In May I spoke at a conference in Manchester organised by Euclid entitled ‘Creative Europe in a Time of Austerity’ – you can see my presentation on Prezi here. There were many great examples of organisations finding new ways of turning funding reductions into new opportunities for creative work and enterprise. Dan Eastmond, Director of the Firestation in Windsor gave a tough presentation essentially berating arts organisations for being dependent on public subsidy, a topic he also covered in typically forthright fashion in a blogpost for Arts Professional here.

This is a theme I have also talked about with my clients and in conference talks around Europe. The depressing thing, as Dan points out in his blog, is that so much of the debate about the ‘value of the arts’ is in reality a discussion about ‘how do we get more public subsidy.’ I am very uncomfortable with the idea that the value of arts is measured mainly by the amount of public subsidy it can unlock. Indeed in some countries artists and arts leaders get very close to suggesting that arts which do not receive public subsidy are no more than mere entertainment – in other words, art is defined by public subsidy.

I don’t think this can or should be true and there are many counter-examples (not least almost the entire history of western culture before 1945!) but, for three generations of arts managers and policy makers in Europe raised in a system of heavy state-funding, it is hard not to think this way. One interesting statistic presented at the Euclid conference by Peter Inkei of the Budapest Cultural Observatory is that public funding of the arts in France and The Netherlands is four times as much, per head of population, as in the UK. One has to ask what exactly the French or the Dutch are getting for all that extra money – More art? Better art? Perhaps there really is solid evidence that all this extra spending produces something remarkable – if so, we in Britain should be using this evidence to demand the same from our government.

I am not holding my breath for such evidence. Some artists regard the very question of what impact or outcomes is achieved by arts funding as irrelevant, and people who ask such a thing must be soul-less philistines. But even those who recognise the validity of the question are faced with the difficulty of defining the value and impact of the arts and then measuring it. This is why the recently announced collaboration between the Royal Society for the Arts (RSA) and the Arts Council of England (ACE) is very welcome. The economic impact question is part of this, but only one part.

One of my clients, the International Film Festival Rotterdam, continues to receive good levels of public funding despite recent cuts. But her stated aim is that IFFR should become ‘free of public subsidy’. Yet she also wants to increase the amount of public funding they get. How to reconcile the two statements? The clue is the word ‘subsidy’ – she wants to negotiate partnership arrangements with a variety of public and private organisations based on mutual interests and ambitions. In this she echoes Emily Gray, Artistic Director of Trestle Theatre Company which lost its entire ACE core funding in 2011.In an interview with the BBC  She says that, after a difficult period the company feels that it has been “liberated” by the loss of funding and is now “more creative.” She goes on to say that her relationship with funders is now one of equals rather than “parent-child.”

Now isn’t that something for all arts organisations to aspire to?

This post first appeared as a response to a post on the Audiences Europe Network website (reproduced at the end of this post)

Tiffany Jenkins’s piece criticises arts funding policy and arts management in the UK over the last decade and she wants to warn other European countries not to follow our example. She makes one claim after another about the poor state of the arts in the UK, but offers no evidence of any kind. So we have to ask: is anything she says actually true? Having worked in arts management in various roles in the UK and in other European countries for the last 20 years, I would say that there is not a word of truth in what she claims. The quality of arts produced and presented in the UK has improved dramatically in the last 20 years precisely because we now consider our audiences properly. We have realised that the arts are part of our lives in many different ways and not some sort of religion to be mediated by a caste of high-priests.

Her view of the arts world is distorted because she has not understood the difference between ‘arts’ and an ‘arts organization.’ This distinction is profound in practical, philosophical and political terms. Generally speaking, arts organisations do not produce art – artists do! Arts organisations mostly exist to present art, which means that they exist to bring the art to audiences. If they consider only the art they are only doing half their job! True, some artists do gather people around them to help them make their art (producing theatres, for example) but even in these cases they also present either in their own venues or in others. True, a few organisations exist to preserve and document historic art works (museums) but a large part of their work is also to present and explain.

So, the role of the artist is to make art and the role of almost all arts organisations is to present art. In other words, the central purpose of most arts organisation is to create and develop audiences. I encourage arts professionals (not artists!) to consider the full implications of this definition.

But arts organisations can only find new audiences and develop existing audiences if they have inspirational art to present! The idea that a focus on audiences must inevitably lead to a reduction in the quality of art is simply wrong, and I challenge anyone who says the opposite to produce evidence. Our audiences are intelligent people who know rubbish when they see it and all good arts managers know that the most risky policy of all is artistic conservatism. The old funding system, whereby a small arts elite is given lots of money each year by the politicians, is entirely conservative and leads to unjustifiable amounts of taxpayers’ money going to ‘heritage’ arts (Beethoven, Shakespeare, Verdi, Rembrandt) and very little going to actual creation.

This elitism and conservatism, financed by the taxpayer, is often accompanied by the idea that the subjective tastes of the people in this elite actually define ‘great art.’ If the elite doesn’t like something then it must be bad art; If a work is popular beyond the elite then it cannot be great art.  All of this is arrogant, philosophically unjustifiable and profoundly anti-democratic. Thank goodness that all of the main political parties in the UK have moved away from this old-boys network and now insist that arts organisations justify the public money they are given in a variety of terms (including artistic). Arts manager can no longer get away with just tossing their hair like the woman in the shampoo advert and say “because we are worth it.” In a democracy, if you want lots of money from the taxpayer you will have to do better than that!

Arts funding must include the continuation and renewal of our cultural heritage and it must include support for creativity. But it must also acknowledge that most art is not great art but nonetheless valuable and transformative for the people involved – theatre for children, amateur choirs, touring opera for rural areas, dance groups involving people with disabilities etc. The idea that by supporting these kinds of artistic activities we are in any sense reducing our ability to produce and present ‘great art’ is arrogant and offensive. Great artists inspire the rest of us and in turn we provide them with an audience. It is not a zero-sum game; it is an ecosystem in which audiences are an active part, not passive worshippers.

Original AEN Blogpost from Tiffany Jenkins

A British Council-funded debate at the Bergen 2011 Art and Audiences conference provocatively asked if the arts world has become obsessed with new audiences at the expense of great art.
Is audience development simply about ensuring there are decent numbers of people to appreciate the work of artists, musicians, theatre-makers and so on? Or is it about justifying the existence of the arts – and public funding for them – in social rather than artistic terms?

In her address, sociologist and cultural commentator Tiffany Jenkins thinks that the pendulum has swung too far away from the very thing itself – the art:

“One of the greatest experiences in life is to stand in front of a work of art in a gallery, or listen to a concert, for it can transport us to a different time and place, away from the hum-drum, domestic banality of our everyday existence.

This transformative encounter is threatened by a growing obsession with the public that is infecting arts organizations. The Ministry of Culture is concerned that attendees are decreasing and remain a relatively small privileged group, and that the sector must change to involve more people. Audiences Norway is working to develop new audiences across the arts and is convening a major conference this week (30 May – 1 June) as part of the Bergan International Art festival, to pursue this agenda.
But before you applaud, think again. I have considerable experience researching a similar trend in Britain, and I can assure you that this is not about getting great art to more people – an admirable aim. This is an obsession with numbers, and with reaching people who haven’t participated before, which will have deleterious consequences for the art work we will get to see and hear.

Consider this: due to these changed priorities, the arts professional will spend more time and energy on getting bums on seats and visitors through the door, than on researching, programming and acquiring new work, impacting on quality of what is on show, as their attention is elsewhere. The public have become the object of the gallery – the focus of their interest and activity – not the art.
Of course, there is nothing wrong with wanting more people to experience great work. No artist paints, composes or writes to be ignored. Galleries and performances must be promoted and marketed well. But this is not what will happen. For despite all the egalitarian rhetoric by today’s cultural mandarins, they seem to believe that beautiful paintings and orchestral masterpieces will deter us from hanging out in their institutions and so they dumb it down in the pursuit of the public.
Look out for the key words that betrays this outlook – ‘relevance’, ‘accessibility’ and ‘social inclusion’. These are the buzz words of today’s managers. Instead of stretching people, they programme ‘relevant’ (what we already know) and accessible (what is easy) work so as not to put people off.

In a desperate attempt to be popular, arts managers second-guess the masses and go for the simple and obvious, rather than the difficult but worth it, kind of exhibition. The obsession with new audiences leads to predictable exhibitions, where curators programme work to get people in the space, a recipe for conservatism, and the avoidance of risk – which should be central to the arts.
At the heart of this new agenda lies contempt. Contempt for the art work – for it is no longer given pride of place, no longer a priority, no longer what is important (in fact it would seem to be a bit of an embarrassment). And contempt for the audience who is regarded as a bit stupid and childish, only enticed into a gallery with sugar, spoon-fed by marketing managers. What is so wrong with the old audiences that today’s arts managers seem to dislike so much? Surely being grey-haired and cultivated is no reason to be disregarded.

An additional driver for this focus is that politicians increasingly feel that art can transform society and address social problems. That is why they talk about the role of arts in ‘social inclusion’. The Minister of Health and Care Services, Anne-Grete Strøm-Erichsen, will open the conference in Bergen, which shows that the political elites think that culture can address issues to do with health, cohesion and poverty.

But this is to mistake the purpose and point of art. It can do many things, but not under diktat and not as effectively, actually, as politicians, when it comes to changing society. Relying on art to deal with social problems is an evasion, a displacement activity by politicians who need to address them with social and political solutions.

Asking culture to solve social problems burdens artists and arts organisations, when really they should be free to create and curate. Moreover, if arts organizations are defensive about the value of their work in its own terms, this can only strengthen the case of those who argue the arts should only receive public money if they can be shown to achieve certain policy outcomes.
Arts organisations serve the people best, when they concentrate on art.”