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Artist as Executive, Executive as Artist
Kirsten Forkert
Cultural policy is marked by certain contradictions, which
are at the heart of our definition of culture. One of these contradictions is
between, on one hand, the belief in creativity as a certain indefinable je
ne sais quoi that is the property of unique, exemplary individuals (which
cannot really be fostered by policy or even arts education) – and on the
other hand, the imperative of policy to manage collective entities such as cities,
regions or populations (such as, for example, how culture was historically positioned
in relation to public health or a unified regional or national identity).1
These contradictory dynamics have existed for a long time, at least since the
19th century. In ‘The Field of Cultural Production’, Pierre
Bourdieu describes what he calls the “charismatic ideology”, which
directs attention to “the apparent producer, the painter, writer
or composer”, allowing the “cultural businessman” to “consecrate
a product which he has ‘discovered’ and which would otherwise remain
a mere natural resource.”2 In other
words, the authenticity of the unique genius must exist in order to be ‘discovered’ and
promoted. Nor has this dynamic fundamentally changed through the industrialisation
of culture in the twentieth century. Written in 1989, Bernard Miège’s ‘The
Capitalisation of Cultural Production’ is one of the earliest analyses
of cultural production as at the heart of fundamental changes in the management
of labour in Western capitalist societies. Miège cites a 1983 speech by
Jean-François Mitterand (then-Prime Minister of France) made almost fifteen
years before the election of Tony Blair: “creativity is becoming a development
factor, and cultural activities are establishing themselves among the expanding
sectors around which the future is being organised.”3 According
to Miège, the capitalisation of cultural production does not really disrupt
the genius myth or the figure of the artist as a representation of authenticity,
as this myth provides some continuity between more traditional definitions of
the arts and modern-day celebrity culture. This is why, according to Miège,
the industrialisation and commercialisation of production, to the extent that
it is connected to the reigning economic and social model, will not lead to its
democratisation.
It is one of those obvious, even dumb, but important questions to ask why the
genius myth remains so firmly intact despite over a hundred years of avant-garde
experimentation, artist-led spaces and art collectives; despite proclamation
of the author’s death; despite the challenges of feminism and other social
movements to the figure of the genius as predominantly white, male and middle
class; and despite the models and practical possibilities offered by free software
and copy culture. Is the individual author one of Ulrich Beck’s “zombie
categories”, which are kept alive after they have outlived their relevance
out of force of habit, structural dependencies or because they serve powerful
interests? Or is it that these challenges are far more marginal than we would
like to think, reflecting a gap between theory and practice? To fully answer
this question is outside of the scope of this text; but it is one I feel it is
necessary to raise.
However, if the genius myth has not really been seriously destabilised, I am
arguing that, through neoliberalism, it has merged with economic concepts such
as ‘human capital’, or, as we will see, aspects of management culture.
The concept of human capital actually dates back to Adam Smith; defined as “the
acquired and useful abilities of all the inhabitants or members of the society” which,
although they cost “a certain expense, [repay] that expense with a profit.”4 However,
the term itself did not really come into use until the 1950s, when Chicago School
economists such as Gary Becker, as well as early Economic Development Studies
economists such as AW Lewis and Arthur Cecil Pigou began to make use of it.
Although ‘human capital’ is not a new concept, what is significant
about its use under neoliberalism is that the development of personal skills
and abilities become seen as an investment in a potential future salary, whether
this means schooling or even parenting. In other words, there is an expectation
to be an ‘entrepreneur of the self’5:
each individual is meant to be responsible for his/her continued employment;
keeping ‘employable’ through continually investing in onself (such
as through skills or training), continually adapting oneself to the latest job
market demands, which change all the time (bringing to mind the pervasive modernisation
rhetoric around ‘keep up to date’, or threats about being ‘left
behind’). If individuals fail to do so, they only have themselves to blame.
This is part of a wider tendency to reduce everything to its economic usefulness,
as part of neoliberalism’s “application of an economic grid to social
phenomena”.6 An obvious question
is what happens to skills or abilities that are not seen as economically useful,
and the people who have dedicated their lives to learning them7?
What about other forms of learning that do not immediately lead to jobs, and
what happens to the arguments to justify them, or (more accurately) the willingness
of others to listen to them?
If the ‘human capital’ concept serves as one of the underpinnings of
neoliberal policy, then a related discourse that has more explicitly marked recent
cultural policy is ‘social exclusion’. In ‘The Inclusive Society:
Social Exclusion and New Labour’, Ruth Levitas describes how social
exclusion discourse erases the power relations that produce inequality, so that
terms like ‘inequality’ and ‘exploitation’ (terms that suggest
a systemic critique, particularly that someone might be responsible for
exploitation and might even benefit from it) start to disappear. One is not exploited
but simply excluded – excluded from a seemingly homogeneous and harmonious
majority; as Levitas says, “poverty and unemployment are seen to be residual
rather than endemic problems”.8 It
is an individualising discourse; being excluded is at least partly one’s
own fault – for having the wrong skill set, the wrong character traits or
the wrong kind of family life.
Social exclusion discourse originated in 1960s British critical social policy
(which saw inequality as not only social but also cultural), 1980s US right-wing
discourse which popularised the term ‘underclass’ (applied, in particular,
to unemployed young men and lone mothers) and which stigmatised benefits recipients;
and French welfare reform which equated paid employment with participation in
society with paid work, which then became influential on EU social policy. As
Ruth Lister has described, ‘social exclusion’ discourse was central
to New Labour’s shift from “equality to equality of opportunity”9,
in other words, away from protecting benefits and income redistribution, and
towards education and training, and obligations of paid work. Social Exclusion
Unit was set up in 1997, as was the Centre for Analysis of Social Exclusion or
CASE. At the launch of CASE, Harriet Harman made a speech containing the following
text (which actually presents paid employment as therapeutic):
“We hear a lot about the non-wage costs of work. But very little about the
non-wage motivation for work. Work helps fulfil our aspirations – it is
the key to independence, self-respect and opportunities and advancement.... Work
brings a sense of order that is missing from the lives of many unemployed young
men.”10
Social exclusion policy places artists in a contradictory position in several
different ways. The first issue is that, in its narrow focus on the virtues of
paid employment, social exclusion does not perceive unpaid labour as real work
and “undermines the legitimacy of non-participation in work”.11 As
cultural production can involve, in many cases, activities outside of the ‘day
job’ and even identifying with them more than with one’s paid employment,
this starts to pose a problem. The irony of course is that the dedication and
willingness to work for free on the part of artists, but also others in the cultural
and voluntary sectors, are practically celebrated at the same time as the
support structures that facilitate this kind of work are withdrawn – as
in the current Welfare Reform bill which serves to stigmatise benefits even further.
Another issue is that artists are positioned as the agents of social cohesion,
usually through community arts commissions where artists are expected to involve
marginalised groups in large scale projects. There have been many critiques of
this: Munira Mirza has called these policies fundamentally “therapeutic”.12 The
Cultural Policy Collective (CPC) critiqued the top-down nature of their implementation,
whereby they “recruit willing representatives from targeted zones without
considering the non-participation of far wider sections of their population”13;
promoting a “a parochial sphere of action that is almost wholly dependent
on professionalised community organisations”.14 This
kind of client relationship provides very little scope for communities to determine
their own needs and act in their own interests. This is similar in certain ways
to the depoliticising tendencies of development NGOs, which positions those in
the global South as continually needing the help of trained experts, and in some
cases, multinational corporations.15
This can also be seen as part of a wider tendency to associate culture with an
aspirational imperative, often connected to urban regeneration schemes: that
the presence of certain types of cultural activities (art galleries for example)
will give people a taste of a middle class lifestyle, and in doing so, raise
their expectations and lead them to participate in mainstream society. Consistent
with social exclusion discourse, the only way to improve one’s lot is through
(individual) participation, achievement and success in mainstream society, (through
training and paid employment). Within this context, alternative, and more importantly, collective models
for dealing with one’s personal situation (workplace or community organising,
grassroots campaigns, etc.) become inconceivable. In a larger sense, what is
politically dangerous about social exclusion discourse is that it creates a kind
of inarguable hegemonic logic – to disagree with these schemes is to be ‘against
aspiration’, to be recalcitrantly against change, to want to keep people
(or one’s self) in the ghetto.
We can see both these concepts of ‘human capital’ and ‘social
exclusion’ in recent cultural policy, particularly that of the Department
of Culture, Media and Sport (DCMS) in their emphasis on the ‘creative industries’ over
the past ten years. It could be argued that ‘human capital’ is present
in their very definition of the creative industries, through the emphasis on “individual
creativity, skills and talent”; returning to the discussion at the beginning,
they define creativity in terms of exemplary individuals – but perhaps closer
to the ‘leadership’ and ‘vision’ fetishised by new management
literature: “those industries that are based on individual creativity,
skill and talent. They are also those that have the potential to create
wealth and jobs through developing intellectual property”.16 Imperatives
to address the entire population are also present, but increasingly focusing
on economic development: “creating wealth and jobs”.
Strategy Documents & Cultural Leadership
‘Culture and Creativity: the Next Ten Years’ (2001) was authored
by former MP Chris Smith. It begins with the assertion that “everyone is
creative” and that “people in all walks of life… need to develop
their creative potential and learn from each other”.17 Reading
between the lines, we could see this as an attempt to combine cultural democracy
(that “everyone is creative”, not only a few), with human capital (“develop
their creative potential”). The problem with the UK, according to Smith,
are that people from marginalised communities feel that the “arts are not
for them” and that there is a general lack of support and encouragement
to experience the arts, such as being “taught musical instruments” or
making “regular visits to museums or theatres”.18 The
proposals outlined in the document include increased funding for Arts Council
England (ACE) and free access to museums (a genuine imperative towards cultural
democracy). There is also a strong emphasis on education, including various partnerships
between schools and cultural institutions. What is significant is that ‘Culture
and Creativity: the Next Ten Years’ links the arts, or, more disturbingly,
cultural democracy to discourses of ‘innovation’ associated with science,
technology and business; creativity is seen as “at the centre of successful
economic life in an advanced knowledge-based economy”.19 All
these elements become more explicit in the 2008 strategy document, ‘Creative
Britain: New Talents for the New Economy’.20
Written seven years later, ‘Creative Britain: New Talents for the New
Economy’ begins with the argument that the creative industries are a
growth sector, expanding at twice the rate of the economy as a whole, but the
UK faces competition from other countries (the report does not specify which
countries). National competition for comparative advantage within the global
economy, in fact, shapes much of the document. The other dominant argument is
that many lack the necessary skills to succeed in the creative industries, particularly
those from what are seen to be marginalised communities. Exclusion, then, is
not about not going to museums – it’s about not having enough employable
skills, particularly in technology; by not having enough skills, one is not
employable or adaptable enough within a post-industrial economy. ‘Creative
Britain’ focuses primarily on skills training and on business development;
the arts, when not connected to these two, tend to vanish. Proposals include:
1) the creation of 5,000 formal apprenticeships21 a
year, with a variety of arts organisations; 2) research to promote a “more
diverse workforce” (although’ diversity’ here means skills ability,
not diversity in terms of race, gender or class); 3) closer links between academia
and industry, specifically centres in computer games, design, animation and “haute
couture”; 4) legislation against filesharing; 5) the development of mixed
media centres and live music venues22;
6) the development of various funds, programmes and networks for business development.
These sorts of developments: where creativity becomes defined in terms of human
capital, particularly those skills (such as IT) seen as marketable within a (pre-crash)
post-industrial economy, should also be seen within the context of the raft of
new management literature on ‘creativity’, from Tom Peters (known for
phrases such as “thinking outside the box”) to Daniel Pink (author
of ‘The MFA is the New MBA’); to John Howkins to urban theorist-cum-regeneration
consultants such as Richard Florida, who famously suggested that the old class
structure was being replaced by a new meritocracy of knowledge and talent.23 What
is significant about this sort of literature is how certain qualities associated
with the Romantic genius are brought into management culture and in some cases
projected onto the figure of the manager. In ‘The Organisation of Culture
Between Bureaucracy and Technocracy’, Paola Merli mentions that post-bureaucratic
theories of management discuss the need for charismatic leaders displaying qualities
such as ‘vision’, giving their organisation a ‘mission’,
and being sources of ‘inspiration’ for their subordinates – though,
crucially, not presenting an alternative worldview.24
According to Jim McGuigan, management literature began to become popular with
the Labour Party in the1980s and 1990s, in connection with a turn to economic
pragmatism, following the 1983 defeat. This meant, among other strategies, the
adoption of business lingo, which provoked Simon Frith to ask why the Labour
Party was using terms such as “market niche” and “corporate image”.25 The
result of these influences on UK policy was that, in addition to privatisation,
many publicly-funded organisations were increasingly required to re-organise
and run themselves as though they were the private sector. This was also
a common pattern in many European countries – organisations were not directly
privatised, but were required to operate like businesses. McGuigan uses the term “managerialism” to
characterise this shift in organisational structure and purpose.
A synthesis of the tendencies I have mentioned so far (the genius myth, individualism,
an association of culture with aspiration and employment skills, regimes of professionalisation
and managerialism, and the charismatic leader of management theory) can be found
in recent policy initiatives towards fostering ‘cultural leadership’.
These initiatives formalise connections between management discourses and the
arts, through a variety of professional development programmes set up to train
arts management, and in some cases artists, in leadership skills. It is notable
that all these initiatives propose professionalisation and skills training
as a response to a perceived organisational crisis. In 2002, the Clore Programme
was set up in order to offer fellowships to “exceptional individuals who
have the potential to take on significant leadership roles”.26 The
programme was started in response to what was perceived as a skills gap in arts
management and a “crisis in cultural leadership” in the UK, based on
a 2002 study commissioned by the Clore Duffield Foundation.27 The
organisation does state that “cultural leadership is distinct from management
competencies, and that it is generically different from business leadership”28;
however, so much of the language on the website seems indistinguishable. The
programme now runs twenty to twenty-five fellowships a year.
In 2005, a review was commissioned by then-chancellor Gordon Brown and led by
Sir Arthur Cox, entitled the ‘Cox Review of Creativity in Business: building
on the UK’s Strengths’. Brown announced that “we must recognise
the role of our cultural leaders in delivering [economic] success and ensure
the emergence of a talented and diverse group of future leaders”.29 In
response to the ‘Cox Review’, the ‘Nature of Creativity’ scheme
was launched, with a goal which “seeks to enhance understanding about the
nature of creativity and its relationships with innovation”. It was funded
by the AHRC (Arts and Humanities Research Council) in collaboration with: Arts
Council England, the Economic and Social Research Council, the Dept. for Trade
and Industry, and Research Networks and Workshops. In connection with this scheme,
Dr Anne Douglas of Robert Gordon University, Aberdeen, conducted ‘The
Artist as Leader’ research project30.
According to the AHRC’s annual report, “Douglas has started to research
the role of creativity in culture using the concept of leadership, posing questions
such as: When is an artist the leader?, How does the artists critical thinking
influence practices of leading?”.31 In
2006, Robert Hewison, writing for the think tank DEMOS, also published a report
about cultural leadership, arguing that there is a crisis of faith in institutions.32 On
the one hand, the report is marked by an imperative to show that culture is not
equivalent to business; on the other, it still insists that culture has much
to learn from business and vice versa.33 According
to Merli, this contradiction has marked other aspects of his writing.34
The Cultural Leadership Programme also began in 2006 – a “two-year, £12
million initiative to promote excellence in management and leadership within
the cultural sector”.35 The initiative
was funded by ACE; the Museums, Libraries and Archives Council; as well as Cultural
and Creative Skills (CCS), the “sector skills council for the advertising,
craft, cultural heritage, design, literature, music, performing and visual arts”.
CCS was set up in 2005 to “reduce skills gaps and shortages, improve productivity,
business and public service performance, and to reform learning supply, making
courses and qualifications relevant to industry”.36 It
was launched at EMI Headquarters in West London; at the launch, then-Secretary
of State for Culture Tessa Jowell made a speech claiming that the “initiative
aims to provide a strategic approach to embed a strong leadership culture that
will make Britain’s creative sectors more successful – and more
accessible – than ever”.37 The
Cultural Leadership Programme mentions the Clore Leadership Programme, but notes
that Clore “cannot be for everyone”.38 The
initiative mainly consists of professional development and training programs,
with the goal of training artists and arts managers, particularly women, Black
and Ethnic Minorities and people with disabilities. More recently, City University,
London, launched an MA in Cultural Leadership, in partnership with the Cass Business
School.39 The programme was originally
stated to focus on female arts managers, in response to a ‘glass ceiling’ whereby
women were under-represented in senior management positions in culture. It is
now open to both genders.
It is worth asking about the way in which these professional development programmes
propose to address structural hierarchies of race and gender in arts organisations.
There is at least an acknowledgement that “organisational culture can serve
as a barrier to professional development” and that “the diversity of
sector leaders has not yet been fully addressed”.40 However,
leadership is seen as the cure to all problems, and leadership is to be fostered
by skills development and networking – but not really any change to organisational
structure. It is assumed that if women and minorities have the necessary skills
and resources, they should be able to succeed within existing structures and
contexts. Actively fighting discrimination, or developing alternative organisational
structures (such as through the long, rich and largely ignored history of feminist
art in the UK, which involved setting up numerous organisations and publications),
are not really seen as an option, and a concept such as discrimination does not
really make sense within this framework. What these sorts of initiatives can
be seen as, instead, is as part of a wider regime of professionalisation where
artists are continually expected to retrain themselves and where deeper structural
conditions are problems to be solved, in a technocratic fashion, through modernising
imperatives and management techniques. ‘Leadership’ becomes a way of
merging art and business, combining aspects of the genius myth with the figure
of the executive. Jowell’s statement, that the creative sector can be “more
successful and more accessible”, reflects this sort of desire to have one’s
cake and eat it too – that one can seamlessly combine equality and productivity
or efficiency objectives.
Larger questions needs to be asked about democratic participation in these organisations,
and especially the role for those without management training – what about
those lower down in the management hierarchy, not to mention the ever-growing
number of unpaid interns who must work for free, in some cases for years, before
getting their first paid job?41 What
about the artists who do not work in ways that can be programmatically defined
as ‘leadership’? What about the audiences, or even the communities
targeted by public art programmes? Does this entrench their position as clients
continually in need of help to participate in mainstream society, but never able
to act on their own situations? Another question is about what happens to alternative
models for running organisations, including those modes that would easily be
dismissed as inefficient and amateurish, but which are nonetheless important
in other ways? Can an organisation be sustained without a conventionally defined ‘management
ethos’, and do these imperatives and discourses risk erasing both the history
and the possibility of alternatives? Could the crisis suggested by these policy
imperatives, of organisations that do not function (both inside and outside the
cultural sector), be read, in some ways, as a crisis of democracy – of frustration
at the consolidation of executive control and the inflation of executive salaries42,
at the endless consultation exercises, or the adoption of the latest new management
lingo, and so on? In the current political climate (marked by populist anger
at bankers and MPs) now is perhaps a good time to ask ourselves some hard questions
about the directions taken by cultural policy over the past ten years. But in
a more general sense, it’s also important to question the tendency to reward
and celebrate exemplary individuals, both within and outside the arts.
Notes
1 See, Miller, Toby and Yúdice, George. Cultural
Policy, SAGE, 2002.
2 Bourdieu, Pierre. The Field of Cultural Production. Columbia University
Press, 1993: 76.
3 Miège, Bernard. The Capitalisation of Cultural Production. IG,
1989: 38.
4 Smith, Adam. Book 2: Of the Nature, Accumulation, and Employment of Stock.
In An Inquiry into the Nature And Causes of the Wealth of Nations. 1776.
Online at:
http://www.adamsmith.org/smith/won-b2-c1.htm
5 Foucault, Michel. The Birth of Biopolitics. Palgrave-MacMillan, 2008:239.
6 Ibid.
7 See Richard Sennett. The Corrosion of Character: The Personal Consequences
of Work in the New Capitalism. W.W. Norton and Co., 1999.
8 Levitas: 1998:7.
9 Lister, Ruth. ‘From Equality to Social Inclusion: New Labour and the Welfare
State.’ Critical Social Policy, 1998, 215-225.
10 Levitas, Ruth. The Inclusive Society: Social Exclusion and New Labour.
Palgrave-MacMillan, 2005: 151.
11 Levitas: 1998:27.
12 Mirza, Munira. ‘The Therapeutic State’. International Journal
of Cultural Policy, Volume 11, Number 3, Number 3/November 2005, pp. 261-273(13).
13 Beyond Social Inclusion: Towards Cultural Democracy. Cultural Policy
Collective, 2004: 11.
14 Ibid: 33.
15 Chakravartty, Paula. ‘Governance Without Politics: Civil Society, Development
and the Postcolonial State’. International Journal of Communication:
1 (2007), 297-317.
16 Department for Culture, Media and Sport website, my italics, http://www.culture.gov.uk/
17 Smith, Chris. Culture and Creativity: The Next Ten Years. DCMS, 2001:
5 http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/publications/4634.aspx/
18 Ibid.
19 Ibid.
20 Creative Britain: New Talents for the New Economy. DCMS, 2008. http://www.culture.gov.uk/reference_library/publications/3572.aspx/
21 As to how viable this is, see: ‘Gordon Brown’s apprentice scheme “out
of money”’, The Observer, Sunday 24 May 2009.
22 In spite of such a business-centric model having already erred, e.g. see:
National Centre for Popular Music, Sheffield; The Arthouse, Dublin; The Media
Centre, Huddersfield.
23 Florida, Richard. The Rise of the Creative Class, and How It’s Transforming
Work, Leisure and Everyday Life. Basic Books, 2002.
24 Merli, Paola. ‘The Organisation of Culture Between Bureaucracy and Technocracy’. International
Journal of the Humanities, Vol.3, No.10, 2005-6,143.
25 Frith: 1991:36, cited in McGuigan, Jim. Rethinking Cultural Policy.
Open University Press, 2004: 43.
26 Clore Leadership Programme website http://www.cloreleadership.org/
27 Ibid.
28 Ibid.
29 Arts and Humanities Research Council (AHRC). Annual Reports and Accounts,
2006-7: 14.
30 http://www2.rgu.ac.uk/subj/ats/ontheedge2/artistasleader/pdf/2006-07.pdf
31 Ibid.
32 Hewison, Robert. What is the point of investing in cultural leadership,
if cultural institutions remain unchanged? DEMOS, 2006.
33 Ibid.
34 Merli, Paola. ‘The Organisation of Culture Between Bureaucracy and Technocracy’. International
Journal of the Humanities, Vol.3, No.10, 2005-6,143.
35 Cultural Leadership Programme website http://www.culturalleadership.org.uk
36 Cultural and Creative Skills website http://www.ccskills.org.uk/
37 Clore Leadership Programme website, my italics http://www.cloreleadership.org/
38 Ibid.
39 Cultural Leadership MA, City University. http://www.city.ac.uk/cpm/cultural_leadership_programme/index.html
40 Cultural Leadership Programme: A Call for Ideas: p7. http://www.artscouncil.org.uk/documents/publications/clpideas_php940QwU.pdf
41 See: ‘No pay, no gain: The reliance on unpaid interns in Britain’s
industries puts poorer graduates at a disadvantage and makes a mockery of our
so-called meritocratic society’, The Guardian, 19/1/08.
42 49% of UK staff have taken a pay cut or pay freeze due to the recession (Ceridian),
in addition to more than half working £26.9 billion unpaid overtime in
2008 (TUC), with the UK’s income gap the widest since ’60s (Dept. for
Work and Pensions).
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