Obsessive about focus

My latest piece for Arts Professional discusses what prevents organisations concentrating on their purpose.

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Few organisations know how to focus on their core purpose. The technology company, Apple, is one. Its chief executive, Steve Jobs, is famously obsessive about focus. Apple infuriates as many people as it delights by stripping away that which it considers inessential. But it is now worth more than a number of its close competitors combined. “People think focus means saying yes to the thing you’ve got to focus on,” said Jobs in 2008. “But that’s not what it means at all. It means saying no to the hundred other good ideas that there are. You have to pick carefully.”

How many arts organisations would see their purpose in these terms? My guess is that focus would be an underrated virtue in many. This may be the case for two reasons: either the organisation is not very clear about its purpose and therefore finds it hard to know what should be the object of its focus, or the leadership has clarity about the corporate purpose, but does not know how to align the organisation’s activities behind the mission.

Losing sight of one’s purpose is understandable in arts companies given the shifts and turns in cultural policy over the long-term. Any arts organisation that has been in business more than a few years may well have won a variety of funding lines, each of which has different policy objectives attached. Imperceptibly, activities get bolted on and then integrated to bring objectives like regeneration, social inclusion or education alongside the core purpose of artistic enterprise.

But even if the leadership is able to define the corporate purpose clearly, there remains the challenge of getting all sections of the enterprise focused on the same thing. This is harder than it appears. The board is often disconnected from what’s really going on in the organisation. The people operating the business and who are close to audiences and ticket payers probably have a very different idea of what the company is about. It is almost impossible for an organisation to focus if it is operating to multiple versions of its corporate purpose at once.

The best way to avoid this risk is to keep the organisation’s purpose under regular review to ensure that its activities stay fresh and relevant to changing conditions. Part of this is about reading the external environment well – anticipating changes in policy, the economy and society in general and working out what these will mean for the organisation. But the bigger task is for senior leaders to learn to hear from people at all levels and all areas of the organisation. This is important not only because it involves everyone in dialogue and deeper understanding about what the organisation exists to do, but also because it ensures that the leaders expose themselves to the diversity of perspective and breadth of insight that are critical to making good decisions.

Many arts organisations tend to prioritise the perspective of the artistic director and the head of development. The person who delivers the artistic mission and the person who brings in funding are critical to the enterprise, but they don’t hold a duopoly of knowledge. Other areas of the business – for example, those responsible for brand and marketing, those who run the box office and answer the phones, those who engage with the audience on social networks – have unique perspectives which can be closer to the audience interest and may challenge the prevailing orthodoxy. Challenging views are the ones that are especially worth hearing when you’re trying to keep your purpose fresh. They may well alert you to emerging trends which need to be at the centre of your focus and provide clues to cherished commitments that it may be time to let go.

Computer programmers use the term ‘cruft’ to describe bits of code which are left in place when a program is rewritten but which have become irrelevant to the functioning of the program. By analogy, companies carry organisational cruft in the form of activities which survive because they have momentum but no longer contribute anything relevant to the corporate purpose. They may have opened access to funding in the past, but might actually have become a drain on resources or a distraction from focusing on what is important.

It is especially relevant to tackle these when money is tight, and to think critically about what changing conditions mean for what you should be focusing on. Stripping out the cruft and focusing on the value are key steps to ensuring that the activities people undertake are in support of a consistent sense of purpose throughout the organisation.

My latest article for Arts Professional tries to unearth opportunities in the approaching austerity in arts funding.

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Nobody likes cuts. But is it too outlandish to see an upside to financial uncertainty? Perhaps not. Organisations that navigate the storms ahead may gain more autonomy to set their own destiny. A possible outcome could be that they reconnect with their fundamental purpose and refresh how they deliver value to audiences.

This may sound panglossian. In austerity, our energies concentrate simply on survival and the niceties of maintaining and delivering a vision recede to the sidelines. But it can be a mistake to treat the values that inform an organisation as too costly a luxury to merit attention at a time like this. Clarity about what an organisation exists to achieve is central to making good decisions in the face of challenge.

Even in good times, arts organisations can drift away from their purpose to pursue funding or revenue opportunities which may pull them away from their distinctive capabilities. Labour’s era of generous arts funding came with conditions relating to tangental benefits of the arts: social cohesion, inclusion, urban regeneration, tourism and the like. The arts prospered through being coaxed to channel effort on their instrumental value.

Hard times may allow more attention on the intrinsic value of the arts. Organisations that survive may enjoy more space to focus on their artistic mission with less jumping through non-cultural hoops.

Some arts leaders are hopeful that this could be the impact of the new funding regime for Arts Council England. Jonathan Heawood, of PEN, told The Guardian he found the new framework “more strategic” — less about bums on seats and more about supporting arts in a more general way. But with a shift towards annual funding awards, few organisations would be prudent to plan on sustained grants. It will be a more dynamic environment. If newcomers can break in with new ideas then others in receipt of funding can always be at risk of losing it.

The organisations that flourish through austerity will be those that can develop more entrepreneurial cultures which reduce their dependence on grants and seize the necessity to control their destiny. Martin Smith’s report for Arts & Business last summer, Arts Funding in a Cooler Climate, spelt out what this means: a focus on revenue generation, exploiting cultural assets, innovation to meet changing demand.

Smith points out that digital media and the quality of consumer technology are changing the way people engage with culture. The arts compete with immersive experiences that are readily accessible at home or on the move. But they are also able to realise new opportunities to deliver their creative vision, engage audiences and generate income.

This can lead organisations into fundamentally different ways of presenting their art — live transmissions of theatre or opera performances to cinemas, or the exhibiting of art reproductions in incongruous places. Such initiatives can feel disorientating and remote from the organisation’s artistic purpose if they remove people from direct experience of the art.

This is why it is important to retain connection with the organisation’s underlying values, so that new initiatives are conceived as a way of refreshing the mission for a new era rather than a compromise. Becoming more enterprising need not entail dumbing down the artistic vision but does necessitate improved relevance to how people want to engage with culture.

The counter-intuitive insight is that an organisation’s autonomy to set its artistic destiny is realised by placing mastery of the art of management more firmly at the core of its operations. Again as Smith points out, the space that artistic directors enjoy to take creative risks is linked to the space afforded to management professionals to play their role.

This means respecting the contribution of, for example, marketing managers to the development of products to exploit new ways of reaching audiences. It means recognising the craft skills of internet practitioners as a new locus of creativity in the company. And it means looking to the finance director to guide the organisation to a strategic approach to risk management that informs programming with excellent audience insight so that commercially risky endeavours are balanced by bets that are safer for revenue generation.

From my work as a coach in arts organisations, I would say that most are fortunate to employ high calibre and committed management professionals. But many of these professionals struggle against a lack of understanding or respect for the potential contribution of their skills. Their ability to take the initiative is constrained compared with their counterparts in organisations outside the cultural sector.

If ever there was a time for the management professionals to step up and make the case for their capabilities, it is now. But austerity also demands that artistic professionals learn to respect all the talents on the team.

Image courtesy Dan Taylor.

When humans evolved into seals

Kurt Vonnegut’s 1985 novel Galápagos is a Darwinian satire on the mess humankind causes for itself as a result of having evolved big brains. Set in the late 20th Century, it charts the breakdown of society and the near extinction of the human species — caused by a cocktail of hedonism, financial crisis and viruses. The twist is that the story is narrated from the vantage point of a million years hence, from which perspective the culture and behaviour of 20th Century humans seems inexplicable. The few surviving humans of the future — a small colony that settled on the Galápagos islands — have evolved a more stable equilibrium with their environment with small brains, minimal language and a simple life in which the only concern is when to dive into the ocean to catch fish.

The novel has a fragmented narrative but is brimming with ideas. Reading it in the wake of the financial crisis of the early 21st Century, it resonates more strongly possibly than it may have at the time of publication. Vonnegut evokes the rapidity with which society can break down when people no longer believe in the value of money: a catastrophe to which we came closer than most of us care to imagine.

The crux of the book is that our brains evolved to such a size that we developed redundant capacity. Somewhere along the way, the consciousness of humans was turned away from the boredom of simply existing and reproducing and towards a variety of lifestyle choices that could make life meaningful:

Human brains back then had become such copious and irresponsible generators of suggestions as to what might be done with life that they made acting for the benefit of future generations seem one of many arbitrary suggestions which might be played by narrow enthusiasts — like poker or polo or the bond market, or the writing of science-fiction novels.

The humans of a million years in the future are descendants of a motley group of mainly women and one man who survive by luck. They escape the mainland before the rest of humankind becomes infected by a virus which terminates further reproduction, and between them they embody some genetic and cultural inheritances that help them to adapt well to the small island of rock where they run aground. Most of the group are from a primitive tribe, the Kankabono, and there’s also a Japanese baby who was born with seal-like fur.

What quickly becomes apparent in this new environment is the uselessness of the sum of knowledge of Western civilisation, which happens to have been captured for them in a computer called Mandarax which accompanies them on their voyage. When human life is stripped of culture, the simplicity of the Kankabono has more to offer than the great achievements of art and science.

Vonnegut does not deny the positive things that have emerged from human endeavour — such as Beethoven’s 9th Symphony. But it’s a running gag in the book that most people were never destined to create something of such sublime significance. The achievements of human culture seem to be outweighed by the inevitability that even the most destructive and outlandish imaginings of the mind would always end up being put into effect:

That, in my opinion, was the most diabolical aspect of those old-time big brains: They would tell their owners, in effect, ‘Here is a crazy thing we could actually do, probably, but we would never do it, of course. It’s just fun to think about.’

And then, as though in trances, the people would really do it – have slaves fight each other to the death in the Coliseum, or burn people alive in the public square for holding opinions which were locally unpopular, or build factories whose only purpose was to kill people in industrial quantities, or to blow up whole cities, or so on.

Even the narrator, the soul of a 20th Century American is compromised, having shot an elderly woman in Vietnam out of vengeance when he served there as a soldier. It was an instinctive reaction to seeing his comrades killed by a hand grenade, but one which would be unimaginable to the humans of the future — whose limbs whither away to flippers and who have no need for weapons.

I chanced upon Galápagos while researching my Masters dissertation. It is quoted by the educationist and psychologist Guy Claxton in his book on consciousness, Noises from the Darkroom. Claxton argues that we give too much credit to our sense of the conscious authorship of our lives, and underplay the largely unconscious processes by which our minds work for us:

The problem is that we can pretend to claim conscious credit for our decisions only if we persist in denying the existence, or even the possibility of unconscious influences. Once we see consciousness as an intermittent and unreliable print-out from the invisible biological system that underlies it, we can no longer claim the credit with such confidence.

Vonnegut’s novel delivers a warning about where our reverence for consciousness could lead us. In his depiction of the survival of humankind as being dependent on relinquishing our big brains, he challenges what we most value in Western culture. His imagining of how humankind might evolve is a call on us to learn again how to appreciate the simplicity of just being with our unconscious experience.

Galápagos by Kurt Vonnegut
Available from Amazon

See also Things Mean a Lot.

Image courtesy putneymark.

Empty gallery

I’m writing a series of pieces for ArtsProfessional on how arts organisations can focus on delivering their mission. Part 1, on the gap between the organisation’s purpose and its actions, appears today and is reproduced below.

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A theatre won funding to improve its engagement with disadvantaged groups. It approached the challenge as the chance to spread the word about its work. But it discovered that to get the target groups through the doors, the work would need to change. What the theatre was doing from day to day turned out to be irrelevant to a section of the community it was meant to serve. This is an example of the gap that can occur between the way an organisation behaves compared to its avowed mission, one that provides the sense of purpose from a shared understanding among everyone who works in a company.

The mission statement should inform everything people do in their jobs. Often, though, there’s a nagging doubt about whether a company is fulfilling the potential that marks its reason to exist. Arts organisations are particularly vulnerable. Being values-driven, they tend to be more vulnerable to falling short of a high ambition – and they are more likely to resist change. It’s not surprising that the purpose and actions can be misaligned. Things change rapidly; it’s easy to lose one’s bearings.

New technology transforms people’s expectations of the relationships they expect to have with companies. The global recession and the new government’s spending cuts are transforming the economic outlook for the arts. As austerity bites, it’s not just public funding but also consumer spending on the arts that will decline. The coalition’s broader policy changes for the arts are, as yet, unclear.

Change is the one given. The underlying purpose may stay the same, but the way to deliver it will always need to evolve. An organisation that fails to keep pace can quickly begin to lose relevance.

You might spot the gap around the artistic purpose: a gallery that measures success in terms of footfall, but whose traffic is consistently to its cafe not the exhibition space; a theatre that exists to promote new voices buts retreats in the face of intimidating protests. This kind of gap drives away audiences. Or the gap may open around a company’s business practices. Arts companies can be far from model employers. People may be expected to work for long hours in poor conditions. Occupants of senior roles might find their initiative stifled. There may be a culture of bullying which goes unchecked. These are behaviours that contradict the championing of creativity and respect for human potential that involvement in the arts might lead you to expect. This kind of gap damages retention and recruitment of talented staff. It leads to ossified processes and reduced ability to generate fresh ideas. Ultimately, the gap between performance and action drives away funding. When arts budgets are under pressure, companies can suffer capricious cuts. But those with clarity of purpose and a good narrative about delivery will better weather the storm.

Board members must understand the company’s role and their own part in holding the organisation to account. Management teams need to grasp how the organisation’s values should be manifested in practice. This begins with honest, reflective scrutiny of the artistic purpose. How well is it delivered? How well does it connect with an audience beyond the organisation? It extends to searching questions about running the company in a way that is congruent with the artistic purpose. How effective is the stewardship of public money? Is the cost of delivering the purpose appropriate? How motivated is the organisation to mobilise other sources of revenue? Managers also need to be clear about broader issues, such as how creativity is valued and fostered throughout the business. How are staff treated? What are the social and environmental responsibilities?

Purpose and action are aligned through an organisational culture that transmits respect for the purpose in everything it does. This is most easily evident in how recruits are inducted. If new recruits learn from their peers what people should do and why, the culture is probably in good shape. Where it’s not, managers must find ways to create new cultural imperatives. At the BBC, when Greg Dyke was in charge, he banned biscuits at meetings. A relatively trivial financial saving, but one with a powerful message: that every employee had a part to play in ensuring that the BBC’s use of licence fee money should be focused on delivering great services to the public.

An organisation that consistently asks how well it serves its purpose develops better clarity of purpose and better alignment of behaviour behind it. This kind of reflexivity creates a self-renewing culture, which promotes effective action and communicates its purpose in what it does. It makes staff more empowered, more motivated and more creative. And these are the conditions which foster experiences which delight audiences.

Image courtesy Mr. T in DC.

It was produced for the Department for Culture and, having the misfortune to be published in the midst of the election campaign, will struggle initially to receive the attention it deserves.

One issue Jonathan highlights is the critical need for the leaders of arts organisations to bone up on technology:

“There is a strong perception among the contributors to this paper that the leadership of local authorities and the boards of governors and trustees do not contain enough people who feel confident debating and taking decisions about digital strategy and policy. Trustees, recruited for their seniority and wisdom, are seen as being less likely to be digital natives.

“Having more people with insight into digital opportunities would reduce the risk of boards rejecting worthwhile projects or failing to encourage management to consider new digital methods. It would also reduce the risk of ill-considered digital strategy being adopted.”

He also urges senior managers to recognise that they need collectively to develop some “herd knowledge” of digital strategy and not just leave it to a designated technology expert on the board.

I was struck by a quote in the report from my old boss, Tony Hall, about the reticence of arts organisations to give away cultural assets on the internet:

“People are over-optimistic about future commercial value and not excited enough about present public value.”

Click the image above to see Jon’s top ten tips. Recommended reading for anyone grappling with digital strategy in the cultural sector.

Ella, Gerhard Richter

Gerhard Richter’s portraits are confusing. He paints from photographs – some taken from family albums, others found in newspapers and magazines – and strips away the context that provides meaning. He wants to confound interpretation. Yet time and again the viewer is drawn back to the original context – the story behind the picture. For me, it is this tension between the banal surface and the complex reality beneath that makes his work interesting. An exhibition of 35 of his works at the National Portrait Gallery tells us something about the importance of stories in how we make sense of the world.

Richter’s subjects at first glance are beguilingly mundane: a woman with an umbrella; a young girl with a baby boy. The detail is blurred away and the images seem like familiar, suburban scenes – reassuring representations of a world we think we know.

On closer inspection one realises that the woman with umbrella is Jackie Kennedy and the picture portrays her in mourning for her husband. The girl and baby boy turn out to be Richter’s Aunt Marianne and Richter himself as an infant. While the painting was made in 1965 it is from a family image taken before the war. Aunt Marianne had had a psychiatric disorder and had been murdered by the Nazis.

For many of the pictures then there is a temporal dislocation between when the source photograph was taken and when the painting was made. There’s also a thematic dislocation as detail in the original photograph gives way to an image which seems to make sense but is actually very hard to read. Richter seems to want to banish the cues which engage our empathy and which help us recognise the poignancy in life. “You realise,” he once said, “That you can’t represent reality at all – that what you make represents nothing but itself, and therefore is itself reality.”

And yet the exhibition keeps pointing us back to the original context. A booklet handed to visitors as they enter the gallery provides, apparently with Richter’s blessing, helpful explanations of what the source photographs actually portrayed. There is a recognition – by the curator, at least, if not the artist – that the stories behind the paintings provide a richer level of meaning than do the paintings on their own. The painting of Aunt Marianne subverts conventional accounts of German aggression under the Nazis and reminds us of the suffering endured by some of the German people themselves. A picture of two women on a busy pavement turns out to be Brigitte Bardot and her mother hounded by paparazzi. What seems like a picture of a routine shopping trip turns out to be a study of the loss of the mundane that accrues to the celebrity lifestyle.

What’s going on here? Is it that while the artist is trying to create his own reality – in work that represents nothing but itself – proper reality, the messy and complex social reality from which his source images are drawn, keeps reasserting itself? Or is the artist himself conniving to make us rediscover the stories which shape our lives?

Ultimately, I think Richter is more sensitive to the underlying contextual meaning of his works than his remark quoted above would seem to suggest. This is apparent in the paintings of his immediate family, particularly his daughters. Here, the abstraction disappears and we are presented with carefully controlled portraits in the conventional sense. The emotional engagement between artist and subject – father and daughter – breaks through. The images are at once protective and tender while searingly honest.

The paintings in this exhibition, far from representing nothing but themselves, strike me as being in continual dialogue with their source material. For all that they are gorgeous and engaging canvasses in and of themselves, it is their connection to their roots that, for me at least, makes them resonate.

Stories matter. We can’t brush them aside. If we try to we simply create new ones which fill the vacuum. But one story is not as good as another. Richter’s images are rich in narratives which we uncover beneath the surface obfuscation. Without the narratives, the paintings are less interesting precisely because they do not offer such rich meaning in themselves.

Beyond the gallery, one does not need to look far to see the consequence of paying insufficient attention to our stories. Think of the little Scottish banks which were once bywords for prudence and rectitude. Ignoring their roots, they took risks in their dash to grow into global players and ended up bringing catastrophe not only on themselves but the rest of us too. Or what about the internet search engine which once followed the mantra to do no evil but ended as a friend of Chinese censorship? It’s not that only one story is possible. If we allow for alternatives we can see things from different perspectives and envisage new options for ourselves. But if we brush aside our backstories and ignore our roots we can all too easily lose our bearings. Understanding where we have come from helps us stay true to ourselves even as we try to become something different.

Richter’s portraits bring to light our hunger for stories, our need to tell stories to make sense of what we experience. He plays with the human instinct to create meaning in what we see. In stripping away the original narrative behind an image he forces us to make our own stories around his work. But ultimately we are led back to the roots of the original image and we see that story afresh. In suppressing our stories, he encourages us to respect them.

Gerhard Richter Portraits at the National Portrait Gallery until 31 May 2009.

You Are the Weather (detail), Roni Horn

Roni Horn is a contemporary artist who chips away at our certainties and presents a world which seems familiar yet turns out to be quite elusive.  It’s an experience to be commended to anyone who presumes to lead people or to understand the environment with which they are engaged.

An exhibition of her work is at Tate Modern.  It consists largely of sculpture and photography.  There is a great deal of repetition and variation on a theme and it’s easy to view the work quickly and think you have grasped it.  But it gets under your skin and eventually challenges your preconceptions, encouraging you to question perception itself.

The show culminates in a room containing 100 portraits of the same young woman who poses for Horn in hot springs at various locations in Iceland.  Each photo follows the same form.  The woman’s face and neck protrude from the water, filling the frame as she fixes her gaze on the viewer.  At first glance, it is the consistency you notice.  It carries through in the woman’s expression: still, contemplative, neutral.  Then, as you walk round the series, you become aware of changes in mood and emotion which are unsettling in their subtlety.  In some pictures there is anxiety or irritation, in others a faint smile.

One begins to experience the gulf between how we routinely process information and the depth and richness we can allow in if we give ourselves space and time.  For most of us, our default setting is to assimilate readily available information to form a quick judgment which gives us a basis for action.  We are driven to maintain the momentum of productivity, almost at any cost. You could see this impulse at play in the gallery in those who cantered past the works, barely stopping to apprehend them.

But what are we missing in the data that we exclude from consideration if we are always in this shoot-from-the-hip mode?  What do we lose in our appreciation of the people around us or our grasp of the competitive context in which we work.  Might we act differently if we give ourselves permission to read and feel more of the data which is the stuff of experience, to reflect on it before indulging the impulse to act?  I wonder what difference this might have made in the financial institutions which misread the risks in their investments and ostracised the people in their teams who expressed reservations.

Roni Horn coaxes us to distrust our certainties, to pause and find ways to look at things afresh.  One begins to feel energised, alive to new connections in the brain. I found myself constructing stories about the model and the artist.  I imagined them driving round Iceland from hot spring to hot spring: a growing sense of weariness on the part of the model as she submerges herself and assumes the pose at each new pool; the photographer recreating the image over and over, this time from afar with a telephoto lens, this time staring down from close by.

Notes on the wall from the artist suggest the variation in expression is explained simply by the model’s response to different climate conditions: sometimes cold and snowy, other times bright and sunny.

Who is to say whether she is right, whether I am misreading what I see?  She was there with the model.  But she had an interest in regarding the weather, rather than her own artistic demands, as the greater adversity for her model.  Like any leader, she tries to set our interpretation for us.  But we bridle against it.  We have our own version of reality.   The artist’s interpretation of the emotions conveyed by the model may be right.  But her reading is not accepted until decoded in the way she prefers by those receiving the message.   Meaning is created in the negotiation of the two.  When we create a message, we cannot control how it will be received.

A final thought is prompted by the title of the piece, You are the Weather.  This leads you to reflect on your own position as viewer or, perhaps, voyeur.  The model returns your gaze from every corner of the room – inscrutable yet somehow judging.  We are not mere spectators of the work, we participate in it.  Roni Horn has it that not only was the weather the main factor in the emotional states conveyed in the picture.  Somehow, as consumers of her art, as we gaze on her model, we assume responsibility for what the woman is put through.

So we are left with the thought that there is no fixed reality, out there beyond ourselves.  To observe it is to create it – and the more we make it the subject of our awareness, the more we change it because we are changed in the process and we are part of the process.  Business and organisations often operate with entirely different assumptions.  Our organisation charts convey internal structures which lay a beguiling sense of order and simplicity over the true complexity of how people relate to each other within and across teams.  And we imagine solid boundaries between our organisation and the world beyond, devising strategies for how we will engage with it, manipulate it.

If the current times tells us anything, it is that our reality is more of an improvisation than a structure which lends itself to directive plans.  It is emergent and unpredictable.  The challenge of leadership is to relinquish control and throw open the doors to interpretation.  The biggest risk in turbulent times is that we shut down creativity, constrain people’s ingenuity.  The task we must learn is how to release competing ways of seeing the world, yet coax them towards a unified purpose.  Roni Horn doesn’t offer answers.  But she helps us ask the right questions.

Roni Horn aka Roni Horn is at Tate Modern until 25 May 2009.

The Angel of the North, Gateshead

Arts companies seem to be developing a healthy interest in the intrinsic benefits of the arts, if this week’s annual conference of the Arts Marketing Association is a guide. This seems slightly counter-intuitive. At a time when many companies are feeling the loss of public funding, you might expect the arts to intensify their focus on the public policy objectives which secure grants – such as their economic impact. Possibly, the more challenging financial environment is freeing the sector to think outside the box.

I attended the conference, in Gateshead, to facilitate a seminar about how arts companies might use new media to raise their game (see previous post). My premise was that the websites of many arts companies are strangely uninspiring for organisations whose purpose is to engage the public in creative endeavour. In my view, the arts sector has yet to comprehend the explosion in creativity that digital technology and the internet have facilitated. So it is largely missing the opportunity to address audiences and involve them as creative individuals in their own right.

My suggestion was that arts companies should reflect on their core purpose and make sure that their internet strategy was imbued with its ethos.  This pre-occupation with remembering what the arts are supposed to be about is one I heard articulated repeatedly around the conference.

Who better to deliver the message than the impressario of the biggest event of street theatre London has witnessed?  Helen Marriage, from Artichoke, was part of the team that brought The Sultan’s Elephant to the capital two years ago.  Hundreds of thousands of people witnessed this spectacle, staged over four days on the streets of the West End.  Helen showed pictures which were testimony to the emotional chord it struck with audiences.  Most had little idea what to expect since the event was promoted obliquely to maintain a sense of mystery.  I was there, carrying my then three-year-old in my arms, and can remember well the sense of awe.  This was occasioned not just by the spectacle of a huge elephant and an amazingly life-like giant puppet girl lumbering through Regent Street, but also the sheer energy and warm-heartedness of the crowd coming together.

The Sultan's Elephant, London, May 2006

Artichoke like to stage events which are free to attend.  Not having to market a financial transaction, again counter-intuitively, seems to free them to promote the essential artistic experience: the magic, the emotion, the spectacle.

The need to return to these kind of values was the message from Gerri Morris, a consultant to arts companies with her company Morris Hargreaves McIntyre.  Like me, she drew attention to the rise of the creative consumer.  But she went much further, pointing out audiences’inconvenient refusal to conform to the arts marketing models devised for the pre-television age that are still in use.  These include the subscription scheme and the assumption that people will grow into high culture.  She described contemporary audiences as fickle, promiscuous and discerning, less respectful of the boundaries between high and low culture.  Instead of listening to them, and providing them with resonant, meaningful experiences, arts companies were treating them to a “cascade of disdain” from the artistic director down to the box office.

This provided a useful prism through which to interpret a new segmentation of the English population from the Arts Council.  This showed that only nine per cent of the population are highly engaged in the arts.  This nine per cent comprises two groups – described as urban arts eclectics and traditional culture vultures, both highly affluent.  The Arts Council’s Catherine Bunting presented a slide which showed that affluence and engagement with the arts correlate very closely – raising questions about the equity of public funding for the arts.

Now this seemed to be a more intuitive insight but, on reflection, it doesn’t quite stack up.  Might the reported low levels of engagement be a function of the models of programming and promotion favoured by the sector rather than an inherent disinclination to enjoy artistic enterprise among large sections of the population.  As The Sultan’s Elephant demonstrated, where there’s a motivation, it’s possible to mobilise engagement en masse.

During my seminar, participants spoke of their difficulty encouraging people who were discussing arts events on blogs and on sites like Facebook to do the same on the websites of the arts companies that programme the events.  Phil Blight, a trustee with Nofit State Circus,reflected that perhaps those who shared this concern were missing the point and should take their company to where the discussion was spontaneously happening.  What applies online applies in the real world, and it’s telling that this insight comes from a circus – an artistic enterprise which pitches up in the community.

The Sultan’s Elephant had something of the quality of a circus.  It came to us, and connected with us in a visceral way.  As a review in The Guardian put it at the time:

This is a show that disrupts the spectacle of everyday life and transforms the city from an impersonal place of work and business into a place of play and community. It does something very simple and important: it makes you feel incredibly happy and it gives you permission to let your imagination take flight. It turns us all into beautiful dreamers with silly grins on our faces.

To achieve this is difficult enough (The Sultan’s Elephant was the product of unimaginable logistics). Perhaps we shouldn’t ask any more of the arts.

For the delegates who were asking for a copy of the presentation, you can get the annotated slides.

The conference itself was really interesting. Thoughts on that to follow.