Installation View NEW14. Photo: Andrew Curtis. Danae Valenza, Colour Piano for Chromatic Portraits, 2014. Courtesy the artist. Photo: ACCA
Show me the Money at the Australian Centre for Contemporary Art (ACCA) brought together Fiona Menzies, CEO Creative Partnerships Australia, UK-based Arts Consultant John Kieffer and Kay Campbell, Executive Director of ACCA to discuss strategies for creating new revenue streams, public involvement in funding, increasing corporate sponsorship and ethical funding.
In the light of possible funding cuts in the Federal budget and the controversy surrounding the corporate funding of the Sydney Biennale, the participants emphasised that traditional lobbying of politicians or pitching to corporates is not enough to ensure continuing funding .
‘Artists have to start having a different kind of conversations with the public as well and it should be about special pleading and lobbying, but it’s got to be something a bit more fundamental than that. Art organisations who for too long have been focussed about lobbying for funding and I think they have missed the chance of having a wider conversation, said Kieffer.
So what is this wider discussion? For one, talk more to the public. Politicians don’t listen to institutions and organisations, they listen to the public and turning public opinion in the favour of funding the arts is where the narrative around funding can be enlarged and engaging the public not just in the end result of viewing an art form, instead through the process of art-making could be another way to widen the scope of public engagement with the Arts.
‘I think it’s a question, if you like, of maybe steering some of our passion for what we do to the public as well as targeting politicians to try and get them to change budgets,’ added Kieffer.
Similarly in the private sector, more effort needs to go into building relationships and a long-term understanding. Menzies said the constant turnover in arts organisations made it hard to achieve sustainable relationships with corporate partners.
‘The major hurdle is about understanding the other side. That’s a challenge for arts organisations where there is a high turnover of staff. So building that culture of how to manage those relationships into the organisation rather than being dependent on particular individuals is a challenge and that is something that we are working with organisations to help make better.’
Campbell said funding does not even guarantee the core costs that keep a gallery open.
‘Costs are escalating and that has not been matched by any shifts in funding, and what that means is that proportion of funding has become considerably less…What we would like is to have a model of funding that looks at the sustainability of the organisations which secure core costs of running public galleries.’
Other revenue streams will need to be developed for non-core costs. Venue hire for shows and weddings, selling food and drinks and retail are increasingly important to many arts organisations.
Online crowd funding is also a revenue stream that public galleries and arts organisations could look at. Usually good for artists looking to fund their projects, it is just beginning to work on an institutional level in the UK.
Campbell added that she wished for the next generation to think philanthropically, and that Australians were very generous when it came to bush fires and hospital appeals, but they don’t see funding the arts as something as they need to do because that’s what wealthy people do, it’s something governments should do, very wealthy people do.
‘In order for the Arts to survive, those people who love them need to actually support them at whatever level they can afford,’ she said.
But no money comes without strings attached. Whether it is accounting to several layers of government or serving the corporate aims of a partner, arts organisations don’t get anything for nothing. The recent decision of the Biennale of Sydney to sever ties with long-time corporate sponsor Transfield in the light of its links to refugee detention centres has brought this issue into sharp focus. .
Coming out it from outside Kieffer is not distressed by the Biennale controversy. He said that such rows were good, and that these are the kind of conversations that need to be had in the public, rather than being worked out in boardrooms offices. People needed to have a view on these things because there isn’t any clean money anyway. In the UK, many organisations take money from people who are environmental polluters, for example. Another way of looking at a development like this is that large corporates need to bear their burden and should give something back to the society, and it could be in the form of sponsoring and funding the Arts.
All the panellists agreed that engaging the public in debates, in the process of art-making and what the art could mean to the people who support it were key to widening the narrative around fundraising and with it the flow of money.
Said Kieffer: ‘We are supposed to be creative people in the arts and if we can’t find a way of talking about what we do to the public in an interesting an engaging way then what are we doing it or, really?’
