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Arts management

• Stor opera, små pengar

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Dissertation on Arts managment

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 Arts Management   Tankekulturer    Trender    Publikationer 

DOKTORSAVHANDLING   Avhandlingen "Stor opera, små pengar", doctoral dissertation, Stockholm University 2001, School of Business. Published as book at Carlsson Bokförlag. ISBN 91 7203 404 1

Abstract

What are the financial and aesthetic possibilities of running a theatre? How is performing arts management being practised at an opera house? What kind of character is an arts manager? These are the central questions that the present thesis seeks to answer.

Managing an opera house is a practice determined by musical modes of interpretation, as well as the organising processes of economic activities. This study is an archaeological description of  theatrical management as discursive practices. It draws its inspiration and methodology from the writings of Michel Foucault. The study illustrates strategies, shifting forms of practising management, and the formation processes of suitable governing subjects. Form becomes visible through the archive. Managing produces material artefacts, statements, and concepts, i.e., documents and traces to analyse on a discursive level.

The analysis describes historical conditions of possibilities of managing professional ensembles within permanent opera houses. In the history of theatrical management, the style of 'grand opera' appears simultaneously with certain inventions of administrative techniques. Grand opera required distinct ownership, continuous monetary subsidies, and a modern notion of planning, co-ordination and distribution of financial resources. As costs became heavy, a discourse arises in order to secure sources of income through symbolic acts (speech acts). The thesis suggests the varying concepts of the 'institution', its conceptual transformations, and its linked notion of administrative continuity as the main organising principle at work within discourse, i.e., a strategy for managing varying costs of production.

The empirical example used for illustration is the management of the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm and a national theatre founded in 1772-1773. Four periods are traced in the history of management. The periods roughly correspond with the configuration of a noteiceable character of the general manager: the courtier, the civil servant, the artist, and the contemporary arts manager.

Key words: institution; performing arts management; opera; discourse; art institution; national theatre; Kungliga Operan; Kungliga Teatern

Summary

This book studies the interplay between culture, economic activities, and aesthetics. It takes as its starting point the subject of performing arts management at the Royal Swedish Opera in Stockholm (1772-1773). The analysis is twofold: that of the historical constitution of an institution and that of the governing subjects. It is important to put forward specific historical conditions that govern the continuity of institutional arrangements, as well as the formation processes of suitable characters. Nowadays, a professional 'arts manager' has replaced the aristocratic character that once was a 'sur-intendant' at the royal theatres. A character is not understood here as a social role, but as the embodiment of a culture's moral and metaphysical ideas and theories.

In view of a nominal phenomenon, I describe the institution on the level of writing, and as the effect of a narrative order. Of importance, is the name that one attributes to a complex strategic situation in a particular historical formation. The analysis moves on this level of representation, i.e., under the level of the institution. We will then recognise concepts, strategies, and social techniques used in shaping organisational reality. In analysing a narrative form, one needs to distinguish between fable and fiction (Foucault, M., Behind the Fable). The fable is what is related (e.g., episodes, characters, functions they exercise in the narrative, events), while fiction is the narrative system, or the various systems according to which it is 'narrated'.

Methodological Considerations

The analysing strategy is inspired by archaeology (Foucault, The Archaeology of Knowledge). Analogously, management is dealt with as speech acts or the act of stating. Thus, the book describes management as discursive practices and as historical processes of organising, arranging, and re-arranging local discursive fields. What one is searching for in arhaeology is that of a working concept. It is an attempt to map out the historical a priori of a present formation.

In analysing statements (written or spoken), I try to decipher a codified social reality. A codification is a process of constructing a whole series of notions. The archive is a complex volume and system of statements in which statements can belong to a discursive formation. The analysis of statements operates therefore without reference to a cogito. A strategy is a 'strategy without a subject'. Strategies appear within an institutional context or a field as a set of events, practices, political decisions, a sequence of economic analyses, etc. A discursive practice is a body of anonymous, historical conditions, determined in the time and space that have defined a given period. My description is episodic. I also refer to the time-space dimension as processes of traditionalisation and institutionalisation of aesthetic practices. The institution points at a double problem, namely, that of history and that of formalisation.

The Corporeal Coming into Being

The first part of the book deals with historical conditions of possibilities. Music and serious opera were performed, financed within, and linked to social rites in court life. Of importance are the rise of a mode of civility, the history manners, and pre-national economic arrangements of monarchic power constructions (Elias, N., The Civilizing Process; The Court Society). From the 17th century on, notions appear referring to the socio-economic entities of Nations. In France, we find the birth of a series of new institutions with distinct functions. The French Academies of arts and sciences were in many ways models when art institutions were subsequently established in Sweden. During the 18th century, the concept of 'wealth' became related to the arts. Theatrical life is then arranged according to the idea of public urban space: the public national theatres became a wide-spread phenomenon in Europe. When founding the Royal Swedish Opera in the 1770s, one was eager to create a 'Swedish' and 'grand opera' and an 'opera system'. These were ideas linked to a request of a 'critique', of public 'enlightenment' and of the formation of taste and judgement. Civility is then transformed into a fixed 'civilization' signifying the whole of the Swedish nation. 'Civilization', 'moral culture', and bildning 'Bildung' are concepts used in discourse for legitimising costs of the Royal Swedish Opera in the middle of the 19th century.

The Case of the Royal Swedish Opera: statements and analysis

The second part of the book describes at some length management, the institutional context, and the managing subjects. The main characters, managers appearing in a chronological order, have faces, names, habits, and social status. These managers hold dialogues in memorandums, hold different views concerning running an opera house, are involved in conflicts, and we can see their portraits in museums or find their biographies written in books. These are characters empowered to act and to speak. Behind the fable, however, there is a shadow theatre of anonymous faces, strategies, ruptures, crises, disappearing concepts or untold stories that signify transformations and other often forgotten forms and practices. Four main periods appear in the history of management:

1772: The Court Theatre. The opera is linked to the Royal Academy of Music, but is a personal property of the sovereign King. His personal assets finance the opera. Individuals are under the surveillance of the direction of the royal theatres. Important are spatial power relations, the place of the king, and the organising principle of the king's observing eye. Strategies used are privileges, censorship, monopoly, and taxation of travelling companies and strolling players to support the finances of the permanent royal theatres located in Stockholm. Subsidies are authorised in discourse by ideas of the cultivating process of public taste, judgement, and moderation of passions, i.e., a 'moral culture' linked to 'national wealth' and 'population'.

1809: The Theatre of Duty. Division of power made the Riksdag (the Swedish Parliament) more powerful, and a political discourse is growing stronger. Finances are subsidised by taxes and public revenues. Former regulating articles of the theatre are taking the shape of formal report systems for budget and audit procedures. Normalisation through detailed regulations appears constituting time-fields and a control of individual behaviour. The king's subjects, 'sujets', are replaced by a frequent use of the concepts of 'art' and 'artists' in documents. Opera managers are well educated at universities. When competition is allowed, the coming of a theatrical market is problematic for the management. The opera is overburdened with debts and the house is old and worn with years, with ownership being taken over by the State in the 1880s.

1898: The Theatre Company. A bank consortium is financing the building of a new opera house and the State is hoping for an entrepreneur to take over the management. The opera is organised as a joint stock company managed by an executive managing director and a board of directors. A chairman of the board is later writing a visionary 'program' on a 'method' with 'tactics' for management. Artists are reacting to the intended entrepreneurs's lack of 'spirit', 'tradition', and 'idealistic attitude'. A new program in 1919 is promoting investments in 'rational' technology and a five-year planning circle based on modern administrative principles in an attempt to control expenditures. Notions on the aesthetic education of the Swedish people (folkets själ) are stressed in discourse motivating subsidies. In the 1920s, the opera manager, a former banker, is claiming that he never had had the slightest hope of 'making the opera into a profitable business'. Artistic 'works' are now juridical objects, causing negotiations on agreements and regulated time limits for performances. Monetary means are brought from a State lottery fund.

2000: The Music Theatre. Increasing costs of salaries are a driving mechanism underlying the rise of the new national cultural policy for a modern democratic society. A cultural economic theory appears in the 1960s (Baumol & Bowen, The Performing Arts - The Economic Dilemma). All monetary flows are reorganised within the State cultural budget procedures. In the early 1970s, all remaining privately owned shares of the company were taken over by the State. Since then, the opera is most often treated as a 'cultural institution' in formal analyses and managed without interest in profit. Nowadays, formal report systems, evaluations, and statistics appear as instruments used by the owner on the macro/micro level for control of expenditures. Costs of cultural institutions are often authorised in discourse by the notion of a general history and a 'cultural heritage'. The capacity of the manager is a strategic ability to turn intangible assets into monetary form through discursive acts.

General Conclusions

Continuity cannot be defined with the 'institution' as a firm principle. As a semantic object, the institution becomes twisted within discourse. It was referred to as an 'opera institution', a 'national theatre', a 'public institution for arts and music', and a 'cultural institution'. Narrative mechanisms make us recognise the enunciative modalities. It offers a possibility of knowledge based on cultural embedded practices of managing particular organisations. In short, the study shows how practices are transformed in crucial ways. As music, song, and theatre once within royal courts were spectacular events, these events have turned into an administrative discourse based on 'rationality', 'efficiency', and 'cost awareness'. An Arts Manager is thought of as a calculating character and as someone who knows how to handle costs. An Arts Manager is someone familiar with aesthetic as well as monetary values.

Discursive strategies: I have illustrated the construction of an organisational reality through notation techniques, the production of statements, and visualisations on sheets of paper. To write and to speak are interactive methods of exercising management, i.e., actions making use of different forms of representation, languages or notation systems. In some respect, the body was the most salient feature in economic discourse. The economy of the opera house was organised by the principle of a head, a hand or an eye. The opera institution was one of all the other organs within the socio-economic body called 'society'.

© Jeanette Wetterström och Carlssons Bokförlag 2001