Whose risk is it anyway?

Artistic vision has inevitably to be set against the resources available to realise it – cash, people and time. Getting resources is occasionally about persuading others of the rightness of the vision we have, but mostly these days it’s about going where the money is and adapting our vision to others’ – their strategies, policies and intended outcomes. Ultimately it will be those others who monitor us, measure and evaluate our work against their criteria. Not ours. It’s called ‘accountability’ and it’s not unreasonable.

In the name of sustainability, Arts Council England now expects that its clients find at least 30% of their funding from elsewhere. Reducing dependency on just one funder may sound like common sense, but in the world of public funding it creates many other problems, leaving us to juggle multiple and, sometimes, competing demands. If control of the measures of success is key to real ownership of the artistic agenda and arts agencies are forced into dependency (sorry, accountability) how can the artistic vision be realised. And how can there be change without risk? And if that risk is to do something that runs counter to the external agenda, that of the agency that paid the piper, then the risk is a real one – one that threatens the very survival of the arts organisation. They will stop funding us.

No doubt like many others, the organisation whose board I chair has a ‘risk register’. It’s a cue sheet to remind us to check from time to time to ensure that we have everything covered. Top of the list are a drop in revenue funds; project fees from revenue funders being too low but expectations high; and overspend or misuse of restricted funds. Then come misappropriation of funds, cash flow, significant changes in cultural policy, legal action, breach of legislation, insufficient staff, departure of key staff or board members, poor project management, IT system collapse and confusion of operational and governance roles. Clearly this list is all about risks to survival or good management. It’s not at all about innovation, which is probably what translates into artistic risk and which is about growth and change. This clearly should be on the list – top of the list – but it’s not. Arts organisations are now all so bound up with ‘criteria’, ‘accountability’, ‘funding agreements’ and ‘outputs’ that there is little real room left for the thing we like to think we do: ‘take a risk’. We forget that we should ask whether we are doing what we say we want to do in our mission statement. Our funders forget that they should ask us first if we have achieved on our own terms and not theirs.