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When I worked in the arts, there was one question which we were not allowed to ask, and there was one answer which we were not allowed to question.

The answer which we were not allowed to question was that the arts can play a functional role in society. This is because so much of arts funding comes from Local Authorities and from other public sector bodies such as Primary Care Trusts, New Deal, and funding streams such as NRF and European regeneration funding. Since at least the 1990s, this money has only been available because of the case that the arts made for ‘reaching the parts that other activities did not reach’. I must take some of the credit — or bear some of the responsibility — for this myself, as my main role as Executive Officer at West Midlands Arts was to make the case for the arts in society, a function cryptically known in arts-speak as ‘advocacy’.

The question which could not be asked was very simple: what is art? Any attempt to debate this — for example, in a staff meeting — would instantly set Visual Arts against Performing Arts, with spats forming between Craft and Film (the fab people at the British Film Institute famously used to refer to Craft as ‘mud and baubles’). Any potential definition of art inevitably excluded somebody, and raised one particular artform as the highest. The result was rather similar to Eris thowing in the apple of discord, inscribed ‘to the fairest’, at the wedding of Peleus and Thetis.

There has been a long and rather stalwart resistance to any attempt to ascribe a financial value to the arts in society. Clearly anybody who actually wants to put a price on the value of art is a philistine who has no business talking to art people at all. However, the answer of ‘funding the arts because they are worth it to society’ only makes sense if we can find some answer to the question ‘what is art?’, and thence to the rather base question ‘what does art actually achieve?’

Although arts ‘outsiders’ looked on me as an arts ‘insider’, arts ‘insiders’ always regarded me with a certain degree of suspicion. One of the reasons for this was because I did insist on asking these kinds of questions. Occasionally, the more sympathetic ‘insiders’ used to metaphorically roll-over, and hint at some kind of answer. Regrettably, the very best answers were the very worst. Sally Luton, then Chief Executive at West Midlands Arts, and now Director of Arts Council West Midlands, once suggested that art was ultimately about one thing representing something else. She then immediately qualified it by saying, “but, of course, that doesn’t apply to music”.

What goes around comes around, as they say. Six years after asking the question, I was faced with the question of what art does from the other side of the table — as someone deciding whether or not to invest in the arts from the point of view of an NHS Primary Care Trust. Intuitively I recognised that art really does reach parts that nothing else reaches. However, at the same time, the arts had made their case so well (sometimes using arguments that I had penned myself) that some NHS backed projects were commissioning artists to do everything from organising conferences to undertaking routine administrative tasks — but at a vastly inflated rate. What’s more, very often the most valuable part of an arts intervention was not the final product, but the effect it had on those taking part.

The eventual resolution to the problem was to look at art not as a product — a piece of music, a play, a painting — but as a process.
If you consider the formation of a work of art — be it a conceptual piece of visual art, or a top 40 hit — then there are three stages it must go through (though they may overlap in some artforms). First, there must be a creative stage. This is sometimes referred to as ‘inspiration’, but analysis of the actual processes of many famous artists suggests that the common notion of a moment of artistic inspiration does not fit. Second, there must be a stage of realisation. Someone once suggested that art is ten per cent inspiration, and ninety per cent perspiration. Clearly, both the creativity and the realisation are necessary. Without creativity, no amount of workmanship will produce art. At the very best, it produces an excellent imitation of art. A mass-produced pot may be in every respect identical to the designer’s prototype, but there is an exact intuitive sense in which the designer’s prototype is a work of art, and the mass-produced pots are the product of manufacturing.

If we look at a piece of art, creativity and realisation play a large part in our evaluation of it. A truly creative idea executive shoddily is marred. A truly polished piece of uncreative imitation is dull.

Nonetheless, this is clearly not all there is to art. Geoffrey Stephenson once pointed out that the only things necessary for a drama performance was an actor and an audience. When we consider the question of ‘greatness’ in art, we inevitably consider the response of the original, and subsequent audiences. The first performance of Le Sacre du Printemps resulted in an actual riot, leading Igor Stravinsky to conclude that it should not be performed as a ballet at all but as concert music. Nijinsky’s original choreography is lost, although the ballet is now established in the canon of progressive classical dance. One of the reasons for the popularity of ‘work in progress’ performances by contemporary dance companies is to gauge the reaction of audiences prior to a tour or first public performance.

Shakespeare remains, after four-hundred years, the greatest writer in English, perhaps in any language. The Elizabethan and Jacobean renaissance produced a number of good, perhaps great, playwrights. Marlowe’s Doctor Faustus is better known than Shakespeare’s minor plays, while Webster’s Duchess of Malfi has established a niche as a key A-level text. It could be argued that Marlowe, Webster, Johnson and the others would have been as famous as Shakespeare if they had written as many plays. But anyone who has ever seen Macbeth, King Lear, Richard III or Julius Caesar on stage knows the difference. Audiences 400 years after the plays were written are still completely wrung through by the experience.

If the first two stages are in the hands of the artist, the final stage is between the work of art and the audience. At its highest level, we can speak of an audience being transformed by the experience. At the lowest level, audiences find the art dull or uninspiring — even the riot caused by Le Sacre du Printemps is preferable to that.

The artistic process which I have articulated is a simplified one — but I’m convinced it is the right one. Removing any of the steps results in something which is not art, and going only through these steps does actually complete the process.

For the sake of memorability, let me put forward Alternatives, rather than ‘Creativity’, which is gives the simple acronym:
Alternatives
Realisation
Transformation

This formulation may appear amusing and mildly clever, but there is a more functional point to it.

The free-wheeling, creative thought processes of artists clearly have a lot to offer both business and the public sector. Generally this potential is not realised. Either, artists are brought in for projects for which they are entirely not suited, or they are hired to provide nothing more than entertainment, or, at best, prestige.

The process I have outlined suggests three contexts in which business or the public-sector should look to the arts.

First, where creativity is required, or the unleashing of creativity in others, intervention by artists can open unique perspectives.

Second, when a quality of realisation is required which goes beyond simple sound recording, or graphic design, or business writing, involving artists in the production can lift it from the mundane to the extraordinary.

Finally, when it is necessary to not merely influence, but to transform an audience, artists can make the difference.