Arts need to create fiscal reality by Gunduz Kalic

"Money, money, that's what we want!" This was the refrain of submissions to the Major Performing Arts Inquiry the Howard Government established to find solutions to the chronic financial malaise besetting most of Australia's major performing arts companies.

One after another the arts organizations and concerned individuals responding to the Inquiry "suggested that simply providing more government funding to the companies will solve the challenges they face".

Refreshingly, in Securing the Future, its recently published discussion paper, the inquiry committee, headed by Dr. Helen Nugent, has expressed its view "that this is not the case".

What is the inquiry finally likely to recommend to the government? Possibly, a degree of rationalization - some rugby league style "shotgun" mergers of arts companies.

Almost certainly, however, the top-billing recommendation of the Nugent Inquiry will be that governments assist (the remaining) performing arts companies to adopt a more sophisticated and strategic approach to marketing, including updating technology and systems, and beefing up personnel, to try to match the practices of the competing show-business industry entrepreneurs.

At this, many in the performing arts, wishing to be paid to be "creative", are likely to groan: "Not more marketing!" And it is indeed true that the government-funded performing arts has increasingly relied over the past two decades upon tricks of the sales and marketing trades to bring in the audience.

If arts companies are putting marketing practices to work to get bums on seats, one might ask, why then are they (many of them) in worsening financial strife? The answer is that arts companies - and their government backers - do not understand what marketing is all about.

A standard definition of the marketing concept is that "producers should gain knowledge of consumers' needs and then create products intended to fulfil those needs". Yet so-called arts marketing rarely, if ever, follows this course. Rather, it has to date generally been product-led.

In a document published last year, and supplied to arts companies to coach them in marketing skills, the Australia Council wrote, "it is important to state that the main business of an arts organisation is art - thus marketing should play a supportive, not a dominant, role. Marketing tools are just that - tools - to be used to meet an organisations's artistic objectives".

The implications of this view are that arts' marketing is not about (firstly) gaining knowledge of audiences' needs and (then) creating product to fulfill those needs. On the contrary, the primary business of arts companies is creation according to "artistic objectives".

The resultant arts product handed to them by the "people who make the stuff", as Keith Diggles puts it, the art marketers' job is to draw on the latest marketing techniques in order to package and sell "the stuff".

Having marketing play second fiddle to "for its own sake" creativity is not working for the performing arts sector, as its ongoing financial crisis demonstrates.

The just-give-us-more-money school of arts crisis management would beg to differ, of course. In its view, the increasing of subsidies - forever upwards, it would seem - is the answer. Yet as Securing the Future states, the demographics show that audiences are increasingly "female" and "older". They are also growing smaller - and ever tougher to sell.

At some point the performing arts is going to have to go to basics, find out what audiences want from live performance - and give it to them. If the Major Performing Arts Inquiry can gently but firmly midwife the tearing of the "art is first, marketing serves" protective membrane which coats non-profit, subsidised arts companies - and which contributes to keeping them in a financial, demographic and artistic rut - it will have performed a great service.

After all, Mozart's Magic Flute was originally commissioned by a music hall to entertain a popular audience. And Shakespeare's plays were written for an audience made up at once of gentry and peasantry.

Live theatre, indeed, has strongly tended to enjoy its greatest artistic successes in times and places when it has been marketed, in the words of Arthur Miller, to broad cross sections of "all the people".

This article appeared in the Australian Financial Review, August 25, 1999.