Looking ahead

 Jeremy Newton’s article (p10) in AP this week is the one that has really grabbed my attention. He hits the spot when he says “…there is real additional money to play for, but the arts will only win a decent share of it with a set of strong, imaginative, future-focussed ideas…”. It’s the ‘future focus’ that resonates. At a time when most of the UK arts sector seems to have its feet firmly stuck in the mire of post-recession funding cuts, it’s refreshing to read a set of clear ideas that can stoke much-needed debate about how funding should be allocated.

My enthusiasm is partly fuelled by my experiences last weekend at the Association of Performing Arts Presenters conference in New York, where I was co-presenting a session with the International Futures Forum on cultural innovation, drawing on their case study of Watershed, ‘Producing the Future’ (watershed.co.uk/reports). In the US, as in the UK, no one is pretending that the economic situation is anything but dire. Indeed, it could be argued that they have it tougher across the pond. There’s no such thing as a slow death for arts organisations in the US – if they run out of money, they close. End of. But despite this, everyone is looking for ways to innovate, ways to connect, and they’re right to do so. Public space, participation and ways to engage with young people are recurrent themes – they haven’t been abandoned because of financial constraints. The vision remains, and so it should in the UK.

The conference magazine featured a great
article, ‘Thriving in an uncertain world’ by Kenneth J Foster (see http://www.ybca.org/about/), that gave some good pointers on how we should approach the new future that we now need to prepare for. There are five key themes that we in the UK would do well to take heed of:

Behave like an artist, not like a business: the moment is right to remake our organisations into arts organisations that navigate the business world, rather than organisations that are ‘in the art business’.

Privilege experimentation: no matter how counterintuitive it may seem, now is the time to innovate.

Embrace and engage with diversity: you can’t innovate and you can’t drive change unless you have diversity.

‘Strategise’: constantly monitor what you are doing and adjust.

Focus on relationships: creating art – sustaining an innovative, resilient arts organisation within a changing environment is a people business. It is based on building and sustaining relationships.

I suggest we can take some ideas from this US conversation: we can embrace complexity and diversity overtly without losing clarity of argument. The clarity has to come from our artistic vision with a business model to serve that vision. Back to Jeremy’s article – he’s right: there is money to play for and clear arguments are needed. But those arguments will only be as powerful as the artistic vision behind them.