[cma-l] The Stage - Ed Vaizey: We must help arts organisations grapple with technology

[CMA-L]

In an article also published in this week’s print issue of The Stage,
culture minister Ed Vaizey  calls on arts organisations to further
exploit the possibilities and revenue streams that new technologies
offer.

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Earlier this year Michael Kaiser, the man who saved the Royal Opera
House in the nineties, wrote in his blog on The Huffington Post that
“arts organisations have been slow to exploit the power of new
technology and cling to older, more expensive techniques that are not
as effective. We are clearly doing something wrong.”

He’s right. The cultural sector is one of the most dynamic, most
exciting and most innovative there is. Technology offers huge
opportunities. I’m not talking about using technology to create
digital art - we’ve got some of the best organisations in the world
doing that - but about how culture is experienced and how it connects
with the public.

Millions of people engage with culture first and foremost online. If I
want to buy an album, a film or a computer game, I can do it all
online, straight to my smartphone or tablet. I can use it there and
then or tuck it away and listen/watch/play whenever it suits me.

The music industry is now reinventing itself to take advantage of
this, and the cultural sector is beginning this journey. Digital
Theatre already makes plays available for download, and some of our
national museums are dabbling with smartphone apps. But this is just
the tip of the iceberg - the potential is enormous.

As well as responsibility in government for the arts, I’m also
responsible for media, broadband and the creative industries and the
most exciting things I see are where those lines are blurred: Theatre
Ninjas using an iPhone app to match up free tickets with audience
members in Edinburgh, the Museumpreneurs website helping museums reach
new people in new ways or Faber and Faber’s brilliant iPad app of TS
Eliot’s The Waste Land, which is now outselling Marvel Comics on
iTunes.

People running cultural organisations are some of the most creative
and culturally entrepreneurial people you’ll ever meet. A joy to work
with and be around, creating some of the most amazing experiences you
could conceive. But on the whole, they’re not necessarily business or
technology entrepreneurs as well. So it’s important that they get help
in grappling with technology.

If the cultural sector is to fulfil its potential, it needs to be the
norm, we need to find out what everyone is doing and spread the new
ideas far and wide. We need to instil a new entrepreneurial spirit in
our cultural organisations that looks beyond just culture to
technology and business as well.

The arts at their best are still a physical, live experience. But
technology can complement this, providing an even deeper experience or
reinforcing the sense of belonging to an art form or an institution.
We should have both, each benefitting from the other. Taking the
Digital Theatre idea to the next level, we could have everything at
the National Theatre or in the West End available to download on
iTunes. Or we could make it possible to subscribe to everything at the
Royal Court in the same way as we subscribe to our favourite podcasts,
with it downloading automatically and taking a small fee each time.

This wouldn’t replace the experience of going to the theatre and
seeing it live, just as buying a DVD doesn’t stop people going to the
cinema or buying an album doesn’t stop people going to gigs. Done
right, it will enhance the live experience by deepening engagement and
open up a huge new revenue stream. If the guy who invented an app to
steam up the screen of your iPhone became a millionaire, imagine what
could be done with some of the greatest and most exciting content in
the world.

The challenge for the coming years isn’t just to make sure we continue
to create great art, but also that we take it to people in a way that
is relevant to them, in a way it hasn’t been before, and allows them
to get the most from it. It means an injection of business and
technology entrepreneurialism into the sector, to work hand in hand
with the cultural and creative.

To help, Arts Council England, National Endowment for Science,
Technology and the Arts, the Technology Strategy Board and the Arts
and Humanities Research Council have come together and put £500,000
toward a number of pilot projects looking at how to do this. In turn,
it will inform a much larger programme over the next few years which
will mark a shift towards greater digital capacity and capability in
the sector.

But public sector support can only do so much. A change of behaviour
and attitude is needed as well so that rather than reluctantly
following, the cultural sector will use its greatest assets, its
people and its content, to drive digital innovation and continue to do
what it does best - enrich the lives of more and more people.

Source: http://blogs.thestage.co.uk/newsblog/2011/06/ed-vaizey-arts-digital/index.html

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