Are recessions good for the arts? Admissions to Britain’s free public museums and galleries were up 2 per cent in 2008, and most have reported increases of over 10 per cent in 2009.
Are recessions good for the arts? Admissions to Britain’s free public museums and galleries were up 2 per cent in 2008, and most have reported increases of over 10 per cent in 2009. Tickets for the big touring shows are selling well. West End theatre box-office revenues were up 3.5 per cent in the first six months of this year. This winter we can enjoy a multitude of entertainments as wonderful or as wacky as ever.
So is everything rosy? Well, no. It is true that stocks are high, quality is high and queues are long. But this masks problems in future supplies. Funders, investors and producers are worried.
Many museums and galleries are looking anxiously at America where the crisis has severely hit ticket and merchandise sales. The organisation Americans for the Arts says, ‘The Great Recession has struck museums and performing-arts groups with a vengeance. All around the country, orchestras, opera houses, theatre troupes and dance companies are cutting salaries, jobs and programmers.’
New York’s Metropolitan Museum says that its endowment fell by $700 million in the first six months of 2009, a reduction of 25 per cent, and the Metropolitan Opera saw its $300 million endowment shrink by a third and cut senior staff salaries by 10 per cent. In October, the Art Newspaper reported that one third of America’s museum directors faced salary cuts. It will get worse. Forbes magazine quotes Metropolitan spokesman Harold Holzer as saying, ‘We’re looking at a much more pressing problem in fiscal 2011 than in 2010.’ Arts Council England says that ‘there is a time lag before the impact on the arts is fully felt…. The expectation is that box office will come under increasing pressure towards the end of this year and in 2010’, a prediction shared by the research group Audiences London.
Colin Tweedy, chief executive of Arts & Business, speaking in September at Boris Johnson’s seminar on ‘Arts and the Downturn’, said, ‘Seventy per cent of cultural organisations within London are now seeing a decrease in private-sector investment.’ Boris Johnson, after a visit to New York, thinks more places should charge for admission, although David Cameron seems unlikely to agree. Almost all British arts foundations have lost money.
Are these temporary problems? When the world economy stabilises, will money flow back to artists, curators and producers and the institutions that keep up the supply of new ideas and new shows?
There is no easy answer. The government faces ballooning debt and will severely cut the DCMS budget for 2010/11. Some money that would have gone to the arts is being switched to the loss-making 2012 Olympic Games. But public money and private funds will flow again and the big museums will win back some of their donors and clients.
But the glory days are unlikely to come back, not only because funding is scarce but also because the nature of art is changing. Art today is more collaborative, like Antony Gormley’s Fourth Plinth project and the RSA’s Art and Ecology programme. Many of the so-called ‘new philanthropists’ who emerged out of the media, software and banking boom of the past 20 years seem less interested in supporting old masterpieces than in addressing today’s social issues.
The contrast between old and new is sharply visible in the three generations of Tate. Walk up the 30-odd steps of 19th-century Tate Britain and you pass between classical columns into a marble entrance hall. In contrast, Tate Modern has a spacious wheelchair-friendly ramp and two smaller doors neatly positioned next to money-making bookshops and cafés.
Justifying its proposed extension, Tate Modern says, ‘Changes in contemporary art practice mean that different kinds of spaces are desirable.’ The new building, planned to open in 2012, will ‘more fully integrate the display, learning, and social functions of the museum’ with an emphasis on interaction and social impact. It will build on Nick Serota’s statement in June: ‘I am certain that in the next 10 to 15 years, there will be a limited number of people working in galleries, and more people effectively working as commissioning editors working on material online.’
Tate’s request for £50 million of public money appealed as much to the government’s desire for more jobs and more tourists as to a desire for more art. The Arts Council’s plan for 2008–11 lists four development priorities of which three are social (digital, children and the Olympics) and only one is cultural (visual arts).
In today’s creative economy, the visual arts are only one strand alongside digital media, installations, interaction and social enterprise. The collapse of conventional funding is merely hastening this change in the nature of art.
Tate will probably get its £215 million, but its extension may be the last of the big beasts. Already a new generation of artists is creating new kinds of art that doesn’t want to be constrained within a big museum. The public, too, is looking for more interactive pleasures. But where will the money come from?
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