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THE ‘ARROGANT PIG’ THAT GAVE THE ARTS BUSINESS FEET
20.12.2011 / AI Profile / 0 Comments
Colin Tweedy, chief executive, Arts & Business
Another twist in the story of business sponsorship of the arts in Britain is about to happen with the “merging” of Arts and Business with Business in the Community, devised after the Toxteth and Brixton riots 30 years ago to promote corporate social responsibility and help rebuild urban communities. It is a move devised by the Prince of Wales, who happens to be president of both charities.
To some, A&B might have escaped destruction but by being subsumed into Business in the Community it has been nullified. To Colin Tweedy, its chief executive for the last 28 of the organisation’s 35 years, it is a liberation. “A&B, free from the restraints of the public sector will have a strong voice, and that is the voice of the private sector” he says.
But it won’t be his voice any longer. Part of the price of the new arrangement is his job, and he stands down in January. He will become a vice-president for three years, along with Stephen Fry, Lord Mandelson, Joanna Lumley, Dame Diana Rigg, former Arts Council chairman Sir Gerry Robinson and Lord Puttnam. A campaign director is to be appointed, but A&B will be answerable to the CEO of BitC, Stephen Foster.
Tweedy has been criticised as keeping Arts & Business going beyond its usefulness, but he believes those critics misunderstand the nature of business support, the campaign A&B has been running, and the state of arts funding now. He feels betrayed, not only by the politicians he advised who then abandoned him, but by the arts sector itself for which he and A&B have created a funding system that is the envy of the world. Coin Tweedy has a theatrical style and has been accused of exploiting the drama of a difficult funding time for culture, but that style has won millions for the arts and belies profound thinking about alternative fund- ing.
After Oxford he went into theatre management, and studying dramaturgy in America he came to the conclusion there was no money in it. He joined a merchant bank, hated every minute of it but became financially numer-te. Among his clients were Flemings Bank and the House of Fraser and, overcome by the magic of the Edinburgh Festival, he persuaded them to sponsor shows. He switched to financial PR where he was able to steer even more clients towards sponsorship.
Luke Rittner had founded the Association for Business Sponsorship of the Arts in 1976, and when he left to run the Arts Council Tweedy applied for his job. “I was 29, lost my company car and my company pension, but I thought it was the perfect marriage between busi- ness which I’d just spent six years training in and the arts which was in my soul, my psyche, my water”. He and his assistant, Dawn Austwick, moved the office from Bath to London, and the two had become 100 by 2011.
In 1976 Rittner registered £600,000 in business arts sponsorship; by 1983 it had risen to £7m. Twenty years later it was nearer £700m, and it has only slipped back in the last year.
Under Tweedy A&B established the “mixed arts econ- omy” whereby funding is roughly a third earned income, a third public subsidy and a third private sector support,
a model widely copied abroad. In 1984 the organisation developed matched funding, whereby business contributions would be equalled by a government fund run by A&B. Between then and 2008 £90m of public investment was matched by £1 billion from the private sector, but that year the scheme was scrapped and A&B’s government grant cut from £7m to £4m.
He was accused of being too cosy with big business and philanthropists, not close enough the arts, and he made what he now sees as a mistake. He tried to reverse it by appointing a director of arts, Verity Haines. “It didn’t work, it failed when the matching grant was cut. We were focussing more and more on the arts, trying to please them all the time, but if you weren’t giving them money they were saying ‘What’s the point of you’” Tweedy says.
It was A&B that unearthed the extraordinary potential of individual giving, began exploiting it and persuaded the then shadow culture secretary that this could be a golden egg. Jeremy Hunt was enthusiastic, but saw it as the beginning of a reversion to the American system of endowments fed by wealthy citizens for whom appoint- ment to a “committee of honour” is equivalent to our honours system.
“That’s a fundamental misunderstanding of the rea- sons why people give” Tweedy says. “We’ve been told either that corporate sponsorship is not relevant any more or has peaked, or ‘philanthropy’ is a better word because the Americans use it. If you want philanthropy it will come from businesses’ marketing departments, but in the US most corporations have foundations. In Britain they don’t.
“Fundraising in the 21st century is about engaging individuals - businesses or people – and you’ve got to know your audience, which is what the Americans are good at. That’s where people will engage, but you cannot launch a campaign and expect results in a year. If it works it takes at least three years, probably five.”
He is bitter at “having our reputation trashed by being ignored”, saying that the points he had made to Hunt and Ed Vaizey, now the culture minister, have all being taken to a greater or lesser extent: matching funding, challenge funding, the legacy campaign, cultural philanthropy and tax reforms.
The job of delivering on them was given to the Arts Council, however, he thinks has neither the time nor the expertise to justify it. “They say business is hard-wired into giving to the arts, and there’s nothing more to be done, which of course is nonsense. Business is hard wired to make profit”.
The campaign launched by Hunt a year ago is hope- lessly modest in its ambitions, and the ‘Year of Corporate Philanthropy’ he announced has disappeared without trace. “I sense the Year of Corporate Philanthropy has been written off” is Tweedy’s verdict. “It’s a misnomer because there is no such thing as ‘corporate philanthropy’ – there is philanthropy and there is corporate sponsor- ship, you cannot conflate the two – and nothing can be done in a year anyway.”
His staff of over 100 is being whittled down to 22, and he sees an irony in that A&Bs in Scotland, Ireland and Wales have been made into independent charities, still government funded.
“In England it seems we were being viewed as part of problem, not a solution. But I have to stop being angry” he says. “This was a government decision, I don’t agree with it but we’ve all got to move on and any sense of grief and anger is irrelevant. I have a legacy which I hope to secure within BitC.”
He believes the salvation of arts funding lies with the old fashioned business sponsorship, simply because it is the sector that will recover soonest, and that is the sector in which A&B is most experienced. “The major focus will be bringing the business community to the table, and that’s where we started”.
Many of those who now head the charities and foundations were trained by Tweedy – his first assistant, Dawn Austwick, runs the Esmée Fairbairn Foundation. He says A&B helped to change opinion in the arts from “public good, private bad”, and enabled the arts community to stand on its own two feet.
“I’ve been an arrogant pig at times, and perhaps I should have moved on long ago, but I’ve loved every minute of it and I still do. I want the private sector to understand that the arts are one of the most important things still going for Britain.”
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