Peter Bradbury reflects on the development of an uneasy relationship between arts consultancy and public funding of the arts and culture, and questions the difference that consultants make in the politically charged world of the arts.
I began my consultancy career in London at the beginning of 1986, when the word consultancy was still quite fresh in the arts world. In the beginning, and for much of the ensuing period, I found the work pleasurable, even exciting. And above all, I believed that what I did and what my fellow consultants did was at least useful, and could even be visionary. But it ended for me with a huge question mark over how much of it was worthwhile, how much of it made sense or contributed to a better cultural and socio-political life. I have no doubt that consultants can still be useful in many ways, and that the arts and government have need of them, but a number of disturbing issues have emerged over the past 20 years.
From accountability to bureaucracy
Arts consultancy (including all its variant nomenclatures) has almost become a sector in itself, but it owes its longevity and the richness of its career infrastructure to the arts and cultural funding system and the strengths and weaknesses of one are integral with those of the other. In the early years, for many of us consultancy was never just a job. It was work, art and life. In many respects it was an amateur activity, though one with a shared code of (albeit unwritten) professional standards. To a lesser extent the same was true of the arts funding system, which until the Thatcher years turned into the Major years reflected the original Keynesian principles on which the Arts Council was founded. It was (ironically given Thatchers deceitful claim to be reducing the reach of direct government) the bureaucratisation of government and the Lottery that caused a major sea-change.
Bureaucracy is systematised paperwork. In and of itself it is inoffensive, even necessary. But in the hands of a government and government agencies focused on social control and engineering it can rise to a Machiavellian art. Under Thatcher and Major this is precisely what happened and, alas, almost ten years of New Labour has consolidated it. Dressed as a demand for increased transparency and accountability, it became an instrument of social control. And with a top hat of what is called sustainability (in other words, Learn to get on without us) the beneficiaries of this social control became its apparatchiks. The process was accelerated to the point of frenzy by the introduction of the National Lottery and the money this made available for the arts in particular, the vastly increased levels of capital funding that also helped to draw structural funding from Europe.
A new meal ticket
As a result of this change we have gained a number of wonderful buildings, a few excellent arts projects (that should have happened sooner) and an extended, though anxious, lease of life for a large number of others (though summers lease hath all too short a date). From a consultants point of view, we have gained a meal ticket.
The arts and cultural funding bodies frequently insist that some form of consultancy accompany applications for funding, or when funding has been achieved that a consultant should walk as Dantes guide through the hell and purgatory of sustainability toward a paradise that, for all too many, never quite materialises. Someone more cynical than myself might draw attention to the correlation between this insistence on the use of consultants and the number of arts funding administrators who leave either through frustration or because they have been restructured out and become consultants themselves.
Artists and arts organisations themselves have colluded in these developments. Theyve had to at least those whose work depended on public funding, such as community arts and those with high overheads and low box office. One of the great vocations of art is to challenge the existing order, to find the places where it needs challenging and to light a fire in the crevices to illuminate the cracks. However, even many of the artists whose aesthetic is oppositional (neither of these words is much loved by government or the Arts Council) have been forced into making a Faustian pact with the funding system, as the community arts movement did in the 1980s.
Mistaken models
My real bone of contention is not really the Faustian pact itself the arts and sciences have always had temptation thrown their way by patrons and governments and the arts industry (publishing, production, and so on). Its this: as the political left succumbed to the Thatcherite model of society as a business and tried to out-businessman the Tories, so the arts community faced with the demands of accountability, transparency and sustainability tried to act like the medium- to large-scale businesses whose models were introduced by consultants, arts funders and administrators trained as accountants (or with masters degrees from business schools), and the cultural bureaucrats of national and local government. They tried to be grown up, to act like responsible adults in an adult word in which good accounting and strategic planning were almost more important than the objectives they were in place to secure.
From the perspective of the arts there are three major problems with business models and the practices that are based on them. The first is that the arts are no ordinary kind of business, and their products are not dog food. The second is that business management models are seductive, especially to people who are attracted to the arts world by its fluid boundaries and imaginative flights but dont themselves have the focus or the experience to make art out of it. And the third is that business and management models, at least their simplified versions, are easy to apply and equally easy to replace with new ones; funding bodies tend to like that because it keeps them all well occupied. An underlying factor that influences all three problems is the active interest in the arts on the part of the big consultancy and management firms who sniffed new sources of profit in the capital funds available via Europe and the Lottery, and via increased government investment in film and other media industries.
Short-termism
How does all this manifest itself in the actual world of the arts? Well, the first thing is that just as the soundbite has come to define the political and broadcasting worlds, so the long-term strategy implemented on a short-term basis has come to define the arts world. Profit-driven commercial arts institutions opt for the immediate explosion rather than the slow fuse; funding bodies introduce policies and strategies thought up by themselves and their consultants, then scrap them in favour of new ones, then scrap those.
And in forcing artists and arts organisations to implement these policies and strategies we have so refined the tools and measures of change that we apply them rigorously and frequently to situations and developments that have had no time to unfold with the result that we create, scrap or modify policies and strategies before they have had the ghost of a chance to work. And we attempt to eliminate the unpredictable, which I think must be anathema to any genuine artist working in the real world. The arts are developmental and cannot be treated as a new brand of dog food.
Losing the plot
Think for a moment about the big capital projects funded by, among others, the Lottery and European structural funds during the 1990s. Big and little organisations alike saw very good opportunities to acquire resources (from equipment to buildings) of which they had been starved for years. There were some breathtaking projects and some frankly dubious ones. The other organisations that saw an opportunity were the big consultancy groups who suddenly discovered a commitment to the arts and culture that few had suspected or observed before.
The application forms for funding were actually pretty good, rigorous and exacting, and concerned to ensure that the projects involved had a decent chance of succeeding both the capital project and the ensuing arts-based developments. The applicants themselves, anxious to prove that they were capable of managing not only a capital build (for example) but also an expanded organisation put a lot of time and effort into that great blueprint, the feasibility study. Thats where the consultancy firms came in. And thats why so many feasibility studies began to look like marketing reports for this or that manufacturer of dog food.
The other thing that tended to happen was that the arts organisations themselves became obsessed quite rightly at one level with the detailed mechanisms of capital development and tried to become businessmen, architects, quantity surveyors and entrepreneurs all rolled into one. While the process might have resulted in a growing number of well-rounded administrators, it also led in many cases to a loss of control of artistic vision. The building became an end in itself. And in the frightening demand for business plans with sustainability as their goal, the circle was drawn full: the lines in the business plan looked at with most interest by funding bodies, local authorities, supporters and the arts organisations themselves were those that would ensure that building costs would be paid for irrespective of whether or not the art was still happening. Another job for the consultant.
Surrogate management
One of my concerns as a consultant was that arts organisations often asked me to undertake for them work that they ought really to have been doing themselves: vision building, community building and business planning. It would have been easy to treat the process in the way many of the bigger consultancy firms treated the feasibility study study the brief, talk to the workers, write the document, hand it in and collect the fee. The arts funders would have been satisfied. But in the long term the artists themselves would not have been because they would have been left out of the process.
Another concern was that when I and other consultants worked with our clients, went through all the bureaucratic hoops to deliver the strategy, the plan and, ultimately, the application, and satisfied all the demands of transparency and accountability, we often encountered an elusive or unclear response on the part of the funding body. We suspected, and in many cases simply realised, that a lot of the key decisions had been taken behind closed doors and were part of a hidden political agenda that we could only guess at and whose rules were never made explicit. In this respect, there emerged during the 1990s a class system among consultants. There were those who were part of the club: the senior arts funders, Whitehall mandarins, favoured consultants and political activists who created these hidden agendas in the first place. Then there were the rest of us who laboured earnestly and had our successes but were sometimes rather bemused by our failures.
Looking back, I can see just how much, as a consultant, I colluded in these developments: a bit naïve, a bit self-seeking, not sufficiently well-informed about the rapid sometimes blindingly rapid changes that were in the pipeline long before they entered the creaky vehicles of public awareness and knowledge. And I can see just how much I did not want this to be true.
I well remember taking on a piece of work for a national organisation involving a fee that was large from the perspective of any arts organisation, only to find that I was beavering away diligently to produce a piece of work that had already been suffocated by the other consultancy that was going on at the same time I forget now which of the big boys it was (well, I dont actually, but Id better not say). My findings, my work with the lead officer, and my report were all received with praise and gratitude. It was, of course, shelved and has long since made way for I dont know how many new reports, strategies and policies.
Renewal
I finished my last job as a consultant in the early part of 2006. It was not an honourable exit: the stress of working in a system in which I had less and less faith was one of many factors that led to a breakdown and a subsequent change in personal priorities. I wish that I had not lost all energy for the cause at a time when consultancy needed to fight back and put itself once again on the right side the side of art, creative exploration and challenge, diversity of tradition and practice, risk. It still does. Perhaps, now that energy has returned, I will have another chance. I hope so.
Peter Bradbury is a former arts consultant who is currently working on a novel.
e: peterjbradbury@blueyonder.co.uk