The relationship between funders and arts organisations is a crucial one to get right and a key part of the Mission, Models, Money programmes focus. Dawn Austwick, Director of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and member of the MMM Action Group, explains her take on the funding question.
I thought it was a bit risky to start writing about intelligent funding without at least attempting to define what the term might mean. So, my first port of call, being prosaic rather than imaginative, was the dictionary. Perhaps not surprisingly I discovered it wasnt a bad place to start at all: for funding to be intelligent it seems it should be clever, perceptive, knowledgeable or informed. We need to use our brains and know our stuff! But I think the dictionary short-changes us on one important issue: for funding to be intelligent, it has to have a point of view. Or, if I were being really grand, I would say it has to be informed by a set of beliefs around purpose and place purpose in terms of what art is for, and place in terms of what the right role for the funder is. And it is here, of course, that the trouble really begins&
Purpose
There has been a real merry-go-round about whether you take an instrumental or an intrinsic view of the arts with much heartache around the capture of the funding agenda by the instrumentalists, amid agonised cries that art for arts sake is being lost to an approach rich with mechanistic acronyms and number crunching. In truth, neither argument is quite on the mark; the instrumental argument is doomed to failure because it is always arguing on someone elses terms, whilst art for arts sake seems to forget that art without people may exist, but it has no meaning, no interpretation and no use.
We have to see culture not just as the rich mans plaything, on the one hand, or as a tool for social cohesion, on the other. Actually art, culture whatever word we choose is as much a part of the human condition as the need for food, drink and shelter. History shows us this, and I think 21st century Britain also shows us just as much.
Culture is consumed (and I use the word carefully) nowadays in the same way that other goods are: do I spend the afternoon at the market or in the gallery, shall we meet up for dinner or go to the theatre? Making art is not so very different either: shall I do a cookery course or a painting course, do I join the youth theatre or the football team? I realise this wasnt Mozarts approach, but most people dont privilege art as something better or different; they take it into their lives and make it their own.
This normalisation of arts activity has profound implications for funders as they consider their place in the food chain: if its a basic need, cant it look after itself? Wont the market sort things out? Certainly the market will sort quite a lot out, and to find out where the market wont work, its worth speculating about what the UK would look like without funders. Well all have a different view, of course; for what its worth, heres my tuppence hapenny.
There would be less production: whether what was left would be of a lower quality is a moot point. Market pricing would mean that fewer people would enjoy cultural activity no more free admissions to national museums, or Travelex seasons at the National Theatre. Our cultural roots might be forgotten and we would live in a world with fewer connections to the past; the classical artforms would suffer greatly. Many of our institutions would falter. Artists would probably carry on creating but would struggle more.
Herein lie some clues for the intelligent funder: the market lives for today without much of an eye to tomorrow and not even a glance over its shoulder at yesterday. Intervention should complement what the market or human endeavour will do.
Big picture
Intelligent funding has to focus on the ecology of the cultural sector. We need to go to the places that others cant to ensure that the overall landscape inspires everyone to participate in culture, to make product available where there may be market failure, and to protect our cultural histories and organisations from decay. So, in my brave new world of intelligent funding, I would want to use fewer metrics for decision-making because on the whole they answer the wrong questions (on issues of competence, these can be a card to play, but they shouldnt be the winning hand).
I would want more focus on genuine engagement with young people so that as generations grow up audiences, markets, customers are queuing at the doors of the theatres and the art galleries, just as they now do to get on the terraces. How fantastic that the RSC wants to take the teaching of Shakespeare out of the traditional classroom and into performance. My own childhood was transformed by seeing Peter Brooks production of A Midsummer Nights Dream where I was confronted by worlds other than my own, a lesson as profound about life as it was about the theatre.
Id want longer-term sustainable engagement with key institutions that carry history, memory, knowledge and resource for the sector as a whole. But Id also want them challenged (and funded) to be leaders in their sectors, working dynamically with the innovators and the upstarts! It would need to be a proactive relationship, developed over time, and enriched through trust and mutual respect. This would take us into the realms of financial management, leadership, and direction. It would require us to look at the overall medium-term financial health of an organisation. Do we really want organisations kept in penury with annual handouts on the revenue front, while we resolutely declare that weak balance sheets are a good thing because they demonstrate need? I think we might be chasing the wrong target here!
Wouldnt it also require of us that we ask the tough questions about succession planning and why the board doesnt hold the chief executive to account, because we need vibrant, strong, and well-run cultural organisations. But alternatively, where our relationship is more transient for example, with project funding maybe we ought to get out of the grantees hair, and simply ask whether what was aspired to was achieved. As funders we have to recognise what it is legitimate for our funding to demand.
This would also apply to developing policy and to strategic thinking. Of course, we funders are immensely privileged to be able to look across a panorama and to see the big picture, but practitioners are also quite capable of vision and strategy. We should not confuse funding with wisdom and insight. They may coincide, but they arent always bedfellows.
Inclusion
So what will make us intelligent funders? Listening, balancing, judging, looking at the whole ecology and not just our little bit of it. Perhaps most of all, some humility recognising that no conversation about funding (intelligent or otherwise) is complete without those who are funded being in the room and making some of the running.
Dawn Austwick is Director of the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation and member of the MMM Action Group.
w: http://www.esmeefairbairn.org.uk
The principal theme of the Mission, Models, Money (MMM) programme is that the traditional not-for-profit arts and cultural sector is experiencing a period of dis-equilibrium, has over-expanded and is undercapitalized. Much of the MMM programme to date has focused on developing new approaches and new solutions to these challenges from the perspective of arts and cultural organisations. The programmes attention is now turning to include the role of public and private funders in responding to this contemporary reality. In a programme strand entitled Intelligent Funding, a new Provocation Paper by John Knell and a series of gatherings with the four principal funding communities public sector funders, endowed foundations, the corporate sector and high net worth individuals we will begin to unpack some of the funding issues that might hinder the development of a thriving arts and cultural sector in the current changing environment, and start to develop some concrete suggestions as to what should be done to encourage public and private funders to fund intelligently within this new and developing context.