Funding resilience: market rationalism and the UK’s “mixed economy” for the arts

Abstract

The contemporary emphasis on resilience in UK arts and cultural policy discourse has developed in relation to the longer-standing model of the “mixed economy” in which state grants, earned income and private sponsorship are imagined to provide a secure foundation for sustainable growth. This genealogy is evident in a series of programmes developed by Arts Council England and the UK’s other national funding bodies since the mid-1990s with the intention of fostering the sector’s strength and sustainability – most often by exhorting recipients of state funding to explore and develop new business models centred on non-state income sources. Tracing that history allows us to follow the ways in which specific neoliberal rationales have been naturalised through socio-ecological metaphor and, more significantly, how policy measures encouraging the entrepreneurial pursuit of private and earned income may introduce new forms of risk that exacerbate existing structural inequalities in the cultural sector.