The Blog

Culture, Funding, and What Arts Pollicy Keeps Getting Wrong

I put up a post on social media last week that got a lot of attention. The bit that resonated was this

“But culture (arts, community, youth etc) does not behave like a product line. It behaves like soil. You don’t fund a forest by paying for leaves. You fund it by protecting the conditions in which growth is possible: time, trust, continuity, and shared meaning…many of our funding instruments are not neutral. They actively reshape the cultural field – and often in ways that contradict stated policy goals. Funding tools can create the problems they are designed to solve.”

I was surprised how much attention this post got, particularly by one comment: “That feels like a genuine discovery. And rarely in dialogue in this topic have I heard genuine discovery. It sounds like a treatise that needs to be disseminated where it can affect comprehension and change.”

So that felt like a bit of a challenge!! So this is my thinking behind the forest leaves metaphor and why there’s never enough money in the arts,

First, there is a fundamental mistake running through arts and cultural policy. It’s been there so long it’s almost impossible to see.

Public policy works on the assumption that funding responds to problems.

In reality, funding tools can create/aggravate the very problems they are designed to solve.

Now, this is not because policymakers are careless, nor because institutions are corrupt, and it’s not because artists are ungrateful. The reason is simple and it’s a really common mistake. The state, politicians, bureaucrats and other agencies keep misidentifying the object of cultural policy – and then they build instruments that reshape reality to fit the mistake.

The result of this mistake is a system that appears busy, inclusive, and productive, but is actually and quietly destroying the conditions that make culture/art possible in the first place.

The Forest and the Leaves

Let’s take a second to consider this metaphor. You don’t fund a forest by paying for leaves but cultural policy has become very good at funding leaves, as we all know.

Projects. Events. Outputs. Participants. Audiences. Artefacts. These fit neatly into applications, assessment criteria, and annual budgets. They can be measured, reported, and justified.

But culture – unfortunately – doesn’t live in outputs. It lives in conditions.

Time. Trust. Continuity. Shared memory. Informal learning. Intergenerational transmission. Risk-bearing capacity. These are not incidental to culture, they are its soil.

So here’s another great sound bite: when we fund only what we can see, we weaken what allows anything to grow.

The “three body problem”

At the root of the problem is a “conceptual collapse” that policy language rarely acknowledges.

Creativity, culture, and art are routinely treated as if they were the same thing and they are not.

So let’s take a moment to break it down – to name the parts as it were. Creativity is a given – a universal human capacity.

Culture emerges from the convergence of individual and group creativity over time.

Culture produces artefacts: and these are traces, indications, of a society thinking about itself.

Some of these artefacts endure, and we call these Art.

Art then feeds back into culture, reshaping imagination, language, and possibility.

This is a cycle, not a hierarchy.

Unfortunately, when policy collapses this cycle into a single category – ‘“the arts” – it creates impossible expectations:

creativity is treated as something to be allocated or produced, culture is treated as something to be delivered, art is treated as something to be predicted, and funding is expected to function simultaneously as welfare, evaluation, and validation.

Essentially the funding/policy system becomes incoherent because the model is incoherent.

Funding Is Not Neutral

Funding is often spoken about as if it were passive support – the beneficence of an enlightened state.

It’s not that!

Funding is a design tool.

Every funding instrument encodes a theory of how culture (and the arts) works:

project funding assumes culture is episodic, competitive calls assume scarcity and competition produce quality, pre-declared outcomes assume culture is predictable, individualised grants assume resilience is personal.

These assumptions just aren’t articulated, but they are enforced daily through forms, deadlines, assessment criteria, and reporting requirements.

And the arts eco- system behaves accordingly.

Time fragments. Risk is pushed downward onto individuals. Learning becomes performative. Collaboration becomes irrational. Continuity is quietly penalised.

These are not failures of character or competence. They are logical outcomes of the policy tools currently in use.

How Funding Creates Its Own Justification

The irony, or perhaps the joke, is that despite the fact we observe the outcomes produced by this system – precarity, fragmentation, exhaustion – we respond by intensifying the same logic.

We see instability, so we introduce more short-term grants.

We see fragmentation, so we add more competitive schemes.

We see lack of depth, so we demand clearer outcomes in advance.

We see exclusion, so we spread smaller amounts thinner.

Each response treats a system effect as if it were a localised failure.

This is how funding architectures become self-justifying: the damage they cause becomes the evidence for their expansion.

The forest weakens and the leaves multiply. It’s self harm at a systemic level.

The Quiet Substitution of Welfare for Cultural Policy

This is a really fascinating aspect of the great funding mistake and nowhere is it clearer than in the way cultural funding has been asked to absorb failures elsewhere in the state.

Because there is no coherent income architecture for artists, arts funding has quietly become:

income support, labour-market correction, wellbeing intervention, social policy proxy.

All without the scale, authority, or design to do these jobs properly.

This is not compassionate it is simply avoiding the issue,

When welfare is smuggled through cultural funding, both systems are distorted:

cultural policy becomes moralised, funding decisions become confused, and culture is instrumentalised to solve problems it did not create.

Arts funding should not be concerned with artists welfare because that’s a welfare /human rights issue not an arts issue.

Separating income support from cultural funding is not technocratic tidying – it is conceptual honesty.

Culture Is a Condition, Not an Activity

Let’s try and pull all this together. The central error is this:

Cultural policy treats culture (and therefore arts) as an activity when it is a condition.

Activities can be funded episodically, but the conditions that produce those activities must be sustained.

Culture, however, behaves like a field:

relational rather than transactional, cumulative rather than episodic, place-based rather than mobile, time-dependent rather than immediate.

Project funding is excellent at producing events, but it’s very poor at sustaining fields.

When the project approach becomes the dominant logic, depth declines even as activity increases. We just get more stuff.

What an Effective Alternative Requires

A different outcome does not need better intentions, or a more refined language, but it desperately needs better models and better tools.

It is my belief that an effective cultural funding architecture would:

Fund conditions as infrastructure. Time, continuity, coordination, reflection, and learning are not overheads. They are the system. We need to accept that cultural value is retrospective: what endures cannot be predicted. Autonomy and unevenness, failure, are not flaws: they are conditions of seriousness. We need to mix funding instruments deliberately because direct grants stabilise time and risk; income supports belong in welfare, and tax systems drive investment and engagement. No single policy/funding instrument can do all the work. We need to evaluate coherence, not volume. Retention, collaboration, memory, and capacity tell us more about cultural health than output counts ever will.

What This Implies About the State

If we take all this seriously, it leads us to an uncomfortable conclusion.

The state currently relates to culture as something it funds, uses, and depends on – but does not recognise as a form of public intelligence.

So, in the absence of a robust theory of culture and art, administration and funding step in.

Application forms and guidelines replace understanding, metrics replace meaning, and competitive funding replaces stewardship.

Essentially, culture and the arts are tolerated so long as they remain legible and useful.

But their deepest value lies precisely in what resists legibility: ambiguity, contradiction, deep time, critique, and shared sense-making.

A state that cannot accommodate this is not hostile to culture.

It is simply incoherent.

The Point of the Forest

The forest metaphor works because it exposes the mistake cleanly.

Leaves matter; but they are not the forest.

Projects matter; but they are not culture.

If you fund only what you can see, you will destroy what allows anything to grow

The question really is not whether to fund culture more “generously”. It is whether the state is willing to redesign the invisible infrastructure that shapes cultural life:

funding logics, time horizons, risk distribution, and the boundaries between culture, welfare, and civic participation.

Until that happens, we will continue to get the same outcomes – with better language, kinder intentions, and more exhausted systems.

That is not failure of will, it is failure of design.

Evaluating artist-led projects is persistently uncomfortable work – and I’ve done a lot of it in recent years: artists in residence, artists in health settings, artists and climate, artists embedded in community systems, in bureaucracies, etc. All this work that artists do sits slightly sideways to the frameworks we are expected to use to account for public value. Once the word evaluation enters the brief evaluators reach instinctively for outcomes, indicators, deliverables.

The problem is that Artists reach for something else entirely.

This mismatch is not a technical problem by the way. It’s a conceptual one.

So, bear with me. The problem is that most evaluation frameworks assume a linear logic: inputs produce activities, activities produce outputs, outputs produce outcomes. (Who doesn’t love a good logic model). The assumption then is that the artist enters this logic as a producer of things – artworks, workshops, events, moments of participation – which can then be measured for impact. But this assumption, this logic misses what artists are actually doing in these contexts. It misreads the nature of their labour, and therefore misunderstands their value.

Artists in these roles are not primarily producers. They are researchers. Arguably art is the original form of all research.

Obviously not researchers in lab coats or with spreadsheets (though sometimes those appear), but researchers in the original sense of the word: people who re-search a situation. They look again. They look differently. They attend to what is usually overlooked.

Like all good researchers, artists begin with relationships. They embed. They listen. They notice patterns, tensions, contradictions. They collect fragments: stories, gestures, materials, overheard comments, institutional habits, silences. They connect these fragments across boundaries that usually remain separate – between departments, disciplines, people, timescales, ways of knowing.

Amanda Palmer once described her work as “collecting, connecting and sharing”. That phrase captures something essential. It is not extraction. It is not production. It is sense-making.

This is why artists are particularly adept at working in complex systems. Health systems. Local authorities. Climate responses. Communities shaped by layered histories and power relations. These are not environments where change moves in straight lines or where causality can be neatly traced. They are living systems, shaped by feedback loops, informal practices, emotional undercurrents and inherited assumptions.

Artists sense complexity. It’s part of the toolkit. Artists work with ambiguity rather than trying to eliminate it. Artists notice where language fails, where processes contradict stated values, where people behave differently than policies suggest they should. They feel the system as much as they analyse it.

From an evaluation perspective, this creates a problem only if we insist on the wrong question. If we ask, “What outcomes did the artist produce?” we will always be dissatisfied. The answer will feel partial, anecdotal, resistant to quantification.

If instead we ask, “What did the artist surface?” the work becomes visible.

What relationships shifted?

What conversations became possible?

What assumptions were disturbed?

What new ways of seeing entered the system?

What world was reflected back at us?

What did we learn about ourselves?

These are not soft or secondary effects. In complex environments, they are the conditions that make any durable change possible.

The mistake we repeatedly make is to treat the artwork as evidence of impact rather than as a mode of evaluation in itself. We try to translate the work of artists into reports, logic models or metrics that sit outside the practice itself, as if the art were merely illustrative.

But the art is the evaluation.

The artwork – whether it takes the form of an installation, a performance, a score, a temporary intervention, a set of instructions, a story, or a social process – is how the research is shared back into the system. It is a proposition. A reflection. A reframing. It carries data that cannot be reduced without being destroyed.

This does not mean abandoning our critical rigour. On the contrary, all art work is an intense methodological discipline: careful observation, ethical attention to participants, iterative testing of ideas, responsiveness to context. What art and artists resist is not rigour, but reduction.

The push by funders and policy makers to frame art in terms of outcomes reflects a deep institutional anxiety rather than a concern for genuine accountability. Outcomes promise control. They suggest that if we design the right intervention, we can predict and manage change. Artists, by contrast, reveal how little control any of us actually have – and how much depends on relationships, trust, timing and openness.

This is uncomfortable knowledge, particularly for organisations structured around a faith in certainty and compliance. But it is precisely why it’s important to understand that art is research and that is why it is so valuable.

So what have I learned from recent evaluations of artist led projects. Evaluating artist projects requires a shift in stance. Less auditing, more interpretation. Less counting, more attending. It requires evaluators to read artworks not as decorative extras, but as analytical texts – dense, layered, situated.

It also requires commissioners and funders to accept that not all value arrives on schedule, or in forms that can be anticipated in advance. Some of the most significant effects of artist-led work are delayed, diffuse or indirect. They show up later, in changed practices, altered language, new alliances.

If we are serious about learning from these projects – not just justifying them – we need evaluation approaches that mirror the artists’ own intelligence: relational, systemic, reflective.

Artists are not delivering outcomes to a system. They are helping the system understand itself.

And in an era defined by complexity, that’s probably the most necessary research of all.

At some point every arts/cultural organisation and probably every artist is asked to produce a “plan” Depending on who’s doing the asking you might be asked for a Policy, or a Strategy, or a Business Plan, or a Business Model, or a Funding Model, or a Revenue Model, or a Resource Plan or – my personal favourite – an Implementation Plan. Sometimes you’ll be asked for all or most of them at the same time, and other times you’ll be asked for one thing but the person doing the asking actually wants something else (this is way more common than it should be).

So, in the interests of sanity I offer this simple taxonomy to ease the pain of dealing with the deep anxiety that planning tries to mask.

So, let’s start with Policy (which is a kind of plan). A policy must have a clearly defined “object”; it must have a precise purpose – something it wants to do to or with the “object”; and it must have a tool, or tools, with which to achieve the purpose. So, for example, “affordable housing” is kind of a clearly defined object; making it widely available is a fairly precise purpose; and tools could include tax incentives, funding, legislation, government loans, public private partnership, shifting the county onto a Welfare State model etc. Culture, on the other hand, is not a great policy object because it’s really hard to define and is not really a thing in and off itself but the result of lots of other things. Making policy for results or outcomes (as opposed to the things that produce or contribute to the results or outcomes is considered in the policy world to be a really bad idea).

Strategy. This frequently gets confused with implementation (and Policy, and Business Planning, and nearly everything else) and it is absolutely not about implementation. If somebody asks for your implementation in a strategy conversation try and distract them with something shiny. Strategy is the answer to the questions “Why”, “What” and “How”. It’s really that simple. Why? because there’s a need or a gap or an opportunity or a belief. How? In collaboration, or in partnership, or sustainably, or slowly, or inclusively, or ruthlessly or profitably. One of the principal reasons for making strategy is that we can answer the questions “why do you do what you do?” (or why your organisation does what it does?). The answer to the Why is the vision part of the strategy (and a little bit of the mission). And when you give the answer to the question why, people ask you “how will you do that?” and you’ll list off the values (and a little bit of the mission) because values are how you will behave as you do what you do to achieve what you want.  Strategy also answers the What question (the mission bit of strategy), so for example you can say that you want to make sure that everybody has a place to think and talk about their lives so they can imagine a better society together (The vision bit that answers the why question), and you will do this by producing community plays throughout the country that provoke and encourage debate (the mission bit of the strategy that answers the what question) and you will do this in “collaboration and partnership” with communities, local governments, national agencies,  in a “sustainable” and “inclusive” way (and that’s the  values bit of strategy, that answers the “how” question). Essentially, that’s it. Draw a line under it and walk away

Business Plan. The demand for these increased over the course of my career, primarily due to the Rise of New Public Management which was really just the triumph of market capitalism over the ideas of citizenship and public service. A business plan needs to have some solid research to be credible and it needs to express the strategy in numbers. At the most basic level The Business Plan needs to demonstrate that there are enough people in a very specific place or places, willing and able to give you (as opposed to somebody else) enough money on a regular basis so you can carry on doing what you’re doing. The most common error in Business Plans is confusing your product or service with your Business: the latter is how you will make money from the former so your business plan needs to describe what your product/service is , and it needs to do this very clearly and very concisely. Then you need to use the better part of your plan explaining:

• why people in your potential market area might like it/need it/want it,
• how many people in your potential market area might like it/need it/ want it,
• how you will get their attention and custom,
• how much they are prepared to pay for it on a regular basis,
• and what it will cost to produce and deliver the product or service.

The numbers need to be real and verifiable, and the identified need must be supported by strong evidence. The Business plan also needs to say who’s on the team, why they’re on the team, and what value they bring to the Business.

So, a business plan for an arts organisation, for example, needs to describe what the product or service is (e.g. A Local Festival); why it’s needed in this place (e.g. there are no festivals in the local area, there is a local appetite for a community event, and the demographic evidence suggests an arts festival would be supported), there’s a population within a 30minute drive of 100,000 so in all probability a potential market of 20,000, the demographic evidence suggests they are able/prepared to pay €100 for a festival event once a year so potential market value is about €2 million. Now you won’t get all of that ( because of competition and capacity) and you certainly won’t get more than that. You will need to outline a realistic marketing plan (audience segmentation, user personas, inbound and outbound marketing tactics etc.). Then you need to set out your operational costs, your programme costs, and your marketing costs, your risk management (and a summary of the strategy), and then you need to include the team and the organisation structure (who’s responsible for what) and Bingo! Business Plan done. At no point in the business plan do you need to set out the specific programme details or festival schedule. Because you don’t know the details at this time and the reality is that the details of delivery (implementation) change when you start to deliver – the unknown unknowns start to kick in.

There’s lots of popular tools you can use (PESTLE, SWOT, SOAR, 5 Forces, Ansoff’s Matrix, Logic Model, Forecasting, Blue Ocean, 5Ps etc. etc.). The trick is to choose the appropriate tool and that tends to be the one you understand. Remember that most of these basic business tools are mostly just ways to categorise and present information, they don’t do anything by themselves, and they are frequently misused and misunderstood, even by those who ask you to use them.

The business plan is a way of checking feasibility for yourself, and is designed to be read by people who can support the venture – funders, investors, other stakeholders etc. – to convince them that this is a good idea.

The Business Case has a lot of similarities with the Business Plan, except that it’s usually an internal document concerned with a single project in the business and not with the overall business. For example, if the organisation wants to invest some of its resources  (time, money, talent) in a specific project or venture (buying a dedicated property, investing in audio-visual equipment for digital broadcast, allocating a greater percentage of its overall budget to marketing, spending resources on a Van, etc) then it can be worth preparing a business case that says why this allocation of resources is a good idea, how it contributes to the business, how it aligns with strategy, what it will deliver for the organisation, and what kind of return on investment is expected. So for example, buying a van will increase the reach of the work and therefore increase the potential market size, its cheaper than hiring a van over the medium term, it can function as a mobile branding and marketing tool, and we will save money on transport hire over the medium term and we can rent it out to other local organisations so it can pay for itself and contribute to the revenue model.

The Business Case is usually an internal document focused on a specific element of the overall business and allows you to clarify your thinking and demonstrate to relevant people (mangers, CEO, Board of Directors, key funders etc) that the idea is a good one. Sometimes, when making a specific application for for funding (e.g. arts council or local authority) for a very specific project or capital support you are effectively preparing a business case, or a national agency looking for funding for a new IT system or new staff will prepare a Business Case for its relevant Department.

The Business Model. This one can lead to a lot of confusion but essentially, it’s a way of simplifying – usually in a visual format – what your business is (think of it like a full body X-ray). Its useful to have one on the wall of your office, and it should be built on a white board, or with post its, or with bits of paper sellotaped to the wall.  It summarises the key business offering (that tends to be the Mission and Vision of the strategy), the resources you need, the activities you need to engage in, the partners you need to work with (suppliers, funders etc); it also summarises the customer segments, the kind of relationship you have with them, and how you communicate and deliver to them. It summarises the costs and the income.  It’s a really useful way of explaining to yourself and the team what business you are actually in and what that business actually does, and it’s a really useful way of spotting opportunities and challenges on an ongoing basis – once you keep it updated!

Funding Model and Revenue Model. Again – people get these confused (including people asking you for them, which doesn’t help). So here we go:

The Funding Model: this essentially lists the sources and amounts of funding necessary for the operation of your business.  In an arts context we can include all the sources of funding (money that funds what we do), so we’ll probably include Arts Council, Local Authority, Debt (bank loan or overdraft), Total Sales ( the sum of tickets, bar and cafe, art sales, rental etc.), and other sources including ETB, Pobal, CE schemes, and sponsorship or donations.  It’s a really good idea to express these as both cash amounts and percentages so you can see the relative weight of each funding source. Building a Funding Model for yourself allows you to have a conversation around the funding risks (which is really the main point of it), and on overdependence on specific sources, on identifying additional sources, on sources that can deliver more etc.

The Revenue Model: This is a deep dive into your Total Sales income: it’s about  understanding how you “earn” money. It looks at the ticket prices to understand which price delivers more income, and which customers deliver more income. It’s about understanding that if 20% of your customers deliver 80% of your earned income you need to ask some questions about the other 80% of customers. It’s about listing all the sources of earned income (ticket sales, commission on art sales, bar sales, merchandising, copyright, guarantees, booking fees, rental etc.) to identify weaknesses, risks and opportunities, dependencies etc. I’m always surprised that organisations that provide artist support and development for example don’t secure a percentage of ongoing rights in the work. The income will be – in most cases – small or negligible but in some cases can be significant over time.

Implementation Plan. I don’t know why but bureaucrats love the implementation plan. Its possibly because so many of them have come from engineering, business, and project management backgrounds. Implementation plans are funding dependent. You can’t create an implementation plan if you don’t know what the funding will be (actually you can, but it’s kinda pointless). The business plan, or business case, or business model will give you some ballpark numbers around the funding need. These numbers are the basis of the ask. When you have an actual number in response then you can start an implementation plan.

Implementation plans work best if they are project specific because they answer the question “how are we going to deliver this?” Implementation plans are project management tools so they need to contain work break-down structures, timelines, dependencies, (these things can happen at the same time, but this other things have to happen sequentially), milestones, phases, resource requirements and allocations, RACI charts (who is Responsible, who is Accountable, who needs to be Consulted and who needs to be Informed), detailed costings and final overall budgets. They need to have a live risk management, monitoring and control process, and they need to have an agreed change process (what happens when the world doesn’t behave according to our plan). Implementation is not the starting point. If there was a planning sequence then Implemention comes at the end.

Planning as Metaphor. Planning is all about reducing anxiety. The different plans address different anxieties and they are designed to be read by different groups of people. In this sense plans are performative, like magic powers in a Live Action Role Play.

Plans (as opposed to planning) are also about power, about the dominance of the “rational” over the “emotional” or the “creative”.  When people ask you for a particular kind of plan, ask them what they want to see in that plan, because there’s a 50/50 chance they’re asking you for the wrong thing, and what they want to see will tell you what their anxiety looks and feels like.

Having said all that, planning is useful and planning is necessary, however there is no right way of doing it, and all plans inevitably change the moment we try to realise them, the moment they come into contact with the messy complexity of the world.  

Let’s finish with a quote from Ritter’s “Dilemma’s in General Theory of Planning” – one of the great meditations on planning.

“In turn, and equally intractable, is the problem of identifying the actions that might effectively narrow the gap between what-is and what-ought-to-be. As we seek to improve the effectiveness of actions in pursuit of valued outcomes, as system boundaries get stretched, and as we become more sophisticated about the complex workings of open societal systems, it becomes ever more difficult to make the planning idea operational… The information needed to understand the problem depends upon one’s idea for solving it. That is to say: in order to describe a wicked-problem in sufficient detail, one has to develop an exhaustive inventory of all conceivable solutions ahead of time. The reason is that every question asking for additional information depends upon the understanding of the problem – and its resolution – at that time. To find the problem is thus the same thing as finding the solution; the problem can’t be defined until the solution has been found”. (Dilemmas in a General Theory of Planning, Ritter & Weber, 1973)