With possible changes to how public funding is disseminated, the arts and cultural sectors need to look towards new funding opportunities, including those used predominately by corporate bodies.  Why should an arts organisation not approach an investor, Venture capitalist, or philanthropist?  Is there something so inherently wrong with this approach?  Now I know that the argument against it will probably contain references to profit and being profit orientated, which will distract from the independence of art.  However, I am not advocating total immersion into solely looking at the return on investment of profitability, but for specific projects and organisations, this model makes much sense.

Imagine for one moment when there is no public finance or, as is more likely, the case when the large public bodies disperse public finance to only a select number of arts organisations.  Who should then distribute this to the smaller organisations?  This model already happened in England and could be the model adopted by the Arts Council as early as 2015.  Add to this that the available funding will be decreased and will stipulate that it can only be used for artistic means and not for core costs.  So now I think that a move towards the corporate business model has become more apparent and necessary.

Arts organisations are great at what they do, not only because of the services they offer but this service depends on the venue or building on which rent has to be paid, the almost impossibility of obtaining an exemption from rates but most importantly, for the 32,000 directly employed in the arts sector, the staff.  How will these core costs be met?  It will be no use in screaming at the local funding authority, the arts council, or all government, for by then, the situation will be too late, and I, for one, would certainly not see this situation bent reversed no, maybe controversially,  should this situation be reversed.  No arts organisation should at this stage be looking at new ways of generating revenue to cover these costs, and to achieve this, it can only look at a model that includes profit generation for specific projects or streams.  This might encourage a more diverse arts programme rather than a reduction or amalgamation of the arts into a series of events directed towards popular culture.  As many organisations will be going for the same pot of disposable income, each will have to find its unique selling point, that advantageous element that it has over another, and to capitalise on that rather than providing the same programme was its neighbour.

Going back to my initial comments about where arts and culture fit into state and public perception, there is a gulf between the corporate world and the other sectors.  Three speakers at a recent investment conference in Northern Ireland were from state organisations, Enterprise Ireland, InvestNI and Intertrade Ireland, each of whom highlighted the amount of finance they had from the two central all governments to put towards investment, which dwarfed the amounts given to either Arts Council.  The closet was in fact, the direct investment by the other.  Ireland assembly, which had earmarked £28 million towards one scheme from InvestNI, the total for all the schemes for InvestNI came to around £190 million, compare this to the £12 million that the Arts Council of Northern Ireland gets, and you can start to get an idea of the disproportionate amounts towards corporates and the arts.  So maybe it is time for the arts sector to stop kidding itself that it is an important sector, that the government takes a serious interest in the arts.  Now, a picture starting to emerge, if arts and culture were important and seen as an essential part of boosting the Irish economy, would we have such significant shortfalls in public spending?  No, as far as the government is concerned, arts and culture only play an essential role when the economy is on the cusp of a wave.

So why should we, and when I say we, I am talking about arts organisations, not be looking to encroach on this space, to coin one of the corporate world’s favourite sayings at the moment, why don’t we disrupt this, put our spokes in the wheels of industry?  We don’t because we are passive and afraid.  We don’t consider ourselves to be of financial worth.  Otherwise, we would be outside the Dail protesting, lobbying ministers, staging protests, and doing all we can to highlight the positive effects and economic benefits that a thriving arts and culture sector provides.  The recent Arts Council survey suggests that over 99,000 people were indirectly employed in the arts sector, and Noel Kelly from Visual Artists Ireland even indicates that this figure rises to over 5.8 million when you include Europe.  This is a huge body of people whose whole life is at stake and a huge number of people who “invest” in the country’s economy through taxes, spending and savings.  It’s time we lost this passive mentality, and rather than licking our silent wounds, we should be getting our hands dirty in disruption, financial disruption.

Through all our dealings with one of our main stakeholders, we have come into close contact with several other social enterprises, another sector that faces the same financial difficulties as the arts sector.  From fourteen companies we had close contact with over the past years, each stated their position and engagement with the social sphere they deal in.  They made it clear that the sector and not finance was important.  Thirteen of them are now looking at corporate revenue streams not to be their main thrust but to supplement their revenue, to allow them to continue to provide the services they offer and ultimately will enable them to offer increased services to a more significant section of their targeted society.  To me, this is the type of model that the arts sector should be looking at, an enhancement allowing growth rather than the only way to survive.  In the corporate sector there are research and development units whose job is to look and validate new sectors, products, and methods.  This incurs a huge cost and as the vast majority of these ideas never come to fruition the financial loss is great and needs to be made up by other revenue streams.   If we look at this model and impose our own notions on it we can see that the experimental event, the alternative performance, the group who meet to look at ideas is the arts sectors research and development, we can afford these costs provided that we can cover this by other revenue streams but without loosing our focus on our aims and goals, the section of the arts sector we are looking to serve.

The sector needs to lose the affinity towards public funding and grant rounds.  We also need to look away from the notion of the philanthropic donor who will step onto fill the void because even though there are people who can step in we in the sector are all chasing the same people, people who support the arts but people who do not have a bottomless cave of money to give to all.  No we need to start looking at new models, models, as I have highlighted are alien and in some ways perceived as offensive to the arts sector but ways at the end of the day will ensure that the sector survives, maybe not as a whole but at least survives.  A sector which I feel will embrace these changes once the animosity towards them has been removed and the sector will thrive.  A sector that can bring new creative methods to investment and models that even corporates will embrace, something that can only increase the importance of the arts sector.  Creativity has always been a great innovator; in the arts sector, we have an abundance of creativity.

Arts and cultural need to be taken seriously but the archive this we have to play our part to, we need to be disruptive, shake the system and the hand that feeds us.

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