Friend and arts manager Mark Nerenhausen in Florida sent a link to this article in The Guardian about the leadership shake-up at the Royal Shakespeare Company subtitled “Debate over business in art rages as Foy quits.” The article points to a classic struggle among boards and administrators…do we hire an artist or a businessperson to run the show?
A favorite quote from the article:
The story exposes once more this common assumption that business thinking and artistic mission are mutually exclusive qualities. While this may be true in specific instances, it cannot be a universal truth. An exceptional arts manager uses the tools and, yes, the ‘gobbledegook’ of business to serve an artistic mission. Whether that manager self-identifies as an artistic thinker or a business thinker is irrelevant, as long as he or she is actually both.