You may already know, most likely you won’t, that although I have spent the best part of twenty years in the arts and entertainment industry, my move into the third sector is a relatively recent one. It has so far been a thrilling, exciting and utterly rewarding trip. I confess, however, to not anticipating the feeling of being abruptly transported to a different dimension, or my surprise at being frequently eyed as if I had just arrived from another planet – complete with green skin and tin foil trousers. It has most definitely been a close encounter with the third kind!
My career has taken me from arts co-ops and pirate radio to the music industry, nightclubs and entertainment venues, online communities, galleries and members clubs. Some have been commercially very successful, most have just about stood up on their own, a couple have bombed spectacularly. All have in common the aim – thankfully often achieved – of making meaningful encounters or chapters in other people’s lives, whilst making commercial sense for those involved, however humble.
Dan Eastmond
It is then with an ongoing sense of befuddlement, that I encounter the public arts sector’s allergic reaction to profit, it’s nagging guilt when stumbling upon surpluses (often akin to the horror of a high street purse snatch) and the undercurrent that somehow commercial success and the pursuit of profit is a dirty business that betrays a lack of artistic or social merit.
This might be acceptable if the sector was a public funds cash-cow or a self-sufficient industry used to, even if uneasy with, six figure black numbers at the bottom of every annual return. This is sadly not the case. Public arts is a funding junkie, a trust-fund chancer, picking up the phone to deliver apologetic words every six months and beg for another chance. It is constantly under the threat of a change in public priorities and smothered by the weight of its obligations and gratitude, with ongoing losses trapping organisations in a subservient and ultimately toothless role.
Initially intended to offer some internal evaluation tools and frameworks for the team at Firestation Arts, ‘Kick Out The Jams’ is a piece of research that also hopes to provide an informed and contemporary set of ideas relating to modern cultural production as an influential, profitable, socially minded and publicly supported industry. It’s a fourth sector notion, and no industry needs it more. ‘Kick Out The Jams’ (a title unashamedly borrowed from MC5’s ferocious status quo banishing anthem) is a collection of proposals, ideas, financial analysis and conversations, of which this interview with ARC Chief Exec Annabel Turpin is the second.
With the help of Firestation Arts’ Financial Consultant Samantha Dharwar, we have surveyed and compared the public accounts of ten existing Arts venues from year-end 2005 to 2009, to gain some solid data on the current financial reality for arts venues and ask the first question – “What’s the problem?”
Dan Eastmond: Our survey paints a picture of a severely financially challenged industry, with at least half of arts venues making routine losses despite funding. What do you think about that, is it a surprise?
Annabel Turpin
Annabel Turpin; It’s not a surprise, sadly. It’s not right; it’s not what we are aiming at. I would love to have a surplus and be building reserves, but in all my previous organisations I have never had reserves to work with. I think that would enable you to do so much more, and manage finances so much better. [When you are making profits] You can take greater risks, play around, invest, you need to spend to make money and we are on such tiny budgets that we have not got that money.
I can give some crude examples of that, although tiny, like having the cash in the bank to pay your insurance premium in one lump sum instead of spreading it through the year. I’ve been able to move slowly over the course of a year from just being able to scrape together the monthly payment – with credit interest on top – to being able to pay it in one lump. That saves us money.
Another example is the lights we have just invested in, we’re able to install them because we have cash in the bank, but that will also save us money over three years. We have never been in the position to do that before. Because the Arts is such a poor sector, it’s so hard to trade ourselves out of being poor, because we have no slack.
DE; You mentioned your previous organisations, where were they?
AT; My first arts venue role was in Coventry, but I grew up in Devon. I worked at Warwick Arts Centre in the University of Warwick which was a very different experience because it was part of the University so cash flow? – We never had to worry about that. It was a heavily funded, well-subsidised venue and that puts you in a specific place.
Norden Farm Centre For The Arts
When I took over as Director of Norden Farm in Maidenhead it was pretty much at the point of closure. We had to fight to keep it alive and although we managed to get funding to stay open, there was absolutely no slack, so trying to trade out of that was extremely hard. When I arrived here at ARC, our losses for that year were c£170,000, and although there were some reserves in place from it’s re-launch, we were back to trying to trade out of that position with no slack.
DE; So is the move to a more positive cash flow something that was already underway or did you turn this around yourself?
AT; It was thanks to additional funding, we had some Sustain funding from the Arts Council last year and part of that was to alleviate our cash flow. It has helped us achieve this and given us some money to invest in capital improvements that will make the spaces more usable, more commercially sustainable.
DE; What are ARC’s commercial and cultural strategies? Do they exist independently and how do you knit them together?
AT; Very simply, the way I see it is the building is our main asset. We are a venue, so whilst there is lots of work in the arts sector currently around working outside of the building and in the community – and we’re part of that – the building is our main asset and fundamentally there is a business model inbuilt in the building.
One space is big and has a greater capacity that is ideal for comedy and music; the other space is small and ideal for theatre, spoken word and dance. So in very simplistic terms I feel that one should be subsidising the other. You generate surpluses from the comedy and music events and you use this to subsidise the dance, drama and spoken word.
It’s about balance of activity, not only artistically but also in terms of how much we hire out to third parties, how we use our spaces, how we generate income from what might appear to be non-income generating spaces e.g. the foyer.
Culturally and artistically it is about presenting high quality work and building a loyalty with our audience. Part of it is that fundamentally we are a small-scale organisation, we are never going to get big names, except comedians from the TV. We are never going to have George Clooney on our stage.
So, people aren’t coming here because a person is famous, they come here because they trust what we do and believe that what we offer is going to be really good entertainment for them. We have to build up that loyalty and I believe we do that through a consistently high quality offering. Part of our strategy then is ‘consistency of offer’ across the art forms, and making sure that it’s good enough and builds up loyalty with our audience.
DE; Do you feel you have a duty to maintain that balance and to be commercially viable, from your own point of view and in your position here? Or do you think the Arts should be supported by funding?
AT; Both. I think we have a responsibility personally and as an organisation to be as commercially viable as we can be. There are no excuses to be slack with money, wasting money, and not operating in the most commercial way they can. But, I also believe that the Arts should be accessible to everyone and because of that funding is sometimes necessary to enable that to happen.
DE; You mentioned accessibility. What about works that are either incredibly progressive or very niche, so by their nature could be considered as inaccessible or likely to make a loss?
AT; I think it’s dangerous to label that kind of work inaccessible. I think people link those two things too easily. People think if something is too alternative, experimental or progressive it’s therefore in some way inaccessible. Yet you can have the most traditional, basic interpretation of a Shakespeare play that’s still completely inaccessible if it’s badly done. I think there is a spectrum of work from the most popular to the most progressive and they both need to exist, that’s about developing the art form, about making sure there is exciting new work that makes people think. That is one of the most exciting thing about the arts, that it makes people think.
DE; So what is ‘accessible’ then, if it’s not about popularity of difficulty?
2headedpigeon Theatre Co
AT; Different things to different people, but ultimately it’s something people can relate to. One of the things that underlines our artistic policy at ARC is to present work that is relevant to people, to our audiences. Here we are in Stockton in Teeside, which is very different to Maidenhead in Berkshire, or the Old Vic in Bristol. I think relevance is important and it can mean accessibility; people have to feel the work they see has, in some way, a resonance with them and that can happen in a myriad of ways for different people. Accessibility is partly about relevance.
DE; Does that belief about accessibility and relevance cross over from your artistic program to how you run the rest of the venue? For example in the drinks you stock?
AT; Yes, but we tread a fine line here. Part of what ARC is here to do, I believe, is to raise people’s aspirations. It’s a cliché but we really are here to say to people “You can hope for something better. You can have something better”. We are always trying to show people something better than they would be imagining, but equally we don’t want to scare people off. At the café bar for example, I would rather stock a range of things that are a little different to what you can get in the cafe down the road, but if we went all out, totally organic for example, it would most likely scare many people off because it would be alien to them. The last catering company we had in wanted to bring in lots of organic products, but without well-known brand names that our audiences will recognise we will just alienate them, and food is a really good example of how you can and can’t do that. So yes, those principles do run across the organisation.
One thing I’m really concerned with is that the voice of the arts is currently dominated by a small number of organisations – The Royal Opera House, The National Theatre and so on. Now it’s great they exist, and if they heard me I’m sure they would say “but we do loads of that educational and community stuff” – I’m sure they do – but never-the-less when you read about the Arts in the media, when you hear politicians talk about the Arts they only reference those kind of places which appear to be very elite to the wider public.
Arts organisations like ours play a much deeper role in their community and I think where the Arts sector is really missing out is that we are really good at engaging people, we get people to come and experience what’s on offer and we should be using that. Where we are trying to align our work to social, educational and health agendas, that is really important and that is not recognised enough.
DE; Two things spring to mind, one is that I understand your caution in labeling those places as elite but I would go further and question the contemporary relevance those venues have. One of the articles that dismayed me the most in the run up to the election, when there was much talk about Arts cuts, was around the launch for the Cultural Capital manifesto. Neil MacGregor (director of the British Museum) said that “We want to give politicians the confidence to put on their CVs not what football team they support, but why life without Schubert is impossible” and I thought, of all the things, could you not have lied and said the Arctic Monkeys. You had to go with Schubert, so some of the population would have thought “Schu-who?” and many would have thought “that means absolutely nothing to me”. It was very frustrating.
AT; I agree.
DE; Then the other thing which was quite interesting is I have had a few email exchanges with a prominent Arts figure, about getting his involvement with this research, which I have yet to clinch – although I’m reading his book and he annoys me, so I might not now! I sent him an email saying “I’m doing this piece of work about sustainable arts models and would love your involvement,” and I got this email back saying “I would love to help, but I have never found the discussion about sustainability and finances particularly relevant.” So I thought, well that’s probably because you’re not in a regional Arts venue under the threat of a funding cut! Could he not have said “I find it boring” instead, I might have agreed with that.
AT; Jeremy Hunt at the ‘State of the Arts’ conference said in his speech something about “an actor starting his career at The National Theatre” At question time someone stood up and said “Can I just point out that no actor starts at the National, it’s the pinnacle of their career!” It just shows the dominance. Don’t use these as examples, it doesn’t help us as a sector, we are so weak as a sector at lobbying and arguing our case and what the wider benefits are. Communicating the wider benefits, how we help our communities and the relevance we can have, we are not good at it and that’s the reason for that dominance.
DE; One of the things I have looked at is the idea that Arts venues and the arts sector, because it is so reliant on funding, has ended up picking up the agenda and the language of the people funding it. When we talk about arts venues being social dynamos and raising aspirations, I’m really split as to how I feel about it. Part of me thinks it’s true and that’s great, but then I think it’s just another example of the wind being taken out of our sails. Are we not now chasing someone else’s measurement tools?
AT; I have thought about that a lot recently, particularly since being here. If I stand up and argue for the arts helping all those other things, am I somehow reducing the importance of just putting on really good stuff for people to take part in? I’ve really wrestled with that, but I’ve come to the conclusion that you can do both and what’s more we should do both because they are interlinked, otherwise we are in danger of being too elite and missing out what is going on in the rest of the country.
To a certain extent it’s about reaching people. We could just put good stuff on for people to see, audience development strategy after strategy to slowly increase our audience. But by working with some of those other agendas, without compromising what we do, we can get more people to embrace the arts. We can run a substance misuse campaign with young people and use creativity in the arts for that and those people will benefit from their engagement with the arts and learn something about substance abuse. It’s something I have wrestled with and I do now and again bump up against it and think hang on, we are not a community Arts organisation.
DE; I have to constantly stress to people the difference between a community centre and an Arts centre, and maybe this is part of the change from 20th to 21st century.
AT; Going back to the language of funding, I have been looking at organisations in Europe, in the Netherlands, Sweden and Finland where subsidies for arts organisations are 70 to 80%. Frankly, it’s made them quite lazy and when you talk to them about their audiences they are not really bothered, because they don’t need to be. They are not reliant on their audiences in the same way we are. Their audience development strategy is “if the same people turn up we will get the same funding. It’s fine”. Diversity is not on anyone’s agenda and venue managers are quite comfortable saying our audiences are white, 50 year old women, and that’s fine. Well you wouldn’t find any venue manager in this country saying that, certainly not in an Arts Council funded venue! It makes the UK look streets ahead in terms of it’s thinking about audiences.
We asked one venue manager what was the incentive therefore to find an audience, and they said, “Well you know, it’s nice to have an audience”. So that’s made me think about our funding, if we are lazy in our thinking because of our funding, but I don’t think we are. It’s interesting to see that extreme and then question what’s driving our own priorities, and is it right. That research has made the UK look better to me than I expected it to.
DE; So if in two years time you had no funding support at all, but you’re doing so much volume on tickets, drinks etc that you’re generating routine surpluses, what would you do differently?
AT; We would be able to bring more exciting work here. We would be able to invest in work being made that is relevant to our audiences – I’m not necessarily talking about us becoming a producer, but building relationships with companies and artists that understand our audiences and are here to see our audiences on a longer term basis. Being able to do more work for people who don’t have the freedom to access the arts, far more interesting and more costly projects to help people find their way here, taking work out to the community. We do this to a certain extent already, but mainly to other people’s agendas. Most of the community arts work we do is education, health or social-care focused because that’s where we can access the funding. If we were generating our own surpluses so we were not answerable in the same way to our funders, then we could use it to run arts projects for the community.
DE; What are the principle or important factors that currently stop you from doing that? What would need to change?
AT; We need to use our capacity better. However much you trim your costs you need to be doing a certain amount of activity to cover your costs. We are getting much better, but we need to increase our activity and use our capacity better and it needs to be a balance of activity that doesn’t increase our risk. More commercial activity, letting our spaces more and working with partnerships can help increase activity.
DE; Is that a scale issue as well? Do you think the design of the building you have been given allows you to do this?
AT; I think there’s a sensible balance in the building, it should and can work. I try not to think too much in “what ifs”. We are where we are, it cost £10m to put us here and I don’t intend to waste that money. If you put on the right stuff people will come. I have yet to meet someone who thinks they are in the perfect location. In the 90’s there was so much money put into building new Arts venues and it got a bit careless, so now I think let’s stop building and knocking down walls and use the money to use what we already have. I think people sometimes get a little greedy and ungrateful.
The Auditorium, Firestation Centre for Arts & Culture
DE; I notice that because a lot of Arts venues are either old local authority buildings that have been gifted to the arts or are new builds on under-used land like Norden Farm, it can instantly be ten times harder to get your audience because of the location. I can only think of a handful of Arts venues that are in high street locations. If you can build an “arts quarter” it works, but a lot of the time Arts venues are stuck out on their own, on the cheap land.
AT; People used to say that Norden Farm in Maidenhead is stuck out in the middle of nowhere, but there are 6000 people within fifteen minutes walking distance. Sure, it is not in the town center but it is in a residential area and that’s where the audiences are. People from shops don’t come to arts centers, but people from houses do.
I remember talking to Martin Sutherland when he was Chief Exec. at Newbury Corn Exchange, which is right in the middle of the town centre and he said The Corn Exchange has been open for 20 years and he still meets people who have no idea it’s there. It’s not about location; it’s about profile and how you communicate with people. People can walk past you every day and know nothing about what you do because they don’t think it’s a place they’d want to go. If you put something on they want to see, they will find their way in.
DE; True. We always joke about the fact that you can make the nicest flier in the world on the most beautiful paper, but if someone doesn’t pick it might as well have never existed.
On a couple of occasions, two days before an event I have opened a cupboard to find the leaflets are still there. I’m wondering why ticket sales are so slow and the answer is that nobody knows about it!
AT; Yes, and its happened to all of us. My biggest thing here was to get out and tell people what we are doing. If the staff don’t know what’s on tonight how can we expect anyone else to know?
DE; You have mentioned diversification and the hiring out of spaces and such like. What are your thoughts on that from a commercial view looking forward with the potential of arts cuts and from a cultural view? Is it positive, a distraction or an economic necessity?
AT; It is positive. When ARC was first built they had this idea that by putting a gym in here it would attract people who wouldn’t normally go to an arts centre. Clearly that didn’t work and ARC closed one year later. It’s a good example of diversification not working. But I do think that it goes back to balance of activity, being a building of this size that expects to run itself on purely subsidised work is not going to work. A mixed economy where part of the building is commercially led and a part that is subsidised is a much healthier way to go. We have to be secure.
Where things get cloudy is with arts activities. If it’s non-arts activities, if people are coming here for a transport forum – which they regularly do – that’s fine. If they are coming here for a psychic evening where someone has hired us to put this on, I find that less comfortable. I’d rather have the transport forum. The artistic vision needs to be part our vision. If it’s on here it’s going to part of what ARC does and it can dilute the quality and clarity of what we do. So I’m more comfortable hiring out for non-arts activity than arts activities.
DE; How does that work from an audience development view? Do you get much feedback?
AT; Not really, there are amateur arts groups here, not nearly as many as there were in Maidenhead, but we do hire out to other arts groups although we are careful as to how that is interpreted. I wouldn’t hire out to a professional theatre company that I don’t want in the programme. For example, Howard Mark’s agents have approached us about doing a show here, but I have said no as I don’t think it fits in with the programme. They have come back to ask if they can hire instead, but I have said no. It’s not always just a financial thing, it’s about clarity.
Mixed art form centers are so difficult to communicate because you are trying to communicate so many different things to different people. If those messages start to get diluted or clouded or confused then you just end up back where ARC started, which is a bit of a mess.
DE; In terms of diversification, how far can you push it? One of the questions I asked Gavin at Farnham Maltings was “What’s the difference between an arts venue and a supermarket?” A question I really like, but it took us the whole interview to work out what it meant. I think what it means is “How much are we bound by our notions of artistic practice?”
Any high street will demonstrate the importance of the games industry; it’s been an enormous cultural driver over recent years, a massive influence on design, music and how they interact. As a whole the industry is lucrative and self-sustaining, so how far can you push an arts venue in this way before it becomes a high street, or a supermarket?
AT; There are different models – being a boutique, a department store where you have a say over your concessions or a shopping centre. I see the arts program here as being boutique, completely under our control and we choose everything and the rest of what we do is a cross between a department store and a shopping centre. Anyone can come and hire space here, but we do have control over it and we do say no.
How far can you push it? It’s so specific to the venue and what it is that people want to do. Again, it goes back to balance. I suppose the ARC profile has to be artistically driven and if something was going to push that out of the way that would be uncomfortable.
DE; Do you think that view would change if there were no funding?
AT; Yes I suppose it would have to.
DE; Would that be the point where you would decide you wouldn’t want to run an Arts venue anymore?
AT; No, I wouldn’t decide that because I want more people to have access to the arts and in a way will do whatever it takes to make that happen. So long as you can protect the quality and integrity of the arts programme then, whilst it would be uncomfortable for it to be smaller than something else, you have to be realistic. There is no money!
DE; What, from your experience, do you think is the main cause of losses in the arts sector?
AT; It’s partly having so little money you can’t improve things. It would be great to give an organisation loads of money, but say that in 5 years time you will have no more so you have to get from here to there and trade into a position of being completely sustainable. I think you should be able to do that and invest the money you need, but I have yet to find someone to let me try!
But that’s not how the Arts works is it? In the Arts you are given the smallest amount you might manage on and you will probably have to go back and beg for more, which will be just enough to cover what you need. If someone had said, “here is a million pounds to get you started and off you go”, then maybe some venues would be self-sustaining by now. It’s never really enough to change yourself into a sustainable business.
DE; What advice would you give to organisations that are currently making unsustainable losses?
AT; Don’t look for one answer.
Cut your costs, cut your costs, cut your costs and keep cutting them. Start with the biggest costs and work your way down to the smallest.
Look at your balance of activity; you need to do more activity for less money. That’s how we turned Norden Farm around and that’s how we turned ARC around.
Work your staff as hard as you can, people have to be productive. There is no place for people who waltz in at 10am and leave at 4pm and think they’ve done a hard days work. Treat it like it’s your business, your money that is being spent/wasted. Get everyone to think like that. Increasing activity is important, because you can keep cutting costs but you will eventually get to a base line where it is really hard to cut any more, so you have to get your activities up.
DE; Looking at the wider cultural sector – fashion, games, film, music – which of course have their successes and failures and bad practices but on the whole have a successful culture of investment, surpluses and return. What’s the difference between the business habits in the wider cultural sector and what we do here as Arts venues, particularly as we trade in the end results of those industries?
AT; Tangibility. Is it because we sell experiences and they sell something that is a bit more tangible?
DE; In what sense?
AT; Well, I’m thinking about the live side of what we do. We sell performances as an experience; it happens there and then, film and fashion are slightly more tangible outcomes.
DE; So people put more of a value on things they can physically own?
AT; I think they do, but it’s also about understanding it. It’s easier to grasp a film than it is a live performance because it exists beyond your viewing of it; you are only left with the memory of a live performance. People value material goods more than experiences, sadly.
DE; What do you actually see the role of the public arts venue being in the 21st century and has this shifted in recent years?
AT; Specifically here, it’s about raising aspirations, but with a wider view of the arts it’s about making people think, helping people understand what’s goes on around them, extending their experience, broadening their attitude to difference. Clearly a multi-Arts venue has a role in making that culture accessible to people. In a town where there is no other cultural offer, we have to be quite broad and be accessible to the wider population. Our role is to help people benefit from the Arts.
DE; I have noticed from asking that question to people, that nobody so far says “bringing beauty to the world”, or “bringing the wonders of the poetic or aesthetic experience into peoples lives”. This seems to have been taken away from the arts and replaced with a much more social function.
AT; I agree. I don’t think its been lost at that end of the artistic spectrum, the breadth of work is still really important and it’s therefore important that people still believe there is a beauty, for want of a better word, in art. But, we have all woken up. We are in a bigger world, we have to run ourselves better, we have to justify ourselves better and I think we have to articulate what we want to do better. Sure we want people to have beauty in their lives – but we have to substantiate it a little better than that.
28 June 2010
Dan Eastmond is the MD of Firestation Arts and Culture CIC
Annabel Turpin is Chief Executive of ARC, Stockton on Tees
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