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.

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.