2004-11-19

Academics', Consultants' and Practitioners' Perspectives on the Cultural Sector

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.

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