Whose Art Is it Anyway

1
Whose Art Is it Anyway?

• Arts Council England, Yorkshires Arts Summit
• National Media Museum, Bradford
• January 22th 2007
• John Knell
• Intelligence Agency

2
The arts should not feel defensive

• The arts sector shouldnt internalise guilt
  around levels of public funding - Grant in aid
  has doubled since 1979 but it is still less
  than half the NHS projected overspend for the
  current year
• It is nowhere near a level that could provide a
  universal offer for the arts

3
Get out there and reach somebody

• Its a great pity that the record sums of
  public investment we have made in the arts have
  not led to a higher profile for the arts in the
  public mind
• David Lammy, Culture Minister, 30/03/06

4
Supplier knows best?

• Its hard to object to the view that people who
  use a publicly funded facility or service should
  have the chance to express opinions about it and
  be heard. But I do not see this much in the arts.
  The supplier knows best seems to be the dominant
  attitude
• Peter Hewitt (2005.17) Changing Places, ACE

5
My starting point

• Yes, reach matters, but type of public engagement
  is even more important
  
• That issues such as the quality of public
  engagement in cultural activities and how
  innovation might recast public engagement, have
  been left relatively unexamined
• All of which has created a distorted debate about
  the primary accountabilities of the sector

6
Personalisation what is it?

• Two clear threads run through personalisation
• Equipping the service user with the ability to
  tailor and personalise the service experience
  
• Inviting the user to co-produce the service by
  encouraging the individual service user to be
  active participant in designing the type of
  service they receive

7
Personalisation in the arts

• Already happening in the arts both to increase
  audience reach, and to encourage new forms of
  participation
  
• But the scope for further innovation across the
  whole sector is enormous
  
• There is no one size fits all approach to
  personalisation
  
• There are a spectrum of soft to hard
  personalisation outcomes in the sector

8

• The audiences that flock to Les Miserables are
  probably looking for a different from of
  personalisation from those that are working with
  Blast Theory. The former are looking for a more
  bespoke booking service, linked to babysitting,
  coach journey and evening meals, fixed to suit
  their timetable and with opportunities to involve
  themselves in after-show events, spin-offs and
  booking arrangements for similar events. They
  dont necessarily want to be involved in a living
  interactive project with a handheld pc one
  Saturday afternoon in Westminster. Or they might

9
Soft P Personalisation

• ICT enabled marketing, audience development, and
  personalisation of the customer experience
  
• Predominantly push type marketing strategies, and
  some limited pull type opportunities for the
  customer
  
• Soft P will increasingly be about cultural
  organisations making their work and collections
  available in digital from for everyone to see and
  re-use creatively
• Not seen as contentious not a step change in
  innovation but despite this, not business as
  usual across the sector

10
Soft P activities create the possibility for arts
consumers to

• Tailor, adjust and time shift their arts
  consumption
  
• Experience more interactive venues and
  environments
  
• Experience rich online environments with the
  opportunity to personalise
  
• Take part in social networking opportunities
  hosted through the arts institution
  
• Participate in heightened dialogue, engagement
  and feedback
  
• Use and Re-Use creative products
• Rip, Mix, Burn and Share their creative outputs

11
Hard P Personalisation

• Consumer as producer and active participant - the
  accent is on co-production
  
• Audiences moving from spectator to participant
  actively seeking out new and distinctive
  interactive experiences
  
• Currently concentrated in particular art forms
  (music, contemporary visual art, media art) but
  not exclusively (Perfect by Kate OReilly at
  Contact Theatre in 2004)
• Largely resulting from the creative decisions of
  artists, not shifts in the mission or purposes of
  arts organisations

12
Hard P experiences help build

• User confidence and knowledge
• User interest and satisfaction
• A sense of exploration and learning
• The desire to be heightened and challenged
• A mindset which accepts (and relishes) the
  unpredictability of art and creativity
  
• Future Physical, Creative User (2004)

13
Hard P a minority pursuit

• Hard P personalisation forms a very small segment
  of activity across the sector.
  
• If we take the North West as an example, only 14
  of arts organisations there positively identify
  themselves as generating this sort of experience
  
• NWs Regional ICT Digital Content Audit, Arts
  Magnet and ACE NW (2006)

14
Fad, fashion or fundamental driver?

• Not enough regularly funded arts organisations
  are customer centric organisations by instinct
  and practice
  
• Thus far the arts are responding slowly to these
  opportunities
  
• Does this matter?
• Do we need arts organisations to just sharpen up
  their act a little in terms of how they reach and
  manage their relationships with customers?
  
• Or is there a much sharper imperative at work
  which over time will demand more root and branch
  change in their core practices and products

15
Whats driving personalisation

• Artistic innovation and democratisation
• The transformative power of ICT
• New dynamics of consumer behaviour particularly
  those growing up digital
  
• The reality that publicly funded arts will
  increasingly have to negotiate their value with
  the public

16
Productive waste
17

• What characterises the new public art is
  engagement and participation. Gormleys Waste Man
  in Margate was built by volunteers he issued a
  call for help in the local newspaper. The walls
  between the elite who produce art and those who
  observe it are disappearing
• M. Bunting, The Guardian

18
Want to play?

• ..new forms of mass, creative collaboration
  (Wikipedia, Youtube, Linux and Craiglist)
  announce the arrival of a society in which
  participation will be the key organizing idea
  rather than consumption and work. People want to
  be players not just spectators, part of the
  action, not on the sidelines
• Charlie Leadbeater, We-think Innovation by the
  Masses, not for the Masses (2006/2007)

19
iEverything?
20
Democratising culture?

• The platform is already out there, in our bags,
  our coat pockets, on our beltsWe have a seamless
  system from Web to application to player for
  delivering any sort of homemade audio content we
  want
• Samis and Pau, San Francisco Museum of Modern
  Art (2006)

21
A Moores law for cultural transmission?

• Gordon Moores famous 1965 prediction that the
  number of transistors on a chip would double
  every 24 months
  
• The rate of growth of the means for culture to be
  made and broadcast by anyone for anyone seems to
  be outstripping Moores law comfortably

22
Growing up digital rejecting force fed culture

• All of us are us. We consume culture. The
  them I want you to focus on are people who
  consume and create. They are our children. We
  experience culture as something we take. It is
  delivered to us broadcast. The increasingly
  understand culture as something they make, or
  something they remake and remix and remake,
  something that they get and through the tools of
  technology, recreate.
• Culture for them is not delivered in final form
• L. Lessig (2004)

23
Teenage kicks and clicks

• Todays online teens live in a world filled with
  self-authored, customized, and on-demand
  contentThe internet and digital publishing
  technologies have given them tools to create,
  remix, and share content on a scale that had
  previously only been accessible to the
  professional gatekeepers of broadcast, print, and
  recorded media outlets
• Lenhart and Madden (2005)

24
I think therefore I...
25
Share and share alike

• The rise and rise of public publishing and
  content sites
  
• Five of the 10 fastest growing online brands are
  websites for people publishing and sharing their
  own material (Neilsen Net Ratings 2006)
  
• Google recently bought the video sharing site
  YouTube for 883m, which has an estimated 72
  million individual visitors each month

26
Thriving not surviving?

• If the arts dont embrace personalisation
• If they dont offer consumers the chance to
  tailor their experience and co-produce products
  they will be failing to create new routes to
  cultural participation
• They increasingly wont be seen by a large
  proportion of their future potential audiences,
  growing up digital
  
• The challenge is to invest more in innovative
  arts practice that connects artistic excellence
  with personalisation, and with new forms of
  cultural participation

27
Negotiating the value of the arts

• In an increasingly democratic and demanding
  age, artists have to establish the value of what
  they do through a conversation with their
  audiences, peers and stakeholders
• Charlie Leadbeater (2005) Arts Organisations in
  the 21st Century ten challenges ACE

28
The rise (and rise?) of public value

• ACE and their forthcoming public value inquiry
• What does public value measure? outcomes,
  services, trust and legitimacy
  
• If one accepts the need for arts organisations to
  be genuinely committed to user engagement and
  participation, it would be perverse if this did
  not lead to a more concerted effort to measure
  their impact, and user satisfaction, through a
  public value approach

29
An innovation agenda for the arts

• Leaders of arts organisations need to embrace the
  personalisation agenda
  
• Customer centricity should be a hygiene factor in
  the arts - ACE to specify minimum levels of
  performance for its RFOs in terms of customer
  understanding and engagement, linked to a range
  of soft P personalisation indicators and
  metrics
• ACE to build into its planned public value
  inquiry an explicit focus on personalisation
  testing appetite, demand and user satisfaction
  
• ACE to emphasise personalisation outcomes (soft
  and hard) within existing funding streams and
  evaluations

30
An ICT led sector?

• ACE to conduct a detailed audit of the ICT
  capacity of the sector
  
• ACE to develop an ICT and Digital Content
  Strategy for the arts, in partnership with
  leading edge organisations within the sector, and
  regional champions
• ACE to boost the funding of development agencies
  focused on ICT capability and content development
  within the sector, with the aim of creating
  effective lead agencies in every major UK region

31
Personalisation matters

• Personalisation raises the bar of public
  accountability for the arts, by ensuring that
  arts organisations and artists take their
  responsibilities to the public seriously
• Personalisation is about making arts
  organisations more responsive to the public, but
  also about reinvigorating the process which art
  is commissioned and produced
• Personalisation underlines that artists and the
  public are the best arbiters of the value of the
  arts

32

• john_at_intelligenceagency.co.uk