Making money in the arts is a puzzle few are able to solve and often times it seems impossible. The trick to making money it would appear is to not be an artist or posses any kind of actual talent rather, just tell people how to fund raise and you can make a packet! (or is that racket? Ed!)
Various seminars are available throughout the year with titles such as “Introduction to Arts Funding” and “Preparing succesful bids for statutory grants and tenders”. Charges range from £70 to a whopping £360 to learn the deepest darkest secrets of just how you can wring money from various government and non government sources of funding.
40 people on the most expensive of these seminars provides the organisers with a whopping £15,000 in turnover (give or take a few hundred). The irony is, as with most ‘how to’, seminars, books, websites, etc, is if they actually worked then everbody would be successfull at raising money for their given project and ACE and other government, corporate funding streams would have to resort to the old boys network of back slapping and politics to distribute their funding! (which is what they do anyway right? Ed!)
Further irony comes from the fact that most people who attend these things will be working for ACE/Government funded arts organisations, so the money they spend on them will come from, you guessed it, ACE or the Government, ie: it’s tax payers money being used to teach people how to get their hands on tax payers money by a commercial company.
If you have ever been on one of these seminars you will also know it’s a certain way to an early death and dying from boredom is unpleasant! The reason we know these things exist? They are promoted by Arts Council England! You couldn’t make this up if you tried.