A fundamental challenge for educators and academics is how to deliver the effective training and education of cultural managers who will be required to deal creatively with radically new social, economic and political situations. Professor Eric Moody believes that, in order to respond creatively, it is necessary to question the institutionalised attitudes and beliefs which constitute the dominant operational culture: the culture of culture.
In the cultural sector the democratic necessity of public accountability is seen, by some, as an attack on artistic freedom and aesthetic experiment, while cultural management, as a professional discipline, is wilfully confused with the endemic managerialism of our privatised, post-colonial and post-industrial nation. Modernist battle-lines against the bourgeoisie, with echoes of the class-struggle for political opportunists, have been re-drawn by vested interest and the self-appointed guardians of Culture and the Cutting Edge. An archaic epithet with biblical gravitas, the Philistine, conveniently designates (without much further thought) a managerial enemy; a supposed ?monstrous regiment? of inevitably ?grey? and ?faceless? bureaucrats and ?brass-necked? politicians who presume to have a political, social or ?instrumental? agenda for the Arts. Amongst ranks, artificially opposed, with the real threat of summary dismissal for dissent (ICA style), are former colleagues and political allies. What both sides have in common is a biased view of cultural history and an unreasonably high expectation of their culture as a symbolic panacea for all social ills. In the year of his demise neither side chooses to recollect Gombrich?s challenge to institutional control; ?There is no such thing as Art only artists??.
Art Administration
In the beginning life was, at least, simpler. The Arts Council created arts administration in an original Welfare State and the Arts Council saw that it was good. And the Arts Council said ?Let us make arts administrators in our image, after our likeness; and let them have dominion over the Arts and every creeping thing that aspires to participate in the Arts?. In the beginning the Arts Council cloned its own, through personal contacts, but eventually even the ?arms-length? instrument of state patronage for the arts needed help in supplying its expanding Artworld. As with all empires the need was for colonial administrators well versed in the systems of the dominating culture. As Pushpa Sundar?s account of the Arts and the State in British India reveals, colonial administration can be effective and benign, at least, to those it chooses to recognise. It also reminds us that colonialism continues at home long after the Empire has faded.
Arts Administration Studies
In the mid-1970?s City University became an Arts Council revenue client conveniently located in London as a national centre for training in the techniques of public and business administration, suitably modified for the Arts. With the midwifery skills of Professor Anthony Field, Finance Director of the Arts Council of Great Britain, arts administration programmes were born. Administrative techniques taught in a university would become sector specific skills when applied and mentored in a carefully chosen professional environment (placement). In terms of ethos, recruitment and delivery, the initiative had a lot in common with university based postgraduate teacher training.
The appointment of Sir Roy Shaw in 1976, Secretary General of the Arts Council, as Visiting Professor in Arts Administration at City ?indicates an important and growing link? according to John Pick, Director of Arts Administration Studies (later Professor and now Professor Emeritus) in his introduction to Professor Shaw?s inaugural lecture, 'Elitism versus Populism in the Arts?.
This seminal lecture is evidence of Shaw?s proselytising style as well as a remarkable insight into the corporate culture of a national funding body with an over-weaning power in British Culture. Like his colleagues before and since, Shaw was for an art (Art) which was selected by a connoisseur elite who exercise critical judgement on behalf of a public that was or needed to become, (through remedial education if necessary), sympathetic, knowledgeable and above all, passive consumers. Shaw concluded his account of a ?dialectical struggle? between difficult elite and easy popular culture with the slogan ?The best for the most.?
Seeing no need, Shaw failed to address the necessarily contested nature of ?best? in a society which has always been multicultural. Through omission the Secretary General revealed a major systemic weakness which plagues the management of Art and Culture; a form of cultural apartheid which separates the art of selection from arts management. Any challenge to the curatorial prerogative, which actually dares to ask for an account of artistic selection or to suggest instrumental ambitions still calls forth stage-managed protest.
Arts Management
By now acknowledged as ?best practice? in vocational training, the close involvement of senior professionals as amateur teachers at City University obliged academic staff and students to accept, in self-interest, the culture of Culture espoused by the Secretary General. The ?important and growing link? which his appointment symbolised certainly helped identify and deliver an excellent curriculum designed to create efficient administrators, but within a world created and sustained by the Council. The application of scholarship to these subjects inevitably drew professional educationalists into a pedagogic and for some, like Professor Pick with his vitriolic indictment of the Arts Council as ?Vile Jelly?, into a long lasting ideological struggle with the professional culture they served.
At the day to day level of subject teaching it was clear that the Arts Council required a truncated version of key subjects. Marketing was strictly product-led; Education, Shaw?s personal enthusiasm, was not about art in general and certainly not about education in or through art. Finance required book-keeping skills to come in over-budget in a not-for-profit culture, and law was the knowledge needed to remain within (the law) in order to avoid liability and to be eligible for the benefits of charitable status. An introductory Government Framework provided a campaign map of subsidised operational terrain with key contacts and landmark institutions - the Networks so beloved of arts administration. Policy, on the other hand, was simply an academic recreation in an arts culture where it was (and still is) not uncommon to have professionals declare ?our policy is not to have a policy?. For City academics, by contrast, a fuller study of operational frameworks, including an understanding of aesthetics, history, policy and criticism, was imperative because it actually helped to expand the basic techniques of arts administration into skills, as well as encouraging a strategic consideration of context. This strategic approach was (and remains) increasingly necessary in a changing world of vaunting ambition, decreasing public funding and increasing competition for alternative sources.
Arts Policy and Management
By the mid-Eighties the emphasis on the interrogation of purpose encouraged the development of the collective transferable strategic skill of management and eventually led to a change of department name at City, to emphasise the essential relationship between policy and management and to distinguish management with purpose from the managerialism which deflects from purpose and which today infects universities as well as other public institutions. Mature students, operating in very different cultures, were attracted; and the most significant national constituency, further attracted by the development of part-time masters programmes, was those who came from the Local Authority cultural sector - a sector closer to independent political and financial scrutiny and therefore obliged to consider seriously policy formulation, implementation and orthodox accounting in artistic, social as well as financial terms. Success also brought a steadily increasing flow of international students who needed transferable arts management skills (rather than Arts Council techniques), appropriate to their own national contexts. Many of these were alert to the consequences of globalisation and operated within systems less dependent on public subsidy. There was also a steady recruitment from the world of business and other professions.
Cultural Management
As specialists in mid-career, many students at City are motivated by a personal need to locate their work in a broader cultural context. Contemporary visual arts managers wish to see themselves in the context of visual culture, the museums professional in the context of heritage culture; and artists, for a variety of reasons, wish to understand the institutional and critical framework in which they are obliged to operate.
The Department of Arts Policy and Management enjoys a ?growing link? with a number of institutions, professions and professionals, including current and former employees of the Arts Council who like us realise the future lies in collaboration and not conflict. Institutions are bound to have an important influence on art, artists and culture but without self-criticism they become merely self-publicising Academies. New ?important links? are also made and maintained with different professional bodies, and where possible National Training Organisations validate courses, such as CHNTO for our MA in Museum and Gallery Management. This MA course was also developed with an ?important and growing link? but this time with the Museums and Galleries Commission, the encouragement of students and the midwifery services of Professor John Last, businessman and Museums and Galleries Commissioner. Similar links with Libraries, Criticism and Education and other appropriate professionals have resulted in specialist courses.
Research
Arguably one of the most important transferable skills that can be imparted by an academic institution is academic rigour and the ability to conduct research. Initially slow to recognise the value of independent research the cultural sector and national governments have recognised the need for well informed policy formulation and practice. City?s links within a growing international research community has enhanced the Department?s own independent and contract research for national and regional governments.
After nearly thirty years in the business of cultural management it is clear there will always be a need for administration but these skills must be employed for a purpose. This questioning of operational culture may periodically attract the wrath of the Cultural sector but it may well create the synergy between the creative and cultural industries which governments and nations need. Fortunately under the cool winds of change even ?vile jelly? can solidify into useful stuff as the evolution of some art form departments at the Arts Council demonstrate.
Creative managers capable of exercising critical judgements inside instrumental agendas may be the final evolutionary phase in cultural management. Hopefully there will be no more talk of ?their policies? and our culture but rather a shared ownership of Culture within our common and necessarily instrumental culture.
Eric Moody is Professor of Arts Management and Head of Department at the Department of Arts Policy & Management, City University
TheProfessionals ? Eric Moody
Title: Professor of Arts Management and Head of Department
Name of Organisation: Department of Arts Policy & Management, City University
Phone: 020 7040 8751
Email: e.h.moody@city.ac.uk
How long in present post?
Those who don?t know how things have changed might consider ? too long
What does your organisation do?
? Train and educate a broad range of cultural managers.
? Research the cultural sector at post-graduate level
What are your responsibilities?
Teaching, research, university administration, departmental management and external relations (nationally and internationally)
Who did you used to work for and what did you do?
I have worked for myself for 30 odd years as an artist. Teaching in the UK and abroad has been a part of my portfolio career, as has writing and curating
What do you enjoy most about your job?
Maintaining a proper curriculum balance between criticism, policy, management and administration
What do you least enjoy about your job?
Quasi?devolved management and the sheer volume of communications
What is your career ambition?
To play my part in the effective management of the arts in culture for economic and social good
Who has influenced your career to date most - and why?
Prof. John Pick by creating opportunities and by example. Prof. Robert Hewison by his scholarship and humour
If you could have done any job in the world what would you like to have done?
Pablo Picasso?s old job
If you had three wishes for the future of the arts, what would they be?
? Less rhetoric and more practical cultural policy
? Cultural democracy
? More artists gainfully employed and suitably rewarded