Business needs to broaden its approach to sponsoring the arts

The arts sector is on itss knees, but is business really listening?

Businesses looking to invest in the arts should look to those companies whose decades-long partnerships with cultural organisations have endured.

“Making money is art, and working is art — but good business is the best art.” So proclaimed Andy Warhol, a creative genius who by all accounts — including the ones that held his considerable fortune — knew a thing or two about capitalism and culture.

Warhol’s pearls of wisdom were not overly popular among his contemporaries at the time, nor did they appeal to purists in the art world. Indeed culture and business have always been strange — if not philosophically estranged — bedfellows. But Warhol wasn’t talking only about the art of lining his coffers. He was alluding to a bigger idea: that the two worlds were more similar than they cared to admit; that they might learn a thing or two from or — quelle horreur — actually help each other.

Business, especially since the dot.com boom and the digital revolution, has begun to recognise the value of capitalising on an involvement with the arts, through sponsorship, partnerships or community engagement. And it’s little surprise. The arts, after all, is a cultural reflection of who, and where, we are. The data doesn’t lie: 98 per cent of Australians engage daily with the arts — be it a book, a film, TV, the theatre, visiting an art gallery or a cinema — according to the Connecting Australians report released by the Australia Council in 2017. The arts isn’t some niche elitist sideshow: our society, and our economy, is built on it.

But the sector is on its knees. Late last year, the Australian Bureau of Statistics revealed the arts had been the most adversely affected employment sector during the pandemic. More than 50 per cent of the industry ground to a halt. The Grattan Institute released a report estimating 75 per cent of the industry may have been unemployed as the year closed. Up until the JobSeeker scheme finished last month, one in five arts workers was still on the program. The future of those jobs is unknown.

The government’s much-spruiked $250m rescue package was heavily criticised as being insufficient at its release last year. In March, it was updated to include another $135m, most of which will go towards its RISE program to support touring acts and festivals. But for an industry that in 2019 contributed $111.7bn — a hefty 6.4 per cent of GDP — to the economy, the rescue package is small fry. Add to this a report released last year by the Australia Council that revealed a significant decline in the percentage of Australians who support government funding of the arts, and we have a real problem.

Is business the answer? Perhaps. But what exactly does business actually owe the arts industry? In short, nothing. There are no moral obligations — certainly there are no legal ones — to engage with the cultural sphere, but increasingly the idea of being a good and cultured member of corporate society is a reputation businesses want to adopt.

Personal philanthropy among individuals has a strong history in Australia but increasingly institutions are looking also for deeper commercial arrangements. See Opera Australia’s long-running partnership with Mazda; The Australian Ballet’s associations with Telstra; Art Exhibitions Australia’s relationship with Singapore Airlines. Luxury brands, too, have a long association with the sector. The Bulgari art award is one of Australia’s richest art prizes ($50,000 acquisitive award plus an artist residency in Rome valued at $30,000). Internationally, Rolex has its own arts mentoring program .

According to Fiona Menzies, chief executive at Creative Partnerships Australia, the benefits of aligning with an arts brand are undeniable.

“Beyond the obvious inclusions of brand promotion, hospitality opportunities and reputational benefit through brand alliance, partnerships that are truly collaborative can expose a company’s staff to a different way of operating,” she says.

“Arts companies work to tight budgets and timelines and have to be creative and resourceful to achieve their goals. Arts organisations have to deliver on time and on budget, opening night is opening night — you can’t delay a product launch for three months because it’s not quite right yet. It is often hard for businesses to attract a diversity of thinking among their staff, so being exposed to working with an arts organisation is a useful way of doing this.”

Menzies says there is a general recognition among business leaders that their stakeholders, especially their staff and their customers, expected them to be good corporate citizens. “Whether this includes partnering with arts and cultural organisations will depend on finding brand alignment, which for businesses is going to depend on the nature of their business,” she says. Menzies adds, however, that arts companies and businesses needed to learn to communicate: “Partnerships by nature involve two parties and I think both could do a better job of helping make this happen: the arts sector as a whole and individual arts companies need to better articulate their case for support and the impact of the arts on the community, for example in education, mental health and wellbeing and community-building .

“Businesses need to be better at working with the arts sector especially by being more transparent about what problems they are trying to solve so that arts organisations can work with them on things that are important to them.”

‘There are no moral obligations, there are no legal ones’

CPA was created in 2013 in a merger between the Australia Business Arts Foundation and Artsupport Australia. The agency now fosters relationships between business and the arts. It also manages the Australian Cultural Fund, which has since its inception raised more than $20m for Australian artists. Tellingly, Australia’s commercial giving has been growing. In the decade to 2017, Australian businesses tripled their annual giving to arts companies. According to the Giving Attitude report, the most recently commissioned data released by CPA, private sector donations to the arts totalled $608m, comprising mainly cash donations (58 per cent) and volunteer work. In-kind support accounted for the rest.

(The agency’s most recently commissioned two-yearly report on private giving to the arts was interrupted and will be released later in the year; CPA also has commissioned a separate survey on the impact of COVID on giving).

Not every arts organisation wants help, though. Take the Museum of Old and New Art’s Tasmanian midwinter arts festival Dark Mofo. In February, artistic director Leigh Carmichael announced the festival was doing away with corporate sponsors for its annual radical cultural June jamboree in Hobart. Carmichael says the commercial arrangements “were having a detrimental effect on the festival”, which in recent years has featured artworks that included the ritual sacrifice of a bull carcass, replete with 500 litres of blood, the erection of giant, red inverted crosses around Hobart and the burial of a septuagenarian performance artist beneath the city’s main street.

“Some parts of the festival were just becoming dominated by sponsors and we want to get back to focusing on the art and cultural aspects of the festival,” Carmichael says. “It certainly helped us have a bigger festival, but we’re not sure bigger’s always better. We want to be able to pursue our own cultural agenda free from restraint.”

Mofo’s erstwhile sponsors might be breathing a sigh of relief. Carmichael and Co have spent the past fortnight in PR purgatory, trying to extricate themselves from a media storm relating to a proposed artwork — now cancelled — by a Spanish artist calling on donations of blood from Indigenous Australians. (The great irony in Mofo’s dramatic capitulation in the face of public backlash is that its recent programming misstep, in spite of its new-found commercial “freedom”, has shifted it closer to the place it fears most — the mainstream.)

Warhol was right: culture is and always will be big business. And there is a very real art to businesses aligning themselves with the correct event or institution. But the pathways to partnership are clear, and arts companies have never been in more need of, or open to, support.

Businesses looking to invest in the arts should look to those companies whose decades-long partnerships with cultural organisations have endured. Who needs 15 minutes of fame when there’s a lifetime of friendship on offer?