Professor Eric Moody has spent 25 years with City University, the last six as Head of Europes largest inter-disciplinary centre for arts, heritage and cultural policy, management studies and research. He talks to Liz Hill of his concerns for the development of the disciplines of arts management and cultural leadership.
City University Department of Arts Policy and Management, regarded fondly by a whole generation of managers across the world as the birthplace of arts management education in the UK, is on the move. Its highly-prized home at Londons Barbican has been let go in a University re-shuffle that sees the Department subsumed into a broader School of Arts, headed by former London Arts Director Sue Robertson, and move to a multi-purpose Innovation Centre, apparently quite divorced from its artistic roots. Professor Moody himself has just taken early retirement to concentrate on his academic career as an artist, a curator of international renown, and on the development of a research agenda that focuses most notably on The culture of Culture and its impact on the management of culture. To what extent does he see the moves afoot at City as symbolic of broader divisions between management and the arts?
When City first launched its Diploma in Arts Administration, the art world, as it was known in those days, had just woken up to the fact that better administration could help cultural organisations develop their potential. The syllabus, handed down by the former Arts Council of Great Britain, was dominated by subjects such as law, marketing and finance. But, Moody observes, These techniques only turn into management skills when they are implemented in a context. Somewhere along the line, the context of the cultural sector has become detached and the practice of arts management has been separated from its political, philosophical and historical roots.
The culture of Culture
According to Moody, the separation of curatorial leadership and artistic direction from functions such as education, marketing and administration may have led to sharper business skills and more efficient processes, but whether it has led to more effective arts institutions is a different question altogether. The science of management has unwittingly driven a wedge between artistic vision and artistic endeavour. Under the current status quo artistic people who have no desire to think too closely about issues such as audience development, finance or administration, can devolve such matters to those labelled marketing, accounts or education. An arrogance about the right of an artist (and those who deem themselves artistic) to be allowed to pursue exclusively artistic goals, coupled with a suffocating use of artistic rhetoric, has led to the artistic leadership of our cultural institutions being insulated from many of the key administrative issues that face them. In its most extreme form, this leads to the rejection of the whole notion that the arts should be accountable for the public money used to subsidise them, and that they should somehow remain untainted by the instrumental agendas of government.
But how can the arts be separated from these agendas? History reveals that this has never been the case. Do we honestly believe Michelangelo was free from instrumental agendas when he painted the Sistine Chapel? Surely the arts are about such agendas and the debate should be about the nature and appropriateness of those agendas in subsidised institutions.
Moody believes that widely held beliefs that artists should be allowed to do as they like a key part of what he terms the culture of Culture have paradoxically led to the destabilisation of the practice of arts management too. He sees the exploitation of administrative staff as widespread, with individuals being expected to work for excessively long hours and low wages in the name of art. Administrators are obliged to lose sight of artistic goals to pursue a disconnected managerial agenda over which they still have some control. As a result, strata of technocrats and managerialists have emerged, working, not towards outcomes, but towards servicing their funders targets. This is a condition which is not exclusive to the arts, but is endemic to the public sector, including universities.
The politics of exclusion
The paradigm under which artistic expression remains unquestioned, he believes reflects the potent force of the politics of exclusion still operating in Britain a country which has always encompassed a multi-cultural society, yet where the major cultural institutions consistently promote excellence in their own image. Western notions of art and quality dominate, though both history and international experience reveal the value of other approaches. This celebration of excellence in our own image serves only to suppress creativity and in this country and we invariably have to venture beyond the mainstream to find examples of work addressing most of the current agendas, like social inclusion and diversity. This is not to deny, Moody insists, the pursuit of excellence but within a clear context rather than as some abstraction which automatically provides public benefit.
He believes that new leaders need exposure to new cultures, cultures beyond the contemporary, the excellent and the cutting-edge, where most public money for the arts is spent. In his view, too many assumptions support the dominant institutional models and there is insufficient debate as to why, or what its all for. Plenty of discussion takes place about government targets for the subsidised arts, but little support is forthcoming for dealing with an environment in which limitations are imposed from outside. So the leaders of the artistic community retreat into the myths of art and justify their work using personal value judgements and the vocabulary of a kind of art criticism, intended to obscure rather than reveal criteria.
Effective leadership
The process for developing leaders under such a scenario is a challenging one. Moody believes that current role models tend to derive their authority from undisputed assumptions as to the primacy of the artistic leaders. He also believes that creative potential at lower levels in organisations needs to be released and that all staff should be empowered to deliver organisational and cultural outcomes, rather than treated as resource inputs to the delivery of a top-down artistic vision. The most effective leaders work at creating and sustaining an inclusive culture across their entire institutions. Only if they harness the talents within their organisations will leaders have sufficient resources to meet the demands of current arts policy to be inclusive with the audiences they serve.
Eric Moody is Professor of Arts Management at City University. t: 020 7040 8758
e: e.h.moody@city.ac.uk