FACILITATING INNOVATION IN THE ARTS
Tatiana Langerová – Andrew Travers
Abstract
Funders of the arts face particularly acute problems vis-a-vis their assessments of the future
worth (artistic and financial) of innovative works. For instance, in his lifetime Vincent Van
Gogh’s dealer brother could not have known the multi-million dollar value the paintings would
acquire only a few decades after the painter’s suicide. Or what about the case of the Beatles in
the realm of popular culture? No record company would sign them in 1962 because they had
Liverpool accents. And who could have predicted that Marcel Duchamp’s ‘Fountain’ would
become an iconic Dada exhibit? In London the collector Charles Saatchi was laughed at for
paying £20,000 for Damien Hirst’s dead shark suspended in a Perspex tank of formaldehyde.
This shark (or rather a substitute re-hung in a new tank) now has an estimated value of £8
million. Similar examples can be found in music (the silence of John Cage) and in the theatre
(Waiting for Godot), whereby works that started off in the outer fringes have become seminal
influences. In this paper we suggest an unusual method by which funders might back winners
rather than losers in the arts, which is to employ relatively unknown artists, those who are not yet
established, to provide shortlists of candidate works and projects.
Key words: innovation, arts, funding
JEL Code:
Introduction
In this paper we first describe how innovation in the arts has worked in the past, and then
consider who and what are facilitated and who the facilitators are and what criteria of selection
are used to decide who to facilitate. After this we look at the most serious problem for those who
facilitate the arts, which is the unpredictability of outcome, and we float some ideas as to how to
minimise the risk of backing losers. We also identify problems of facilitation in the arts that
highlight similar less visible problems of facilitating innovation in the worlds of business and
science, and suggest some ways in which the facilitation of innovation may be made more
effective at the human level.
There are of course differences between the management of non-profit arts organisations
and management within the money-driven for-profit sectors of the economy, but there are also
many similarities (see Ellis and Mishra 2004). Those similarities and differences, however, only
bear on the sponsorship of innovation where the for-profit element leads to a ‘play safe’ strategy
whereby funding is risk-averse. And we should note here that in the current economic climate of
austerity there are a wide number of different responses with respect to how to continue to fund
cultural institutions, some of which will have an impact on the actual form of an institution (see
Ellis 2001).
Accelerating Innovation
Rapid advances in technology create the need to develop innovations as efficiently and
quickly as possible. The pioneering work in this field is Mark Dodgson’s (2000) The
Management of Technological Innovation, in which he emphasises the use that can be made of
modelling, simulation, visualisation, and virtual prototyping. Thus he displaces the role of
innovation from the actual innovators and from the people and organisations that directly foster
innovators to rather abstract processes. However, in his later work Dodgson (2005) he does
stress that innovators need to feel free to ‘play’, ‘think’, and ‘do’. Particularly interesting from
the point of view of the arts is how he unpacks his idea of ‘play’ into the activities of
‘experimenting, ‘tinkering’, and ‘prototyping’. Here we have activities corresponding to typical
methods of innovation in the arts.
And theorists such Huizinga (1992) do suggest the similarities between artistic creation
and the imaginative game playing of children (play is performed in order to enjoy the capacity of
being able to perform it). But of course,, when artists are working in a playful mode, the work of
choosing which ones to back becomes extremely difficult. It is certainly a question worth asking,
whether in 1917 it might have been predicted, for instance, that Marcel Duchamp’s Fountain was
early evidence that Duchamp would become a major artistic figure of the twentieth century.
The Rewards of Innovation in the Arts
For a long time in Europe the church and nobility were the principal patrons of art and
now and then they picked winners, for instance Leonardo da Vinci’s Last Supper in 1495
(commissioned by the Duke of Milan) and Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling
(commissioned by Pope Julius II in 1508). Though the public rationale for these commissions at
the time would have been that they celebrated the greater glory of the Christian God, another
factor in their commissioning would have been the prestige they conferred on their patrons. So
here we can see that investing in art is not the same as investing in a business innovation, where
the hoped-for rewards are principally financial profit. And in recent times when art has become
‘autonomous’ and responsible to itself alone for its ‘truth content’ at a distance from society
(Adorno 1984), it still possesses the capacity to confer prestige on those persons and nations that
honour it (hence museums, national theatres, concert halls, and so on). Moreover, quite recently
in the case of the visual arts, fantastic financial profits on the back of the prestige of reputation
have become possible (viz the millions of dollars routinely paid for paintings by such as Renoir,
Van Gogh, Picasso, Warhol, and Bacon, who at the start of their careers could be bought cheap).
It should be noted at this juncture that all art that is going to be called art is in fact
innovative, for unless a new work is not to some extent original it will be dismissed out of hand.
So our question of facilitating the arts narrows down to the question of which works to call art
and which of those are the most innovative.
But, while there are numerous theories of how an artistic movement develops as well as
theories of what must constantly be evolving in any given art form, there is generally a great deal
of surprise about new work, and from time to time a scandal when the artist seems to a staid
audience to have gone a step too far (major examples would be Stravinsky’s Rite of Spring, the
paintings of the early French impressionists, novels banned for obscenity, such as Flaubert’s
Madame Bovary and James Joyce’s Ulyssses). Further there are often violent controversies about
whether or not to call a work art, with the consequence if it is denied the title of art that it is not
regarded as innovative. In the UK, for instance, there was a huge controversy about Tracey
Emin’s famous ‘My Bed’, a rather unsavoury, unmade bed that was shortlisted for the Turner
Prize and exhibited at the Tate Gallery in 1998. Some people saw it as art, as being an innovation
in the world of art, and some people saw it as unmade bed.
What follows from this is that the facilitation of art is necessarily the facilitation of
artistic innovation (in this paper we are only considering ‘intrinsic’ art, that is, art works unto
themselves, see Knell & Taylor [2011] who distinguish between ‘intrinsic art’ and ‘instrumental
art’, the latter being art that has calculated community functions).
Who Facilitates Artistic Innovation
Fundamentally the open market is the chief funder. Any artistic work that can sell itself at
a profit for the creator(s) is, as it were, a going concern, facilitated.
But a great deal of European art (painting, music, theatre, and literature) would not exist
without support over and above any income derived from its direct marketing. Traditionally, as
we said, the church and nobility commissioned such work and thus supported the artists who
made it. But governments today still feel that the arts have a civilising and uplifting function in
everyday life and support the arts accordingly, often through designated organisations such as, in
the UK, The Arts Council of Great Britain.
And here we come to a central fact about the dispensation of funds. Seldom is it done by
artists alone. More often monies will be disbursed by committees and panels. And panels will
typically comprise elders, administrators, accountants, civil servants (reporting back to
government), and representatives of the general public. For example in Prague there are
substantial grants from the government to support both projects and artists in a wide variety of
artistic fields. The conditions for funding are highly formalised and laid out in a series of
documents available to applicants.
The fundamental requirement of an applicant in each annual round of funding is that the
proposed work conform to the cultural policy of the city of Prague. Thereafter there is an initial
screening by appointed experts as to the practical and economic feasibility of the application.
One supposes that this screening weeds out applications that do not have a reasonably clear selfassessment of their scope and limitations and of the likelihood of success at achieving the stated
goals. Further the applications at this screening level are required to be backed up by evidence of
previous demonstrable results. And only when an application has successfully passed through
this screening level will it go on to be considered at the next level. Here, a minimum of five
evaluators will make the final judgment, some of whom will be members of the Grant
Committee (presumably civil servants of some sort) and others will be specialists in the relevant
area of the application.
So we can see that this process, which cannot be faulted for its provision for a fair
competition, favours those applications that are submitted by persons with (1) good verbal skills
at presenting their ideas, (2) a clear view of the outcomes they desire to achieve, and (3) with a
sure grasp of the economic necessities of their project. Thus are disadvantaged (1) those
applicants whose strengths are not in the realm of verbal exposition, (2) the novice applicants
who have not yet developed a body of work to show demonstrable ability, and (3) applicants
whose project does not lend itself to a clearly defined outcome.
Later we shall suggest that because the composition of the people responsible for
supporting art and artists is a crucial factor affecting the very forms of innovation, it needs closer
scrutiny. And we shall make some suggestions as to possible improvements that will encourage
innovation.
Criteria of Selection
When panels or individuals judge a winner from a number of applicants for funding, they
will consciously and unconsciously employ various criteria. The curriculum vitae will be
important, as will past performance. And background will be taken into account, such as the
place of education (in the UK postgraduate study at the Royal College of Art is a powerful
positive, for instance). And of course previous success in other selection procedures counts for
the applicant. But it must be clear here that we are talking about individuals who have already
been facilitated in a minor way. What needs to be discovered is how to find unknown
practitioners before they have done anything remarkable.
Intangibly, therefore, there is the ‘promise’ of an applicant. And nowhere are there any
but intuitive ideas about what constitutes promise. Here again, there is a case for more precision.
Unpredictable Outcomes
Even the Duke of Milan in 1495 and Pope Julius II in 1508 would have been astonished
that Leonardo’s Last Supper and Michaelangelo’s Sistine Chapel Ceiling would become two of
the most important artworks in the world during the next 500 years.
Especially in the visual arts, it is notoriously difficult to predict future success from
present performance, never more so, perhaps, than in the case of Vincent Van Gogh who is said
to have painted more than 3,000 paintings, none of which were sold in his own lifetime and all of
which are now highly valued in art galleries and private collections worldwide.
The situation is not greatly different with respect to the management of technological
innovation. For instance, at the time of its inception, the World Wide Web as developed by Sir
Tim Berners-Lee in 1989 by the innovation of marrying hypertext (texts including hyperlinks to
enable immediate access to other texts) to the internet was not thought to be of use to any but
research scientists.
Much the same can be said of other innovations, such as electricity, the steam engine,
railways, the internal combustion engine, TV.
While there may be improved tools for the rapid development of innovations in
technology on the lines Dodgson (2000) proposes, there is still the question of allocation of
funds. Our proposed improvements in the management of funding in the arts may give some
clues as to how the human element ‘hidden’ in the processes of technological innovation may be
made more effective in its decision making.
Improving Facilitation and the Detection of ‘Promise’
1.
Involve the public. This is to say open the doors of the committee rooms and private
offices of the decision makers and let the public see what is going on and who is saying what.
Then let the public have their say in the process. This is beneficial in two ways. Exposed to
scrutiny, decision makers will be moved to perform better. And the public may well introduce
new thoughts.
2.
Cross-fertilisation. Conscript to the decision making experts in topics and specialties
quite different to those under discussion. This is a variant on the ‘lateral thinking’ approach, a
means by which a radically different view may be generated, which can stimulate thought.
3.
Demonstration pieces. Applicants for the funding of innovations can be invited to
produce ‘samples’ of their own work, miniature works, tiny scraps of evidence as to the style of
their thinking.
4.
Peer review. To be sure most funding councils use blind peer review to sort through
funding proposals in the sciences. But there is peer review and peer review. The kind we are
proposing here is that of novice practitioners making judgments on other novice practitioners,
which cuts out the kind of thinking that has a vested interest in favouring certain forms of current
practice.
Conclusion
Much of our thinking in this paper has been hypothetical and exploratory. What we need
to do next is conduct research both amongst the recipients of funding and also those who fail to
receive funding. It is important to have good feedback from the ‘customers’ if better systems of
provision are to be devised. The customers, the artists and performers, are the ones to say how
they may best be supported in their efforts to innovate.
References
1. Adorno, Theodor W (1984) Aesthetic Theory, London, Routledge and Kegan Paul
2. Dodgson, Mark (2000) The Management of Technological Innovation: An International
and Strategic Approach, Oxford, Oxford University Press
3. Dodgson, Mark (2005) Think, Play, Do: Technology, Innovation, and Organization,
Oxford, Oxford University Press
4. Ellis, Adrian (2001) ‘The Context for Culture Now’, paper prepared for J Paul Getty
Trust and British Museum conference in Venice
5. Ellis, Adrian and Sonali Mishra (2004) ‘Managing the Creative – Engaging New
Audiences: A dialogue between for-profit and non-profit leaders in the arts and creative
sections,’ Background Note for a seminar at the J Paul Getty Trust, 15-16 June, 2004
6. Huizinga, Johan H (1992) Homo Ludens: A Study of the Play Element in Culture,
London, Beacon Press
7. Knell, John & Matthew Taylor (2011) Arts Funding, Austerity and the Big Society,
London, RSA
Contact
Tatiana Langerová
Faculty of Business Administration, University of Economics in Prague
Winston Churchill Square 4, 130 67 Praha 3
[email protected]
Andrew Travers, PhD
University of Exeter
Exeter, Devon, UK
[email protected]