“To finish a piece of work, an artist [has to know how] to marshal the material [in time for an audience] coming through the door.”

September 15, 2013 1:50 pm

The art of managing artists’ egos

By Emma Jacobs

Yoko Ono has a reputation for being beyond bonkers. But not with Jude Kelly. The artistic director of London’s Southbank Centre, which had Ono curate its annual Meltdown music festival this summer, describes her as “wonderful”. Three times in fact. “A wonderful woman . . . totally untemperamental, completely wonderful . . .Totally wonderful, easy to deal with . . lovely.” Ms Kelly believes the “characterisation of creative people as temperamental” is wrong. Divas are few and far between, she says. However, on the rare occasion she does come across a prima donna (she refuses to name one) she does a quick mental calculation: weighing the quality of their output against the amount of effort involved in managing them. “It’s really annoying but if the end-product is extremely amazing, you deal with it.”From her desk overlooking the river Thames, the 59-year-old artistic director is well-placed to view the sprawl of her Brutalist concrete empire. The UK’s largest arts centre, which was born out of the 1951 Festival of Britain, occupies 21 acres on the south side of the river and is planning a £100m overhaul, with work expected to start next year. Its various buildings, including the Royal Festival Hall, Purcell Room and the Hayward Gallery, have hosted performers as diverse as singer Patti Smith, philosopher Slavoj Zizek and the London Philharmonic Orchestra as well as exhibitions of artists such as Francis Bacon and Dan Flavin.

In 2012-13, there were over 25m visits to the centre to see more than 3,000 artists appear, which is a lot of egos. Does she think creatives need a different style of management to, say, lawyers or bankers?

“People who are confident about their creativity are confident about asking questions. So you have to be flexible and excited about a variety of solutions. It’s not about being right, it’s about getting to the best place.” The best leaders of creative projects, she adds, are those who are “excited by other people’s imagination and not just their own”.

Ms Kelly is dismissive of the stereotype of artists as “fluffy”, or unconcerned with the practicalities of the real world. “To finish a piece of work, an artist [has to know how] to marshal the material [in time for an audience] coming through the door.”

The perception from business, she says, is that people in arts will be “airy fairy”. However, she says, “once they spend time with us, they realise you have to be tough as old boots. Good arts organisations have to be highly entrepreneurial and flexible and make a little go a long way.” It is a “two-way street”, she says. “We can teach business to be creative.”

She has a reputation for being skilled with numbers and project management. Unlike some of her peers in the arts world, she is unashamedly pragmatic. “I’ve been a CEO in lots of my roles. At the end of the day you’re talking about the purpose of a great artistic institution and how you ensure it survives and thrives. You can’t do that by going ‘I’ll just think about the art.’ It doesn’t work that way.”

The Southbank, a registered charity, receives an annual grant from the Arts Council providing just under half of its income (in 2011-12, it received £19m). The remaining 53 per cent comes through ticket sales, sponsorship and charitable donations. This compares with a 24 per cent Arts Council grant for the Royal Opera House, which has a total income of £109.8m.

The CV

●Born: March 24 1954 in Liverpool
●Education: Quarry Bank school, Liverpool (previous alumni include John Lennon); University of Birmingham, Drama
●Career: 1976 Founds the Solent People’s Theatre touring company
●1980 Founder and Artistic director of the Battersea Arts Centre
●1985 Joins the York Festival as Artistic Director before moving to the Royal Shakespeare Company
● 1990 Founding director of the West Yorkshire Playhouse in Leeds. Later appointed chief executive
●1997 Awarded an OBE for her services to theatre
●2005 Appointed artistic director of the Southbank Centre
●Interests: Windsurfing and running

She perceives a shift in attitudes among private companies that sponsor the arts. “It used to be [that corporate sponsors would] just do the things that are very, very safe, it was mainly classical music.”

That has changed, she says, as some businesses have proved eager to engage with modern projects. “Any company that wants to say that they are contemporary, interested in ideas . . . that they are creative and alert, they’ve got to look like they
are competent enough to be in the middle of contemporary debate, otherwise they don’t look like they’re a future bet.”

Ms Kelly sees her key role as creating ideas and projects; she leaves fundraising to others. However, she will “talk to a potential funder” to explain the creative vision.

As arts organisations, struggling for public funding, have been forced to show their contribution to the economy, Ms Kelly remains unconvinced of the merits of viewing arts through the prism of a cost-benefits analysis.

“There are a handful of poets in the world who can make money. But if you ask anybody, when someone close to them is dying, or has died, what do they need, they’ll often say to you: a poem. So the question of need in a society isn’t defined by an obvious commercial tick box.”

She is disdainful of the term, “subsidy”, believing it equates to “handout”. “That’s how people in think-tanks think of it. But you could say, it’s an investment in to what is going to become important to society, artistically, in the future.”

She insists she never views a project as a pure money-spinner. “You can’t feel cynical . . . It always rebounds on you. Do I think everything potentially can be successful in its own lifetime? No. Some of the most important and provocative things will never make money.”

One of four daughters, Ms Kelly grew up in Liverpool. Her father, a civil servant, and mother, a teacher, were not artistic but encouraged their daughter’s bent for “storytelling”.

“Wayward” is how she sums up her teenage self, preferring to run with an older crowd than attend school. Her headmaster, who remains a friend, helped turn her attitude round. “He said: ‘You won’t be able to achieve what you need to achieve if you don’t think of this moment as about your ambition, not about the school’s ambition for you.’ So I made it my goal then to go to university to do drama.”

She went on take roles at the Royal Shakespeare Company, the Battersea Arts Centre and the West Yorkshire Playhouse, directing more than 100 productions. Her creative life is all-consuming and has rubbed off on her two grown-up children who are both in the arts (her daughter is a poet and playwright, her son a dancer). She insists she has not pushed them. “I’ve been really, really happy being involved in the creative life. It isn’t just about making a living. Making a living is critical but it’s also to do with [being] you.”

Work has also been a salve for personal tragedy. Twenty-four years ago, when directing the York Festival and Mystery plays, her three-month-old son Johnny died suddenly. “I picked him up from the cot and he was warm and floppy.” She decided to continue to work. “For me that was the right thing to do because you have massive distraction [and are] surrounded by people who are looking after you.”

Today she consoles herself with the thought that “at least we knew him for a bit”.

She attributes her ability to raise her family while pursuing a high-profile career to her writer-director husband Michael Bird, from whom she is now separated. “We set out to manage it together and he was just as involved as I was, and often more involved.”

While sexism is not as overt today as it was at the start of her career, she laments the fact that there are very few women in the most senior arts positions in the UK. When she joined the Southbank Centre eight years ago, she was perceived by some as lightweight. There remains, she says, a frustratingly persistent belief that women speak to other women, while men speak to everyone. There’s “something about a woman’s voice that can’t be universal, whereas a man’s is”, she says.