Engineering Audiences

Delivered online for attendees of University of Goldsmiths' Decolonising the Culture Industries series, May 2021

Introduction


Thankyous - Marina and Shela for inviting me to give this talk and to Anamik for chairing.


A lot of what I’ll be talking about today draws on my personal and professional experiences, so I think it’s probably helpful to give you some context about who I am and how I came to be delivering this lecture. 


I work at the National Archives, as the Head of Strategic Insight. I’ve also worked as a researcher at Nesta, a foundation who have been very influential in the field of cultural economics, and before that I worked at the Barbican Centre in arts evaluation and policy, where I researched and wrote the organisation’s first Equality and Inclusion Strategy. I’ve also delivered lots of music education projects for various orchestras and have worked front of house at a lot of venues. Before all of that I studied Economics and was a recording artist for a few years too. 


In my career I’ve been lucky to work across disciplines, and you get to see how different professions use systems of knowledge and see the world in vastly different ways. One of those systems is quantitative data. What I want to talk about today is how data is used in the cultural sector. Specifically, how data has been presented to the cultural sector as a tool which can create greater accountability and fairness the sector, but is actually being used to entrench a range of deep-seated inequalities which benefit large, high-brow cultural institutions in the performing arts. I’ll demonstrate how data intersects with funding and also with paternalistic attitudes to stifle change that it is meant to bring about. 


Obviously, decolonising in the performing arts is not the same as the contested heritage discussions in museum studies, given that nothing was stolen here, so I think it’s helpful to look through the lens of internal colonialism, which to paraphrase Eve Tuck and KW Yang’s essay Decolonisation is not a metaphor, is the management and control of ‘people…within the borders of the domestic imperial nation to ensure ascendancy of a nation and its white elite’. 


Even though this lecture is about decolonialism, I’m not going to talk much about race - I’m going to look more at underlying structures, such as concentration of resources, control of knowledge and exploitation of people, many of which have major racial implications. There’s another aspect of contemporary colonialism which I’d like to draw on, which is our inability to let go of certain attitudes and mindsets from the past and the mental gymnastics that a lot of our cultural institutions are doing currently to try and avoid confronting some uncomfortable truths. 


I’ll primarily use examples from music throughout and I’m going to paint quite a broad strokes picture so that I can explain how I see the whole system working. I’m sure that there are any number of academic papers on the various subjects I’m going to cover, but I just want to give you the narrative from inside the sector.


At the end when I’ve made you all really miserable, I’ll share some of my own strategies and projects for alternative approaches to using data. 

The current funding landscape


First, what is the problem? The problem is that there isn’t a fair system to decide who should get public money to produce art. This is a problem that has existed in some shape ever since there has been public money for art. 


If we look at this table of the top 10 best funded organisations in all art forms, you can see that in the last three funding rounds, the same few organisations are getting the most money. Most of them are from western high cultural traditions - classical music, opera, ballet, theatre.  





So funding is concentrated in limited genres of art, in a small number of organisations and, right at the top, in a small geographic area. This has been the norm for so long here that it’s become accepted, but these are the legacies of issues that were created when the Arts Council was established in 1946. Even though it has always spoken the language of redistribution and of bringing culture to the masses, it’s only recently that we’ve even begun to try and grapple with that ambition of equality with any seriousness. 


At that time in the 50s and 60s there were a very limited number of people involved in distributing Arts Council money. Funding was decided by expert panels who weren’t paid, and essentially travelled around the UK deciding who and what was of cultural value. The panellists were culturally confident people with the independent wealth to perform such a task, so you can imagine that they were drawn from a narrow pool of people with similar cultural tastes. They weren’t particularly accountable to anyone, and also weren’t representative of much of the country, so it’s not surprising that the funding was distributed to the so-called high art forms, based mainly in London, and expected to tour the so-called regions. 


To give you a sense of the kind of disparity we’re talking about, we can look at the Royal Opera House in Covent Garden, who will pop up a few times in the presentation. They were the first organisation to receive funding from the state, in 1952. The Royal Opera House received £160,000, which rose to around £250,000 a year later and had risen steadily to £1.42m by 1971. In 2014, it peaked at £29m/year. It has received the most money in every single round of funding except one, and in today’s money it has received close to £2 billion including capital investment for refurbishments. 


The first acknowledgement that money should be given to cultural organisations which fell outside the European artistic traditions was in the late 1980s, when there were categories of funding determined by ethnicity and there was an equal opportunities fund in 1988, which distributed £24k to 10 organisations. There was also a carnival fund which gave just under £100k to 40 organisations for Notting Hill Carnival. In the same year the Royal Opera House received over £12m.


There have been plenty of campaigns and calls for funding a more diverse and distributed portfolio for years, and for a long time they was no policy mechanism for making this change. Looking back at the annual reports there are many, many instances where this issue has been acknowledged, but usually downplayed or dismissed.   

The Creative Case for Diversity & Quality Metrics


So this is the problem. We want to change this funding scenario, but we want to create a system to change it fairly. There have been two headline changes recently to try and address this seriously. 


One is the introduction of the Creative Case for Diversity and the second is the Quality Metrics. They are both part of a drive towards more data driven, evidence led policy-making that is understandably becoming more popular across many areas of government. The idea is to create more accountability and more objectivity. 


The Creative Case for Diversity mandated that all ‘National Portfolio Organisations are required to integrate diversity into their programming as a condition of their funding.’ Every organisation is given a rating, based on: 

Data is collected on workforces and audiences, covering gender, ethnicity, age and ability. It is collected via in person and online surveys, box office data and anecdotal evidence. 


The Quality Metrics are a set of questions relating to dimensions such as concept, presentation, relevance, challenge and rigour.  In the last three years its become mandatory for organisations to ask their audiences and their peers these questions and report on their results. 


When I worked at the Barbican, it was my job to think about how to collect this data properly. From a fieldwork perspective, collecting quantitative data in the fluid environment of an arts centre is difficult.  There are a lot of practical issues relating to when and how you collect the data on a consistent basis, event after event, how you overcome researcher bias and how to get a decent return rate so that the sample sizes are big enough. As someone with a background in economics and statistical research I guess that this was naturally where my thought processes led me. 


Over time though, I realised that beyond the logistics it was a really problematic and flawed approach to the whole problem. Firstly, at the actual point of collecting the data, it doesn’t really work.  No matter how benign you try and make it, the fact remains that making a minoritised person fill out of a form detailing their ethnicity, gender etc, serves only to remind them that they are outside the norm, which totally undermines the point of doing it. With the quality metrics, what is an entirely subjective and personal experience is abstracted into these dimensions, when in reality, the answers could change depending on when you ask the questions. There is no room for ambiguity or ambivalence in the responses, which is as valid a response as any other. We’re not entirely sure what they will do with the Quality Metrics data yet, so I won’t explore this is too much detail in the lecture, but it’s an interesting indicator of how far they are willing to go with a data driven policy.


Secondly, entire logic of the creative case for diversity proposes that all organisations have equal responsibility to address representation, both in their workforce and in their audiences. By doing so it echoes movements like New Labour multiculturalism and All Lives Matter and uses a kind of ‘both sides’ argument. It moves responsibility away from the funding body who can make structural changes and instead creates a market economy where orgs ability to collect and present evidence of their diversity give them a stronger ‘Creative Case’ rating. It becomes a system which can be manipulated just like any other market, and it actually makes the data of black, brown, disabled and other minoritised people a currency of sorts. Consequently, organisations run by minoritised people have sometimes received lower ratings than historically exclusive organisations.


Thirdly, on both the demographic surveillance and the attempts to codify personal experiences, we are essentially limiting our imagination for what the future  of the cultural sector could be. The sociologist Susan Leigh Star describes information technologies as frozen organisational and policy discourse, and I think that this is exactly what we’re doing here. We are taking a lot uncertainties, disagreements and unfinished processes, and we’re hiding them behind these metrics. Over time the data dominates our thinking such that we can’t really see other ways of doing things.  


In reality, quantitative data, which is the only kind of data that is really used at policy level, will always exclude a wide range of voices by giving statistical experts control of the discourse. There are very few people working in cultural organisations who are familiar with statistical analysis. Those who are are often in finance and completely removed from the realities of cultural production, so they can’t really assist with analysis or interpretation of data. The organisations can’t really challenge the status quo because it isn’t a level playing field.  


I arrived at the realisation that these statistics were being used was largely to perform objectivity rather than to actually deliver any tangible, actionable insights into what we needed to do differently. Data gives us a veneer of objective progress, with statistics, infographics and sharp conclusions, but In reality it rarely says much of value. Whether it’s intentional or not, it feels like this is a distraction from the real conversations we need to have about restructuring the sector so that a broader range of organisations receive a fairer share of the funding available.

Aspects of Classical Music


Now, I said that I would cover how this kind of data use actually benefits the organisations who are occupy the top of the hierarchy, and that’s what I’ll do now. I said earlier that data practices are frozen organisational policy and discourse, so what is actually going on behind the data which I’ve shown you? How is it gathered, how does it relate to the reality of cultural production? What other factors are at play that the data driven approach does not address?


To illustrate this, I’m going to use classical music as the case study for this part of the lecture, partly because it’s the area I know best but also because I think it throws a lot of the issues that I ‘ve discussed so far into sharp relief, although they do also apply in similar ways to theatre, ballet etcetera. When I talk about classical music I mean music written in western Europe between approximately 1650 and 1900 using staff notation, and more specifically the symphonic and operatic music which is most commonly performed by orchestras today, beginning in 1750 with composers such as Mozart, Beethoven and Haydn and picked up by Brahms, Liszt, Wagner and others. 


It’s very easy to look at the time period, look at colonial history, the enlightenment et cetera, and arrive at the conclusion that classical music is the music of Germanic, WASPy white supremacy. Maybe it is. There is a lot of orientalism in the music, especially the opera, which is unsurprising as it was the age of colonial expansion. Having less of it in the public funding portfolio would definitely be a step towards decolonisation. But in order to understand how we could achieve this, and perhaps why we are unlikely to achieve this with the current approach. We need to look at how classical music is produced and how its institutions are able to use data practices like the Creative Case for Diversity and the Quality Metrics to maintain their position within the funding hierarchy.

The first thing to consider is attitude and mindset. The way that the Creative Case for Diversity is written, you have to believe that your art is for everyone in order to be successful, and the classical music establishment wholeheartedly believes that everyone should enjoy and benefit from classical music. I heard this repeated so many times when I was working in the industry and ultimately this is the root of a paternalistic attitude. This means that their values align very naturally with the ideas in the Creative Case for Diversity and they will try and demonstrate wherever possible that they are evangelising for their music and trying to bring more people in. I would call it a delusion of sorts.  

Why is that?

Classical music has a completely different understanding of itself, its genesis and its value than other genres of music. Most music is rooted in a scene, or a time, or a place, think everything from Gregorian chanting, to Bebop, to Punk to Hip-hop. Classical music is too - it comes from the enlightenment, the industrial revolution, the age of European colonialism, but the way it is presented is as if it lives in a vacuum, outside of time, and the reason for this is that their music is preserved in perpetuity by staff notation and the printing press and is reproduced exactly as it was first written by the orchestra. Every time it is performed it is an exact reproduction of the first time it was performed, even though it’s happening hundreds of years later. 

So in many ways a classical music concert is more like a museum experience than many other musical performances. This is reflected in the venues as much as the music. We don’t think of this music as a product of its time and we also don’t consider the material conditions that the music is produced in or that it was written in, just as we look at objects in a museum without appreciating how they came to be in the collections. Just as museums are presented as of timeless, universal and benevolent value, we are taught to see classical music in the same way. This attitude shows up in the way that they try and demonstrate their value to society, and their efforts to diversify their workforce.

Orchestras will do a lot of work to try and show that they are making a valuable contribution to society. They will partner with universities to carry out research to demonstrate the impact of their education work, or they will develop a relationship with schools to bring children from nearby schools to a concert. They produce brochures with black and brown faces on the front which convince banks’ corporate social responsibility teams to sponsor them. They partner with oil companies and finance houses to sponsor subsidised ticket schemes. And they capture all of this in audience data, in feedback forms, in how many school children on free school meals came to their concert etc.

The fact that so much of the money that goes towards music education is funnelled through these organisations, that they enjoy such disproportionate benefit from it and that they promote the so-called instrumental and social benefits of the work to demonstrate its value give the whole enterprise a sort of ‘trickle down social justice’ ethos, where orchestras are harvesting the data of participants in their programmes and using these numbers to justify their own grant funding. Programme evaluations often cite outcomes like ‘increased resilience,’ ‘improved social inclusion’ or ‘better concentration’ as evidence that these programmes are successful, all the while adding to the data collection that serves future funding bids.  It’s also worth pointing out that these claims are often build on very shaky research, if there is any.


On the diversification of the workforce, all along the talent pipeline, from primary to secondary school, through higher education and into professional life, there are programmes and initiatives which ultimately claim to make the classical music workforce more representative, but there is no data which suggests any progress has been made. It’s an uncomfortable truth, but it’s also one that the sector cannot afford to acknowledge because it would undermine their future funding. Therefore we continue forward with a delusion that these relatively large sums of money are going towards making classical music more diverse and inclusive, when in fact they’re a loss leader for the sector, which knows that the majority of future talent will continue to come from people who have cultural affinity with the music, get private tuition and are at home in the conservatoire environment.  

The assumption that all culture needs to have an educational bent is the biggest policy which has been baked into the data collection approach that Arts Council have taken. Other genres, which are rooted in a community, in a political or cultural movement, will not necessarily see it as their responsibility to do any of this kind of educational work, and they shouldn’t have to. They reach their audiences much more organically, and even though they want their music to be influential, they aren’t relying on younger generations to copy them or learn how to be them, which is essentially what classical music requires to survive.

Docile audiences: There is very clear hierarchy from composer to conductor to orchestra.  Even the audiences are part of this hierarchy; they are completely submissive to the orchestra, with no opportunity to participate or interact outside clearly defined activities at clearly defined times. They sit in the dark. Their behaviour is policed by stewards or hosts and often by other more experienced audience members. Unlike carnivals, a gig, a club night or pretty much any other kind of musical performance, the audience is expected to suppress themselves almost to the point of invisibility.  It’s not surprising therefore that orchestras can treat audiences as a resource to be exploited  by surveilling and documenting them, rather than as more equal participants in a cultural event.  

Advantages of Scale: What is an orchestra? An orchestra is essentially a human machine which turns printed texts or scores into sound. Each member of the orchestra is a highly skilled and specialised, yet replaceable, cog with a clearly defined role in each piece of music. In many ways the composer, the orchestra and the relationship between them is the natural artistic outcome of the industrial revolution, primed for accurate reproduction at scale using specialised division of labour. When you see an orchestra on stage, the players are usually all freelancers, who join the orchestra on a job-by-job basis. It’s incredibly competitive work, and a lot of the players, especially the more junior ones, will often take education work to a) pay the rent and b) try and get noticed by an orchestra. So if an orchestra is running an education project in 6 schools, the orchestra can hire enough musicians to do so. They can work in many different schools on the same day, even in different parts of the country. 

So, the orchestra is actually just a brand and a service provider, and, artistically or pedagogically, largely indistinguishable from its counterparts. Underneath the veneer of good intentions, this work is about gathering the data to make their case for all of the disproportionate funding that they get for their concert programmes. A schools concert in the Royal Festival Hall could have an audience of 3000 children. Can you imagine how a musician from any other genre could do similar, without the entire apparatus of an orchestral organisation behind them? 

To suggest the this a completely cynical or unscrupulous endeavour is probably unfair, because many of the people who work in these education teams believe that they are doing good. This is unsurprising, because most of them did study music through the more established routes into the profession and very few have any experience of coming through the kinds of programmes that they are now responsible for delivering. Whether they appreciate it or not, I think they’re contributing to classical music’s continued ascendancy and consolidation of power and funding in the sector.   


Bureaucratic operations: Behind the delivery of these programmes, there is a whole bureaucracy dedicated to showing off the benevolent work of the orchestras, staying ahead of the curve on policy and bringing in additional income from philanthropic and corporate funding. Again, these are all jobs that organisations who have grown steadily with many years of public funding can accommodate, with job titles like Strategic Partnerships Manager, Relationship Manager and the like. Both the London Symphony Orchestra and ROH have had government investment in learning centres, independent of their performing spaces, which enable them to house all of their teaching projects. 


Most other musicians wouldn’t know where to start with delivering an education programme. It’s time consuming to build relationships with schools, to plan sessions and to manage the logistics. It also isn’t very creatively fulfilling to try and work with a group of say 30 children and try to write music. What you need is something repeatable that works at scale and, ideally, you need someone to work out all of the details for you so that you can show up and do the teaching bit. The orchestral institutions have education teams who can do all of this heavy lifting with programme administration. 

Power: There have been close ties between politicians and these institutions, which gives them privileges that few other organisations enjoy. I’ll give you some examples:

First is the Royal Opera House, who as I mentioned before have received more than £2 billion in public money since they were founded. They have also had their overdraft cleared on multiple occasions by the government and even when they were audited for overspending, the auditor wrote to Margaret Thatcher, who was prime minister…‘it is very embarrassing for the government to have to consider giving [the Royal Opera House] more [money] when…there is so much trouble over the NHS’. Still, he recommended they receive additional funding because they ‘do good work’ and are good for the ‘morale of the nation’.

A more recent example is the London Symphony Orchestra, when the conductor Simon Rattle joined the London Symphony Orchestra, the first thing he did was announce that London’s concert halls weren’t as good as Europe’s, and soon afterwards George Osborne, who was the chancellor, committed £5.5m to developing a business case for a new hall in Central London. Once covid hit, priorities shifted and Rattle announced he would be leaving London sooner that expected. This money that has just disappeared in consultants fees, architects fees and research trips to concert halls in New York and Paris, when grassroots music venues have had to fight for £2.25m just to survive the pandemic.   

What this shows is that those in positions of influence will always have their own biases and attitudes reaffirmed by the powers that be. They always have, and it’s hard to see this changing in the current political climate. It will take a lot more than some data initiatives to burst the bubble.  


So where does this all leave us at the moment?

Strategies

Like I said, it's a depressing picture. Sorry. But there is so much development and growth for us to do as a sector when it comes to our data practices that I think there is lots of reason for optimism and excitement. It is incredibly fertile ground for meaning-making, imaginative and generative practice and self-reflection. Here are a few thoughts on how you might do this, but they're deliberately general - it's for you to apply them however you want:

1. Resist the hegemony of these current practices and try and capture or embrace ambiguity in data. Look at rituals, make more of the process of cultural production visible to decision makers. Work with experts in using richer forms of data, such as ethnography, and who aren't in thrall to quantitative data. 


2. Be experimental - how can you borrow from sociology and psychology to collect different kinds of data? I worked with a sociologist who repurposed a birdwatching app to monitor audience behaviours in a fluid but systematic way.


3. Get specific and get applied with data use. Who wants you to collect it and why? Does it have any value to the artists or producers involved in the project? Is it honest about their intentions as creators? If not, question it.


END. Questions.