I Am Dan Eastmond

Just over 12 months ago, we launched a brand new dynamic ticketing experiment at The Firestation (the Neo-Ticketing project), powered by Monad ticketing software (we don’t call it ‘box office’ anymore) and supported by the Digital R&D Fund for the Arts.

Dynamic Pricing is not a new idea and there are a fair few methods to choose from, but after considering what was most measurable and most likely to be used by other organisations we settled on three schemes; Rising Prices – where the ticket price goes up steadily over time, Moving Prices – where prices go up or down automatically depending on demand, and Price Crash – where prices are discounted by 75% for half an hour, with customer notification via our social networks.

Eight or so months after our first telephone conversations – and three rounds of applications later – the first phase of the project went live, and everything about how we book and sell events changed. Our conversations with artists, companies and agents became richer, more frequent and more sophisticated. We began talking about price entry points, selling timeframes, market breakdowns and whole tour structures (you have to if your prices move about and you’re the only one on a twenty date tour doing it!). In the office, pricing conversations stretched out over the life of a show, instead of the normal ten minute chat before the programme goes to print. We had a record of our early predictions to measure sales against, we had live volume and price data to explore and, quite simply, we became more proactive and better equipped.

The results of the project are interesting. In short (you’re best off reading the full report, but…) the modest (+/-25%) Rising Prices scheme generated the same volume of sales but with a 10% increase in overall revenues. Sales also shifted slightly earlier. The bigger rises (+/-50%) ended up restricting sales volume more than the benefit in higher prices later on. Moving Prices just didn’t work, lower than expected demand compressed our ticket prices and resulted in lower revenues. We may be able to solve this by fine tuning the sales curves, and are looking again at our traditional sales patterns for different types of event. Price Crash, weirdly, resulted in no extra sales, but again this may be due to the timeframe being too short, or perhaps our customers needing time to get the hang of it. It does give us another marketing tool for free though, so we’re still working with this.

Perhaps most exciting of all though was that the process of attributing value to our activities no longer happened in secret, a best guess taken some time in the past. Now, the ticket price would move up or down depending on how our customers behaved, it would float on top of their enthusiasm (or lack of) and therefore reflect how they felt, not how we thought they should feel. Our customers were invited into the ongoing conversation about value and sustainability in the culture sector, sometimes by polls and questionnaires, sometimes by feeding back to us, but unavoidably in the act of buying a ticket – where the core price, current price and ranges were clearly displayed.

As arts organisations around the UK navigate changing cultural forms and ever shifting political agendas, modernising our processes alongside deep, deep structural reform are essential if we are move forward as a healthy and relevant part of society. Changing how we price events is one tiny piece in this great volume of work. Keeping up with digital trends, re-imagining the role of the physical venue, asking whose culture we are championing, following ideas rather than form, are all right there in the mix too.

When we launched the Neo-Ticketing project my hope (unscientific I know) was that all three models with generate astonishing results, show the way to better revenues across the board and initiate – even just for us – a pricing revolution. In the end that didn’t happen, but I guess one out of three isn’t such a bad hit rate. Then again, sometimes just getting out there and doing things differently sets the conditions for the future we’re all chasing.

Last week, industry body UK Theatre reported that average theatre prices rose by more than 5% across the UK, apparently to pick up the shortfall from funding cuts. It was an interesting read, but no great surprise.

Whilst public funding of the arts comes from an admirable social and ethical place - that beauty, poetry, tolerance and a sense of collective purpose are worth spending a few quid on (well that’s my take on it at least) - there’s no question that it brings a good fistful of bad stuff along with it.

A false economy has developed, in the performing arts world particularly, where tickets are routinely sold for considerably less than the cost of producing the show. If we paid performers, technicians and facilitators what they actually deserved the gap would be even greater. As a result, whilst attempting to ‘support’ the arts (as we currently know it), local authorities, national bodies and private sponsors have also unintentionally dug an ever deeper grave for it.

Pricing tickets to realistically reflect the costs of production is commercial suicide, so funding plugs the gap. To keep the funders happy, venues go for numbers through the door and keep their ticket prices artificially low to ensure they get them, and so it goes on. The funding that was once there to support access for all and a vibrant culture of new ideas (I know, I know, but I can dream right?), ends up supporting the lie of demand and a status quo that keeps creativity and alternative thinking comfortably dependent.

We need to wake up and fess up, that much funding (and I really mean that, not all) represents a massive problem. Like sugar, tobacco and the dark side, funding will get you in the end.

With the spending review looming, it’s worth stressing that the current hacking into arts and local authority funding is not the solution either. Arts organisations need more than a couple of years to reimagine how they might fund themselves. The closure of a number of perfectly equipped and sustainable venues over the past few years is testament to the damage that will be done by an ill-conceived hatchet job.

Just as interesting, is the same old vocabulary and undercurrent of dismay that always seems to accompany such reports of cuts and price changes. The arts sector bleats to the same song every time, that in order to make things add up “quality” must surely fall, that supporting popular, contemporary forms of culture inevitably means less “difficult” work.

Difficult and poorly attended = Good.

Popular, disposable, entertaining = Bad.

It’s never shouted, our overwhelmingly middle class manners would never be so crude, but it’s implied. It’s why comedians are largely ignored by the Arts Council (despite currently bank rolling most regional venues, like the rock bands before them).

In a recent Digital R&D funded research project into dynamic pricing at Firestation Arts (Neo-Ticketing), one of the most interesting things we discovered - apart from a 10% increase in revenue by letting our prices rise slowly over time - was that our customers were quite happy for us to do it. We talked to them, let them in to the conversation about value, the costs of production and survival. We made sure people knew to buy early if they were on a budget, meaning some customers grabbed show tickets for as little as £3.50.

We haven’t had to ‘dumb down’ our mission in the hunt for meaningful revenue and meaningful work, just think differently, start conversations, avoid the myths of aesthetic value. Our dynamic ticketing sits alongside our gaming nights, our busy bars and our publishing activities as ways to make ourselves more relevant and financially independent.

We’re not alone, ARC in Stockton, Dundee Contemporary Arts, Square Pit in Belfast, NT Live, KKL Luzern - I could go on - are all finding new ways to talk to more people about more stuff and make good revenues at the same time. Building a future arts sector that is alive, relevant and independent will take more than a 5% increase in ticket prices to fill the hole left by exiting funders. It’ll take a huge bunch of new ideas, a little less indignation, a little more honesty and a population ready and willing to make it happen.

What's in your headphones? It's a great question (one we ask pretty much everybody). You can tell a lot about a person from the tunes they inject into their ears - their mood, their tribe, perhaps their aspirations, maybe even class. You name it, you can make pretty much whatever pigeon-holes you chose from somebody's music confessions.

And - of course - you can tell a lot about 'the times' by the music we make in it, and give our support to. From the uncompromising anger of punk to the flamboyant egocentricacies of mainstream New Romantics.

So here's a thing, in my ears at the moment are the twenty something rebellions of Miley Cyrus, all Deep South cussing and teenage mall-running. Then there's the Nottingham dear diaries of Sleaford Mods, with trips to the off-license and arguments outside the chip shop. Not your thing (come on, who doesn't have Miley on a playlist somewhere?!)? Then how about the North London lion talk of Chip (formerly Chipmunk, but the munk got ditched somewhere along the way), painting linguistic portraits of the aspirational, sometimes angry, frequently struggling young metropolitan.

Each of them flies their regional credentials with pride. Ditching the smoothed out sheen of consumable internationalism for something a little more genuine, believable, raw. Do your thang, Miley.

At the same time, you can't avoid the visible shift in what we eat, drink, how we consume. Perhaps it kicked off with food miles, when we were all told that the apples from Kent that we loved had been shipped twice around the world to get a waxy spray and a Union Jack shrink wrap. As we woke up to shopping a little fuel-smarter, we also rediscovered taste (that we didn't even know we'd forgotten), the joy of regional variation (settle down wine buffs, we know you were there ages ago #terroir), and maybe even a little pride that our sausages were made by the guy down the road who drinks in the same pub.

Our current love affair with Craft Beer comes from the same place, so too the (less well known) micro-distilleries that are popping up all over the UK and serving up Gin and Vodka the likes of which have been decades in the forgetting.

The list goes on and reaches into every bit of us - Farmers Markets, youtubers, writing co-ops, locally owned water supplies, and flat-pack democracy like Frome and Sidmouth.

So what's going on?

Well, here’s a theory, not very scientific, but I like it and it's yours if you want it: Global - that shrinking world and marketplace that was the big promise for Generation X, is in fact a bit shit. When our arms (no pun intended) reached around the world, when the all-too-fleeting rush of one-ness subsided, what we got left with was conscience-less conglomerates, polluted or privatised water, and whole villages lost at sea on makeshift rafts.

When the future glow of the world wide web - at first the realm of mavericks and socialist ideals - faded into the Internet, what was once our ticket to emancipation gave us trolls and misogyny. Instead of revolutions and power, our social networks and information-rich lives gave us sex, self-harm and suicides.

Our global politics haven’t brought us much salvation either. Regional conflicts - not nice in the first place - have been mutated into global terror, the borderless, randomised expressions of hatred from the likes of ISIL and countless disenfranchised young men with a gun.

A few months ago, following a tip off from a local councillor, a little bit of pushing and a sympathetic ear from a local authority officer, I stepped inside a damp and dusty empty office block that sits under the weight of a 1960s low rise block.

It stank. 6 years of emptiness, several leaks that had rotted the carpets and four toilets straight out of Trainspotting made the air inside sickly sweet with neglect. Dead flies lay in rows on every window sill like little tiny exhibits.

“This is the place” I thought “This is the place we’ve been looking for.”

and with that, Prime Studios was finally born. It was conceived a good couple of years earlier, most likely on the fireside rug of lessons learned when Ella Gibbs and I set up Cornershop Studios all the way back in 1992. Then, we just wanted somewhere to work, alongside other artists who shared our aesthetic and social ideas. We wanted a space where we could try out different ways of making things, new ways of showing what we had made, and a place to throw the occasional massive party. We did all of that, it became much more than we expected and the building is still a home for artists and ideas today.

One of the most powerful experiences at Cornershop was working next to such a vast range of different creatives. Potters and animators, performance artists and saxophonists, all busying around the same space, feeding off each other's successes and failures. Prime Studios puts this positive contagion at the heart of it's structure. It's a curated programme, meaning we pick who goes in, making sure that the space is balanced, that participants are supported and challenged and that the under-priced spaces benefit people and projects that would otherwise struggle.

Affordable spaces however, as important as they are, are not the whole story. Like the food banks that are popping up in every empty youth club and leaky church, these are symptoms not solutions.  I've said it before, but it's always worth saying again - artists should be minted, we shouldn't need cheapo spaces to house our cultural ambitions. We shouldn't need meagre Arts Council hand outs that change nothing, in exchange for hours and hours of form filling and a bullying hand in our operational practice.

So Prime participants don’t just get a roof, they get mentoring as well, what ever we can offer that makes sense for them, building business models, finding new audiences and customers, cross-checking ideas and making alliances. They also get access to our performance and exhibition spaces at The Firestation. Not just because it makes perfect sense for their work to feed into ours, but also because there's no point in supporting emerging artists and cultural operators if our institutions can't handle the results.

This, of course, is where it gets interesting. The real story of supporting emerging artists. The truth is, we will always be "supporting" emerging artists, forever offering just the edges of opportunity, until we completely overhaul our cultural spaces and create an industry brave enough to bend and break to the demands of new artists, and the audiences they already have.

This is why Lemonade Gallery takes up a third of the space at Prime. Lemonade Gallery has a mission to reinvent entirely how galleries work in the 21st century. Why? Because galleries are otherwise so fucking boring. Galleries paint themselves white in pretend neutrality, whilst engineering their status with structural singularity and in-print critiques from cultural border guards. Galleries hire meat-heads to ring fence shiny artworks, to make the money feel at home and the plebs know their place. Galleries turn off the music, because this isn’t Urban Outfitters, right??

Well maybe not, but I know where I'd rather be, and so does almost everybody else. Whilst most galleries were chipping graffiti of walls or building black boxes to put TVs in, modern retailers were making an art out of engagement and the numbers speak for themselves. Oxford Street, one of the busiest high streets in Europe. Any galleries on it? Nope.

So Lemonade Gallery is working with a small number of European artists - Christo Viola, Csaba Kis Róka, Meg Mosley, Sarah Maple and Syl Ojalla - whose work ranges from oil paintings to animated gifs, on new ways to share, distribute and sell artworks. Their work is provocative, sexy, relevant and exciting, so Lemonade’s job is to keep up and be the same.

Already the questions bubbling up are exciting, from the sorts of technology we use, to which bits are the artworks, to why we’re even bothering with a space anyway. The last one is a beauty, seeing as we haven’t even opened the doors yet, but it’s the best of the bunch and one we should ask every day.

In fact, one of my favourite interview questions is always “what is the point?”, as it cuts to the heart of the matter super-quick. Most arts organisations, spaces and creatives should probably ask it every day, perhaps over a champagne breakfast, and certainly when we're talking about "supporting emerging artists" we should just cut straight to it. If you can’t come up with an answer that involves only doing it once, you’re doing it wrong.

Lemonade Gallery launches on 6th June 2014

More information at lemonadegallery.com

or @lemgallery

I've tried to resist jumping into this week's hot debate in the arts - how much artists earn - as it's one of those areas that is so filled by personal experiences and passions that it is hard to engage a 360 degree debate without being burned at the stake. Offering a counter view is a lose/lose scenario. But since the story now seems to be popping up in every arts journal, blog and feed going, fuck it. I've been working in arts and entertainment for over twenty years now, I'm comfortable with losing.

My first thought is that whilst there are a huge number of artists and makers who are underpaid or not paid at all, it isn't anyone's fault. Suggesting that haggling venues or metropolitan focussed funders are to blame is entirely missing the enormity of the problem. Artists and makers on the whole don't earn very much because we, on the whole, don't buy very much. We don't buy very much because a lot of what is made doesn't speak to us, is out of date or just a little bit crap. There is some good stuff out there, but not nearly enough to feed all of us who think we deserve it.

Then again, most people don't buy what we make or turn up to our things simply because when they were little, maybe 4 or 5, we began to wean them off creativity and free thinking altogether, preferring instead to feed them measurable skills and employment focused learning. The result is that when most people - them - those who are not us - have enough money in their pockets to buy our stuff, they don't, because we spent 10 to 15 years telling them it wasn't really important.

It is everybody's fault that most artists and makers don't get paid very much (I say most, because of course not all artists, creatives and makers are underpaid, not by a long shot), and dividing us up into saints and sinners won't help anybody. More than that, that path and type of response is part of the problem, and the reason why we never seem to move any further forward, despite endless proposals, initiatives and hashtags.

Venues. I have worked at, set up and run a fair few, but I can't speak for all of them. I can, however represent The Firestation and how that fits with the current conversation and language. Venues like The Firestation are not sentient, they are run by people who, like artists and makers, have professional and personal choices to make.

Pete, Benn, Chloe, Chantal, Charlotte, Adrian, Hannah, George - there are lots more - and myself are all on salaries lower than we could earn in other sectors. We know this, and we revel in it. Why? Because we all work here on purpose, because there is nowhere else quite like it and we understand each others motives. We have all made sacrifices, but more importantly we have made the decision to trade a little salary and maybe a few perks for living a life that makes us feel alive. This business pays what it can (which is not bad all things considered), and directly supports around 20 people in varying degrees. We joke about the New York Office and staff trip to Tahiti. One day.

Benn is our Programme Manager, I guess he would be the principle "haggler" referred to in the articles and posts on this topic. I prefer to think of him as an extremely good negotiator. His job is to match the needs of an artist or touring company with the realities of our audience and space and the aesthetic aims of the company, which for the record go like this;

"Life is better, for the individual and collective, when creative activity is prolific and culture is rich and dynamic."

and

"Firestation Arts and Culture adopts a dynamic and progressive role in the celebration and promotion of all forms of contemporary culture and entertainment. By showcasing and instigating performing arts, visual arts, critical thinking and production it aims to support and drive forward cultural activity and the importance of a creative life."

A normal conversation(s) with Benn, or any other regional venue might go like this;

"Hi Benn, we'd like to bring War Horse to you next year. Want it?"

"Well, hey, it is one of the most talked about pieces of theatre in the last decade, we'd love it. How much is it?"

"£25k"

"Right... well I know we'd sell out, but we only have 150 seats. That's £200 a ticket (VAT init). Can you do it for £8k??"

Click.

or

"Hi Benn, we're an emerging theatre company and we're like to include you in or 2014 tour."

"Great, I've heard or you, it's a very interesting piece. How much do you need?"

"£1,000"

"Ok. Our audiences are growing, but they're not huge for new writing just yet. I'd like to think we'll get 100 in, but it might only be 50. If we do a £15 ticket, can you do a £600 guarantee with an 80/20 split to you after that?"

"Ooh, Benn, you're a tough haggler, but it sounds fair enough. Lets do it!"

"Brilliant!"

"and we'll make sure we get some excellent copy and images to you in a timely manner so you can market the shit out of us!"

"Even better"

Click

Or something like that.

As I said, I can't speak for every venue, booker or experience, but certainly every venue I have visited or worked with in recent years, the many people I spoke to when researching "Fireworks" and all the others I meet at conferences, drop ins and the lavish champagne receptions we hold every month all work in a similar way to us.

There are of course funding opportunities and some superb initiatives (House for example) that address this mechanic, but they are ultimately sticking plasters (no disrespect intended) when dealing with the core problem, the gap between how much most people will pay for the arts (because this isn't a comprehensive cultural problem) and how much we need/want to earn.

The Firestation isn't perfect of course, the deal may be done but cash flow haunts us like Bela Lugosi in a mood! With multiple revenue streams and types of income, keeping track of it is a full time job (mine in fact), and with HMRC kicking the shit out of us every quarter (not a charity you see) more than one artist or supplier has had to wait longer than we'd like to get paid. But most of the time people understand that we're all caught together in a bit of a cultural shit storm. We understand each other, we're all on the same side. Right?

We could of course blow what little funding and resources we have in a blaze of egotistical glory over a year (probably more like 6 months) - booking stuff that we think is important and shouting at people for not coming and funders for not funding - but that's been done before. Aside from what we're doing this week, next month and next year, our job is to make sure that we're here in 5 years time, maybe even 10, so that there will still be some kind of arts provision in Windsor, and places just like us, in 50 years time.

I have two daughters aged 7 and 10 and there is no doubt that underlying much of my decision making today, is the desire that when they are older they too will have a place to embrace culture and creativity in whatever shape that may take. To visit events, engage with ideas, immerse themselves in beauty and poetry, or simply get trashed in a place where people and creativity bounce and collide around them.

Of course, it may already be too late. In much the same way that we fret about global warming and environmental catastrophe whilst buying rapidly obsolete technology in our sweat-shop clothes, most of our conversations about culture, value and getting paid happen as the probability of a creative renaissance drifts further over the horizon.

I came across an old photo of the D-Day landings in a newspaper the other day, and was struck by a powerful thought. There was a soldier lying in the surf, half in and half out of the water, and I wondered if he knew that he died at Omaha? We're all heroes in our heads, survivors. Did he know that his brave and terrifying leap from the landing craft lasted only a few steps?

On some days I think that we, us arts people, us underpaid but righteous creatives, are a little like the soldier on the beach. Everybody whose looking back down the beach, everybody looking at the photograph for over 65 years knows that we're dead in the water, but in our minds we're still heroes, running up the beach to take on the enemy.

Vimeo surfing for Bar Pop! today..

..found this terrific video, great project and track too :-)

Recent years have seen the start of a sharp, deep and enthusiastic challenge to how the arts are supported by the public and private purse. This might be ok, if our audiences were fresh, far reaching and happy to pay the real cost of a ticket. But years of funding have so distorted the market place and frankensteined our output that none of us, culture maker or consumer, know where we are or what we want.

Austerity isn't just a money problem, not for us at least, it's the microscope that exposes the disconnect at the heart of what we make, who we make it for and why we bother.

Cueva de las Manos & Frankenstein

As part of putting my thoughts together for this presentation, two images have lodged in my mind and become integral to this piece - first is Cueva de las Manos, or Cave of Hands, a 13,000 year old cave painting

and second is Boris Carloff's cold stare from the stills of the 1931 film of Frankenstein. They are, admittedly, unlikely bedfellows, but I have reconciled myself to the fact that they both belong here. Perhaps they are the yin and yang of my thoughts.

We'll come back to Cueva de las Manos, but for the time being let it sit quietly in the corner of your mind, a beautiful and surprisingly modern image, made with the creative engagement of many and seemingly for no purpose other than to celebrate their togetherness.

Frankenstein, however, we need to deal with straight away and up front, but to do so we need first to go back to June 1945. As the UK, Europe and indeed most of the world begins the task of dragging itself up from the ruins of war and the trauma of such violent loss,

John Maynard Keynes stands before Parliament and puts forward his vision for the cultural near future, a plan "restoring to the nation something it should never have lost". Out of death, fear and fire the Arts Council is born, with an opening fund of a mere £235k (ironically, at the going rate it looks likely that the Arts Council budget in it's 70th year may not be far off where it started), The Arts Council kick starts theatre productions, orchestras and exhibitions and within a few years plays its part in the Festival of Britain, an epic event, the ambition and infrastructure of which still resonates today.

Scroll forward 67 years and our closest equivalent is the London 2012 Festival, although comparisons with Woodstock would perhaps be more appropriate, "if you can remember it you weren't there" they say of the 60s, for London 2012 try "you were there, you just didn't know it". Arts and culture (of the publicly funded kind) and the Arts Council no longer need audiences to meet their brief, it would seem.

Whilst I support the Arts Council’s gear change in 2011/2012, and recognise that the public arts sector is supported by a range of bodies from trusts and local authorities to businesses and philanthropists, it is the case that slowly but surely, over the last 70 years, kick starting has become maintaining, supporting has become selecting and funding has become engineering.

It's hard to make the distinction between failure and need, but with decades of focus on the institutions of culture, the bricks and mortar of delivery, somehow our activity has drifted further and further from a collective creativity and shared aesthetic impulse and we have created something truly horrible. Welcome to the Frankenstein Sector.

King Lear

"Save the Arts" we cry out, throats dry from calling and wills weak from loneliness. But we don't mean save the arts, we mean save us. Save us from the poverty of irrelevance, save us from the vulnerability of dependence, save us from the weight of our agendas and above all save us from ourselves.

For as we campaign for our worth and argue amongst ourselves over internships and regions, culture and creativity continue to fizz and progress regardless, in nightclubs and networks, in shops and forests, in public and in private. These may not always take the forms that we know or even the outputs that we like, but who are we to say beauty and the unique energy of aesthetic transmission needs a stage, script, a canvas or even our involvement?

Perhaps our value collapsed when one person in a crowd of 300, eyes tight shut and bass pounding in their ears, feeling their heart beat with perfection surrendered themselves to the moment, or when two friends, over a telephone network, shared the graffiti stencil that made them both lol.

Empty Pockets and Desperate

It was mentioned to me not so long ago that the income formula for arts and cultural organisations should be around 40% earned, with the rest coming from public and private funding sources. My view, from studying a large number of accounts going back 5 years is that our most robust organisations operate more along the lines of 70% earned and 30% funded, and there are precious few of these. From now on, I think for organisations to even survive they should be operating around 80/20.

The reality for us, as the 21st century begins to reveal its history, is that whilst the current shrinking of public funds and tightening of incomes represents a current and very real challenge, the underlying disconnect that bedrocks our helplessness and has been a long time in the making, is our most likely executioner.

To be clear, the disconnect is the difference in value that we assign to our activities and the value assigned to them by the public at large. It is born out by the amount of subsidy required simply to keep going, the lack of influence the sector has on policy and our social profile generally.

In the 16th century over 30% of Londoners visited the theatre every month. In 2011 our highly engaged culture seekers represent around 7% of the population. (Source: Arts Audiences Insight, ACE 2011)

In 1946, cinema admissions in the UK alone were 1.6 billion. In 2012, despite showing a little growth on previous years, cinema admissions only reached 172 million. (Source: Film Distributors Association, “UK Cinema Admissions 1935 to date”)

We are the architects of our own collapse, recognising too late that the business models we have built, the institutions we have protected and the dialogues we have adopted have only served to fracture our relationship with people, and therefore with the future. I have worked with artists who will accept rows of empty seats with a shrug and receive sponsorship from businesses with lukewarm gratitude, whilst grinning from ear to ear at the Arts Council logo emblazoned on their posters. It's not the money that is making them smile, although this is nice, it's the validation, but this approval - learned from a lifetimes education - is the sugar that coats the poison.

A suite of distortions just like these grows unchecked throughout the sector. We are awash with mixed messages, hypocrisies and confusion. I meet customer who ask me to bring emerging artists and performers to them but object when the ticket price crosses their value threshold, often roughly equivalent to Harvester "Original Combo".

Our need to generate audiences, in a frame of disinterest, has led to regional ticket prices hopelessly out of balance with the costs of production, and this in turn feeds the downward pressure on cultural value that keeps the sector trapped in poverty. Heavy investment in bricks and mortar assets has meant that many organisations not only rely on their rising book values to balance the accounts, but are at the same time unable to dispose of them to adopt new models (who else would want a listed arts venue?).

Touring companies routinely lose shows because their costs are based on an ideal notion of income not market realities, whilst funded venues blow thousands on marketing to bring in accidental audiences, because this is what brings more funding.

The confusion in the sector is further evidenced by how we demonstrate success. Audience numbers, financial result, longevity or something altogether vaguer like wellbeing? These metrics, some our own some borrowed from others, may well guide and sharpen us, but if we let them drive and define us we are lost.

What People Want

Whilst the arts sector is currently marginal, the wider creative culture sector is far from it, with a healthy impact and deep fusion with our everyday lives. Music, gaming, fashion and publishing are very much alive despite the shadow of austerity and the public arts sector should perhaps look to these areas for a glimpse of what our public wants and needs.

People need an active role in shaping the future, but we give them monsters. As quaint as it may sound, people need beauty, poetry and purpose. We give them monsters. People want ambition and progress, despite the fact that comes with a measure of uncertainty, but we give them the stolen and stitched reprint of what was. Above all people need us to deliver the new, to find a horizon the separates our history from our future so that we can embrace both, away from the influence of our dusty and derelict institutions.

Bush Fires

In a superb keynote for State of the (Arts) Nation in Belfast in March, Diane Ragsdale explored what it is to be a sustainable arts organisation and the paradoxes that exist within that ambition. She gave mention to bush fires to illustrate one of those paradoxes and I'd like to explore that a little further here.

Wikipedia's entry on Fire Ecology states that “Many ecosystems... have evolved with fire as a natural and necessary contributor to habitat vitality and renewal. Many plant species in naturally fire-affected environments require fire to germinate, to establish, or to reproduce, or all three. Fire suppression not only eliminates these species, but also the animals that depend upon them. Finally, fire suppression can lead to the build-up of inflammable debris and the creation of less frequent but much larger and destructive wildfires.”

It's a phenomenon that mirrors perfectly the place we have come to after years of protectionist thinking from funders and protagonists alike. When did we slip from kick starting new ideas to protecting the old ones and are we currently in our wildfire, or is it yet to come?

With this in mind, if we are happy to carry out survey after survey to map the economic value of arts and culture to demonstrate why The Arts as it is should be valued and should be protected, should we not also measure the things that we lose?

How many revolutionary cultural projects never see the light of day because we are not equipped to support or even recognise them? What is the number of brilliant young creatives who drift away from us and the number of ideas hungry everyday consumers who look elsewhere because their paths are clogged with Shakespeares and Warhols, with theatres and opera houses, with The Arts and Education?

We must recognise that saving the arts might not be producing the results we are actually looking for. We invest so much energy in engaging with young people, the disenfranchised and isolated, but then betray them by suggesting that project success comes when they adopt our methods. We must own up to the fact that many of the most significant and exciting cultural developments of the past 25 years have not come from our sector, coming more often from computing and technology, an industry notably rich with bush fires, death and renewal.

Exploding Culture

When we are so entrenched in the practices and ways of thinking that have created this disconnect, looking for a way out is like unpicking a knot that has no start and no end. But there are strategies that make a pathway to a reconnected and vital arts sector that I would like to suggest here.

In “Fireworks” I described a way of working that I called “Exploding Culture”. It’s a term that describes the process of breaking apart the rules of what we do, challenging our value scales, building new partnerships and having the confidence to present ideas that we do not understand or may later dismiss. As a first step it can be as simple or as complex as needed, changing the wording on your website, the music in your foyer, making a phone call to start a conversation you always thought would be interesting or making some space for the performer who has asked ten times over to be on your stage. Sometimes, simply moving a desk from one office to another can start a chain reaction that invigorates an entire organisation.

Furthermore, breaking our habits and finding new ways of working also brings with it new opportunities and revenue streams. Focused on championing and educating the richness of modern life, cultural organisations could and should be partnering with architects, academics, coders and chefs, breathing life into stagnant business models and opening the door to new incomes and financial independence.

The shift here is that not only do we leave behind the motivation to make something complete or justified, but also that we move away from the notion of end product at all, favoring instead a process focused activity. We are seeking meaning not prescribing, searching for aesthetic endeavor in whatever form that may take, and acting only as conduit and tour guide.

Most importantly, I believe that the best, indeed only way to reinvigorate the production of art is to stop trying to make it altogether. Culture is where the action is in the 21st century and the process of breaking chunks off to label as “Art” only produces static relics. Behaving culturally, together, in the flux of new invention and with an acceptance that it is ok to not know where we are headed, is the only way to bridge the current gap between our sector and our public.

We need visionaries who champion and demonstrate that the power of arts and culture is it’s absurdity. That it’s essence is oppositional to logic, measure and knowing and by occupying this space it can not only be stronger but also financially robust.

Einstein

There is a particularly perfect quote from Albert Einstein that I like to use here as it precisely illustrates the challenge before us

“Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created”

In other words, whilst we can tinker with our make up and tweak our outputs, to really change our fate we must step outside of our practice altogether. Thinking back to our bushfires, there is a degree of destruction that we must embrace to move forward, but it doesn’t have to be painful. Rather like the end of a romance, we can let go with tears and affection, whilst still heading into the future with excitement and joyful expectation.

A 21st Century Aesthetic

The point of all this reassessing, exploring and un-making is to create the space to find our voice, our language, our soul. To find our own transmission forms and meaning, built from what it is to be alive in now. When the world around us has changed so much, why does the theatre of today look essentially the same as the theatre of Ancient Greece? Is it intimacy or laziness?

The disconnect between us and modern audiences is not just a result of how we do things, it is also created by our hesitancy to make work that is truly modern. One of the most common sentiments I hear from friends and colleagues, from students and customers, young and old, is how bored we all are. We have so much but are lost in a storm of options.

We have an urgent need to find a 21st century aesthetic, to find a way to transmit the aesthetic experience that is not a tweak or rehash of previous successes. We must not shy away from the ideological casualties and confusion that are a necessary path to the new, and must not rest until we have found a result that is genuinely independent and modern, if such a thing can ever exist.

Cave of Hands

To close, let's return to our Cave of Hands. Unlike other cave paintings, which depict hunting triumphs and an array of beasts, this appears to have no function other than the joy of collective action and mark making. It's colours are vibrant and alive giving it a surprising modernity, whilst it's mix of tiny and grown up makers marks exudes a tactile intimacy.

It reminds me that at one time there was no distinction between the making and the consuming, no high and low culture and no disconnect between creating and living. How complicated we have become. Then, as if by magic, it reminds me that what we do now and what those hands did then has never really changed, that the most potent and long lasting sparks of culture always come from creating and sharing - in the spaces we inhabit - something we can't quite do any other way.

Perhaps there is not so much separating us after all, only a little time and a little space, we just need to come out of our caves and into the morning sun, to begin the hunt for beauty, poetry and purpose again, together.

I must confess, I left. Got up, said my “excuse me's” to my row and headed elsewhere. I never do that.. well not often. The last time I walked out of anything was the Spiderman reboot, which was so full of plot holes and sentimental teen angst I could've thrown up. Since I lasted longer with Spiderman, it's fair to say What Next? was not for me.

But, as I don't want to be cartoon angry boy for ever, let me start with some positives.

It wasn't that long ago when an event like "What Next?", or a group of 650 cultural professionals as we were, would have referred constantly to “The Arts”... The Arts this.. The Arts that.. capital T capital A, with all the certainty of the Aesthetic Elite and a smug incredulity that there are (gasp) some people who “just don't get it" (there was still a little of that, but this is the positive bit). On this day, however, everybody was talking about "art and culture", broad, inclusive, varied and not even capitalised. Heavens, Bernard Donoghue even championed the theatre, games designers and blockbuster films in the same breath. Hoorah for us! We are changing - whether our new found chums in multiplexes, record company offices and design studios will want to hang out with us remains to be seen - but at least we are playing.

The other good thing about What Next? is in the title, or lack of title in fact. It's a big question what next? and although it may have been intended to merely imply a sense of investigation and openness, it carries within it all the uncertainty, loss and tragedy that will define the next few years of cultural production, whether publicly funded or not. The Arts (damn!) and a large part of the culture industries have crashed into the 21st century with an enormous crisis of purpose - stretched thin over social networks, washed out by hyper-media and beaten by the curious tyranny of creative democracy - it's hard to know what we're doing and our audiences (of course) share our confusion. It makes for a bit of a weird conference, but the fact that we are beginning to come together in the darkness, around the warm fires of our failures, is the first step to seeing in the dawn.

So, why did I leave? Well, first of all there was all this talk of starting a movement, or was it not starting a movement? I got lost somewhere between David Lan's assertion that there was no agenda other than this "What Next?" question and Sir Ken Robinson's peculiar endorsement of "the mission" and overriding message that it's all the fault of politicians. Either way, this movement thing bothers me deeply. I am of course reminded of Groucho Marx's "I'd never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member", but more than that is that it just seems so quaint, so old fashioned, so us! In an age of rampant social networks and frenzied agenda setting, even the mention of a movement seems hopelessly out of touch.

So to is this notion of engaging with politicians, of pushing the importance or plight of arts and culture into the political spotlight, making it "a manifesto issue". When voting numbers are shrinking year on year, and the fate of the country is being decided by fewer and fewer individuals, why on earth should we waste our time talking to the figureheads of nobody? If we spent the same energy building our audiences, making our output the lifeblood of, well life, politicians would surely come to us. We might lose out in the short term, at least or institutions might, but this is the long game, right?

Furthermore - as it cropped up more than once on the day - when politicians like Maria Miller ask the cultural industries once again to explain how they contribute to our economy, we could simply refuse to engage. It would be a far more interesting scenario than playing the frustrated regurgitation game. Then again, we could simply tell her to fuck off. I use the words explicitly and with purpose, for we are also often far to polite in our responses to such resource wasting ignorance. Sure, politicians may currently hold the purse strings, but in a few years strings is all they will be holding. We should join the rest of the population and move on.

Fuck off, Maria. Done.

After the movement / non-movement bit came the biggest tragedy of all. Art, we are told, has the power to change communities, rapping the ability to turn lives around and education should never be considered as separable from culture. I'm sorry have we met before? Oh yes, at EVERY ARTS CONFERENCE I'VE EVER BEEN TO! For a moment I panicked, wondering if - Bobby Ewing style - I was about to wake up to find the past 20 years had all been a dream, whisked back from the 21st century to some late eighties community arts rally. From that moment "What Next?", when faced with the reality of needing some actual content and ideas, became "What Was" and once again we sank back into the glue of our preconceptions and allegiances.

This is the moment when I left, I know there may well have been good things I missed, but outside on Shaftesbury Avenue the sun was shinning and culture was being gloriously busy. I still have my "What Next?" card though. A big brown postcard that invites me to pledge (yes, really, just like the Brownies and Cubs) to engage with an MP, treat my stakeholders as high-level donors, sign up to something called the "What Next? grid", start a group or "Other". It's worth pointing out that if your "Other" is "to unpick and dismantle the public arts sector’s over reliance on bricks and mortar solutions to the transmission of shared aesthetic worth", then tough. You don't have room. You could fit "Pray" though.

But seeing as I am writing here and you are reading it, and we have as much room as we need, here are my "Others";

I pledge to focus the majority of my energies on finding and supporting contemporary cultural activity, whatever form that may take, that resonates wildly with the population and expresses what it is to be alive in the 21st century, not the past.

I pledge to allow the institutions that I understand to stop when they are no longer needed, to make space for new generations to make institutions that I do not understand.

Delighted that my talk "Who Is The Us That Them Is Protecting?" has been included in the Arts In Society conference in Budapest this June. An overview is included below. Arts In Society is always a superb (and intense!) few days of ideas and connections, hopefully see some of you there!

Arts organisations and the whole CCI Sector are currently facing their biggest challenge for decades; a seismic, global re-evaluation of the allocation of public funds to support creative projects alongside the prospect of years of shrinking customer spending in a challenging economic climate.

The squeeze is already highlighting the vulnerability of organizations, flushing out the failing business models and fair-weather policies. There are undoubtedly more shocks and disasters to come. But the tragedy of the arts and culture sector is about more than economics, it is haunted by a lack of relevance and failure of mission that has been growing despite the cosy drinks at 10 Downing Street and flag waving cultural projects to unify nations.

Using audience data and social studies from Arts Council UK and the European Commission Culture Programme amongst others, alongside blog extracts, keynotes and tweets, "Who Is The Us That Them Is Protecting" seeks to explore the identity of the arts sector, from the position that understanding and challenging our core values, assumptions and make-up is the only first step to a renewed relevance for the arts.