IT was good to read Vuyisa Qabaka’s article “We have so much talent in South Africa” in Business Report, not least because it is often a battle to raise debate about the arts in sectors other than lifestyle or entertainment.
Critical to the argument about the arts being under-supported, though, is the argument about South African arts education, particularly in early childhood development spaces.
Importantly one does not educate a child in the arts so that he/she becomes an artist (he or she will do that anyway), but rather to develop imagination, creativity, playfulness and innovation - all survival tools of the new economy - and also to grow audiences and markets for the creative sector.
This is an argument that has real purchase in the US, with the STEM to STEAM Movement.
The movement argues that school education should not consist only of science, technology, engineering and maths, but should include the arts as well. This is premised on the belief that the arts offer the skills to enter into many other workspaces. Once we achieve this paradigm shift, we could see a new engagement with the creative sector.
In fact, one commentator argues for an education system with a focus on science, economics and the arts (Sea).
The learnings from the arts are valuable. In her book, Grit - the Power of Passion and Perseverance, Angela Lee Duckworth describes a world that is less dependent on IQ and more on “grit”.
She talks of passion and perseverance for long-term goals, stamina, the need to live the marathon and not the sprint. But how do we build this in society, she asks.
Talent doesn’t necessarily make you gritty. Grit requires follow-through.
Duckworth talks of “failing fast” (the current holy grail of the business world, it seems), saying that failure is not a permanent position. I believe that the arts teach grit - they are about failure and iteration.
Every good artist or creative, at some point in his or her life, has failed - a theatre production that bombed, an artwork that never sold, a less than perfectly pitched song. After failing, it is the artist who gets back into the ring and tests a new answer to a different question.
In his article, Qabaka talks correctly of the catalytic drivers of peer learning, that Business and Arts South Africa (Basa) should offer. We do.
It should be noted that Basa is not a programme, but rather a non-profit company that has operated for close to 20 years as a public-private partnership, with valuable support from both the Department of Arts and Culture and the private sector. This includes business members as varied as the JSE, the major banks, insurance companies and also small to medium enterprises.
Our national education programme (supported by the National Arts Council, Rand Merchant Bank, the British Council and the National Lotteries Commission) takes place in all nine provinces, driving the concepts of access and agency within the sector.
We work closely with young arts organisations, focusing not only on business skills, but also driving the tools of Asset Based Community Development, while examining society’s inconsistent response to scarcity, as cogently argued by economics professor Sendhil Mullainathan and Eldar Shafir in their book, Scarcity: Why Having Too Little Means So Much.
Qabaka is also accurate in distinguishing between the self-employed and the entrepreneurs in the cultural sector. There is a difference.
The former talks more specifically to sustainability, while the latter talks to scaling. Our research over many years has shown that some creatives have the entrepreneurial bug while others simply need the business skills to become self-sustaining over long periods so that they can talk to having jobs, instead of job hours.
Basa’s research shows that the role of the private sector has shifted and changed over the years. Funding of the arts moved from corporate social investment budgets to marketing budgets around 2008.
Most recently, owing to the economic downturn, we have seen businesses requiring a much more equitable partnership, one that verges on shared value and one that is based on trust and real deliverables.
The support for the arts is often driven directly through core strategy and may impact on human resources (performance before profits), broad-based black economic empowerment and then marketing.
With this mind, Basa has a variety of programmes that offer research and arts-based intelligence to businesses - including our Young Professionals Programme (specifically for business people) and the Business Exchange Programme.
We offer marketing toolkits for both businesses and arts organisations, as developed by members of the Gordon Institute of Business Science, and consult on our extensive research on millennials and the arts market.
It should be noted, though, that currently the Treasury does not offer tax benefits to businesses that support the arts, unless it is considered to be an education programme, in which case it is included in Section 18A. This is severely debilitating for arts sector funding opportunities. While the arts and culture sector only provide for 2.9 percent of the gross domestic product, according to Department of Arts and Culture statistics, the opportunities are extensive.
According to Sadiq Khan, the mayor of London, the planning of culture needs to run parallel to the planning around transport and housing in the city. Isn’t it time we took it a lot more seriously?
Michelle Constant is the chief executive of Business and Arts South Africa (Basa).