Art at the right time (part x in an ongoing series)

I've referred before to my theory that art finds you when and how you need it, and it happened again this week with a particular song from Field Music's new album. The refrain 'them that do nothing make no mistakes' has been in my head all week. It's a good mantra, I think, for funders, funded and commentators, to apply to ourselves and others. And a hell of catchy tune, which also has a use of the word 'tight' I find absurdly pleasing.

Here's the video for you to enjoy. (Has Sunderland ever looked so lovely?)

What's the state of the arts?

The RSA and Arts Council England collaborated to produce the ‘State of the Arts’ conference last week – a long and packed day of presentation and discussion. We heard from both Jeremy Hunt and Ben Bradshaw, two very similar men to the naked eye. Bradshaw’s speech seemed to me to have a certain valedictory feel to it, Hunt was clearly trying to not to appear too cocky, but came across as passionate and open. Neither really broke any news, although Hunt’s proposition that emerging policy makers should aspire to have jobs at DCMS rather than, say, ACE, did make a small shudder run through the 500 plus crowd.

The sessions I attended varied in their impact. The session on business models had some interesting speakers – I wanted to go and work for Coney immediately, or at least volunteer for the Society of Codenames – but reinforced the need for more people in the sector who can frame a model, or a theory about how the sector actually functions. It only takes us so far to say ‘be great at what you do’. We need replicable models if we are to convince politicians and policy makers. (And voters too, actually.)

Highlights of the day were (therefore, I might almost add) the highly contrasting Helen Marriage and Bill Ivey. Helen Marriage spoke about the work of Artichoke in transforming cities – but only on a temporary basis. She made a sound argument for ‘the power of the temporary’ and the ‘cultural value of the merely spectactular’, based not just on what she’d seen work in London, Liverpool and Durham, but on how she thought that actually happened. She put together an argument for large-scale investment in the temporary in a way I’d never quite heard before, stronger for having what I can only a methodology behind it. And she ended by reciting a poem, which I always think is a good trick, though don’t all start doing it please, it’s one of my own favourite techniques.

Bill Ivey could learn a thing or two about powerpoint from some of the other speakers, but apart from that was really impressive in applying his ‘Expressive Lives’ thinking (see here for my thoughts on that) to the idea of a cultural bill of rights. Challenging and intellectually rigorous, the tone wasn’t quite maintained throughout the debate. The questions from the floor suffered from a kind of solipsism, a framing of things only within the arts. Freedoms of expression and of movement are not being restricted for artists because those people are artists primarily, but because of broader political issues. They can’t be addressed simply as artistic issues, but need to be put in a bigger context. But then the earlier discussion around whether artists could change society suggested a deal of nervousness about getting explicitly and deliberately political… For this reason, allied to my inate triviality, I therefore had the Beastie Boys and Public Enemy running through my head for the latter part of the day. (‘You gotta fight – for your right – to PAAA-RTY’ and ‘Party for your right to fight’ respectively.)

I believe there are already plans a foot to make this an annual event – we shall see in what roles Messrs Hunt and Bradshaw might be there. That's a really healthy thing, as this kind of serious discussion needs to happen on a regular basis, and be informed by more serious research and provocation.

How do you fund for resilience?

This week I was part of the panel at MMM/ERA21’s latest Peer-to-Peer event in Newcastle, the topic being ‘funding transition’. Chaired by David Carrington, the panel was myself, Penny Vowles from the Northern Rock Foundation and two leading American thinkers on funding and philanthropy, Clara Miller of the Non-Profit Finance Fund and Ben Cameron of the Doris Duke Foundation. (The audience was pretty stellar too, of course.)

It was a really stimulating conversation, encouraging and daunting in equal measure. Encouraging because it showed potential ways through the issues which seemed to face arts organisations on both sides of the Atlantic. Daunting because those issues are so deeply ingrained in the mental models of both funders and funded, and because of the political pressures we face in this country, given our public sector-leaning funding model. (Although, as Jim Beirne from Live Theatre pointed out, the issues of under-capitalisation, lack of focus on business growth and fluctuating revenue streams seem common to the UK and the US, where government funding is a very small percentage of income.)

Both Clara and Ben have a great turn of phrase. Clara described how NPFF had realised it could ‘either nurse the malaria patients one by one or drain the swamps’ and decided to try and deal with the underlying issues. She also introduced us to ‘the four horsemen of the non-profit financial apocalypse’ – Overbuilt, Over-endebted, Labour Economics and Disappearing Revenue.

If there was a single idea to take away and pass on from the very rich discussion it was this:

Both funded and funders need to acknowledge the difference between capital fund and revenue funds, and use them well. Capital is not just about buildings, but about building enterprises (organisations if you don’t like that word, though Clara also suggested we ‘learn to love our inner enterprise’.) The best definition I heard was ‘investment that builds capacity to attract reliable income'. Revenue funding is about ‘buying’ – of cultural value, or activity, or ability to take risks, depending on the funder. This is not an either or: for a resilient organisation and cultural sector, building and buying are necessary. Doing one without the other is the biggest risk of all for funders. Mistaking one for the other is unhealthy for organisations. It’s often – maybe always? – about survival and transformation. The task of being flexible and responsive enough is shared – and goes all the way through the system, which in the case of the UK, takes it right up to central government.

Video and recordings of the conversation will be available on the MMM site very soon. You can also catch up on the Steady State discussions last month.

In a right steady state?

MMM and ERA21 held one of their peer-to-peer events in Newcastle this week, in the trendy new offices of Northern Film and Media in the Hoult’s Yard development. The theme was whether the sector is now ‘overbuilt’, underachieving, at ‘steady state’ or in a perilous condition. Or indeed none of the above.

The conversation demonstrated, for me, that we are at the point when innovative solutions start to pop up – ie that bit where you think you have a series of irreconcilable ‘truths’, and an intractable problem the current tools can’t fix. These clashing factors mentioned include:

- a renewed infrastructure – notably capital, but also organisational – that needs time and support to develop and have greater impact
- the sector can’t stand still and may need further infrastructure investment (capital of all sorts perhaps, including into digital technology)
- buildings and their physical assets are not always used to best effect to create cultural impact, and our business models (eg greater reliance on ‘commercial hires’ leads to less artist use of space for r&d, leading to diminished quality or quantity of new work). This suggest building in some ‘downtime’ to budgets.
- the public sector as a whole faces big cuts, whilst optimising service to the public – delayering of management, more efficient back offices. This suggests tightening of budgets
- the cultural sector is not meeting the needs of significant parts of the population
- but demand for the arts and culture is high, and thus far not significantly hit by the recession
the increased emphasis on the knowledge economy is an opportunity for the cultural sector, in helping the country out of recession
- we need to think broader than the commercial and subsidised sectors, and consider the role of amateur and voluntary activity
- non-arts agendas offer great opportunity for development but we lack compelling evidence (at least according to those judging matters)
- it’s unclear whether the base of the cultural sector pyramid (people enjoying the arts, say) is broad enough to give us enough people at the top of the pyramid (highly skilled, knowledge-based earners)
- there are lessons to be learned from creative industries and third sector experience
- persistence should not be mistaken for real, productive, resilience.

There were some local points, as well, but that will do as a summary for now. My own conclusion from the afternoon was that a more concerted ‘looking out’ would really help us disrupt our own patterns of thinking – from region into world, from artform into sector, from sector into economy or community or globe.

There are still a few spaces on MMM’s next series of events, if you can get to Edinburgh, London or Newcastle. Clare and Rohan have put a great panel of speakers together, including, in Newcastle, Clara Miller, President and CEO of the USA's Nonprofit Finance Fund, Ben Cameron, Arts Programme Director of the USA's Doris Duke Foundation,David Carrington, Member of the Supervisory Board of Triodos Bank, Erica Whyman, CEO and Artistic Director of Northern Stage. Oh, and me...

Is thinking becoming more popular?

I spent last weekend mainly at The Sage Gateshead at Radio 3’s ‘festival of ideas’, Free Thinking. I threw a couple of 3 minute theories out, in the Theory Slam -‘Sustainability is a convenient but dangerous word and we should talk more about resilience’ - and the Speed Dating with a Thinker event -‘We need a nationwide programme of strangeness to build our sense-making skills and teach us we don’t really understand the world.’ Think-dating was fun, but as I said to a couple of people, saying the same thing 11 times to a mix of keenness, scepticism and intelligent questioning was a little too much like being at work for comfort on a weekend. (No, I didn't win. And yes, dear team, I'm only kidding. No, really.)

I also attended lots of talks being speakers from William Orbit to Tanya Byron. A debate on which was most valuable to humanity, sport or the arts, made me suspect I was the only person in the room who did/enjoyed both, and I fiercely wanted to send the ‘arts people’ on a cross-country run or get them on a squash court.

What struck me most was the size of the audiences though – packed halls, often simultaneously and lots of debate in the concourse – a real appetite for intelligent debate and learning, from people of all ages and accents. It rather encouraged me about public discourse, which I can sometimes think is a thing of the past. Noticeably the politician speakers, David Miliband and Ken Livingstone both had capacity audiences. Maybe the next election will see a revival of big public political meetings?

In fact the ‘thinking’ obviously spread into the concerts also going on at The Sage Gateshead that weekend. I bumped into an old friend who was halfway through a piano recital by Freddy Kempf, and asked him whether he was enjoying it. (I’m a deep thinker, me.) He immediately wondered why he’d ever been a Marxist and launched into a critique of Beethoven’s weak class analysis and his romantic transcendentalism. Perhaps thinking is contagious? If so, spread the virus!

(Visit the Radio 3 Free Thinking microsite and you can ‘listen again’ and find links to lots of short videos too.)