The artist, the administrator and the audience - as the Arts Council gets a new director, Mary Cloake, Rod Stoneman reflects on the 'professionalisation' of the arts.
The resignation of Patricia Quinn from her position as director of the Arts Council in March threw polarised views of arts management in this country into sharp focus. Her plan to make the Arts Council a proactive developmental agency which directs and shapes the way the arts develop was dramatically set aside by the new council appointed in late 2003.
This council has yet to articulate the key differences in its proposed approach, but clearly it sees itself as a "conduit" for artists first and a strategy-maker for the arts second.
Arguments between these different approaches to the cultural sector must be seen against the fast-changing backdrop of a public service in Ireland which is moving towards more modern, transparent and accountable management.
Apart from the occasional high profile journalistic revelations released by the Freedom of Information Act, there are myriad examples of ordinary citizens shining the torch of public scrutiny into the darker crevices and corridors of power. It is a framework which encourages a more rigorous and ethical approach to decision making.
Every citizen can now elicit the criteria by which his application has been judged, the details of the assessment, and the basis for its rejection. This was not always the case. As former chief executive of the Irish Film Board I became used to receiving a letter every few weeks from a TD "supporting" a constituent's application for funding - old habits die hard.
I remember when Channel Four Television was set up as a new and radical public service broadcaster in London in the eighties, its ethos was to redeploy models of best practice from private enterprise for public service ends.
This blew the residual cobwebs off the old Yes Minister approach still to be found in the cumbersome inertial structures of a large, national broadcaster like the BBC. Modern management models brought a much-needed administrative precision and energy to even non-commercial activities.
A version of these changes has happened here with the introduction of "MBA culture" into the arts in Ireland. A few years ago arts administration courses here were rebranded as "arts management" - a subtle verbal difference which signalled a significant sea change in approach.
A new breed of proactive professional managers has been trained and positioned between artists and their potential audience.
The provenance of the MBA approach developed in American colleges in the sixties and came from the need to formulate new templates to analyse very different types of businesses. However, the clear benefits of these powerful tools can also lead to problems when MBA analysis is applied clumsily by those who do not have an adequate grasp of the specificity of this. To be effective, business analysis needs to be coupled with a feeling for the nuances of the arts. At its worst, half-digested jargon is wielded as a weapon, well-paid consultants conduct risible seminars on risk management (at a recent Institute of Public Administration seminar for semi-states in Dublin the following were listed amongst 21 "risks" for any organisation: 15) coming in under budget, 16) coming in over budget, and 19) not recruiting high quality staff).
This approach attempts to quantify everything, even the ineffable - if it can't be measured it can't be managed. This leads to some strangely contorted formulas; for instance in England, the question of how to assess university lecturers for promotion and salary increases led to a search for the appropriate KPI (Key Performance Indicators). How many articles has each academic published?
This led to an entirely predictable increase in irrelevant and unread essays published in esoteric academic journals, virtually a vanity press.
To foil this, the system became more sophisticated and added extra KPI points for an article that is referenced in another scholarly article.
Professionalism in the arts is clearly overdue, but the neglect of specificity in the application of MBA approaches can have dangerous effects - the systematic becomes a new version of the bureaucratic, irrelevant cost centres are constructed in non-commercial contexts, evidence-based reporting utilises specious data.
There is such a focus on the means of administration that the end is neglected. Just as art production without a notion of the audience becomes solipsistic, so arts management without a sensitive and responsive relation to the art itself becomes bureaucratic and self-serving.
Over-zealous application of MBA policy has lead to an aggressive reaction which risks throwing the baby out with the bathwater. There are signs of a return to more anachronistic approaches - the director's resignation at the Arts Council was greeted with a fog of fuzzy discourse: "we need to be passionate as well as logical about the arts", "we need to understand the artist" (The Irish Times, March 13th).
The new council reputedly wishes to get much closer to the grant process and there is a danger that this discourse can become a smoke screen for a relapse into fudged decision-making, rife with conflicts of interest.
There is a natural tendency amongst those on the receiving end of funding decisions to criticise and demand change. As Jonathan Swift wrote, "I must complain the cards are ill-shuffled 'till I have a good hand."
But the maths remain the same - there are not enough resources to respond to most needs and a rational framework for judgment is crucial.
Administrators need to think of the third and most important term - to keep the audience in focus. As Jeremy Isaacs, the founding chief executive of Channel Four, once quipped, "the function of arts administrators is not all to keep creative people happy: it is to please the public. Engendering creativity is only a means to that end".
The challenge is to find ways of deploying modern and business-like approaches in tandem with a full understanding of art practices. Administrators also have to recognise the specificity of cultural activity, aspects of which are not in the domain of the rational. As the French poet and film-maker, Jean Cocteau, wrote "The arts are essential - if only one knew what for."
Rod Stoneman is the director of the Huston School of Film & Digital Media at the National University of Ireland, Galway. Until September 2003 he was chief executive of Bord Scannán na hÉireann/the Irish Film Board and previously in the Independent Film and Video Department at Channel Four Television in London.