Open Art Surgery The dilemma of the administrator - Essay Example

Open “Art” Surgery – The dilemma of the administrator “Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody This short ment by famous Dutch painter and abstract artist Piet Mondrian is just what the “doctor” ordered for the lesser souls like us. Another riddle to solve. Makes your head wobble ….like… what’s that again? Art has always been…well, art. It has always been priceless, an immeasurable entity. Art has never been or perhaps never will be defined satisfactorily. There is always that cloudy, mysterious air about art. It’s connected with impregnated words like creativity, inspiration, wonder, imagination and the kind of feelings that are intangible but are very a part of everyday life. When the “experts” describe a painting, you can hear words of this kind in abandon which are mostly out of the common man’s range of understanding. For example, an expert may observe a certain painting and say something like “this painting portrays a journey of the psyche that transcends the eternity within the confines of your soul” and listening to this the artists and their managers may nod their heads in agreement. For those outside this wonderland, however, these words will sound hollow and will go right over their heads. There, exists a need for the art to be interpreted without the usual expert jingo and clichéd usages and phrases. But since 1980s the art trade has blossomed one of the most profitable activities for the rich and famous. It’s much like a new company going public in the stock market. “When a “priceless” work of art gets a price tag, the haggling, bluffing and profiteering begin.” 2 The players descend from around the globe with highly solvent accumulated wealth that will move hands in just a few minutes. Never before has art been such a commodity as it is today. “The worlds top galleries and auction houses are turning record profits: in February, 2007, London did 590 million euros in business with auctions of artwork in just five days”3 The differences between managing Arts and managing Business - Can art be managed like a business? The answer lies in the fact that though there is a severe pressure from new community in the art sector that of the businessmen and the speculators to deal with an art work as a piece of good real estate or blue chip stock, there is still hope of retaining some of the uniqueness that art is credited with. Like Dewitt Jones declares in his article Creativity makes a difference, “Art is creative; business is practical. Art is frivolous; business is serious. Art is to be indulged in only when all the "important stuff is done; business is the "important stuff." 4 Is art a commodity? - Art is not a commodity in the regular sense of the word. Art is rather a luxury commodity, a product that is tested and consumed before its value is determined. Much of this value is tied to an idea about the art itself. And this revolves around who created it, when, why and how. When art transforms into a commodity it changes the artists’ reason for creating. The internal demand to create gives way to external demand of the audience and buyers. And that takes art out of the work. The “state of the art” trade - It took just five minutes on May 5, 2004 at 7.25 pm for Picasso’s “boy with a pipe” to be hammered down to an anonymous bidder for $93 Million. Add to this Sotheby’s commission of a whopping $11 million, and this became the third most expensive work of art ever sold at an auction. This sale earned its vendor the equivalent of 64 percent per annum over 54 years that he possessed it.5 So art is now with the rich. The prices they pay to acquire art are astronomical in the common man’s world. And the return on investment is just as enticing for the rich to park their funds in the art industry. Managing an art organization - The work involved in managing and administering art is an art in itself. It is a tough activity to define. But the “experts” claim to have solved the riddle and now “art administration” is one of the majors in selected colleges with a detailed curriculum. But can the skills of arts management be taught to the students. Arts management consists of five activities, namely, strategic planning, finance management, fund-raising, marketing and facilitating the management processes involved in producing artistic work. Arts managers work with producing, presenting and exhibiting organizations (theatres, opera companies, orchestras, dance companies, galleries, museums), arts councils, arts service organizations, government, and many other related areas6. In defense of increasing government spending on art John Tuse, the famous art administrator himself, said “The arts matter because they are universal; because they are non-material; because they deal with daily experience in a transforming way; because they question the way we look at the world; because they offer different explanations of that world ... A nation without arts would be a nation that had stopped talking to itself, stopped dreaming, and had lost interest in the past and lacked curiosity about the future.”7 Many consider cooking an art. Many of the variables that play when art is being created could be attached to the act of cooking. In the early 1950’s, McDonalds redefined the art of making a hamburger, into several smaller replicable assembly-line processes that could be taught to students in a matter of minutes. He took out the variables and brought in consistency. That’s what some of the institutions teaching art administration are trying to do. Taking the variables out. Franchising, a la fast-food industry model, is increasingly adopted by the art organizations to leverage on the asset value of their permanent collections. So what makes a good art administrator? It’s that same special ingredient that makes the difference between art and a pair of shoes. The duty of an art administrator is to take the art to the masses, not just the connoisseur and the businessmen. And be the interface between the art, the artist and the audience. The art administrator makes the work of art, work. A beautiful painting does not fulfill its function until it is seen. It differs from the of a business manager in that the job cannot be broken into processes that can be just replicated and carried over from one to another. There is one secret ingredient that makes a good art administrator and that is a basic love for art. The “administrator” part of the job is a set of skills that can be acquired in classrooms. They are the traditional managing skill set consisting of planning, organizing, staffing, supervising and controlling. The management of facilitating the production of arts and the presentation of the finished works to the audience is what an art administrator is supposed to be good at. The challenges for arts administrator- The greatest challenge for those engaged in the arts administration activities is balancing their skills and competencies of being scholar, aesthete and connoisseur on one hand and fund raiser, lobbyist, publicist, and diplomat on the other 8. The easy way for an administrator to work is by treating art as a commodity. The Wordnet dictionary defines a commodity as "an article of commerce"9. Jim Fitch famously said, “By considering art as an article of commerce I hope to provide a less confusing foundation on which to build criteria for purchasing art with investment potential. Diamonds are valued by carat, cut, color, and clarity, gold by the ounce, paintings don’t enjoy that kind of market security or stability. There is however, in my opinion, a common denominator for determining the present and future value of paintings.” 10 Fitch goes on to establish that this common denominator is the artist. When one analyses any historic art period or movement there are a few who rise to the top. He says, “They become identified with that particular period for several reasons and consequently their work becomes the museum pieces of the future.” Needless to say the value of these works appreciate at annual rates that cannot be matched by the stock market or real estate. It’s in this identification of the artists in the present era that poses the supreme challenge for the art administrator. And that is the unique skill that has to be cultivated by observation, exploration and experience. And that’s what separates the good from the mediocre. When artists produce art they are responding their internal necessity, their way of seeing, observing, feeling, reacting and thinking. 11. Let’s not forget that “Art is not made for anybody and is, at the same time, for everybody12..” Art cannot be manufactured in an assembly line. But at the same time industrialization of art will be a constant pressure and a sour truth that art administrators, like us, have to live with. It’s that thin line that we have to walk. Gingerly. Bibliography ArtQuotes.net, Piet Mondrian Quotes, http://www.artquotes.net/masters/piet-mondrian/index.htm Art as a Commodity, 27.02.2008, http://www.dw-world.de/dw/article/0,2144,3148473,00.html Augusto Boal, 1998, Legislative Theatre, London, Routledge p.152 Derrick Chong; 2002, Arts management, Routledge, p.10 Iain Robertson, 2005 Understanding International Art Markets And Management, Routledge, London, p. 1 Jim Fitch, 2006, The new masters, Art As Commodity http://aarf.com/newmasterssf06.htm John Tusa, The Guardian, Tuesday December 13 2005, Art Matters, http://www.guardian.co.uk/artanddesign/2005/dec/13/art Jones Dewitt, Journal for Quality and Participation, Creativity makes a difference Jan/Feb 1999, http://findarticles.com/p/articles/mi_qa3616/is_199901/ai_n8831474 WordNet-a lexical database for the English language, http://wordnet.princeton.edu/ University of Toronto, Arts Management- Specialist and Specialist (Cooperative) Programs in Arts Management http://www.utsc.utoronto.ca/artsmanagement/ Read More