News and Events
Noises off: The hidden cost of recession in the theatre
14th Jul 2010
The director and blogger Chris Goode has been looking back over his recent work, leaving him to ponder: "So often, there's been a palpable gulf between what I've made and what I've insisted 'we' should now be making." Yet, he acknowledges, in these financially straitened times, worries like this can seem faintly pointless. He writes, rather despondently: "Even the opportunities to make work one is merely�content�to make as a way of just staying alive seem now to be dwindling, with money tightening everywhere and risk-aversion clogging the sector's bloodstream, it feels absurd to be clinging to this predicament. I can no longer tell whether I'm the dead horse or the one flogging it, but neither role has much in it to cause one to spring out of bed in the morning."
What Goode's comments reveal � other than commendable self-awareness � is that practical considerations such as funding (or the lack of it) are inseparable from the creative process. And so, inevitably, money is an issue that is weighing on many people's minds at the moment. Guy Yedwab on the Culture Future blog recently came across this quote from the chef Anthony Bourdain: "If there's a new and lasting credo from the Big Shakeout (the economic crisis) it's this:�People will continue to pay for quality.�They will be less and less inclined, however, to pay for bullshit."
The implications are that the recession might lead to a flowering in artistic quality. Though, as Yedwab points out, this is not necessarily the case: "It's true that people will be less and less inclined to pay for what they consider to be bullshit, but is what they think bullshit actually bullshit? My fear is that to the average American, the arts are bullshit. It appears that for state governments, for instance, the arts are bullshit."
On the subject of state subsidy, American blogger The Playgoer has recently been jealously eyeing up the subsidies available for artists in Europe. In the States, arts funding is much more heavily reliant on private and corporate philanthropy, but this can force companies in to a reliance on the whims of private interests. As the Playgoer asks "Why splurge public funds upon artistic efforts that can get private funding on their own?�To free them from patronage.�At their best, the European state theaters take advantage of public subsidy to be accountable to no one."
He makes a good point. And it is one worth repeating to the culture secretary Jeremy Hunt, who has recently been lecturing arts leaders about the need to seek more cash from private philanthropists rather than relying on the state. He does this despite the fact that most theatres already have development departments that are working flat out to raise this kind of money; and that this will inevitably end up benefitting the larger institutions that already have well-established connections with donors, while smaller organisations lose out.
Yet, like it or not, it looks as if private money is going to play an ever-greater part in the arts ecology. As the Guardian's Bella Todd recently pointed out: schemes are already emerging in which members of the public vote for whom they think should receive corporate cash. An example of this kind of thing can be seen with the Chase Bank Community Giving Programme where Facebook users vote to decide which organizations should get a share of a $5m pot.
This is a set up which, as the Mission Paradox blog explains, seeks to "mix marketing and giving together". And understandably, cash-strapped companies are going to be keen to get their hands on it. But even free money comes at a price. Don Hall points out that the constant demands to members of the public to vote for them could mean that "artists will become known more for the annoying plea for money than for the work". And won't this kind of thing reward and reinforce popularity, rather than nurturing new talent and encouraging innovation?
Source: The Guardian
