There is an emerging dissatisfaction with the current evaluative regimes for the quality and effectiveness of funded arts organizations. Far too much evaluation rests on audience satisfaction surveys and quantitative measures of audience attendance numbers, production numbers and revenue sources. The intrinsic benefits of the arts to audiences and to society are recognized to be of major importance, but the means to measure these in an acceptable and on-going manner has not been found. This article changes that. It shows, through almost three years of data collection on arts audiences, that a newly developed and tested Arts Audience Experience Index can be used and embedded by companies and government funding agencies to measure the audience experience of quality, alongside other acquittal tools.
Claire Bishop argued that the ethical lens applied to socially engaged arts practice encourages ‘authorial renunciation’ in favour of collaboration and limits the opportunity to expose such practice to critical reception. This article responds to Bishop’s implicit call to envision an artist-centred framework for participatory arts by identifying the motivations and beneficial discoveries that artists make when they seek out the creative involvement of others. Based on interviews with Australian performing artists who have established socially engaged practices, the article aims to bring about a form of ‘authorial reinstatement’ into the value system around participatory arts practice. It identifies a range of motivations for artists who establish socially engaged or participatory practice, from self-developmental to altruistic; and from arts-focused to community- and society-focused. The article argues that using these motivations to inform indicators of achievement for participatory practice provides new opportunities for critical interrogation of those practices.
The arts and cultural sector has historically relied on funding from state and federal levels of government. Increasingly, however, local government has become a source of distinctive cultural policy making and a provider of significant funding for arts and cultural activities. The paper notes the relative absence of analyses of the role of local government in policy literature. It argues that with the recent proliferation of dedicated local cultural policies and plans, the attention of scholars is warranted. Through an analysis of the cultural plans of five local councils around Australia, the paper argues that the distinctive feature of cultural policy at the local level is a function of local government's proximity to its constituents, flexibility in decision-making and the discretionary nature of its expenditure.
The idea that organizations need to adopt structures and practices that facilitate ‘creativity’ has become a central theme in theories of managing organisational innovation and success. This idea has been deployed in organisational theory, HRM, marketing and other domains of organization studies. For many theorists and practitioners in this area, organisational creativity is something to be distilled and managed as an element of organisational performance.We argue, however, that this process of appropriation from the creative arts is subject to a number of problematic transitions. Our starting point is the notion of creativity itself. Within the creative arts, the question of what constitutes creativity and its relationship to artistic practice is subject to considerable debate. This debate centres on the question of whether creativity represents an essentialist and inexplicable (even spiritual) component of artistic practice or whether creativity is a trait of work and cannot be attributed as a unique aspect of art.However it is defined, we argue that the notion of ‘creativity in business’ conveniently ignores essential elements of what constitutes creativity. In the process of being appropriated from the arts, the concept of creativity, we argue, has been ‘hollowed out’ and refashioned to suit the structures of organization as institution, and its needs as a business organization. This appropriated view of creativity has, in turn, been imposed on arts organisations, which are impelled to see themselves as ‘creative businesses’. In both cases, the mantra of creativity provides nothing more than a means to control individuals and provide them with a false hope that contributing to the success of business will provide a means to self fulfilment.
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