The heritage of expectancy

The first roundtable I attended at the IFACCA World Summit on Arts & Culture focused on the likely effects of recession on intercultural dialogue. Shelagh Wright drew on ‘After the Crunch’ for her introduction, with some especially telling comments about the ‘phony hierarchy and dodgy advocacy’ that limits much British debate. Even more challenging was the contribution from Farai Mpfunya of the Culture Fund of Zimbabwe Trust. He drew on 8 years of official recession in Zimbabwe to suggest a more fundamental questioning of our ways of life was necessary. He used a phrase I found really resonant in describing what he hoped to pass on to his family, ‘the heritage of expectancy’.

This led to a discussion about who was actually wealthier (and/or perhaps healthier) – people/countries with huge amount of credit/debt leading to spending power, or those with no access to credit, but therefore correspondingly little debt? Farai's phrase also echoed many conversations I've had in the North East about the so-called lack of aspiration in the region's young people, and whether actually what is missing is not so much aspiration as expectation - the lack of which will eventually quash many people's hopes.

In the context of recession, however, the phrase is more debatable. It struck me there was in the cultural sector's thinking, as in the general population's, a continuum, only part of which was actually healthy. This continuum might go something like this:

Despondency - Aspiration - Expectation - Optimism -Entitlement -Dependency

Discussing the different ways of investing in culture, notions of trust and social capital became central to emerging out of the recession in a healthy manner. There being no genuine dialogue without trust, for instance, and the connections which make up social capital building trust, potentially forming a virtuous circle. But holding the centre of that continuum above is perhaps also dependent on the health of our social capital. (I'm picturing trying to keep a seesaw balanced on your own - you need to avoid both ends.)

What might this mean practically in the cultural sector? Well, perhaps things like:

• leading organisations playing prominent roles in creating apprenticeship and other development opportunities
• funders not colluding with dependency
• an increased focus on sharing of stories to create a heritage of healthy expectancy
• (even) more collaborative working and social networking
• avoiding business as usual.

First cut is the deepest?

The c word is now being spoken out loud on all sides of the political spectrum. There are good cuts and bad cuts, it seems, but the focus is all on cuts in spending. Joe Hallgarten on his arm’s length state blog makes the point that politicians needs to be talk more honestly about the limitations of their power over the world, and thus encourage in us, the ‘public’, a more realistic and probably more forgiving attitude. (He kind of praises Arts Council with one hand, for at least grappling with change, and then digs us in the ribs with the other, which is probably fair enough.) Politicians, he suggests, need to point out they cannot do the impossible - eg keep costs down but make sure no one ever gets hurt. (I'd say the same goes for funders.)

Also this morning someone sent me a link to a report called ‘How to Save £50 billion’, which is at least honest enough to have a clear and relatively unequivocal list of cuts in spending that the Institute of Directors and the Tiny Minority of Tax Payers Alliance think would be a good idea. Read the list and you can see which Tax Payers the Alliance voice might represent: not those like my dad living on the Basic State Pension, or families being helped by Sure Start or Education Maintenance Allowance, or the children being educated in dilapidated buildings. Not to mention the people employed as a result of the things on their little list.

This is not to deny savings are possible or even necessary in some areas. But what needs to be considered is not which expenditure lines should be reduced, but which of the outcomes we want to do without. (We do also need to remember that some of the ‘savings’ also have a direct financial cost, in terms of unemployment, but also indirect social costs – conveniently left out of most of the equations.) I’d happily live without ID cards, but I don’t want the state education system on starvation rations in horrible old buildings. (I know there are some horrible new buildings, but let’s not go there right now.)

In a sense, the public spending cuts debate could then become a part of a wholly necessary discussion about how we are living beyond the means of the planet and our real economies, and what we are prepared to forgo, and how we can reinvent our ways of living and working. That’s obviously also a discussion that is ongoing in culture, and we at Arts Council are constantly making the case as strongly as humanly possible that money spent on culture is well spent and productive. A more mature language for the overall debate can only help us in that.

Self-employment in the visual arts

AIR – Artists Interaction and Representation – have had research done by a-n on employment patterns for visual and applied artists. This was in the context of the Future Jobs Fund and the work done by New Deal of the Mind that I talked about a short while ago. I commented then that the focus on employment by employers, and the exclusion of self-employment, was problematic. The summary of the findings appears to back that up. I quote…

Whilst previous research by a-n, ACE and others over the last ten years suggested at least half of all practising visual and applied artists were self-employed, the new AIR survey reveals that has substantially increased.

72% of artists are self-employed
25% are a mixture of self-employed and employed
2% are unemployed
1% is employed

In terms of status by career stage:

88% of established artists are self-employed
73% of mid career artists are self-employed
67% of emerging artists are self-employed

Significantly, the overall level of self-employment amongst artists is considerably higher than for the creative industries as a whole, where it stands at 41%.

They also note that self-employment is currently excluded by the Office of Statistics when analysing the efficacy of art and design courses in creating employment, which seems perverse, given the career trajectories of those graduates.

Whilst this pattern will not be replicated right across the artforms, it is important that it is taken into full consideration by government and policy makers looking to ‘create jobs’ within the creative industries.

Do It Yourself?

Because I became a chef the week after I left university, I never went on the Enterprise Allowance Scheme, though I had lots of friends who did. (You can listen to some 80’s janglepop from my friend Ally's record label, Sombrero, partly enabled by the EAS, here.) My recollection is a key boon (to both individuals and the government of the time) was getting away from the dole office for a year, but that may just have been my friends, and it did undoubtedly assist some long-lasting businesses, and provide some great experience for people making their way into the world with few resources. (And MySpace and the internet mean those old records, books and magazines in attics and garages might even have a second life.)

Do it yourself: cultural and creative self-employment in hard times is a new report by New Deal of the Mind for Arts Council England, just published. It provides research and analysis to inform thinking about opportunities for young self-employed creative people and the potential implications of the government’s Future Jobs Fund, and amongst other things suggests creating a 21st century version of the EAS. (It has interviews with people who benefited such as Louise Wilson.)

I feel there are also lessons to be learnt from more recent small grants schemes to support creative industries, such as the North East’s Cultural Business Venture. Investment in technology and marketing in the early days of a business, enabled by access to ‘micro-finance’ may have more impact than the same amount spread across a year to subsidise living. The requirement to talk to a Business Link adviser and work on a business plan was often of real benefit to people, they told us – though usually only afterwards! We have been working with Business and Enterprise North East to make sure artists get a good service: see here for a press story about the new MOU we’ve signed. Such an approach would also encourage an approach to the support of artist businesses based on building a business - or 'just' a living - though investment of funds rather than simply a weekly subsidy. Probably a mixture is required to help people out of unemployment.

Where I think the report hits the bull’s-eye is in drawing attention to the lack of focus on self-employment in the government’s approach to recession and job creation. The Future Jobs Fund is based on having employers and employees, and self-employment hardly features. This has to be self-defeating as an approach, particularly in a sector with such high freelance and self-employment figures as the arts.

You can keep them for the birds and bees?

A new working paper from two Harvard Business School academics has as its title ‘It Is Okay for Artists to Make Money… No, Really, It’s Okay.’ (I picked up on this from Ian David Moss’s very lively and useful blog Createquity, which I heartily recommend.)

The paper describes how ‘an inclination to take offence often attends the close juxtaposition of art and commerce’, making reference to ‘a lively response to ideas we didn’t write and meanings we didn’t intend’, which is precisely what I was writing about just last Tuesday. It then explores what the authors, Robert D. Austin and Lee Devin, say are three fallacies:
- Art is a luxury, an indulgence
- Yeah, but that’s not art, it’s not any good
- Commerce Dominates and Corrupts Art, and Subverts its Purpose.

Much of this is interesting, and there are some nice apercus along the way – 'art is a behaviour', anyone? - but rather old ground. You can apply their argument not just to commerce as in the sale of art, but also ‘marketing of the arts’, and the drive to increase participation levels and the various views on that. Where it gets potentially rather useful, I think, is their conceptualisation of the inhibiting dynamic at play. This comes in the form of a handy 2x2 matrix.





Their basic provocation is that too much of the world – artists and potential audience alike – is so obsessed with avoiding quadrant B, that they fall into quadrant C, and thereby miss the chance of moving from quadrant C to A. (Don’t ask me why the Junk quadrant doesn’t even deserve a D!)

I would want, naturally, to caveat and broaden some of their terms – marketed and commercial, for instance, need to refer to more than simple purchase transactions - but I find their conclusion, whilst not flawless, rather rousing:

‘Our culture has many flaws, one of them, perhaps, the movement of art away from the center of life. But we change things by reconceiving, by including what is in a larger conception of what can be. The supposed malign influence of commerce on art will not go away because marginalized artists cry “How dare you!” or when people object to high values placed on art outcomes. It will go away when artists and non-artists find ways to include what is in their worldviews, and to combine what is with a view that includes art understood and valued in many different ways.

In a better world, art will command fair prices, best-in-the-world jazz musicians will
make as much as partners in consulting firms, and jobs up and down the value chain around such activities will pay a living wage. To fulfill the vision of art as a humanizing force in the world, we need to make the market for art work better, not separate the art world from markets and commercial value.’

(Digital) Irony Corner

Here's something a little ironic (as that annoying song has it):

I just spent 40 minutes carefully crafting a post about Digital Britain, pressed 'publish post' with a sense of 'good job done', only for an error message to come up, and my fine words and links to have disappeared even from the saved draft.

I'm sorry, readers, but life's too short to do it again. It welcomed the report, though it's a bit baggy in places and over-long - a bit like modern software that does with gigabytes what a programme on a floppy disc used to do just as quickly, or so it would seem. Digital sprawl.

So I'll keep this short: read Digital Britain, start with the exec summary if pushed or just not that geeky-wonky, then get on with changing the world.

What's the best way through a time of crisis?

I spent a fascinating two days last week in Wexford in Ireland, at the conference of the Theatre Forum Ireland. The theme was 'The Way Through', and I was asked to talk about the creative uses of crisis. As well as drawing attention to the thinking around resilience I've talked about previously here - and in particular the habits of resilient organisations - I talked about how crisis is often defined as something which disturbs equilibrium (psychological or business, for instance) because it can't be responded to using one's usual methods or approaches or skills. As such it is precisely the thing that allows us to grow, or to (in the jargon) 'build capacity'. It relates to the ways things move from the 'release' or creative destruction phase to 'reorganisation'. When we realise our usual methods of control are no longer sufficient for the world (if they ever were), we are forced to find new and better ways. But before we get to reimagining, we have to properly accept the limits of our current methods.

The 250 theatre and dance professionals from all over Ireland seemed to be at precisely that point, because the Celtic Tiger economy appears to have gone 'pop!' very messily indeed. Interestingly, the Arts Council of Ireland also seemed to be at a point of reimagining how best to support theatre, given the challenges. These seemed huge, but there was, by the end of the two days, a real appetite to work together. It was fascinating for me to observe the sector and the Arts Council relationship at one remove, for once - the different perceptions and the difficulty of communication and partnership. It was also nice not to have to feel personally responsible every time I heard 'the Arts Council' being criticised! (That wasn't all the time, I hasten to add, and there was a general understanding of the necessity of the difficult decisions that Arts Council had to take, and an acknowledgement the Council was really making an effort to work with the sector.)

It was my second conference speech in a week, and interesting that the issues around young leaders I wrote about after the ENYAN conference were very apparent. One of the biggest dilemmas facing the Arts Council of Ireland, and the sector, is how to maintain some stability for the key institutions and companies, whilst also bringing on new talent. Clearly some of the 'emerging' artists, most in their 30s, felt more needed to be done to assist them.

There were lots of other thoughts stimulated by a hugely enjoyable two days, so thanks to curator Belinda McKeown and Tania and Irma at Theatre Forum Ireland for the invitation, and to people for making me welcome. I may return to some of those thoughts, once I've caught up with myself.

What comes after the crunch?

The end of last week was all about ‘the crunch’. Arts Council England announced a number of steps to help organisations weather the recession – you can read about that here . (This includes our reaction to the Budget announcements – well, I say announcements, but as some people have said it to me it wasn’t exactly very visible in the budget, so perhaps I should say detail – of a £4M reduction in next year's budgets. We will not pass this on to any RFOs.) CCSkills and British Council also published ‘After The Crunch’ a helpful book about the role of creative industries in responding to the recession.

This is a really stimulating collection of short essays, illustrations and cartoons about how the creative industries need to look after the recession – if not sooner. Contributors ranging from Charles Leadbetter to Chris Smith via Dave Moutrey, CultureLabel and many others, give short, sharp thoughts on the current situation. If there is a consensus emerging, it’s that we shouldn’t look to keep ‘business as usual’. (This is of course a challenge to anyone, like Arts Council, helping organisations meet the challenge of the crunch – how to help and support continuity whilst encouraging suitable change.)

Editors John Holden, John Kieffer, John Newbigin and Shelagh Wright draw out 12 big issues for consideration if we are to close what they call ‘the gap between today’s reality and the possibility of a creative, fulfilling, greener and more equal society.’ These include issues to do with global competition, intellectual property and open source sharing, administrative and policy coherence, data collection and analysis and metrocentrism (the need to see policy thinking flowing upwards from communities and regions to Whitehall) .Underneath those runs the threat of short-termism. Linking back to my posts about resilience: we need to act now to enhance rather than diminish long-term strength. Anyway, give ‘After The Crunch’ a read: if, like me, you get tired at times of the design speak, I'm sure you'll find the cartoons entertaining!

What would a resilient (arts) world be like?

Brian Walker and David Salt’s Resilience Thinking ends with a handy check list of 9 things a resilient world would value. I’m going to conclude this little series of posts with them – and by repeating the invitation from the book to send your 10th attribute to Brian Walker at Brian.Walker@csiro.au - though please post it here as a comment too!

1. Diversity: A resilient world would promote and sustain diversity in all forms (biological, landscape, social and economic)
2. Ecological Variability: A resilient world would embrace and work with ecological variability (rather than attempting to control and reduce it)
3. Modularity: A resilient world would consist of modular components
4. Acknowledging Slow Variables: A resilient world would have a policy focus on ‘slow’, controlling variable associated with thresholds
5. Tight Feedbacks: A resilient world would possess tight feedbacks (but not too tight)
6. Social Capital: A resilient world would promote trust, well-developed social networks, and leadership (adaptability)
7. Innovation: A resilient world would place an emphasis on learning, experimentation, locally developed rules and embracing change.
8. Overlap in Governance: A resilient world would have institutions that have ‘redundancy’ in their governance structures and a mix of common and private property with overlapping access rights
9. Ecosystem Services: A resilient world would include all the unpriced ecosystem services in developing proposals and assessments.

You will be able to apply this to artsworld without me pointing out the obvious. It might be worth saying, though, that an ‘unpriced ecosystem service’ , might, for instance, be the ideas of individual artists that often go unpaid,or the amateur and pro-am arts.

10 quotes and thoughts on resilience (8 - 10 plus hidden bonus track )

8. Most systems… usually proceed through recurring cycles consisting of four phases: rapid growth, conservation, release and reorganisation….This understanding is also important for policy and for managing natural resources because it suggests there are times in the cycle when there is greater leverage to change things, and other times when effecting change is really difficult. The kinds of policy and management interventions appropriate in one phase don’t work in others.

Please look here for a better, briefer summary of the four phases than I can do right now . The phases of rapid growth – the phase marked by opportunism – and conservation – marked by growing specialism and consolidation - are known as the fore loop. The back loop consists of release – often chaotic, marked by disturbance and shock - and reorganisation – when the options arising from change lead to renewal and the return of order, albeit a new order. We need to respect the necessity in the cycle of both loops, although they may not be equally as fun for all of us. Deny the back loop, for instance, and you may appear Canute-like. Want to live there and you may just be a trouble-maker…

9. The dangers of the late conservation phase:
- Increases in efficiency being achieved through the removal of apparent redundancies (one size fits all solutions are increasingly the order of the day)
- Subsidies being introduced are almost always to help people not to change (rather than to change)
- A preoccupation with process (more and more rules, more time and effort devoted to sticking with procedures)
- Novelty being suppressed, with less support for experimentation

The credit crunch and recession seem to sit most clearly in the release phase. But perhaps the cultural sector is also still in experiencing the dangers described here. Not falling into these traps in responding to the early release phase will be really important.

10. A back loop is not all bad. It is a time of renewal and rejuvenation, a period of new beginnings and new possibilities – hence its description as a period of creative destruction….Those new beginnings can often grow to be ruling paradigms in the next front loop. They are critical times to achieve change and reform in a constantly moving social-ecological system.

I am a glass-half-full type of person. (And a Libran, although I don’t really believe in horoscopes.) So the idea that both loops are creative is appealing. Ensuring that the actions we take in the back loop help shape new and better, more resilient, ‘ruling paradigms’, is really important. So, to use a current example, whilst I welcome this week's government announcements about encouraging artists to keep town centres lively by occupying empty shops, I don’t want that to be the new ruling paradigm for provision of artist workspace. I want that paradigm to enable the development and resilience of sustainable, high quality spaces that properly supports a thriving sector delivering quality art. The proposals may help that, but only if delivered with appropriate sensitivity to the whole arts 'social-ecological system' to use the phrase from Resilience Thinking. If it’s simply a short term measure with simplistic measurements of success – moving from empty shops to shops with things in them – it may actually damage the resilience of the sector in the long run, let alone the town centres. (By, for instance, not having good quality art in town centres positions, and reinforcing negative or outdated perceptions in some people of what art can be or do.) Done well, though, it could be brilliant.

And finally, a self-explanatory, free-hidden-bonus-track quote for anyone who's stuck with this:

11. Anyone can do it. You don’t need a detailed appreciation of thresholds and adaptive cycles to apply it. You do need to see your enterprise as part of a broader interlinked system, be able to identify the important processes and variables that underpin your operation, and have the capacity to ask the appropriate questions. And you need the capacity to implement change.

10 quotes and thoughts on resilience (4 - 7)

4. ‘What’s the difference between a complicated system and a complex adaptive system? Consider the situations of Cogworld and Bugworld. Everything in Cogworld is made of interconnected cogs; big cogs are driven by smaller cogs that are in turn driven by tiny cogs…. Bugworld is quite different. It’s populated by lots of bugs. The bugs interact with each other and the overall performance of Bugworld depends on these interactions (as does Cogworld). But some subgroups of bugs are only loosely connected to other subgroups of bugs. Bugs can make and break connections with other bugs, and unlike the cogs in Cogworld, the bugs reproduce and each generation of bugs come with subtle variations in size or differences in behaviour. Because there is lots of variation, different bugs or subgroups of bugs respond in different ways as conditions change. As the world changes some of the subgroups perform better than other subgroups, and the whole system is modified over time. The system is self-organising. No one is in control.

Now let me be unequivocal: I’m not comparing arts councils, artists or RFOs to bugs. But the way Bugworld is described makes more sense of the arts ecology than a model which suggests you can turn a crank and definitely get a certain result out, and then keep doing that for ever more. Funding, for instance, should not be seen by either funder of funded as a turn of a cog that will deliver, in linear, predictable fashion, great art for everyone. We have to look very closely at the interactions of the different areas, rather than concentrate on individual subgroups. (That's why I have, for instance, always welcomed the move away from pre-defined ‘artform’ budgets in favour of a holistic approach, though I know some disagree.)

5. Social-ecological systems are complex adaptive systems. They do not change in a predictable, linear, incremental fashion. They have the potential to exist in more than one kind of regime (sometimes referred to as ‘alternate stable states’) in which their function, structure and feedbacks can drive them across a threshold into a different regime.

This builds on the last point but adds the notion of ‘threshold’ – those points where fundamental change happens. Recorded music helped push music-making and performance from one regime into another as the live communal tradition morphed. Digital downloads are pushing the music industry towards another threshold right now. Change is possible, however.

6. Knowing more hasn’t helped because the underlying expectation of the people in the region is that they want to continue doing things the way they’ve always done things. Consequently they have thus opted to fix up short-term problems rather than address the large system-wide issues.

This refers to one of the case studies, to do with an agricultural region. I think it applies to some people in the arts and cultural sector too. There are times when the short-term fix is necessary as a first step – emergency response to cuts or recession for instance – but they need to be seen in the bigger context, and not taken as a full response.

7. Though social-ecological systems are affected by many variables, they are usually driven by only a handful of key controlling (often slow-moving) variables. Along each of these variables are thresholds: if the system moves beyond a threshold it behaves in a different way, often with undesirable and unforeseen surprises. Once a threshold has been crossed it is usually difficult (in some cases) to cross back. A system’s resilience can be measured by its distance from these thresholds. The closer you are to a threshold, the less it takes to be pushed over. Sustainability is all about knowing if and where thresholds exist and having the capacity to manage the system in relation to these thresholds.

Developing a sense of what the key 'slow' variables are that might affect your resilience is key. Much of the sector has a long way to go on this. The ‘bottom line’ beloved of tough finance types is one such variable. Reviews might be another. Audiences figures and ages a third and fourth. What are the really vital ones – that might push you towards a threshold? The alleged pressure on arts organisations to be socially usefully in return for funding might be one such. At what point do you change function? The choice is up to you – it’s knowing what you’re doing that’s vital. There is a contrary thought from this quote also. Risk is key to innovation in the arts, and many organisations live healthily with it. Might an over-awareness of your thresholds lead to risk-aversion? Too great a distance from one a kind of 'safeness'? Perhaps this gives a new meaning to living on the edge?

10 quotes and thoughts on resilience (1 - 3)

I mentioned some time ago I had been reading ‘Resilience Thinking’ by Brian Walker and David Salt. I can’t recommend it highly enough. Although I plan, at some point when I’ve more time, to write a ‘proper’ essay on the implications of resilience thinking for the arts, and for funders of the arts, I thought I would for now share some of my ‘notes in the margin’ –some quotes and thoughts. They concentrate on possible parallels in the arts world – and how Walker and Salt’s advice might be applied in the arts ecology - though the book is important in terms of climate and ecological change too. I’ll spread over a few posts to make it a little easier to read. (I know this one’s a bit long.)

1. ‘Resilience is the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function and structure.’
Helpfully memorable and easily applicable to the arts or individual organisation and to the system. Disturbance might be a grant cut, a failed application, the loss of staff, change in audience or customer behaviour. It might also be a new CEO, an influx of funding, a funder wanting you to do something else, a sudden ‘hit’. How resilient are you? Can you absorb the shock and work in a way which doesn’t damage long term? Crucial at a system level – the system of organisations also needs to have resilience. (Put simply, for example, the poetry world can withstand one or two small presses stopping so long as others fill their space – in fact that is part of the system that brings new growth.)

The idea of systems is central. The easiest way to think about this is that things in a system interact in a complex and adaptive way – not in a simplistic, linear ‘crank the handle’ way. The book includes 5 case studies in the environmental field which illustrate this. But an arts organisation can demonstrate this too. There are factors to do with their quality and ‘efficiency’ that impact on them. But they also interact with how audiences are behaving and that ‘system’, with the ups and downs and changes in funders’ worlds, in the business world, in the broader economy, and in the political world. These are all arguably ‘systems’ that also interact in a larger one. It’s complex – though we do it to some extent without thinking - but you need to consciously ‘map’ all the systems to know what’s working on you.

2. ‘The Paradox of Efficiency and Optimisation:… Being efficient, in a narrow sense, leads to elimination of redundancies – keeping only those things that are directly and immediately beneficial… this kind of efficiency leads to drastic losses in resilience.’
You could relate this to how you shape your budget and programme, or to cuts in local authority funding. Worth the Chancellor bearing in mind when looking around for savings before the Budget. Simplistic efficiency today may have drastic knock-on effects when further shocks come. Systems work indirectly as well as directly so you need to look at the big picture. An obvious example of of 'simplistic efficiency' leading to less resilience is what happens when organisations choose not to build up a reserve in order to maintain or expand programmes. Reserves give not security for now but resilience for the future. They should be a measurement of health not wealth.

3. ‘There is no sustainable ‘optimal’ state of an ecosystem, a social system, or the world. It is an illusion, a product of the way we look at and model the world. It is unattainable, in fact… it is counter-productive, and yet it is a widely pursued goal.’
This is challenging to someone like me who’s talked a lot about sustainability and sustainable organisations. They go on to say that the common reaction when the model doesn’t quite work is to exert even more control, and I can see the truth in that – from government to arts funding to artistic directors. Models are not necessarily a bad thing – they can be useful if you use their simplification to explore how things might work – but you need to acknowledge they are models and not reality in all its complexity. So if there is no stable sustainable state, only an adaptive sustainability, we need to support people to adapt, to be as complex as they need to be, and to acknowledge that concentration on single aspects is likely to lead to less resilience when further change comes, as it inevitably will. Sustainability therefore comes from resilience, not vice versa, and is continually happening or not, rather than being acquired.

What will you buy on Record Store Day?

Saturday 18 April is the first international Record Store Day. As the phrase would suggest, this started in the US and is being adopted by independent record shops (see what I did there?) in the UK and elsewhere this year.

Record shops are somewhat under threat these days, and not just independent ones. Time was you could spend a happy Saturday afternoon walking round most towns of any size and visit half a dozen record shops of different sorts. Now you can struggle – and even the corporate chains have been disappearing, whilst those that remain are mainly DVD shops. But independent record shops – such as Beatdown Records or RPM in Newcastle where I can sometimes be found browsing at lunchtimes – are hotbeds of local music scenes and of diversity in music. I’m not going to get all Nick Hornbv on you, but they can be formative and transformative as well as sometimes, to be honest, off-putting and inaccessible-seeming to non-cognescenti. So very much like other arts spaces then…

I spent my first wage packet (summer job, carpet warehouse) on a Pere Ubu album I still have and a Passage lp I don’t, from the fabulous Action Records in Preston, not too long after it opened. It's still hanging in there, remains as atmospheric as ever and is taking part in Record Store Day and which you can visit here. The last thing I bought there, earlier this year, was a second-hand copy of Weary Blues by Langston Hughes and Charles Mingus, which just goes to show how record shops can grow with you. (No, I didn’t sell the Passage record in revenge for Richard Witts’ later history of Arts Council Great Britain, I rather enjoyed that, I just went off synthesizers, long before I'd ever heard of the Arts Council.)

So even if you’ve got out of the habit of visiting real record shops, forgo Amazon for a day and visit your local record shop – many have special events on.

Wednesday Word of the Week: Resilience

This is a word I think we’ll be hearing a lot more of this year and next, in the arts as elsewhere. Enjoy it now before it gets tiresome. It draws on thinking in the field of ‘ecology’ – a word I’ve been using a lot lately in describing the needs of the sector, though there is also a strand of thinking about personal or 'emotional resilience'. This sees the sector not as a fixed infrastructure which may or may not reach a state called ‘sustainability’, but as a system or field where individual elements will grow, shrink, give birth, die and mutate, with organisations of different size and nature both co-operating and competing for the greater good. It also draws, as that description might suggest, on systems thinking. It’s not about simply pulling a lever or inputting something to get an output – it’s about often overlapping systems and their impact. (This is one of the reasons I don't think simply protecting funding is the answer to all the issues of the recession - unless we understand the complex systems at play that may only be a sticking plaster.)

So the best definition of Resilience as it applies to the arts sector I’ve seen is ‘the capacity of a system to absorb disturbance and still retain its basic function’. For the arts the ‘disturbance’ (not always a negative) might be loss of funding, sudden influx of funding or commissions, change in funders’ priorities, change in environment (eg a multiplex opening down the road from your arthouse cinema), changing audience patterns, changing technology and so on. Many arts organisations are already highly resilient, but there may more that can be done by thinking this through as a sector. Size does not guarantee resilience – note, for instance, that the best independent record shops may be surviving the download era better than the chain stores.

I plan to return to some of these themes over the next month, as they seem some of the most urgent things to think about, and there a number of possibly fruitful parallels I want to throw up to be challenged. (I’m currently pushing Resilience Thinking by Brian Walker and David Salt onto people – it’s a really good exposition of these ideas. There’s an article summarising them here .)

I also recommend an article by Peter and Trudy Johnson-Lenz about the ‘Six Habits of Highly Resilient Organizations’. It's worth thinking whether your organisation does these things:

1. Resilient organizations actively attend to their environments.
2. Resilient organizations prepare themselves and their employees for disruptions.
3. Resilient organizations build in flexibility.
4. Resilient organizations strengthen and extend their communications networks – internally and externally.
5. Resilient organizations encourage innovation and experimentation.
6. Resilient organizations cultivate a culture with clearly shared purpose and values.

How are artists like hill farmers?

I remember being at a conference a few years ago about arts and creative industries in rural areas. (Creative industries encompassing The Shed and a very impressive women who made bras.) The attendance was a real mixture, but someone found the common thread between the two main constituencies. Artists and farmers may seem very different, they said, but they're alike: both groups feel they are misunderstood and undervalued, both fight horribly amongst themselves, and both are addicted to subsidy whilst thinking they get no support or love from anyone. It was a quip, and got a big laugh – but one that recognised the underlying truth.

An article in The Guardian by Peter Hetherington reminded me of this. It describes the battle hill farmers have to make a living. But also the pleasures and freedoms of ‘being your own boss’, and the value of not being driven by money, but a better balance (and rhythm) of life and work and landscape. The earning figures – from farming – are if anything even lower than those that are quoted for artists. The dilemmas are very similar. The arguments about public subsidy also feel rather familiar.

The discussion of the need to look at the very ‘structure’ of the industry, and the way the individuals and business work also rang bells, as I’ve been re-reading John Knell’s work for MMM recently. The question for artists and small arts businesses is where or how far the ‘countryside guardians’/’guardians of cultural values’ analogy lead us – up a hill or down a dead-end track?

Wednesday Word of the Week: ‘shovel-ready’

Bit different from other words I’ve looked at, this one, but I can’t resist. The debate about Obama’s financial stimulus – which includes $50M extra for the National Endowment for the Arts – has brought me a new word – ‘shovel-ready’. It means something – usually a capital or construction project – which is ready to start, and therefore (in this context) provide immediate activity, expenditure and general stimulus to the economy. (See this definition on the entertaining Word Spy site.) I shall be making every effort to use it as I go about my business. ‘Do we have any shovel-ready projects?’ ‘Is this work really shovel-ready?’ ‘I’ve got something shovel-ready for you.’ I apologise to everyone in the office in advance!

An article in Atlantic Monthly suggest the arts, especially public art, are a worthy part of a stimulus package because the arts are shovel-ready. It has a slightly naïve view of how artists work, and in particular how large public art projects work – in my experience they are rarely shovel-ready until relatively late in the day. And major arts capital projects including public art rarely run to the originally discussed timetable – even before they get on site. That said, it’s basically right: the arts can be both an immediate stimulus, and help improve both the physical and ‘mood’ environment, in a way that’s definitely worth 1/600th of the package.

There’s clearly an interesting debate going on the States about this. I picked up on it through Artful Manager. It’s an argument we’ve made – and often won – many times before, since the 80s. Given pressures on Regional Development Agencies, and public spending generally, we will need to revisit and sharpen our arguments once more.