The Art of Money
Toner Quinn
How the arts can get through this recession
‘Good business is the best art’ – Andy Warhol
How are arts organisations and artists going to get through this recession? This is hardly an ideal time to ask this; the right time was a couple of years before it happened. Nonetheless, as budgets continue to disintegrate, we have to start seriously discussing the funding of artists and arts organisations, and how we are going protect it – what’s left of it.
In the arts, we often cite lateral thinking as one of the benefits of arts involvement, but how much lateral thinking on the economics of the arts has come from the arts sector? Traditionally, we have credited arts organisations with the skill of making a lot happen with little money, but we acknowledge that that is because nobody gets paid that much. When the budgets of organisations begin to grow – and usually it is as a result of a bigger grant rather than more sales – that funding usually goes into paying people a little better for what they formerly did for very little. Most artists and arts entrepreneurs would accept that if they had put the same amount of effort into anything else apart from the arts, they would probably have become very wealthy.
It is this thinking on the economics of the arts that we have to start...
