The arts must learn to help themselves
This article profiles how those responsible for the arts are seeking to develop a new breed of fund raisers to replace public funds. Is this applicable to other areas of public service which have been or are being turned off? The story tells us:
Asking people for money is considered a dirty, shaming and unrewarding job: graduates with romantic notions about a career in the arts all want to go into production or performance rather than income generation, while anyone with financial savvy is going to look askance at the lousy salaries that arts organisations offer and take their services elsewhere. Nobody, in other words, wants to be a fund-raiser, and that seems daft at a time when interesting and challenging jobs for young people are so thin on the ground.
So it’s good news that next month the Arts Council addresses this problem head on, with the establishment of an Arts Fundraising and Philanthropy Consortium aimed at offering “11 entrepreneurial self-starters with a passion for the arts the chance to take part in an intensive 12-month training programme”, with secondments to such organisations as Opera North, Tate Liverpool and the Roundhouse.
The state will not, and cannot, provide in the way that it used to, and the days when a theatre company or art gallery could look to the Arts Council for 60 or 70 per cent of funding will never return. Self-reliance and self-help is going to be ever more vital, and at this crucial point in time, the arts desperately needs to nurture a new class of motivated and imaginative people who understand that persuading others to part with their money is as essential to the creative process as painting the scenery or dancing the dance.
One problem remains: how to pay these fund-raisers sufficiently competitive salaries to keep them happy (current rates of payment in arts administration being so dismally low) and stop them taking their skills elsewhere. If Peter Bazalgette can insert that piece into the jigsaw, then this faint ray of hope could turn into a burst of unexpected sunshine.