Sounding Board – Methinks it is like a weasel

Christopher Gordon excavates some buried questions about senior public appointments in the arts sector.

The press and media have recently latched onto ‘cultural leadership’ as an important issue, in part responding to the emergence of the Clore Duffield Foundation’s new Leadership Programme to be run by a former Secretary of State for Culture. At least this is progress on the customary gossipy national media obsession with personalities. ArtsProfessional itself has carried some notably intelligent comment on the topic – most recently from Venu Dhupa (ArtsProfessional issue 55, July 28), while John Tusa contributed a perspicacious piece to The Observer last month.

Double standards

Following the announcement of Chris Foy’s resignation from the RSC at the end of July, a number of theatre professionals have seen this as a further death knell of the big business executive producers in publicly funded companies, and have suggested the time is overdue to call a halt to the management gobbledegook which has invaded the arts. Since even New Labour’s Tessa Jowell has noticed this and put down a marker on ‘meaningless bollocks’, perhaps change is in the air? If so, not before time. Some of us have consistently been pointing out since the 1980s Rees-Mogg Arts Council era that the arts would be damaged by this remorseless corruption of language and meaning, with creativity itself increasingly besieged by dishonest and flavour-of-the-month business terminology and fashion.

However, this entirely healthy debate only goes so far. What it doesn’t ever seem to admit, and appears to accept as unquestionable, is a couple of post-1980s trends in professional cultural management practice, one of them very questionable indeed. The implication is always that the sector has grown up and now has to live in something like the real world. It is only deluded artists, Romantics, or worse ‘people with long memories’, we are told, who mistakenly hark back to this earlier era and find features to commend in it by contrast with the tougher post ‘New Reality’ climate. Publicly subsidised cultural organisations suppress their doubts for fear of antagonising their funders, while consultants won’t comment openly and risk alienating potential clients. In such a climate of self-censorship, it is all too easy for those higher up the food chain to dismiss any legitimate questioning as the work of disaffected curmudgeons. I think it is high time that some of the concealed double-standards at work here are exposed to public debate.

Culture and values

Point number one. In the course of discussion, ‘leadership’ is frequently described as if it were almost synonymous with ‘entrepreneurialism’. It is then all too easy to treat it as a ‘problem’ in a sector which is caricatured as innately sceptical about management, and which requires the imposition of some form of external solution. What this ignores, of course, is the culture and values of the sector, a necessarily complex public/private mixture of funding and practice, and the motivation of those who choose to work within the arts (which is precisely parallel to the Tusa analysis of why John Birt was a bad leader and failed at the BBC). Cultural leaders are only as good – or bad – as their senior teams.

Let us hope that the new focus on this topic will restore some balance, and once again concentrate on developing the skills of, and opportunities for those who really do have the qualities and commitment required. Chris Smith, discussing his appointment to run the ‘Clore Fellowship’ programme in a recent BBC Radio 4 interview, alluded to “the one-off accident of Nicholas Serota”. Very revealing – and utterly wrong. Where did Serota emerge from? He is most certainly not a unique phenomenon, but simply happens to have the highest profile in a group of successful visual arts curators and administrators (no, it’s not a dirty word) who worked at the Arts Council in the early 1970s under the late Joanna Drew’s charismatic and unselfish leadership. Joanna was a brilliant and visionary administrator who created space for and trusted her promising young staff to grow through calculated risk-taking. Andrew Dempsey wrote in his Guardian obituary of Joanna Drew in April “During this period, Joanna’s staff included many who would later take on major roles… She seemed never to wish to own projects: she led by example”. You could pay a similar tribute to the creative role of Dick Linklater’s Drama Department and Tony Field’s Finance Department in the Arts Council of that period in encouraging and developing future cultural ‘leaders’.

Contrary to what Chris Smith has recently implied, the leadership potential was always there, and was frequently recognised and developed – without gimmicks. Sometimes there was the short-term assistance of inspiring trainers from both inside and outside the sector. People moved on. Salaries in the sector and the funding bodies were not princely, but at least there was not the ludicrous differential that is now such a disincentive to this kind of healthy career path being realistically possible.

Point number two. Current practice in finding leaders for cultural funding bodies and institutions is increasingly being concentrated in the hands of the ‘Executive Recruitment’ merchants. This weasel term actually means the headhunting of senior staff outside the spirit of equal opportunities, more often than not for high-profile organisations which boast of their being an ‘equal opportunity employer’ alongside their ‘Arts Council funded’ credentials. It seems to me that the slipperiness over language is now giving virtually unquestioned cover in the UK for unfair and ethically dubious practices. The remuneration deal for the headhunters themselves, of course, generally encourages salary inflation. And the lack of transparency in the process itself can just as easily slide into incest and over-promotion as discover new talent. Most of us can tell horror – and occasionally hilarious – stories about how these processes operate, and there have certainly been some spectacularly high-profile disasters, maybe because the process is external and divorced from meaningful values and context.

Unequal opportunities

I recall an occasion over a decade ago when one of the London orchestras was looking for a senior executive, and requested permission from its Arts Council funder to save money by not advertising the post, because they were pretty confident they knew their own professional market in Europe, if not the world. They were, no doubt correctly, instructed to advertise – in professional journals and other places where interested prospective candidates might be expected to look. Although the headhunters are extremely careful to demonstrate compliance with the letter of the law, and to protect their own backs through statements such as “we at all times encourage equal opportunities and discourage discriminatory practice”, the very business they are in belies the sincerity of their stated good intentions.

Some years ago several people wrote to the Department for Culture Media and Sport (DCMS) asking for their views on what seemed to be a dangerous near-monopoly developing in senior arts recruitment at the time. The same names were being hawked around continually, foisted on one organisation after another. The DCMS failed to make any response, but when challenged, the relevant senior official admitted that it was just too tricky an issue for them to deal with. One colleague at an executive recruitment session at an annual arts conference in the UK had the temerity to ask a headhunter – who had just carefully gone through the equal opps protestations routine – to reveal if a particular post they had just helped fill had been advertised, because despite his intimate knowledge of the sector, neither he nor any of his friends or colleagues had seen any public notice. “Of course” was the gist of the instant and slightly frosty reply, “in the only place that a serious candidate would look – The Economist”. Hello?

Remuneration inflation

OK – times do change, but that shouldn’t be taken as justification for ditching shared values and sensible collective practice which has been developed over decades. A survey of senior posts filled in Arts Council-funded institutions and publicly funded heritage organisations over, say, the past five years would, I believe, overwhelmingly reveal the fingerprints of a very small group of headhunters. Just how Equal Opportunities is this? Yet it is all done with the support of public money and connived at, if not actively condoned. I suspect that were a neutral comparative survey to be conducted today into the remuneration packages on offer from the public funders at all levels, and the comparable capacity of the arts organisations working at the ‘sharp end’, we would find that the gap had never been greater. The cultural world has for far too long been berated by politicians (of all people) and others for not being sufficiently professional, yet we now have the last Secretary of State for Culture moonlighting as part-time leader of a leadership programme, while his Tory predecessor moonlights as a part-time headhunter for jobs in the sector. Funny old amateur world. Some things in the UK don’t change.

Christopher Gordon has over 30 years’ experience as an arts professional in the public sector, and is now an independent consultant in cultural policy.
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Sounding board – Your opportunity to say what you really think
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