ARTISTS are notoriously bad managers. Managers have no concept of high culture. Both ideas pervade the arts world. Both ideas are wrong, as this book shows.
From Maestro to Manager has a specific audience students and arts managers. It aims to be of practical use to both. At over 400 pages it is not likely to be a quick fix for the arts manager facing a crisis; but if these managers read it they might very well avoid crises, or at least reduce their incidence. (Life would be dull without the odd crisis. And no one can say that the arts here are ever dull in that regard.)
Ask any number of Irish arts managers how things are and usually you will get context, philosophy, history and difficulties with funders (aka the Arts Council). This approach, informs the book. For the most part it is a comfortable read; there is little to challenge the current orthodoxy in the arts world. Even the excellent essay by Decian McGonagle of IMMA which opens the book covers philosophical argument well aired already. Who would disagree with his view that "Art is not an antidote to reality but a means of exploring and understanding and, if necessary, remaking it"?
Do we yet have the certainty of knowing what arts management really is? Management science has been with us for nearly a hundred years, so we avoid the necessity for philosophical definition every time we address management issues. Not so in the arts sector. A recurring theme in the book is the "what" of the arts business, even when the "how" is under discussion. The culture management debate with McGonagle, Pat Cooke of the Pearse Museum, Jeremy Isaacs of the Royal Opera House and Patrick Mason of the Abbey, forms part one of this book. Is it too much to hope that future arts, management, publications will not feel this need to define? We can have only so much navel gazing. Management is not a personal indulgence, it's a way of delivering. It's time to move on.
The real interest in the book for the eager arts manager comes in the chapters devoted to strategic management, marketing and human resources issues. Go to the text by Ann O'Connell of Coopers & Lybrand on strategic planning and the arts organisation and you will find a template for running, an organisation. The many arts organisations at sea in this area might usefully read her, and so get safely ashore. To recall George Bernard Shaw, "To be in hell is to drift, to be in heaven is to steer."
The near failure of the now hugely successful Music Network is fascinatingly described by Catherine Breathnach and Niall Doyle; compulsory reading for all grant dependent organisations, I'd say. They bury the myth that the best arts organisation spends least on management.
How to make a living from your business? This figures in real experiences of Irish arts managers in the section on marketing. Here again is a useful template, albeit with philosophical asides of questionable relevance, which will repay reading by the pressured administrator/ manager (is there any other kind?). Lessons from the true professional like Arthur Lappin, Norah Norton and Jerome Hynes are worth taking.
Business devotes huge energy to human resource issues. Personnel planning, training and appraising for performance are central to effective service delivery. The book deals with the broad picture of supply and demand and market distortions (Fas?). We could do with more of the Arts Council. It shells but the real difficulties of managing; it might well have opened the book.
This is a welcome addition to the useful Irish Studies in Management series from UCD's Graduate School of Business. The series means that we are no longer solely dependent for academic study on texts published in and about foreign economies, many of which bear little or no relation to our own. The arts need good business managers; editors Fitzgibbon and Kelly point the way forward.