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Ruth Bereson, associate professor of art history, is director of the Arts Management Program in the College of Arts and Sciences.
What is the Arts Management Program?
The Master of Arts in Humanities program in Arts Management is an interdisciplinary program drawing from expertise of
the College of Arts and Sciences, and the schools of Management and Law.
Its advisory committee is formed from members of these schools, as well
as the School of Architecture and Planning. The program will take its
first students in fall 2006 and is a two-year course of study. It is a
signature center of the College of Arts and Sciences. The intention of
UB's graduate Arts Management Program is to equip students to become
effective arts managers. The arts manager is the final mediator between
art and the public. The challenge for us today is to find ways of
forging independent links between each artwork and its true audience,
while negotiating the increasingly complex legal, political and economic
bonds that now constrain the management of the arts.
Can you describe the curriculum?
The curriculum is
designed to increase the student's ability to identify and solve the
complex, interdisciplinary problems and tensions that are inherent in
the areas of arts management and cultural policy-making. The curriculum
consists of 39 credit hours. Students will take 18 core electives in
arts management subjects, as well as 12 credit hours of specialist
courses designed for the program from the schools of Law and Management.
Students also will complete a final project or a thesis.
What's the relationship between the program and the schools of Law
and Management?
The relationship is very strong between all
three faculties. I have been working on the program with the dean's
offices of all three. They have provided intellectual support, faculty
and finances, and advertised the program to their students. This is
evidenced by the fact that we are teaching a preliminary course this
spring and the students who are taking it come equally from all three
schools. There is above all a genuine wish for this program to develop
in an innovative fashion and is a great opportunity for us to form
strong lateral connections.
The program held an inaugural seminar last fall. Any plans for
more seminars or events?
Yes. Next semester we will be looking
at the relationship between management and the arts, and I'm delighted
to say that we will be hosting the U.S. premier of the most recent film
of Pierre Guillet de Monthoux, professor of marketing at Stockholm
University School of Business, as well as his CD, entitled "Liedership."
Pierre is author of "The Art Firm: Aesthetic Management and Metaphysical
Marketing from Wagner to Wilson" (Stanford University Press, 2004). The
film, CD and seminar we will be holding should be a lively event,
looking at the arts from a management perspective. Later in the term, we
will host Robert D. Austin, associate professor of technology and
operations management at Harvard Business School and author of "Artful
Making: What Managers Need to Know About How Artists Work" (Prentice
Hall, 2003).
In these increasingly difficult economic times, the arts seem to
be one of the first places the budgetary ax falls. What argument would
you make to convince local lawmakers that government should be funding
the arts?
It is, in my view, essential that those who are
arguing for the arts� should remember the importance of the arts
themselves and not argue from perspectives of those in other
disciplines. I often ask my students if they know of any society in
which the arts do not exist. The answer to that is pretty evident. But
the lesson drawn from the question is that there is no reason to
underestimate the importance of the arts. Our job is to find a language
that is cogent enough to speak with those who need to make such
decisions and to draw them into an understanding of the significance of
the arts in their environment.
Tell me a little about yourself.
I have worked as an arts
manager in many different ways. I was general manager of a musical
theatre company, events manager for an international festival of
indigenous arts, coordinator of an international visual arts exhibition
exchange involving for-profit and not-for-profit galleries, and have
worked in government as an arts manager, as well as consulted for
different agencies. When I finished my Ph.D., I took some time out to
run a pub that presented world music. I moved from being an arts manager
to being an academic because at the time I found that I wished I knew
more about the way in which the arts functioned within contemporary
society. I wanted to know more about funding bodies and how the arts
had been managed historically in order to see if I could find new ways
of doing my job. I ended up writing my dissertation, which was entitled
"Opera Considered as State Ceremony," on the reasons why opera has
always been supported by governments of many different stripes over four
centuries. My book, "The Operatic State," delves into this further and
explores operas as seemingly disparate as the one now being constructed
in Tianamen Square in Beijing and the Sydney Opera House, alongside the
reasons for the creation of opera in France in 1669. The implications
of this are, of course, that one need not argue in purely economic terms
that opera should be supported and that perhaps the opera should be
taken out of cultural budgets entirely as monies always will be found
and regimes always will intervene to maintain their premier opera
houses. My main interests today are the areas of cultural policy and
cultural diplomacy. In particular, I like to explore what governments
say they are supporting and examine those words against what they
actually are doing on the ground. I worked recently at the National
University of Singapore and Teachers College Columbia University, where
I started out as associate director of the Program in Arts
Administration before broadening my scope and working more in the field
of arts and cultural policy and diplomacy in the Department of Arts and
Humanities.
You've traveled all over the world and lived in London. What do
you think of Buffalo's cultural offerings?
I've only been in
Buffalo a short while, but I've been delighted by the range of
activities that are offered. Given that I've recently had associations
with scholars and artists in China, "The Wall" (an exhibition of
contemporary Chinese art in the UB Art Gallery, the UB Anderson Gallery and the
Albright-Knox Art Gallery that closes on Sunday) proved itself to be an ambitious and
extremely well-curated and realized exhibition. This is a very important
exhibition—and as it will not be traveling throughout the rest of
the U.S., a real coup for Buffalo. Equally, I've attended many other
exhibitions of local work and have found them to be innovative and
engaging. There are some great artists' spaces around. So, too, the
theater scene. I have chosen to live in the Theater District (in
downtown Buffalo) so I can easily get to shows, and my first experience
was when Tom Burrows, director of the Center for the Arts, invited me to
attend Curtain Up! It was great to find so many groups actually
working together to coordinate the beginning of a season.
What
question do you wish I had asked, and how would you have answered it?
I wished you had asked me about the Inaugural Seminar, held
last September. Firstly, I'd like to say that the Inaugural Seminar,
"Why Manage the Arts?," was very well-attended, with a diverse group of
people, ranging from those working in the arts across the United States
and Canada to many from the Buffalo community who wanted to learn more
about the subject. Its aim was to open the program with a spirit of
inquiry. We wish to provide more than a "how-to" manual. The formation
of a program in a university such as this must be research-based and
that is at the heart of what we do. Our keynote speaker, John Pick, spoke about the development of the subject
internationally, outlining some of the reasons why this is an important
area of study. I explained the broad areas of inquiry we will be
undertaking and the reasons for this. Finally, and much to my delight,
former students of mine from across the United States formed a panel and
debated the importance of obtaining degrees in the subject for their
personal development and careers. The publication of "Why Manage the
Arts?," the first of our occasional paper series, is in press. For more
information about this and how to apply to the program, go to http://www.
artsmanagement.buffalo.edu/, or contact us at ub-artsmanagement@buffalo.
edu and ask to be put on our mailing list.