What do cultural leaders really think about the problems they, and the arts and cultural sector, face? This book brings global leaders in the cultural field into dialogue with academics and experts to offer profound insight and perspectives on the complex issues the cultural sector faces in a rapidly accelerating and destabilising twenty-first century context. The book engages directly with leaders in the arts and cultural sector, bridging the gap between academia, policy and practice. Each chapter sheds new light on national cultural policy contexts, offering different perspectives on arts subsidy, audiences, the cultural workforce, heritage, artform development and how cultural leadership functions in a fast-changing local, national and international context. Interviews are conducted by academics and experts with significant knowledge and understanding of the arts management and cultural policy field, who ask critical and probing questions. Featuring interviews with an impressively international range of senior figures from the cultural sector, from the Royal Opera House, BMW, Bloomberg and Onassis Foundation and covering countries including the UK, Germany, Chile, Singapore, Greece, USA, Serbia and Ireland, the book gives a truly global overview of cultural leadership from leaders who are open to question, critique and challenge. Each chapter offers a unique and fascinating insight into the mind of a leader in their field, with their experience ranging from huge participatory events featuring tens of thousands of people to the visual arts, opera, the Turner Prize and the #blacklivesmatter movement. This book will be essential reading for reflective cultural leaders around the world, as well as a useful resource for students and scholars involved with arts and cultural management and policy.

The contemporary world faces unprecedented upheaval and change forcing institutions of all types to rethink how they are designed and how they must now function if they are to survive into an uncertain future. The performing arts are no exception; in an era of constant change and technological transformation, arts organizations and their leaders face significant organizational challenges if they are to maintain their relevance. Arts Leadership: Creating Sustainable Arts Organizations provides a contemporary overview of the field of arts leadership, focused on the performing arts. It examines what these challenges are, how they are affecting the performing arts and arts organizations in general and proposes creative ways to reimagine, build and lead sustainable arts organizations in this uncharted environment. With a global perspective drawn from his extensive experience advising arts organizations around the world and based on his own work successfully leading important performing arts organizations in the United States, Foster proposes an innovative approach to organizational design, systems, and structures for arts leaders in the 21st century that is based in ecological thinking and the creative process that is intrinsic to the arts. In disrupting conventional arts leadership practice, the book provides an exceptional tool to understand a unique sector, and is essential reading for students and practitioners across the creative and cultural industries.

This textbook provides an expert overview of the challenge of arts and cultural leadership in the contemporary world. Grounded in theories of sustainability and with a renewed global focus for this second edition, the author’s insights from contemporary arts organizations facilitate meaningful student comprehension. Drawing on the work of practitioners and theorists in the fields of philosophy, biology, and ecology as well as the arts, Foster proposes a rethinking of organizational design, strategy, and structure that is based on ecological concepts and the creative process that is intrinsic to the arts rather than the conventional business model that currently prevails, particularly in western arts and culture organizations. He contests conventional thinking about arts administration and management and urges arts leaders to foreground innovation as they reimagine their organizations for a world unlike any other. New sections include an enhanced theoretical discussion as well as new material on business models, strategy, and organizational design and practice. Applicable to any arts organization, the entrepreneurial focus is especially relevant in the aftermath of the global pandemic, the ongoing climate crisis, and the quest for democracy and social justice. This updated edition will be a valuable resource both for present-day arts and cultural leaders who are working to adapt to the current environment as well as students and future leaders who aspire to make change in the world through arts and cultural leadership.

Leadership has never been more important to the cultural industries. The arts, together with museums and heritage sites, play a vital part in keeping economies going, and, more importantly, in making life worth living. People in the sector face a constant challenge to find support for their organizations and to promote the value of culture. Leadership and management skills are needed to meet the mission of creative arts and cultural organizations, and to generate the income that underpins success. The problem is, where can you learn these essential skills? The Cultural Leadership Handbook written by Robert Hewison and John Holden, both prime movers in pioneering cultural leadership programmes, defines the specific challenges in the cultural sector and enables arts leaders to move from 'just' administration to becoming cultural entrepreneurs, turning good ideas into good business. This book is intended for anyone with a professional or academic interest anywhere in the cultural sector, anywhere in the world. It will give you the edge, enabling to you to show creative leadership at any level in a cultural organization, regardless of whether your particular interest is the performing arts, museums and art galleries, heritage, publishing, films, broadcasting or new media.

Arts and cultural activity in Asia is increasingly seen as important internationally, and Asia’s growing prosperity is enabling the full range of artistic activities to be better encouraged, supported and managed. At the same time, cultural frameworks and contexts vary hugely across Asia, and it is not appropriate to apply Westerns theories and models of leadership and management. This book presents a range of case studies of arts and cultural leadership across a large number of Asian countries. Besides examining different cultural frameworks and contexts, the book considers different cultural approaches to leadership, discusses external challenges and entrepreneurialism, and explores how politics can have a profound impact. Throughout the book covers different art forms, and different sorts of arts and cultural organisations.

A Gardner Museum symposium on American cultural leadership.

Arts and Cultural Management: Sense and Sensibilities in the State of the Field opens a conversation that is much needed for anyone identifying arts management or cultural management as primary areas of research, teaching, or practice. In the evolution of any field arises the need for scrutiny, reflection, and critique, as well as to display the advancements and diversity in approaches and thinking that contribute to a discipline’s forward progression. While no one volume could encompass all that a discipline is or should be, a representational snapshot serves as a valuable benchmark. This book is addressed to those who operate as researchers, scholars, and practitioners of arts and cultural management. Driven by concerns about quality of life, globalization, development of economies, education of youth, the increasing mobility of cultural groups, and many other significant issues of the twenty-first century, governments and individuals have increasingly turned to arts and culture as means of mitigating or resolving tough policy issues. For their growth, arts and culture sectors depend on people in positions of leadership and management who play a significant role in the creation, production, exhibition, dissemination, interpretation, and evaluation of arts and culture experiences for publics and policies. Less than a century old as a formal field of inquiry, however, arts and cultural management has been in flux since its inception. What is arts and cultural management? remains an open question. A comprehensive literature on the discipline, as an object of study, is still developing. This State of the Discipline offers a benchmark for those interested in the evolution and development of arts and cultural management as a branch of knowledge alongside more established disciplines of research and scholarship.