Article

Academics', Consultants' and Practitioners' Perspectives on the Cultural Sector
By Adrian Ellis

“Madmen in authority, who hear voices in the air, are distilling their frenzy from some academic scribbler of a few years back… Sooner or later, it is ideas, not vested interests, which are dangerous for good or evil.”

--John Maynard Keynes

Consultants live in a nether world between practitioners (arts managers, public officials and, yes, occasionally even artists) and academics. The latter are Keynes' ‘scribblers', whose hypotheses and hunches and, on rare occasions, full blown theories we reduce to the pat shorthand of our trade: concepts such as Baumol's cost disease, creative clusters, social capital….

Arts practitioners are often so close to their problems, and so emotionally attached to particular solutions, that they find it difficult to see that these problems form part of a larger pattern. But one needs to understand that pattern if the ‘solution' is to be anything other than a very short term palliative or even a placebo. An injection of emergency cash into a theater is not a solution to a financial shortfall that is caused by some emerging imbalance between income and expenditure in turn caused by changes in the demographic base on the community from which the audience is drawn. Cash may seem like the answer, but if the causes are systemic then the gap will obviously reappear unless those underlying causes are addressed. Equally, when a strong director moves on, having created an organization in her own image, and an organizational culture that is an extension of her own personality, her board may be bewildered by the fragility of the organization when she is taken out of the equation. There is a pattern, with known causes and effects, and even some remedies. But you cannot discern the pattern from a sample of one.

People running arts organizations are pinned down by the weight of daily events. Devoting the financial and emotional resources required to push through one's instinctive explanatory defenses to the underlying problem is difficult. It's easier to write it off as a short-term blip…the aftermath of 9-11'… the weather… The difficulties are compounded when there are so few answers that are ‘actionable' – that is, known prescriptions that have a high probability of working and that are within the financial and organizational reach of the organization in question.

In other words, many experienced, hard-pressed arts professionals face problems that the sum of human knowledge in and about their sector does not satisfactorily address. They may therefore be excused a degree of skepticism when a consultant claims to have an ‘answer'. The reality is that arts organizations, arts policy makers and their consultants are currently faced with many challenges that they do not have the tools to solve; at least on terms that would not involve compromises regarded as outside the boundaries of an acceptable solution – compromises to quality, to scale of operation or to internal conditions of employment that would involve either breaches of faith or collateral damage to the culture of the organization.

There are two broad sets of reasons for this.

The first is rarely addressed in either the field or the academy or indeed anywhere in polite society. There is a structural imbalance between the number and scale of non-profit cultural organizations that there is the available cash to support and the number and scale of organizations that exist. Because the sector is, for compelling reasons, protected from the competition in the capital market, supply and demand are not brought into balance in the same way as in a free market The adjustments back to some sort of equilibrium between supply and demand are slower, more awkward and more politicized than in a situation where there is a market in capital resources. The non-profit cultural market can sustain prolonged periods of adjustment in which relatively inefficient and, perhaps more important, artistically questionable organizations continue to absorb resources that might be better deployed elsewhere in the sector, despite their inability to serve their missions effectively. (The academic scribbler here is of course Adam Smith.)

If there is basically insufficient demand for the product – even latent, unstimulated, demand –then a better run, better capitalized organization, with more professional marketing and development and enjoying a higher level of capital investment is still not going to fly. Many well paid consulting assignments to which funders and arts administrators are collectively party are premised on a well-meaning conspiracy of denial of this fact. More so when consultant and funder are fluttering around a struggling organization with a distinguished history, strong civic backing and strong attachments of sentiment with a community of stakeholders. The existence of such assignments, and consultants' willingness to take them on despite their underlying dread instinct that the organization is kaput, is one of the reasons that the reputation of arts consulting in the arts world is not all that it might be.

The second reason that there are so few viable answers concerns not the inherently insoluble nature of the problem under consideration so much as its contingently insoluble nature. That is, the knowledge to solve it is either ‘out there' or can be assembled with a bit of digging and due diligence; but the question then is: where out there?

Practitioners again, are the first port of call. Someone, somewhere, has confronted this problem before and tried and either failed or succeeded in addressing it. (Failures are as useful as successes in this context.) Find that person and talk to them. Scour the relevant literature – the journals and websites of the specific arts form and their trade organizations and the conference reports and endless PDF files buried on the sites of foundations and funding agencies.

The second port of call is the academic world: management theory and its burgeoning non-profit management subfield; planning and urban policy; cultural economics (Lefties such as Baumol and Throsby in polite tension with righties like Frey and Tyler Cowan); futurology (for long term impact of demographic change, technology, the rise and fall of the leisure class etc. etc.); and occasionally museum studies. (Actually, in truth, this last voluminous field comprises for the most part an avalanche of indignant, painstaking rediscoveries of the simple truth that museums embody values as well as facts, and generally they are the values of the people who pay for them. Well, duh!)

So what does the field of arts management and policy have to offer? How useful is this to the jobbing consultant? In 1990 Pankratz and Morris edited a survey of academic writing about cultural policy and management called The Future of the Arts: Public Policy and Arts Research . A new volume revisits the territory fourteen years later with many of the same contributors – some eighteen articles divided into seven broad subject areas[1]. The emphasis is more on cultural policy than on the management of cultural institutions although there is one rather abstract article on ‘Administering the Culture of Everyday Life'. And within the field of cultural policy, as Alberta Arthurs' short piece points out, the focus of attention is placed overwhelmingly on patterns in arts funding (predominantly that sliver that comes from federal sources and the relative and growing importance of state and local funding). There is also a great deal of definitional wrangling in the volume – what constitutes high and low culture; much hand-wringing about the lack of reliable data-runs; and introspective ruminations on how the field of cultural research is and should be articulated.

What is disturbing is how little robust theory or hard data to support or repudiate that theory appears to have been generated by the field in the past decade, as opposed to data generated to support pitches for funding. The same criticism has been leveled, savagely, at the UK cultural policy field by Sara Selwood[2]. If and in so far as the book represents an overview of the American academic scene – and from this reader's weather eye on the sector it does – there has been precious little theory or data generated to help solve the sorts of problems that consultants are asked to solve.

This got me wondering why…. What is the connection – or rather the disconnection – between the consultants' need to understand what renders either vibrant or congested the heart of cultural life and the literature reviewed in this volume?

My reluctant conclusion was that much of the research in the field suffers a fundamental deficiency: the absence of a theoretical underpinning of any sophistication or an overt dialogue about that model (or those models) that clarifies points of contention, and allows one to establish which assertions are founded and which unfounded.

This complaint is, I realize, uncomfortably similar to Richard Posner's diatribe against ‘public intellectuals' who make their assertions in articles and books that are never subject to the traditional rigor of academe. The result is a not a dialogue but a series of unconnected monologues, not a Kuhnian paradigm but a series of atomized, largely unexamined endeavors.

Data garner their strength from their place in a causal model, whether implicit or explicit. Monetarists in their heyday used to track indicators like M1 and M2 (narrow money) because they had an underlying model of the way the economy worked in which these measures had causal significance. Keynesians and neo-Keynesians use other indicators and the tussle between competing indicators is a proxy for a tussle between alternative versions of how the economy works. Empirical evidence without a causal model is random - evidence of what? - while a theoretical model without evidence is unproven. To edge understanding forward you need both.

So…where is the equivalent intellectual debate in the cultural sector about the relationship between investment in the arts and various sorts of benefits? Well, there is some systems-theory work that looks at the impact of balanced portfolios of investment in different sorts of cultural expenditure – audience development, education, participative arts versus ‘up-holding the canon,' revenue funding versus capital expenditure, non-profit versus for profit etc. etc. – but this emergent field has not as far as I can tell had any influence on the development of thinking about the sector, beyond perhaps John Kreidler's incisive and much quoted critique of the long term impact of the Ford Foundation's funding strategies[3].

Last year I wrote a polemic called Valuing Culture for a conference Demos ran[4].

The basic argument was that cultural policy has been ‘hyper-instrumentalized'. That is, our preoccupation is with what culture can do for, inter alia , tourism, inward investment, educational standards, and job creation. The arts community deserves some of the blame for this – in their efforts to appropriate the budgets of adjacent policy areas, they have developed extraordinarily ingenious arguments about the efficacy of culture as a policy instrument. However, the empirical basis for the claims is often dangerously thin and the cumulative impact may be an over-extended, thinly capitalized, organizationally weak arts sector with an underlying ‘legitimacy crisis' as its imperial ambitions come to be seen as based on shaky, self-serving foundations.

A single quote will give you a sense of how far removed from a secure grounding instrumental rationales for cultural expenditures have become:

"This conference aims at advancing the role of multicultural music and art celebrations in child abuse prevention through knowledge synthesis and dissemination. The discussions will bring together a cross section of representatives from child abuse prevention community, arts organisations, musicians, DJs, volunteer organisations, state and local agencies and councils to assist Africamix's volunteers, board and staff members in developing specific strategies to promote understanding of utilising volunteer arts and music celebrations in helping to combat child abuse and neglect."

Meanwhile, our obsession with side-effects has left the heart of the issue neglected. The heart of the issue is: “What constitutes a vibrant cultural organization or community and what do we need to do to ensure we have one?” rather than “Why do we need one?” This means that relatively little attention is being paid to issues affecting the internal dynamics of the sector as opposed to its effects on other sectors.

My candidate list would include:

• The impact of low levels of capitalization on organizational effectiveness;
• The impact of changing funding criteria on the pattern of arts activity;
• The impact of technology on patterns of cultural consumption and production;
• The impact of changing demographic on attendance patterns;
• The impact of changes in school curricula on levels of amateur participation;
• The circumstances most conducive to artistic innovation, including the management of artistic risk;
• The impact of the vertical integration of the commercial entertainment industry on non-profit provision…

Each of these will have a profound impact on cultural provision over the next decade. You may have other candidates. But our thinking about cultural policy and the management of cultural institutions appears still to treat ‘the arts' as a black box, measuring – or at least asserting – its impacts without lifting the lid off the box and working out how the machine itself works. This represents a major omission and a disservice by the academic community to the practitioner. Maybe consultants should have a go …

Adrian Ellis
aellis@aeaconsulting.com

[1] The Arts in a New Millennium: Research in the Arts Sector , Valerie B. Morris and David B. Pankratz Praeger, Westport, 2003. ISBN: 0-275-97013-2
[2] http://www.psi.org.uk/publications/UKCultSectorsumm.pdf
[3] http://www.inmotionmagazine.com/lost.html
[4] http ://www.aeaconsulting.com/site/assets/pdf/valuingculturepdf.pdf

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