The Museum Bubble

Almost everyone admits that there was an "art bubble." People admitted it as it was happening.

However, most of us are probably still coming to grips with the fact that there was a "museum bubble" as well.

Almost every week brings fresh news of museum cuts. By now the template is established -- layoffs, hiring freezes and unpaid furloughs or pay cuts for those left. Let it never be said that the art world didn’t contribute to wage deflation.

Many of these announcements have been accompanied by symbolic mandates that those at the top will take more of a hit, salary-wise, than the foot soldiers. James M. Williams, the Getty Trust’s chief investment officer, magnanimously agreed to take a six percent pay cut -- he made a staggering $1.28 million, according to the L.A. Times -- even as his investment decisions led to the loss of 205 jobs.

Meanwhile, everyone knows who is getting hardest hit -- it is the personnel who do the unglamorous day-to-day stuff that makes these places run.

The truth is that it is the people at the top who deserve the most opprobrium. I am not of the camp who hates on art students just because they were sold the idea that art could be a lucrative and glamorous career, or who thinks that art dealers are the spawn of Satan (only some of them are). But the art bureaucrats at the top, those pious guardians of our nonprofit castles of culture -- they deserve our scorn right now.

Reports generally frame museum downsizing as collateral damage of the more general train wreck in the economy. But the truth is that museum boards and higher-ups not only participated in the madness of the "bubble era" -- the period of super-charged, risk-fueled craziness that the world is now trying desperately to recover from -- but actively fed it.

Let’s look at why our museums are falling on their faces so very hard right now. Beneath the Olympian veneer of the nonprofit art world, the causes are surprisingly familiar: short-sighted speculation and irrational competition.

First of all, of course, there are the massive endowment losses. Museums are generally heavily funded by interest from their investments -- they depend far more on endowment income then they do on, say, ticket sales. So who is to blame for these endowment losses?

Over the last few years, the people who run museum endowments have followed the siren song of the "Yale Model," pioneered by guru David Swenson at the Ivy League citadel (which itself recently announced a large loss on its investments). This genius idea held that "safety" was actually a bad thing for large investors, who could use their scale to diversify into riskier, less-liquid, high-yielding asset classes.

Take the Museum of Modern Art, with its gargantuan endowment. A 2002 report in Foundation & Money Management described MoMA’s "alternative assets" portfolio as "dabs and splatters of merger arbitrage funds, distressed debt funds, and long/short equity funds, as well as private equity and real estate" ("Real estate is a great way to get some yield and also is a good inflation hedge," MoMA’s investments director told the publication). At that time, the museum was launching a new "hedge fund strategy," allocating an additional three percent of its assets to a new fund -- and indeed, according to the Chronicle of Philanthropy statistics, it seems that between 2004 and 2006, MoMA eliminated all of its cash holdings (11 percent of its endowment value before that), dramatically upping its hedge-fund exposure. "If the Museum's alternatives portfolio were a canvas, the painting certainly would be colorful."

These days there are questions about the Yale Model’s theoretical soundness, given the large-scale losses incurred by Swenson’s protégés. The entry en masse of large institutional investors into high-risk asset classes certainly fed the madness of the bubble years. At the same time, a recent Forbes article, "The Culture Crash," questions whether museum endowments knew what they were getting into at all, noting that "arts boards proved too slow to navigate away from the hazardous investments once the bad times began." As one investment advisor told the mag: "All of the charities, all of the institutions lost money, but they didn't have to lose 25% to 40%. . . putting 85% of your money in equity and illiquid instruments is gambling."

A second reason why museums are suffering is loss of city and county subsidies and support, as desperate municipalities look to trim anything that can credibly be characterized as frivolous. This has left art supporters desperately making the appeal that art actually generates jobs, trotting out any arguments that can make the case that culture is not just a luxury item -- the Americans for the Arts study suggesting that art generates $166 billion in economic activity is popular.

What really burns me about all this, however, is that not so long ago, it was government officials who were actively egging on arts leaders into thinking of themselves as the center of the "new economy." All the chatter about the rise of the "creative economy" was the flip-side of deindustrialization in the U.S., and part of how it was sold -- new "cultural industries" would replace old heavy industry; artists would be "the Johnny Appleseeds of the New Creative Economy," as Myrna M. Breitbart and Cathy Stanton put it in 2007’s Tourism, Culture and Regeneration in an article on New England towns trying to transform their abandoned mills into cultural hubs. There was, they said, "a shift from first seeing investment in culture as amenity alone, to seeing it as a replacement for industry and eventually as an important component of large-scale makeovers" [emphasis mine]. This formula was general.

Thus, the "Bilbao Effect" was sold by and to mayors in Rust Belt towns as a panacea -- old centers of industry could be revitalized by turning themselves into cultural Meccas ("The so-called ‘Bilbao effect’ has come to mean a striking building that almost guarantees that its architecture could or should contribute to the revitalization of a city," the Pritzker Prize’s Martha Thorne explained). Who could have predicted that when the chips were down the same officials who cut the ribbons would cut and run, leaving the art world alone to plead for a paltry few million extra in NEA funding before Congress? Well, in fact, I did write an article lamenting the Bilbao-ification trend with respect to the Toledo Art Museum’s stylish SANAA-designed Glass Pavilion, back in 2006 [see "Glass Houses", Aug. 30, 2006]. I have since regretted dumping on Toledo -- TAM is a terrific institution and the Glass Pavilion is a gem -- but the truth is that the rage for cultural showpieces had become a way of short-circuiting thought about sustainable development.

Which begs a question: If the idea of art-as-revitalization was just a pretext for museum mania, what was its real driver? What caused so many cities to embark almost simultaneously on plans for flashy new museums, from L.A. and Miami to Grand Rapids, Mich., and Roanoke, Va. (the latter’s $66-million Taubman Museum opened in November 2008, and immediately began to lay people off)? We find the answer in a 2007 Art + Auction article on the building craze: "An overabundance of available money." In fact, if you draw a line through the phase of postmodern museum hyper-expansion that passes through the opening of Frank Gehry’s Bilbao in 1997 and ends with the Madoff-fueled evisceration of the Rose Art Museum in 2008, it lays nicely across the recent history of asset super-bubbles -- the internet bubble, and then the real estate bubble. These created huge fortunes in technology, real estate and finance, which swelled the trustee boards of museums and the egos of potential museum donors -- and it was these people who were instrumental in pushing through the unprecedented round of museum expansions of recent years ("a lot of wealthy people are keen to have their names on wings, galleries or walls of a museum designed by a world-famous architect"). Art + Auction described museum directors as being in a sort of "quiet pain" over all the unwise building they were being asked to do. "Most museum directors know better," Nelson-Atkins head Marc Wilson said. "They get pushed into it by the trustees."

The result -- as is often the case with investment driven by an overabundance of cash -- was a lot of bad investment. A famously ill-starred case is that of the Denver Art Museum, which built its Daniel Libeskind museum -- a shiny deconstructionist cruise ship washed up in the Mile High City -- with notoriously over-ambitious projections that it could draw one million visitors a year. The result? DAM ended up operating at a loss, and began laying people off in April 2007, then eliminated its film program and curator in 2008 -- all well before the general meltdown compelled it to slash its budget by an additional 12 percent early in 2009. This, then, is another reason for the fragility of many museums right now -- across the country, cultural institutions have saddled themselves with new, flashy buildings that are expensive to heat and guard. "Subtly, the ratio between fixed costs, which are about the building, and variable costs, which are the programming costs, has changed," Adrian Ellis told Art + Auction. "And that means more building and less art."

...

The cause is simple: The biggest museums have "initial advantages" that they can compound -- they can best afford blockbuster shows (the main driver, aside from population growth, of growing museum attendance), and they are better placed to attract corporate sponsorship and private donations, which in turn have been steadily growing in importance. This competition for big shows and big donations was the reality behind the competition for sprawling new showpiece buildings. "Midsized museums," the study concludes, "will need to think strategically about their basic objectives, the audiences they are trying to reach, and their comparative advantages. They will also need to consider ways to reduce their costs -- for example, by cost sharing, loaning artworks, and joint ticketing." Keep in mind this study came out in 2005, well before museum endowments ran aground on the rocks of a coordinated global economic slump.

Consequently, even as the big museums cut staff, it is the small and midsized arts institutions that are hurting the most, and these are the kinds of places where young and unknown artists get their start, the venues that do some of the most heroic and risky work. For every front-page story about a mismanaged institution like L.A. MoCA, saved by the largesse of real estate mogul and AIG investor Eli Broad, there are ten back-page stories about admirable smaller venues like Memphis’ Power House gallery, forced to close shop as grants and donations dry up.

But it is not, in the end, even such small arts venues that are most battered in the recession, of course. Art, in our society, has an intermediate status -- lavished with praise in the good times, considered dispensable in the bad times.

...

This dynamic is worth meditating on. Given the anatomy of the museum meltdown, the art world should ask itself whose side it is on -- those who are worst hit by this crisis, or those who caused it in the first place?

by Ben Davis, Artnet Magazine

Art and Hypochondria

James Boswell, Charlotte Brontë, Charles Darwin, Florence Nightingale, Marcel Proust, and Andy Warhol - what do they all have in common? They were all hypochondriacs. Brian Dillon examines the relationship between creativity, illness and the imagination.

"A La Recherche du Temps Perdu is itself a sort of treatise on hypochondria and its artistic uses. Proust, it seems, was well aware of the contemporary explanation for hypochondria - it was thought at the turn of the century to be a disorder of the "common sense" or "coenaesthetic" faculty, by which we apprehend the evidence of our senses - and the book is full of instances of physiological as well as aesthetic oversensitivity. The Proustian hypochondriac feels the world press too keenly on him; he mistakes perfectly ordinary sensations for deep afflictions. (In Proust's own case, the touch of a damp towel could send him into hypochondriacal paroxysms.) Proust's genius consists partly in seeing the parallels between sickbed sensitivities and the delicate rigour of aesthetic feeling. What was a vague cliché for the Romantics - the artist's pallor and susceptibility - becomes for Proust a matter of neurology".

"By the middle of the 20th century, "hypochondria" had come to denote little more than the exaggerated fear of illness or the erroneous belief in its actual presence. The condition had meanwhile lost its frequent, and even fashionable, association with the artistic temperament. But that is not to say that hypochondria cannot still teach us something about the relationship between creativity and embodiment, illness and imagination. Consider the case of Glenn Gould, whose numerous eccentricities at the piano and in his daily life - Gould wrapped himself in scarf and gloves in the hottest weather, shrank from physical contact with others and kept voluminous records of his mostly imaginary symptoms - point to a physical retreat from the world that mirrors his retirement from the concert hall in 1964. Just as the recording studio then became Gould's musical prosthesis, so his hypochondria allowed him to engage with the world at a comforting distance".

"The visual artist of the late 20th century who knew most about the dangers and pleasures of physical proximity and aesthetic distance was Andy Warhol, and it is no surprise to discover that throughout his life he was a hypochondriac with a fretful and fertile imagination. The sources of Warhol's bodily unease are well known - his hair loss, his bad skin, the physical and emotional scars from his shooting in 1968 - but his diaries record a much wider variety of fears: cancer, brain tumours, Aids ("the magic disease") and the medical profession itself. (In the end, this last fear hastened his death: had he attended earlier to his inflamed gall bladder, he might have survived the rigours of the hospital; instead, he died of a heart attack in 1987, just hours after surgery)".

"Warhol is also our hypochondriac precursor: his life and art appear to predict precisely the obsessions - weight, complexion, age, aesthetics, the virulence of new diseases and the efficacy of the cures for the old ones - of a society whose medical imagination is better informed than before, but just as susceptible to grisly images of illness and anxious prophylaxis against decay. Though we live at a time when hypochondria is routinely described as merely another anxiety disorder, to be treated with drugs and cognitive-behavioural therapy, we do well to recall the fundamental questions it invites us to ask about disease and well-being, and about the proper attitude to our mortality. Every historical period has felt itself to be an era of heightened hypochondriacal anxieties; the disorder remains current, but its manifestations shift and alter and overlap from one century, or one decade, to another. The history of hypochondria is an X-ray of the more solid and familiar history of medicine; it reveals the underlying structure of our hopes and fears about our bodies".

Brian Dillon

The Guardian

August 22, 2009

Brian Dillon's Tormented Hope: is published by Penguin on 3 September. He will chair a public symposium, 'Culture and Hypochondria', at Tate Britain on 18 September 2009.

Do Critics Matter?

The fact that the classical music, dance, and art critics are not represented in today's critics' survey in the Washington Post may give those of us in those disciplines extra reason to worry that what we write doesn't actually matter.

But the whole idea that there should be some kind of correlation between reviews in the paper and ticket sales, or popularity, is fundamentally flawed to start with. It reveals a misunderstanding of what it is a critic does. Our role is not to be mere consumer advocates, telling you how to spend your hard-earned dollars. If that were the only point, newspapers might as well issue simple public-relations-style puff pieces and have done with it.

The role of a critic is to cover a field. This doesn't mean simply pandering to popular taste. It means doing one's best to convey a sense of what is going on in a given discipline by writing about every possible side of it. It means trying to convey a perspective that a reader who doesn't spend every night going to concerts/plays/films may not be able to gather himself; or offering a thoughtful take that might stimulate a reader who does go to everything to see something in a different light.

For part of our role is to foster dialogue and debate. That doesn't mean setting forth judgments of taste in order that readers might fall obediently into line behind us. Quite the contrary: it may mean putting out views that one knows may represent the minority. It means being interested in the thoughts of those who disagree. It means being delighted when someone is powerfully moved by something one didn't like oneself. It also means writing well enough that someone might want to read you -- a goal that's hard to reach if all you're doing is trying to push readers to buy tickets.

The disciplines collectively referred to as "the arts," commercial or not-for-profit, highbrow or low, offer a lot more than simply the possibility of passive consumption and a thumbs-up, thumbs-down reaction at the end of the exercise. Their very existence is a tacit reminder that there is a lot more out there than this passive consumption, and critics should be reminding people of this fact. To get diverted into yet another hand-wringing round of us-against-them, critics-are-dying-out, audiences-are-stupid plaints is pointless. Audiences aren't stupid, and if critics are feeling irrelevant, it's up to us to figure out how to become a more vital part of the debate. But if we measure "relevance" by how many tickets we sell or how many people agree with us, we've already abnegated our responsibility.

Anne Midgette - "The Classical Beat" blog, The Washington Post - July 1, 2009

Art criticism is not a democracy

You might think it's arrogance or snobbery that leads me to criticise a work of art, and maybe it is – but I'm still right

My last comment, on Classified at Tate Britain, appears to read in a highly polarised way. All the early stuff in the show is basically rubbish, I find myself saying, but the later stuff by Tacita Dean, Damien Hirst and the Chapmans is fantastic. It's a brutal expression of opinion that some may find arbitrary. But this is the right way to review new art.

The reason so much average or absolutely awful art gets promoted is that no one seems to understand what criticism is; if nothing is properly criticised, mediocrity triumphs. A critic is basically an arrogant bastard who says "this is good, this is bad" without necessarily being able to explain why. At least, not instantly. The truth is, we feel this stuff in our bones. And we're innately convinced we're right.

Critics are born, not made. I don't know why I became convinced that I had more to say about art than other people, and an opinion that mattered more than most. But I did decide that – and persuaded others to listen.

The shortlist I have co-selected as a judge of the 2009 Turner prize has been unusually well-received, so say what you like, my taste in new art is apparently pretty good. That is unlikely to make me more modest in my reviews or more tolerant of bad choices and bad art in other people's exhibitions.

Of course, by being so blunt, I run the risk of vilification. I will be seen as a vapid snob, elitist, etc. But I am no more guilty of these traits than anyone else who sets themselves up as a professional critic; I'm just trying to be honest. What do you think all the other critics believe – that their opinion is worth nothing? Unless you think you're right, you shouldn't pass verdict on art that is someone's dream, someone's life.

So, I'm sorry, but this is the deal. I don't believe my views on film or TV or music are worth anything special. But I do believe – actually I know – that my instinct for what is valuable in art is unusually sure. When I say Hirst is a great artist and that Ron Mueck, Marc Quinn and Banksy are cheap, I do think my opinion is true – and that anyone who thinks otherwise is lacking in acuity.

Whatever criticism is, it is not a democracy.

- Jonathan Jones "on art" Blog, Guardian.co.uk, 25 June 2009

The inefficiency of markets

Slaves to some defunct economist

Jun 11th 2009

THE financial crisis that has engulfed the world in the past two years is not just, or perhaps even mainly, a tale of greed run riot; it is the result of an idea that failed. That idea, which over the past four decades became the dominant belief among those generally regarded as the savviest participants in the financial system, was that the market is rational and efficient. So much for that.

The idea first took hold among a generation of economists repelled by the heavy government oversight of financial markets imposed during the New Deal era and by evidence of widespread irrational behaviour by participants in these markets. At the same time they were excited by the advances in mathematical economics and the computing power that allowed market data to be analysed like never before.

Justin Fox’s description of how the idea evolved and conquered is fascinating and entertainingly told. A statement of investor impotence—an attack on the bold ones (“idiots”, said Larry Summers, a distinguished economist) who think they can beat the market—soon became a near-religious belief. Nobel-laureate preachers, such as Milton Friedman and Merton Miller, proclaimed from the pulpits of the University of Chicago that the market could do no wrong.

Somewhere along the way, what started as a critique of the wrong ways people tried to profit from the market turned into a source of new techniques for making money. The “efficient market hypothesis”, the Nicene Creed of the market rationalists, inspired a wave of innovative financial products, such as derivatives and securitised subprime mortgages, that believers claimed would allow users to exploit the wonders of the market. This gospel was embraced so enthusiastically by the markets that these products soon accounted for trillions of dollars of trades. Then it turned out that the market was not rational after all. Trillions were wiped out and, as one of the cheerleaders for rationality, Alan Greenspan, the former chairman of the Federal Reserve, put it, “the whole intellectual edifice collapsed.”

By then, mainstream academic economists had long ago lost faith in market rationality, at least in its purest form. Especially after two of their number, Myron Scholes and Robert Merton, both Nobel laureates, lost their shirts when Long-Term Capital Management, a hedge fund based on their rational-market ideas, blew up in 1998. Indeed, the focus of academic finance has been shifting for at least 20 years towards theories that address the ways in which markets behave irrationally. To use John Maynard Keynes’s phrase, the market participants who in recent years bet trillions on these new efficient-market-inspired financial products were “slaves to some defunct economist”.

The only disappointment about “The Myth of the Rational Market” is that it does not say more about how the ideas that shape financial markets will change in response to this catastrophic intellectual failure. But Mr Fox has written a worthy successor to “Capital Ideas”, the late Peter Bernstein’s 1990s classic on the emergence of the rational-market myth: bang up-to-date; alas, without the happy ending.

Cultural groups tap audiences via social networking

BY KEVIN JOY

THE COLUMBUS DISPATCH

June 15, 2009

Two weeks ago, the marketing director for the Columbus Symphony posted a notice on its Facebook page:

Coming this fall: A special guest will be swinging by Columbus on his "way to normal." We'll be "rockin' the suburbs" of C-bus!

The subtle hint, peppered with Ben Folds song titles, seemingly indicated that the popular indie-rock singer and pianist would perform with the revived classical ensemble.

Late last week, the orchestra made the announcement public: The Folds show is scheduled for Oct. 28 at Veterans Memorial, with seats on sale today.

The delay was intentional.

"We're trying to start a conversation, as opposed to just saying tickets are on sale," said Shawne Beck, marketing chief. "We wanted to tease the public."

Other central Ohio arts groups are doing the same.

The use of social media as a marketing tool is fast becoming a key means for cash-strapped organizations not only to spread the word about offerings but also to heighten their "cool" quotients and attract Web-savvy patrons who might otherwise view the groups as stodgy or impersonal.

BalletMet Columbus last year began using the social-networking Facebook and Twitter to post bite-sized updates, ranging from ticket specials and quiz questions (with prizes) to the breed of dog -- a schnauzer mix -- used in the production of The Great Gatsby.

"We're not who you think we are," said Matt Holsinger, marketing manager for BalletMet. "We're not high and mighty, and stuffy."

In the fall, Opera Columbus hosted a Tweet-up gathering for Twitter users in the Ohio Theatre -- including a dress rehearsal of The Pearl Fishers.

About 30 guests kept their thumbs busy, Tweeting their impressions by iPhone or BlackBerry throughout the performance.

Such digital initiatives represent a boon for the company, which last year eliminated a full-time position and canceled The Mikado to avoid a deficit.

"The most rewarding thing was hearing people say (online), " 'I've never been to the opera before; I love it' or 'I'm so surprised,' " said Lisa Minken, director of marketing. "We can look at how many people are talking about us."

"Viral" grass-roots chatter is essentially free -- beyond the time used by staff members to monitor and maintain the content.

(And the practice is increasingly common: A recent study by a California consulting group found that 85 percent of nonprofits are relying on social media for marketing and fundraising.)

"There's absolutely nothing more powerful than a friend's recommendation," said Matt Slaybaugh, artistic director of Available Light Theatre.

After curtain calls at Available Light shows (including God's Ear, through Saturday at Columbus Dance Theatre), cast members ask audiences to mention the troupe via Twitter, Facebook or blog.

Other promotions are on the table, too.

The Columbus Museum of Art has a YouTube channel, with in-house videos containing sneak previews of exhibitions.

The museum is considering discounts or programming just for its 1,137 Facebook fans -- taking a cue from museums in Cleveland and Indianapolis -- and heavier advertising online and, soon, on Internet radio, spokeswoman Nancy Colvin said.

After the recent Columbus Arts Festival, the Greater Columbus Arts Council encouraged visitors to post photos to Flickr, with prizes for the best submissions. The council also tracked Facebook comments.

And the Wexner Center for the Arts recently started presenting live video feeds of panel talks, artist interviews and event announcements.

Its Web site, meanwhile, features "mix-tape" podcasts of bands booked for shows.

Like the museum, the center is using direct advertising on Facebook.

Tiny on-screen ads are targeted -- by age, sex, geography or other personal data -- to appear on selected profiles among the 200 million users worldwide.

In the span of a few months, Wexner Center ads for everything from the Andy Warhol exhibit to a Jenny Lewis concert tallied more than 31 million "impressions" (the number of times that the ads were seen on Facebook pages), according to marketing director Jerry Dannemiller.

And the center soon plans to double its budget for Facebook promotions.

The old-school crowd needn't fret, however: Traditional advertising (from print and radio ads to fliers, brochures and mailed postcards) will still be used, said all 12 organizations surveyed by The Dispatch -- such as the King Arts Complex, Phoenix Theatre for Children and ProMusica Chamber Orchestra.

"There are people who just want to read our print calendar," Dannemiller said. "On the other end, you've got people who need to be updated every five minutes. We have to adapt to that."

Moreover, arts groups acknowledge a difficulty in determining the extent to which digital followers become bodies in seats.

A fan on Facebook doesn't equal a season-ticket holder.

"We don't know how to define success with social media yet," said Bryan Knicely, president of the arts council -- whose 2009 marketing dollars have been cut in half, according to a spokeswoman.

"We feel we (already) market to our target audience very well. This is an (added) means."

Yet the frontier, all agreed, is one that shouldn't be ignored.

Minken, of Opera Columbus, writes a blog under the alias "Mimi," a stuffed cow.

The blog features a way to make donations online -- reflecting an effort to cover a $90,000 deficit -- and a button to "re-Tweet" the fundraiser.

Discounts are offered to online followers, providing another way to gauge Web traction.

Other methods are also distinct.

Beck, of the symphony, sent a Twitter post in April to encourage followers to shout "Tweet, Tweet, Tweet" among the black-tie masses before an Ohio Theatre performance -- in return for a free ticket to a future show.

Several patrons complied.

Don't forget the cultural economy

Razia Iqbal

BBC NEWS

15 June 2009

Could the creative industries provide innovative models which will make this sector not just resilient in the current economic climate, but allow it to flourish?

There are economists who think this is happening already. Recent research from the National Endowment for Science, Technology and the Arts (Nesta) suggests that the cultural sector will grow by 4% between 2009 and 2013 - double the estimate for the rest of the economy.

There are parts of this sector which are clearly feeling the effects of the recession, such as architecture and advertising. But others, like the video games industry, are burgeoning. There is a skills shortage, however, which means companies such as RealTime Worlds, in Dundee, run by Dave Jones (he created the original Grand Theft Auto), are having to look abroad for employees. Yet the currently available University courses on video games technology are over-subscribed. Surely, this is an area where the government should be looking to invest?

I've been talking to Lord Puttnam about this and he is a passionate advocate of investing in the creative industries. He thinks they are where young people want to work and argues that the government dismisses their potential at its peril. This goes to the heart of an argument that historically presents the arts community as whingeing luvvies. In fact, the reality is that the creative industries will by 2013 employ 1.3 million people and the wealth generated by these industries could reach £85 billion. It is the economic case for the arts that those in the creative industries need to make.

The National Campaign For The Arts has launched its arts manifesto today which includes a section on the economy: "To maximise the sector's potential, governments should commit to investment over a longer funding cycle of five years, more in line with established business planning". That's one thing, but the creative industries also need to make a case for funding connected with private investment. If the state funding diminishes, so will private sponsorship, so it's in the interests of the state to maintain investment.

The UK is uniquely good at creativity and innovation. Even in difficult times, institutions such as the National Theatre are innovating. Their NT Live project, which will project Racine's Phedre with Helen Mirren, live into 70 cinema screens around the UK, creates a new model to increase audiences.

For many bold enough to say so, the creative industries can be part of the solution to get the economy out of recession.