I Am Dan Eastmond

Austerity? It Ain’t About The Money

Wed, 15 May 2013 14:02:00 +0100

Recent years have seen the start of a sharp, deep and enthusiastic challenge to how the arts are supported by the public and private purse. This might be ok, if our audiences were fresh, far reaching and happy to pay the real cost of a ticket. But years of funding have so distorted the market place and frankensteined our output that none of us, culture maker or consumer, know where we are or what we want.

Austerity isn’t just a money problem, not for us at least, it’s the microscope that exposes the disconnect at the heart of what we make, who we make it for and why we bother.

Cueva de las Manos & Frankenstein

As part of putting my thoughts together for this presentation, two images have lodged in my mind and become integral to this piece - first is Cueva de las Manos, or Cave of Hands, a 13,000 year old cave painting

and second is Boris Carloff’s cold stare from the stills of the 1931 film of Frankenstein. They are, admittedly, unlikely bedfellows, but I have reconciled myself to the fact that they both belong here. Perhaps they are the yin and yang of my thoughts.

We’ll come back to Cueva de las Manos, but for the time being let it sit quietly in the corner of your mind, a beautiful and surprisingly modern image, made with the creative engagement of many and seemingly for no purpose other than to celebrate their togetherness.

Frankenstein, however, we need to deal with straight away and up front, but to do so we need first to go back to June 1945. As the UK, Europe and indeed most of the world begins the task of dragging itself up from the ruins of war and the trauma of such violent loss,

John Maynard Keynes stands before Parliament and puts forward his vision for the cultural near future, a plan “restoring to the nation something it should never have lost”. Out of death, fear and fire the Arts Council is born, with an opening fund of a mere £235k (ironically, at the going rate it looks likely that the Arts Council budget in it’s 70th year may not be far off where it started), The Arts Council kick starts theatre productions, orchestras and exhibitions and within a few years plays its part in the Festival of Britain, an epic event, the ambition and infrastructure of which still resonates today.

Scroll forward 67 years and our closest equivalent is the London 2012 Festival, although comparisons with Woodstock would perhaps be more appropriate, “if you can remember it you weren’t there” they say of the 60s, for London 2012 try “you were there, you just didn’t know it”. Arts and culture (of the publicly funded kind) and the Arts Council no longer need audiences to meet their brief, it would seem.

Whilst I support the Arts Council’s gear change in 2011/2012, and recognise that the public arts sector is supported by a range of bodies from trusts and local authorities to businesses and philanthropists, it is the case that slowly but surely, over the last 70 years, kick starting has become maintaining, supporting has become selecting and funding has become engineering.

It’s hard to make the distinction between failure and need, but with decades of focus on the institutions of culture, the bricks and mortar of delivery, somehow our activity has drifted further and further from a collective creativity and shared aesthetic impulse and we have created something truly horrible. Welcome to the Frankenstein Sector.

King Lear

“Save the Arts” we cry out, throats dry from calling and wills weak from loneliness. But we don’t mean save the arts, we mean save us. Save us from the poverty of irrelevance, save us from the vulnerability of dependence, save us from the weight of our agendas and above all save us from ourselves.

For as we campaign for our worth and argue amongst ourselves over internships and regions, culture and creativity continue to fizz and progress regardless, in nightclubs and networks, in shops and forests, in public and in private. These may not always take the forms that we know or even the outputs that we like, but who are we to say beauty and the unique energy of aesthetic transmission needs a stage, script, a canvas or even our involvement?

Perhaps our value collapsed when one person in a crowd of 300, eyes tight shut and bass pounding in their ears, feeling their heart beat with perfection surrendered themselves to the moment, or when two friends, over a telephone network, shared the graffiti stencil that made them both lol.

Empty Pockets and Desperate

It was mentioned to me not so long ago that the income formula for arts and cultural organisations should be around 40% earned, with the rest coming from public and private funding sources. My view, from studying a large number of accounts going back 5 years is that our most robust organisations operate more along the lines of 70% earned and 30% funded, and there are precious few of these. From now on, I think for organisations to even survive they should be operating around 80/20.

The reality for us, as the 21st century begins to reveal its history, is that whilst the current shrinking of public funds and tightening of incomes represents a current and very real challenge, the underlying disconnect that bedrocks our helplessness and has been a long time in the making, is our most likely executioner.

To be clear, the disconnect is the difference in value that we assign to our activities and the value assigned to them by the public at large. It is born out by the amount of subsidy required simply to keep going, the lack of influence the sector has on policy and our social profile generally.

In the 16th century over 30% of Londoners visited the theatre every month. In 2011 our highly engaged culture seekers represent around 7% of the population. (Source: Arts Audiences Insight, ACE 2011)

In 1946, cinema admissions in the UK alone were 1.6 billion. In 2012, despite showing a little growth on previous years, cinema admissions only reached 172 million. (Source: Film Distributors Association, “UK Cinema Admissions 1935 to date”)

We are the architects of our own collapse, recognising too late that the business models we have built, the institutions we have protected and the dialogues we have adopted have only served to fracture our relationship with people, and therefore with the future. I have worked with artists who will accept rows of empty seats with a shrug and receive sponsorship from businesses with lukewarm gratitude, whilst grinning from ear to ear at the Arts Council logo emblazoned on their posters. It’s not the money that is making them smile, although this is nice, it’s the validation, but this approval - learned from a lifetimes education - is the sugar that coats the poison.

A suite of distortions just like these grows unchecked throughout the sector. We are awash with mixed messages, hypocrisies and confusion. I meet customer who ask me to bring emerging artists and performers to them but object when the ticket price crosses their value threshold, often roughly equivalent to Harvester “Original Combo”.

Our need to generate audiences, in a frame of disinterest, has led to regional ticket prices hopelessly out of balance with the costs of production, and this in turn feeds the downward pressure on cultural value that keeps the sector trapped in poverty. Heavy investment in bricks and mortar assets has meant that many organisations not only rely on their rising book values to balance the accounts, but are at the same time unable to dispose of them to adopt new models (who else would want a listed arts venue?).

Touring companies routinely lose shows because their costs are based on an ideal notion of income not market realities, whilst funded venues blow thousands on marketing to bring in accidental audiences, because this is what brings more funding.

The confusion in the sector is further evidenced by how we demonstrate success. Audience numbers, financial result, longevity or something altogether vaguer like wellbeing? These metrics, some our own some borrowed from others, may well guide and sharpen us, but if we let them drive and define us we are lost.

What People Want

Whilst the arts sector is currently marginal, the wider creative culture sector is far from it, with a healthy impact and deep fusion with our everyday lives. Music, gaming, fashion and publishing are very much alive despite the shadow of austerity and the public arts sector should perhaps look to these areas for a glimpse of what our public wants and needs.

People need an active role in shaping the future, but we give them monsters. As quaint as it may sound, people need beauty, poetry and purpose. We give them monsters. People want ambition and progress, despite the fact that comes with a measure of uncertainty, but we give them the stolen and stitched reprint of what was. Above all people need us to deliver the new, to find a horizon the separates our history from our future so that we can embrace both, away from the influence of our dusty and derelict institutions.

Bush Fires

In a superb keynote for State of the (Arts) Nation in Belfast in March, Diane Ragsdale explored what it is to be a sustainable arts organisation and the paradoxes that exist within that ambition. She gave mention to bush fires to illustrate one of those paradoxes and I’d like to explore that a little further here.

Wikipedia’s entry on Fire Ecology states that “Many ecosystems… have evolved with fire as a natural and necessary contributor to habitat vitality and renewal. Many plant species in naturally fire-affected environments require fire to germinate, to establish, or to reproduce, or all three. Fire suppression not only eliminates these species, but also the animals that depend upon them. Finally, fire suppression can lead to the build-up of inflammable debris and the creation of less frequent but much larger and destructive wildfires.”

It’s a phenomenon that mirrors perfectly the place we have come to after years of protectionist thinking from funders and protagonists alike. When did we slip from kick starting new ideas to protecting the old ones and are we currently in our wildfire, or is it yet to come?

With this in mind, if we are happy to carry out survey after survey to map the economic value of arts and culture to demonstrate why The Arts as it is should be valued and should be protected, should we not also measure the things that we lose?

How many revolutionary cultural projects never see the light of day because we are not equipped to support or even recognise them? What is the number of brilliant young creatives who drift away from us and the number of ideas hungry everyday consumers who look elsewhere because their paths are clogged with Shakespeares and Warhols, with theatres and opera houses, with The Arts and Education?

We must recognise that saving the arts might not be producing the results we are actually looking for. We invest so much energy in engaging with young people, the disenfranchised and isolated, but then betray them by suggesting that project success comes when they adopt our methods. We must own up to the fact that many of the most significant and exciting cultural developments of the past 25 years have not come from our sector, coming more often from computing and technology, an industry notably rich with bush fires, death and renewal.

Exploding Culture

When we are so entrenched in the practices and ways of thinking that have created this disconnect, looking for a way out is like unpicking a knot that has no start and no end. But there are strategies that make a pathway to a reconnected and vital arts sector that I would like to suggest here.

In “Fireworks” I described a way of working that I called “Exploding Culture”. It’s a term that describes the process of breaking apart the rules of what we do, challenging our value scales, building new partnerships and having the confidence to present ideas that we do not understand or may later dismiss. As a first step it can be as simple or as complex as needed, changing the wording on your website, the music in your foyer, making a phone call to start a conversation you always thought would be interesting or making some space for the performer who has asked ten times over to be on your stage. Sometimes, simply moving a desk from one office to another can start a chain reaction that invigorates an entire organisation.

Furthermore, breaking our habits and finding new ways of working also brings with it new opportunities and revenue streams. Focused on championing and educating the richness of modern life, cultural organisations could and should be partnering with architects, academics, coders and chefs, breathing life into stagnant business models and opening the door to new incomes and financial independence.

The shift here is that not only do we leave behind the motivation to make something complete or justified, but also that we move away from the notion of end product at all, favoring instead a process focused activity. We are seeking meaning not prescribing, searching for aesthetic endeavor in whatever form that may take, and acting only as conduit and tour guide.

Most importantly, I believe that the best, indeed only way to reinvigorate the production of art is to stop trying to make it altogether. Culture is where the action is in the 21st century and the process of breaking chunks off to label as “Art” only produces static relics. Behaving culturally, together, in the flux of new invention and with an acceptance that it is ok to not know where we are headed, is the only way to bridge the current gap between our sector and our public.

We need visionaries who champion and demonstrate that the power of arts and culture is it’s absurdity. That it’s essence is oppositional to logic, measure and knowing and by occupying this space it can not only be stronger but also financially robust.

Einstein

There is a particularly perfect quote from Albert Einstein that I like to use here as it precisely illustrates the challenge before us

“Problems cannot be solved by thinking within the framework in which the problems were created”

In other words, whilst we can tinker with our make up and tweak our outputs, to really change our fate we must step outside of our practice altogether. Thinking back to our bushfires, there is a degree of destruction that we must embrace to move forward, but it doesn’t have to be painful. Rather like the end of a romance, we can let go with tears and affection, whilst still heading into the future with excitement and joyful expectation.

A 21st Century Aesthetic

The point of all this reassessing, exploring and un-making is to create the space to find our voice, our language, our soul. To find our own transmission forms and meaning, built from what it is to be alive in now. When the world around us has changed so much, why does the theatre of today look essentially the same as the theatre of Ancient Greece? Is it intimacy or laziness?

The disconnect between us and modern audiences is not just a result of how we do things, it is also created by our hesitancy to make work that is truly modern. One of the most common sentiments I hear from friends and colleagues, from students and customers, young and old, is how bored we all are. We have so much but are lost in a storm of options.

We have an urgent need to find a 21st century aesthetic, to find a way to transmit the aesthetic experience that is not a tweak or rehash of previous successes. We must not shy away from the ideological casualties and confusion that are a necessary path to the new, and must not rest until we have found a result that is genuinely independent and modern, if such a thing can ever exist.

Cave of Hands

To close, let’s return to our Cave of Hands. Unlike other cave paintings, which depict hunting triumphs and an array of beasts, this appears to have no function other than the joy of collective action and mark making. It’s colours are vibrant and alive giving it a surprising modernity, whilst it’s mix of tiny and grown up makers marks exudes a tactile intimacy.

It reminds me that at one time there was no distinction between the making and the consuming, no high and low culture and no disconnect between creating and living. How complicated we have become. Then, as if by magic, it reminds me that what we do now and what those hands did then has never really changed, that the most potent and long lasting sparks of culture always come from creating and sharing - in the spaces we inhabit - something we can’t quite do any other way.

Perhaps there is not so much separating us after all, only a little time and a little space, we just need to come out of our caves and into the morning sun, to begin the hunt for beauty, poetry and purpose again, together.

This presentation was delivered on 9th May 2013 at Creative Europe in a Time of Austerity, a conference produced by Euclid at Cornerhouse, Manchester.

Being Bobby Ewing

Wed, 15 May 2013 10:30:59 +0100

I must confess, I left. Got up, said my “excuse me’s” to my row and headed elsewhere. I never do that.. well not often. The last time I walked out of anything was the Spiderman reboot, which was so full of plot holes and sentimental teen angst I could’ve thrown up. Since I lasted longer with Spiderman, it’s fair to say What Next? was not for me.

But, as I don’t want to be cartoon angry boy for ever, let me start with some positives.

It wasn’t that long ago when an event like “What Next?”, or a group of 650 cultural professionals as we were, would have referred constantly to “The Arts”… The Arts this.. The Arts that.. capital T capital A, with all the certainty of the Aesthetic Elite and a smug incredulity that there are (gasp) some people who “just don’t get it” (there was still a little of that, but this is the positive bit). On this day, however, everybody was talking about “art and culture”, broad, inclusive, varied and not even capitalised. Heavens, Bernard Donoghue even championed the theatre, games designers and blockbuster films in the same breath. Hoorah for us! We are changing - whether our new found chums in multiplexes, record company offices and design studios will want to hang out with us remains to be seen - but at least we are playing.

The other good thing about What Next? is in the title, or lack of title in fact. It’s a big question what next? and although it may have been intended to merely imply a sense of investigation and openness, it carries within it all the uncertainty, loss and tragedy that will define the next few years of cultural production, whether publicly funded or not. The Arts (damn!) and a large part of the culture industries have crashed into the 21st century with an enormous crisis of purpose - stretched thin over social networks, washed out by hyper-media and beaten by the curious tyranny of creative democracy - it’s hard to know what we’re doing and our audiences (of course) share our confusion. It makes for a bit of a weird conference, but the fact that we are beginning to come together in the darkness, around the warm fires of our failures, is the first step to seeing in the dawn.

So, why did I leave? Well, first of all there was all this talk of starting a movement, or was it not starting a movement? I got lost somewhere between David Lan’s assertion that there was no agenda other than this “What Next?” question and Sir Ken Robinson’s peculiar endorsement of “the mission” and overriding message that it’s all the fault of politicians. Either way, this movement thing bothers me deeply. I am of course reminded of Groucho Marx’s “I’d never join a club that would allow a person like me to become a member”, but more than that is that it just seems so quaint, so old fashioned, so us! In an age of rampant social networks and frenzied agenda setting, even the mention of a movement seems hopelessly out of touch.

So to is this notion of engaging with politicians, of pushing the importance or plight of arts and culture into the political spotlight, making it “a manifesto issue”. When voting numbers are shrinking year on year, and the fate of the country is being decided by fewer and fewer individuals, why on earth should we waste our time talking to the figureheads of nobody? If we spent the same energy building our audiences, making our output the lifeblood of, well life, politicians would surely come to us. We might lose out in the short term, at least or institutions might, but this is the long game, right?

Furthermore - as it cropped up more than once on the day - when politicians like Maria Miller ask the cultural industries once again to explain how they contribute to our economy, we could simply refuse to engage. It would be a far more interesting scenario than playing the frustrated regurgitation game. Then again, we could simply tell her to fuck off. I use the words explicitly and with purpose, for we are also often far to polite in our responses to such resource wasting ignorance. Sure, politicians may currently hold the purse strings, but in a few years strings is all they will be holding. We should join the rest of the population and move on.

Fuck off, Maria. Done.

After the movement / non-movement bit came the biggest tragedy of all. Art, we are told, has the power to change communities, rapping the ability to turn lives around and education should never be considered as separable from culture. I’m sorry have we met before? Oh yes, at EVERY ARTS CONFERENCE I’VE EVER BEEN TO! For a moment I panicked, wondering if - Bobby Ewing style - I was about to wake up to find the past 20 years had all been a dream, whisked back from the 21st century to some late eighties community arts rally. From that moment “What Next?”, when faced with the reality of needing some actual content and ideas, became “What Was” and once again we sank back into the glue of our preconceptions and allegiances.

This is the moment when I left, I know there may well have been good things I missed, but outside on Shaftesbury Avenue the sun was shinning and culture was being gloriously busy. I still have my “What Next?” card though. A big brown postcard that invites me to pledge (yes, really, just like the Brownies and Cubs) to engage with an MP, treat my stakeholders as high-level donors, sign up to something called the “What Next? grid”, start a group or “Other”. It’s worth pointing out that if your “Other” is “to unpick and dismantle the public arts sector’s over reliance on bricks and mortar solutions to the transmission of shared aesthetic worth”, then tough. You don’t have room. You could fit “Pray” though.

But seeing as I am writing here and you are reading it, and we have as much room as we need, here are my “Others”;

I pledge to focus the majority of my energies on finding and supporting contemporary cultural activity, whatever form that may take, that resonates wildly with the population and expresses what it is to be alive in the 21st century, not the past.
I pledge to allow the institutions that I understand to stop when they are no longer needed, to make space for new generations to make institutions that I do not understand.
I pledge to help steer the cultural sector to a place where high levels of engagement and value replace the need for state subsidy, so that I don’t have to be nice to people like Maria Miller.

Ron Mueck - Couple Under an Umberella

Mon, 22 Apr 2013 14:00:21 +0100

Ron Mueck - Couple Under an Umberella

Who Is The Us That Them Is Protecting?

Thu, 11 Apr 2013 11:09:33 +0100

Delighted that my talk “Who Is The Us That Them Is Protecting?” has been included in the Arts In Society conference in Budapest this June. An overview is included below. Arts In Society is always a superb (and intense!) few days of ideas and connections, hopefully see some of you there!

Arts organisations and the whole CCI Sector are currently facing their biggest challenge for decades; a seismic, global re-evaluation of the allocation of public funds to support creative projects alongside the prospect of years of shrinking customer spending in a challenging economic climate.

The squeeze is already highlighting the vulnerability of organizations, flushing out the failing business models and fair-weather policies. There are undoubtedly more shocks and disasters to come. But the tragedy of the arts and culture sector is about more than economics, it is haunted by a lack of relevance and failure of mission that has been growing despite the cosy drinks at 10 Downing Street and flag waving cultural projects to unify nations.

Using audience data and social studies from Arts Council UK and the European Commission Culture Programme amongst others, alongside blog extracts, keynotes and tweets, “Who Is The Us That Them Is Protecting” seeks to explore the identity of the arts sector, from the position that understanding and challenging our core values, assumptions and make-up is the only first step to a renewed relevance for the arts.

If the arts and culture sector can’t (or won’t) embark on an open and searching self-examination, then the likelihood is that in a few years time, when the sector as we know it has long gone, only then will we ask the questions that lurked behind the grants and policy makers and hash-tagged battle cries? Who were we anyway, what did we want, and who were the people who gave up protecting us from failure?

"The artist “walks where the breath of the spirit blows him. He cannot be told his direction...."

Tue, 09 Apr 2013 11:40:37 +0100

“The artist “walks where the breath of the spirit blows him. He cannot be told his direction. He does not know it himself. But he leads the rest of us into fresh pastures and teaches us to love and enjoy what we often begin by rejecting.””

- John Maynard Keynes

.. and this epic track and visuals by Diplo and Ryan...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:27:19 +0000

.. and this epic track and visuals by Diplo and Ryan Staake..

Diplo - Set It Off feat. Lazerdisk Party Sex

Looking forward to adding this great j.viewz track to tomorrow...

Fri, 29 Mar 2013 15:08:59 +0000

Looking forward to adding this great j.viewz track to tomorrow nights Strange & Beautiful stew..

Taken from rivers and homes:
http://www.jviewz.com | http://www.facebook.com/J.Viewz

"The function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionise the pattern of production."

Sat, 16 Mar 2013 10:50:25 +0000

“The function of entrepreneurs is to reform or revolutionise the pattern of production.”

- Jean-Baptiste Say

anarcakes: How to make money as a comic strip artist! This...

Wed, 06 Mar 2013 05:05:47 +0000

anarcakes:

How to make money as a comic strip artist! This could very well apply to many other art forms.

Great short film on making money as a comic artist. Simple and effective ideas that can be applied across the arts/culture industries #artsfunding

Strange and Beautiful: Strange and Beautiful Episode 3

Thu, 14 Feb 2013 12:41:00 +0000

Strange and Beautiful: Strange and Beautiful Episode 3:

strangebeautifulpodcast:

The third podcast from Strange and Beautiful, playing a mix of alternative, progressive and beautiful music. .

Tracklisting

Dutch Uncles - “Ocduc”

To Arms Etc - “The Hurting”

The Doors - “Wishful Sinful”

Alessandro Moreschi - “Ideale”

Alessandro Moreschi - “Domine Salvum”

Ana Silvera -…

Beat Magazine: Bookart Bookshop – Old Street

Wed, 30 Jan 2013 13:48:48 +0000

Beat Magazine: Bookart Bookshop – Old Street:

beatmag:

Rachel Dakin

Last Christmas my mum bought me a Kindle. As a die-hard English Lit student, I ceremoniously threw it back at her across the sitting room, much to the alarm of my grandparents. I refused to betray the musty pages of hardbacks, the safe confines of the library; in retrospect,…

"A poem is poetry expressed in words."

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 22:16:58 +0000

“A poem is poetry expressed in words.”

- Wallace Stevens, ‘Adagia’

"who is the us that them is protecting?"

Wed, 23 Jan 2013 10:50:15 +0000

“who is the us that them is protecting?”

"Exploding culture means detaching the consumption of ideas and emotions from the method of..."

Tue, 15 Jan 2013 17:34:11 +0000

“Exploding culture means detaching the consumption of ideas and emotions from the method of transmission, and rebuilding our institutions in the service of meaning, not method.”

- Excerpt from final version of ‘Fireworks’, finally in print late January.

On Web Art

Wed, 09 Jan 2013 09:24:01 +0000

On Web Art:

Just been pointed to this lovely article by Dean Whitbread, that runs nicely alongside the themes in ‘Traitors’.

Traitors Free on Kindle!

Tue, 08 Jan 2013 14:50:26 +0000

Traitors Free on Kindle!:

‘Traitors In The Digital Revolution’ is now published in our Fireythings ‘Critical Shorts’ series and its FREE on Amazon until 11th January!

Please go grab a copy and if you feel so inclined, reviews and stars are VERY helpful!!

Thanks

From @thetimes year in pictures

Wed, 12 Dec 2012 13:52:51 +0000

From @thetimes year in pictures

Cuts, Cuts & More Cuts

Tue, 11 Dec 2012 09:41:57 +0000

Cuts, Cuts & More Cuts:

Arts orgs, particularly those currently heavily reliant on funding, need to partner and diversify pronto if they want to have any self determination in the future.

Gucci

Thu, 15 Nov 2012 13:41:58 +0000

Gucci

"Like a marriage adrift in complacency, we are the partners who hold on for the sake of the children,..."

Fri, 26 Oct 2012 10:39:13 +0100

“Like a marriage adrift in complacency, we are the partners who hold on for the sake of the children, keep going because leaving would surface too painful a truth, whilst our hearts reach back from crevassed beds to memories of love.”

- ‘Fireworks, Chapter 10 Exit For The Future’