts and cultural organizations (see Chong 1997). He was not alone: John Pick (1986: 7), for example, criticized the adoption by British organizations of ‘half-baked Americanised notions of “management”’ as ‘a new breed of arts managers … make[s] it clear that one should not look for pleasure from the Arts, but market returns’.

More specifically, Haacke (in Wallis 1986: 61) criticized ‘arts administration courses taught according to the Harvard Business School case method … by professors with little or no direct knowledge of the peculiarities of the art world’. Haacke was taking aim at the inclusion of his celebrated 1971 dispute with the Solomon R. Guggenheim Museum, which was represented in Cases for Arts Administration, edited by Raymond, Greyser, and Schwalbe (1975: 217–22): ‘Director of a major museum weighs whether or not to cancel a show by controversial artist’. It goes without saying that the Haacke/Guggenheim controversy was much more complex; it raised questions concerning the idealist concept of the autonomy of art, and the belief that the art museum is a neutral, nonsocial, apolitical institution (for an excellent account of the case, see Burnham 1971). As the case study method has been criticized for fostering cursory debates and rewarding quick and detached decision-making with limited information. It encourages ‘an approach to the practice of management that is “thin” and “superficial”’, according to Henry Mintzberg (1989: 90). In Managers Not MBAs, Mintzberg (2004: 39) criticizes traditional MBAs, which ‘push theories, concepts, models, tools, techniques in a disconnected classroom’ whereas ‘management practice is about pull – what is needed is a particular situation’.

Arts management has taken root at leading business schools: the Judge Institute (University of Cambridge) includes an elective MBA module, Arts and Cultural Management; the Schulich Business School (York University in Canada) offers an MBA with a specialization in Arts and Media Administration; and Southern Methodist University offers a joint graduate degree (MA/MBA) in Business and Arts Administration, which ‘is based upon the philosophy that a successful career in arts management requires a through knowledge of contemporary business practices coupled with a deep appreciation for the arts’.

Specialist, private universities in the commercial worlds of arts and culture have thrived. Full Sail University, based in Florida, was established in the late 1970s, with a focus on media arts and entertainment (e.g. music, film, video games, design, and animation). Both leading auction houses are associated with educational arms operating in the core art markets of London and New York: Sotheby’s Institute of Art (‘advanced object-based art education whose graduates combine a passion for the visual arts with scholarship and market sophistication’) and Christie’s Education (‘investigation of works of art in order to train through direct exposure to art-world practice’).

There have been prominent examples of training in cultural and management and leadership. Finding the right person for senior posts is increasingly difficult given the combination of skills desired by arts and cultural organizations. For example, it is a rare prize to find a major dancer with professional management training. In the museum world, the Museum Management Institute (MMI) was established in 1978, by the American Association of Museums and the University of California, Berkeley, to offer an intensive summer residential course designed for mid- to senior-level museum professionals to develop and apply their managerial capabilities and leadership skills more effectively. Admission requirements – including at least five years of full-time museum experience and currently in a position involving direct responsibility for planning, decision-making, and supervising staff and sponsorship by the candidate’s museum as evidence of its commitment – are consistent with ‘criterion for entry to management education’ namely ‘proven success in managerial work’ gained by ‘intensive experience within at least one industry, preferably one organization, so that the knowledge base is deep’ (Mintzberg 1989: 83). The MMI is now the Museum Leadership Institute (MLI). The Getty Foundation operates the Getty Leadership Institute, ‘a leading source of continuing professional development for current and future museum leaders … created to respond to the growing complexities faced by leaders of museums and other nonprofit institutions’; the MLI serves as the ‘primary executive development opportunity of the Getty Leadership Institute’ with an ‘in-depth residential leadership program [that] is designed both to enhance the leadership of experienced museum executives and strengthen their institutions’ capabilities’. The original MMI served as the model for the Museum Leadership Programme, a two-week summer residency, at the University of East Anglia, which ‘emphasises such things as recognising and applying different leadership styles; analysing and developing interpersonal skills; leading teams and organisations through projects and organisational change and dealing with funding and governing bodies and with the media’. The John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts ‘strives to impart hands-on arts management experience to participants in its fellowship and internship programs. Through practical application of management skills, fellows and interns gain in-depth knowledge and expertise used by successful managers in today’s complex world of performing arts’.³ The UK’s Clore Leadership Programme, an initiative of the Clore Duffield Foundation, ‘aims to strengthen leadership across a wide range of cultural institutions’ through fellowships, board development training, and residential short courses.

DEFINING ARTS MANAGEMENT

The opening paragraph on ‘arts administration (arts management)’ in the International Encyclopedia of Public Policy and Administration, by Dan Martin (in Shafritz 1998: 128), is instructive:

The application of the five traditional management functions – planning, organizing, staffing, supervising, and controlling – to the facilitation of the production of the performing or visual arts and the presentation of the artists’ work to audiences. The administration and facilitation of the creative process and its communication to an audience is common to both public, nonprofit arts organizations (e.g. nonprofit theaters, symphony orchestras, opera companies, dance companies, museums, public broadcasting, and performing arts centers) and private, commercial, for-profit artistic entities (e.g. commercial theater, ‘popular’ music, private galleries, film, television, and video).

Megan Matthews (2006: Module 1), of the University of Wisconsin at Whitewater, seeks to articulate an understanding of arts management to her students:

Arts management is an exciting field that allows people to combine business, artistic and organizational skills with activities that make a difference in the lives of individuals and communities.

Arts management [is] the facilitation and organization of arts and cultural activity. The arts manager is a person working in the field of arts management; a person who, on some level, enables art to happen. Simply put, arts managers bring art and audiences together.

A fuller articulation of ‘management of the arts’ is provided by François Colbert (in Towse 2003: 287–92), founder editor of the International Journal of Arts Management, in A Handbook of Cultural Economics. Colbert begins with reference to the two constituent elements of arts management:

Management is a relatively new discipline [e.g. Frederick Taylor] and the management of arts and culture an even more recent offshoot [reference to the early 1960s]. The non-profit statu...

Table of contents

• Cover
• Title
• Copyright
• CONTENTS
• PREFACE
• Chapter 1 INTRODUCTION
• SECTION I Institutional Partners
• SECTION II Relationships with Stakeholders
• SECTION III Wealth and the Economy
• NOTES
• BIBLIOGRAPHY
• Index