Newsreel Essay: Richard Florida and the Arts: A Rescue Fantasy

Creativity powers economic growth.
—Richard Florida, The Rise of the Creative Class

Our companion in the noisy café had just resigned from what looked like a wonderful job running an arts organisation. We knew she loved her job as artistic director and manager, and that she was committed to her own long-standing creative practice. And given how hard it is to earn a living in the arts, this seemed a curious decision. What she told us was that running a small subsidised arts organisation these days is an almost impossible dance routine. Yes, you need to improvise, be creative and fleet-footed, but you also must learn the rigour of business practice and dance to management’s tune. But how is this to be done, she asked, without tripping over your own feet?

As the artistic director she had regularly put in sixty-hour weeks and worked most weekends; there was no possibility of taking time in lieu, the pay was low, and the workplace understaffed and stressful. And when confronted with the situation, the organisation’s board of management was, frankly, unsympathetic. If Richard Florida is correct, then the economic growth powered by creativity takes a real toll on the lives of artist-managers.

Florida has dazzled politicians, businessmen and CEOs with the argument that creativity is critical to the success of the global capitalist economy. The arts, on the other hand, have been persuaded to comply with business thinking, strategic planning and management know-how—to internalise the idea that the business model is part of a progressive and modernising agenda that will rescue the arts from obscurity and poverty. Among the recently converted to the Florida line is Prime Minister Kevin Rudd who, at the 2020 Summit, ‘Towards a Creative Australia’, described the distinction between ‘arts and industry’ and ‘arts and economy’ as a false dichotomy that ‘we’ve actually got to put … to bed’.[1]

Putting false dichotomies to bed may achieve peace in the management household but the experience of our friend, despairing at the impossibility of her job, suggests that for some small arts organisations, the dichotomy is not a false one. This marriage of arts and industry, of creativity and profit, might be convenient in theory but is it happy or productive?

Many artists have maintained that what the arts need to flourish is not marketing plans, strategic planning events and mountains of compliance reports, but opportunities to experiment, to rehearse, to contribute to the development of their discipline, to be creative.

The creativity that Florida thinks might engender economic growth is probably not this kind of creativity. Like many others who spruik the advantages of a creative industries approach, Florida links creativity to innovation, and innovation to increased commercial profit. But is creativity synonymous with innovation? We are not so sure. At one level, all the talk around creative industries appears to bring a new and welcome focus onto artists as creators and innovators. But there’s little evidence to suggest that artists are sitting at the grown-ups table. Indeed, we find that much of the creative-industries rhetoric simply ignores the realities of working in the arts, which for many, if not most, means low wages and long hours combined with managerial activities designed around compliance to policy and procedure.

There are two issues here: the first is that linking creativity to innovation, and the (almost) universal application of the notion of creativity to all manner of commercial activities, means that the arts struggle to position themselves as a distinctive set of creative practices. Second, as the world of business takes up creativity, the arts appear to have developed a rescue fantasy about business management practices. In this fantasy, the adoption of management regimes holds out the promise of increased control and sustainability, while actually delivering stressful and insecure working conditions.

Whatever happened to creativity?

The concept of creativity from the visual and performing arts implies an act of imaginative practice intended to express original ideas. But the notion of creativity has been overused to become almost meaningless. Type ‘creativity’ or ‘creative’ into your search engine and you come up with, for example, cruise ship holidays, business leadership programs, bar mitzvahs, management systems, removable dental prosthetics—everything, in other words. And if everything is creative then nothing is. As ‘creative’ become synonymous with any new product in the marketplace, what is disappearing is any special claim that artists might reasonably make about what they do and how they go about it. The concept of idiosyncratic, distinctive creativity has been refashioned or ‘hollowed out’ to suit the management of commerce and industry. It is hollowed out because this version of creativity ignores the possibility that creative activity might exist unhampered by the rational calculation of end-use value. Creativity, as a set of ‘imaginative practices’ with their own intrinsic value, has lost its specific tie to culture in general and the arts in particular. Why does this matter?

The answer is that creative practice is the defining characteristic of the arts. There is no other unifying principle to which the arts can sensibly lay claim. Not all art is innovative, or beautiful, or truth-seeking, or cutting edge. But no matter their other qualities, the arts are by definition the product of creative practices. In an environment of limited and often precarious funding, the arts sector needs to be recognised for its distinctive capacity to produce value that is cultural, symbolic, aesthetic, spiritual and expressive, but may not equate with economic value. Robyn Archer has reinforced this, pointing out that the arts need resources for creative activities that may either produce no results whatsoever, or produce outcomes that are unfamiliar, uncomfortable and ‘almost certainly unpopular’.[2]

Christopher Madden is one of a number of people making a case against the appropriation of creativity by sectors outside the arts such as commerce and industry. He argues, too, that creative arts organisations need a renewed sense of their cultural purpose. For him, the current literature portrays ‘a zealous predisposition for equating creativity with problem-solving, invention, innovation and divergent thought’. Citing Florida’s reading of creativity, Madden argues that he assumes a limited interpretation of creativity to mean ‘invention-cognition’. The concept of invention-cognition implies that all creativity is synonymous with newness and novelty; ‘the common themes are that creativity is associated with new things—where new means inventive—and that creativity is about thought processes and ideas’. For Madden, this reading ignores other important activities and practices of creativity, including emotions and traditions. Artistic practices ‘can be as much about re-creation as about inventive creation’.[3]

The conflation of creativity and innovation can also be seen in the gradual absorption of creative industries into the broader sphere of innovation policies. The Australia Council, for example, has produced its Creative Innovation Strategy, which advocates support for creativity because it is one of Australia’s most valuable assets.[4]

The looked-for convergence of culture and economics is not new; the notion of the arts as an industry emerged in Australia in the 1980s as an outcome of the impact of economic rationalism on public policy. Since the 1980s, the view that the arts are an undeniable public good beyond criticism was superseded by demands to justify funding in terms of tangible benefits. In particular this involved their service to the tourism, information and entertainment industries. These priorities persist in guiding arts policy. Facing reduced government support, the arts are busy addressing the expectations of private and corporate sponsors, planning for audience development, finding linkages with broadcasting technologies, and international marketing opportunities.

Many of these issues got a public airing when the federal government threatened to close the Australian National Academy of Music (ANAM) an institution that had provided classical music training since 1996. In October 2008 Arts Minister Peter Garrett announced a funding cut of $2.64 million in ANAM’s annual funding on the basis that it was inefficient and that repeated requests to improve administrative performance had not been met.[6] The then artistic director of ANAM, Brett Dean, was clearly mystified; in 2008 the students had performed more than 575 pieces of music to great acclaim and this, surely, was a central objective of the organisation. Expressing his despair over the difficulties of addressing the government’s mounting expectations, Dean noted: ‘I have looked on in horror as my colleagues … labour heroically as their funding has been eroded in direct proportion to the rise of bureaucratic complexities with which they must contend’.[7] Some weeks later Garrett reversed his decision on the funding cut after it was announced that Dean had won the United States Grawemeyer Award—an award (the equivalent of music’s Nobel Prize) not for business leadership or efficient compliance reporting, but for musical composition.[8]

And then there’s our friend throwing in her job in the ‘creative industry’; a sector based not only on the assumption that commerce and culture are happy bedfellows, but which is also putatively a haven for the so-called creative classes. In Florida’s utopianist vision, the creative worker is free and reflexive, working in an environment that fosters tolerance, liberalism, diversity and non-hierarchical management. This is not what our friend described.

In her workplace, a chair of the board was appointed who had a business background but no previous experience in either the arts or the community sector. This is not unusual: over the past decade business modelling has seen key leadership roles in the arts taken by business practitioners; arts managers are trained in business management, and arts organisations are experiencing organisational change through regimes of managerial discipline. Jo Caust has shown how the leadership of arts organisations by CEOs from the corporate sector with little knowledge of the art form has seen an increase in managerialist practices in the arts, often at the expense of the arts themselves.[9]

In this particular arts organisation, staff were routinely expected to work overtime for love not money. The board’s expectation was that the staff would absorb within their existing workloads not only all the evenings and weekends required for putting on shows but also all the additional duties, such as strategic planning and reporting. This required significant out-of-hours work by the staff and requests for time in lieu were refused on the basis that the budget could not sustain it. The new chair (against the advice of the artistic director) insisted on the appointment of a general manager who had an MBA but little experience of working in the arts. The message was that the person with the MBA had the real skills.

Our friend’s account of her experiences leading to her decision to resign from the job could be read simply as an example of individual failure; maybe she was just inefficient or incompetent, and perhaps those board members were not very good at their job. But to see the struggles of small arts organisations as merely an illustration of their individual failures seems to us to elide the possibility that there are structural problems in some creative-industry occupations and organisations.

Pierre Guillet de Monthoux has outlined the ways in which art-making differs from the principles usually associated with manufacturing. He argues that art work, unlike other products, cannot be circumscribed by ‘the rational planning for attaining preconceived goals as economically and effectively as possible’. As business has increasingly described its practices as ‘creative’, the arts have been encouraged to think of themselves as a business. Rather than this producing an exchange with reciprocal values, the benefits the arts may draw from the business models they are urged to adopt are not necessarily useful for the art they produce. Creativity in the arts may be a casualty of art’s corporate commodification and the inferiority complex of arts organisations which cling to a fervent hope that business knows better.

Notes

1. Quoted in Helen O’Neil, ‘Ratbags at the Gates’, Griffith Review 23 (2009), p. 15. Back to article
2. Robyn Archer, ‘Winning is abstract in art’, Age, 19 May 2009. Back to article
3. Christopher Madden, ‘Creativity and Arts Policy’, Journal of Arts Management Law and Society, vol. 34, no. 2 (2004), pp. 133–9. Back to article
4. Australia Council, ‘Creative Innovation Strategy’, <www.australiacouncil.gov.au/_data/assets/pdf_file/0013032161/Creative_Innovation_Strategy>, 2006, viewed 14 December 2009. Back to article
5. Jo Chandler, ‘From music theory to conspiracy theory’, Age, 22 November 2008. Back to article
6. Brett Dean, ‘Elite musicians need a training centre’, Age, 30 October 2008. Back to article
7. Robin Usher, ‘Busyness of being Brett Dean’, Age, 5 October 2009. Back to article
8. Jo Caust, ‘Does it matter who is in charge? The influence of the business paradigm on arts leadership and management’, Asia Pacific Journal of Arts and Cultural Management, vol. 3, no. 1 (2005), pp. 153–65. Back to article
9. Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, The Art Firm, Stanford University Press, Palo Alto, Cal., 2004, p.52 Back to article