The study of arts management was required to produce art leaders prepared to confront and resolve difficulties in the arts industry. Art has been created for ages, but it wasn’t until the last several decades that arts administration was studied seriously. New School for Social Research in New York City provided the first arts management course in the United States in 1963 (Hua, 2018). Presently, all of the best universities offer graduate and postgraduate degrees in arts administration. Despite this, there is still a high need for art managers who are well-versed in art theory and history, savvy in the business side of the arts and ready to take on the difficulties facing the field today. Different cultural and economic settings present unique difficulties for arts administration. Take the case of Britain, where the arts sector is losing funding and may soon collapse (Szostak, 2022). A lack of opportunities for the education of art-related experts and a growing chasm between cultural practice and legislation are other major challenges facing Asia’s art business, especially in Hong Kong. Although the arts management sector faces several challenges worldwide, a critical one is a shortage of qualified professionals.
Concerns to arts administration include a shrinking pool of qualified individuals to work for national arts agencies, as noted in the International Overview of Public Arts Administration Issues. Problems were foreseen in the future due to a lack of educational programs, a general unfamiliarity with the commercial sector, and a shortage of training courses for art managers and artists. Furthermore, such dangers are an everyday occurrence.
It has already been established that the majority of people who work in the arts are of the opinion that there are an adequate amount of artists, musicians, performers, and actors in the world. The lack of colleagues ready and able to guide and counsel on curating, financial management, marketing, and other essential responsibilities is the most significant difficulty that art administrators face today (Knardal, 2020).
It’s worth mentioning that the industry is home to a substantial number of art world heavy hitters at the moment. Nevertheless, they are self-taught and don’t have the necessary business and art knowledge to thrive in their positions as art managers. It will be difficult for smaller groups to pay heavy fees to attract and retain big artists. At the same time, many other problems need fixing, such as a lack of funds and the difficulty of hiring qualified art managers to oversee everything.
Museums Association head Sharon Heal made this point clear in May 2016 at the annual gathering of European museum organizations: “The individuals who work for and with exhibitions are one of their strongest assets.” Museum personnel had been lacking the tools they needed to effectively manage difficult circumstances until a new and innovative professional development plan was crafted by the museum association. Current art managers are the intended audience for these strategies (Szostak, 2022). Workers in the artistic and cultural industries should also have a solid academic foundation. A solid grounding in both cultural management and commercial acumen is highly valued by employers in this field.
According to the article published by Mara Cerquetti in the Journal of Cultural Management and Policy, demand for skilled labor has never been higher than it is right now because of the rapid pace at which globalization is occurring and the subsequent increase in the population of the continent as a result of this growth (Cerquetti, 2016). Expressions of culture are no longer employed as a method of communicating national ideas; rather, they are increasingly being used as a means of helping people of diverse backgrounds identify areas in which they have something in common with one another. As a result of this tendency, there is now a greater demand for art managers who have an understanding of international diplomacy.
Even though the arts sector is thriving now, it will require major changes in technology, audience interaction, financial planning, and fundraising in the years to come. The art world’s leaders are in a constant struggle for the attention of their wealthy clients. This behavior is not part of any artist’s training (Knardal, 2020). The job of an art director is a challenging one in this sense. Therefore, art directors need many different types of expertise, including business sense, strategic management, an awareness of the present economic situation, and a firm grasp of art history and theory, in addition to the most up-to-date practices in the field. Finding a manager with expertise in arts administration is challenging but essential.
Migration activities provide an additional layer of complexity to the process of arts governance. Dealing with a more diverse audience can be challenging for an arts administrator, particularly when it comes to the preservation of cultural and historical sites. Even though further study is necessary on the immigrant community, this is a terrific chance for an experienced art manager. The number of visitors that check out your website will be directly proportional to the quality of the audience analysis and marketing materials you provide (Cerquetti, 2016).
Summing up, there is a worldwide demand for art professionals in cultural administration, notwithstanding the fact that more art institutions lack the knowledge and resources to carry out all of their tasks as art managers successfully. In addition, there are not many options for formal education or on-the-job training. Given these conditions, it’s not hard to see why there’s such a pressing need for more art management professionals to fill positions at museums and galleries. Many arts groups won’t be prepared to deal with future problems if this problem isn’t solved. This imbalanced and angry atmosphere might be detrimental to artists. Therefore, the next few years will be quite busy for cultural organization heads as they tackle the difficult problem they confront.
Bibliography
Szostak, M., 2022. Peculiarities of art management in a digital context–case study of Poland. Entrepreneurship and Sustainability Issues, 9(4), p.10.
Choi, B. and Kim, J., 2021. Changes and challenges in museum management after the COVID-19 pandemic. Journal of Open Innovation: Technology, Market, and Complexity, 7(2), p.148. (Choi and Kim, 2021)
Knardal, P.S., 2020. Orchestrating institutional complexity and performance management in the performing arts. Financial Accountability & Management, 36(3), pp.300-318.
Hua, F., 2018. Arts and cultural management: A brief, comparative in curricular design: Cases from the UK, USA, and China. In Arts and Cultural Management (pp. 13-38). Routledge.
Radilova, O. and Ziomek, A., 2020. Fundraising competitive forces of small art and cultural NGOs during the crisis. Social Entrepreneurship Review, 2, pp.92-106. (Radilova and Ziomek, 2020)
Kaiser, M., 2022. The Biggest Problem Facing the Arts. [online] HuffPost. Available at: <https://www.huffpost.com/entry/the-biggest-problem-facin_b_279108> [Accessed 16 September 2022].
Cerquetti, M. 2016. More is better! Current issues and challenges for museum audience development: a literature review. Journal of cultural management and policy, [online] 6(1). Available at: http://www.encatc.org/media/1989-encatc_journal_vol6_issue1.pdf#page=73 [Accessed 16 September, 2022].
write