The “Arts Management Professional”

by Claire Ruud January 19, 2012

Mitra Tabrizian, City, London, 2008

Why should we care about the rise of the arts management professional? Because the institutions that produce art—institutions made up of people who have a set of experiences and frameworks for thinking—are implicated in the kinds of art we produce. In New York, if large institutions with massive collections characterized the early 20th century, and small, collective, or artist-run spaces characterized the late 60s through the early 80s, and the biennial and art fair characterized the 90s and 00s. (Thanks to Rachel Cook for recent conversations about this progression.) There’s a chicken and egg problem here. You could think about this history of institutions as a product of the kinds of art being produced: American and European modernist painting and sculpture, Conceptualism and then movements related to American identity politics, and the global, dispersed contemporary, respectively. Or, you could think about it in terms of the kinds of people available to run the institutions: wealthy families and their intellectual attaches, underemployed boomers during the economically stagnant years of the 70s, and increasingly professionalized, business savvy managers. The truth is probably somewhere in between these two, or perhaps economic structures and conditions were productive of both.

What types of “management thinking” are affecting the art production the most right now? I propose two below, and leave it open to further discussion how these frameworks might be affecting the kinds of artwork and institutions being produced right now.

Brand Management: whether institutional or “personal,” brands are to be “managed.” We should distill our institutions and ourselves into a memorable bundle of attractive attributes for public consumption. Of course, discourses about self-presentation appear throughout history. But isn’t there something different, something very consumer-oriented, in the language of the brand? The brand is consistent, digestible, catchy, and cleaned-up. It’s not about pre-modern etiquette or modern essence. It’s something else.

Investment Analysis: the idea of making philanthropic investments with a social return takes its cue straight from wall street. The (more) measurable impacts on quality of life and the economics of a community fit into this framework better than the aesthetic, creative, or ethical impacts of art. Still, the drive to measure, compare, and select philanthropic opportunities based on impact rather than relationships, interests, and intuitive preferences reaches the art world.

4 comments

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4 comments

Randy January 19, 2012 - 18:14

It’s so amazing when art and business mix. The balance between the left and right brain.

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Janet Tyson January 19, 2012 - 18:47

Art professionals, arts managers, have overseen the corporatisation of museums, the awarding of grants and other phenonomena that have transformed all occupations in the visual arts. It used to be the impassioned amateur and the artist who was prepared to work in a cold-water walk-up on Second Avenue. That’s all gone. We might look at the role that the NEA has played in all of this.

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Tj Aitken January 20, 2012 - 08:13

What unit of measure applies to art? Money measures market value. I think the “hedon” should measure the amount of pleasure one gets from something. But Art has such complicated attributes way over value, pleasure and even aesthetics. I’d love to take art management 101 and learn the taxonomy of measurement. What we value in our society seems to be deteriorating to immediacy hedons with a lack of this type of depth that moves us in a piece of art.
Do Institutions produce art? I thought artists did that. Institutions can only attempt to capture what measures up.
Tj

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Martin January 20, 2012 - 20:27

I agree with TJ, But its sad to know that when times are good, sales are good. When times are grim, the market for art sinks and people go from oil paintings to face paintings at the fair.

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