The ten functions of Arts Management
The ten functions of Arts Management
Ten bundles of sense-making and action-taking that help artistic expression and experience thrive.
I want to be famous in the way a pulley is famous,
or a buttonhole, not because it did anything spectacular,
but because it never forgot what it could do.
Naomi Shihab Nye, from “Famous”
Arts Management is a bundle of professional practices that support, connect, and sustain artistic expression and experience. While all of the work is intertwined and entangled, it can be useful to reduce the mess into “functions” – clusters of sense-making and action-taking worthy of separate attention.
That’s the purpose of the Ten Functions of Arts Management – my attempt to divide the array of things that arts managers do. Each function engages a related group of problems and solutions. Each can benefit from separate study and experimentation. And most have become conventional ways to organize teams and talents within an arts organization.
The ten functions are further sorted into three groups – outward, inward, and boundary – based on their dominant focus (although, again, this sorting is convenient not concrete).
Outward Functions
(bundles of action to engage and activate the environment)
Marketing: Creating, communicating, and reinforcing expected or experienced value.
Hosting & Guesting: Inviting, greeting, serving, and supporting those in your circle; while also acknowledging, honoring, and demonstrating humility in all of the circles where you are a guest.
Sales: Designing, deriving, and capturing inbound revenue from goods, services, or access.
Gifts & Grants: Attracting, securing, aligning, and retaining contributed resources.
Inward Functions
(bundles of action to sustain or change the enterprise)
People Operations: Designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise.
Spaces & Systems: Selecting, securing, stewarding, and harnessing the built environment and technological infrastructure.
Finance: Designing, maintaining, and sustaining systems of money and stuff.
Boundary Functions
(bundles of action at the border between environment and enterprise)
Program & Production: Developing, assembling, preserving, and presenting coherent services or experiences.
Governance: Structuring, sustaining, and overseeing the organization’s purposes, resources, and goals.
Accounting: Recording, summarizing, analyzing, and reporting financial states and actions.
On the ArtsManaged Field Guide, each of these ten functions has a dedicated page, with links to frameworks, stories, and resources to help you dig deeper and make useful sense of the mess.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: People Operations
People Operations involves designing and driving systems and practices that attract, engage, retain, and develop people within the enterprise (also called human resources).
Framework of the Week: Adaequatio (Adequateness)
Adaequatio: the understanding of the knower must be adequate to the thing to be known.