BA (Hons) Arts Management

The Principles of Arts Management module provides knowledge, reflection and insights into the state of the field of arts management - definitions, historical development, dilemmas, the scope, possibilities and the future of the field. Focus of the module is on project management in the arts, creative production process, arts marketing and PR, project financing and professional ethics. You'll gain knowledge relevant to managing projects in the culture and the arts. Case studies, discussions, as well as references used, will be reflecting the diversity of practices in the field coming from different cultures, environments, countries and schools of thinking. Special attention is placed on the questions of professional ethics, social justice, diversity, accessibility and inclusion as well as ecologically sustainable practices in the field of arts management. Module broadly covers 3 key areas: Project Management in the Arts; Arts Marketing and PR; Project Financing.

As part of the module, you'll engage in small group and individual research projects. In the beginning, you'll creatively develop project ideas in groups and pitch them to your peers. You'll also re-contextualise an art event that you choose (historical or contemporary) in a particular city, venue, and moment in time, and analyse it through the lens of the arts marketing framework, using the knowledge and methods learned in the module.

In the last segment of the module, you'll need to select one of the 5-6 listed events, preselected and introduced by the lecturers, which you'll need to attend, observe and reflect on. You'll then use this event to develop a basic income & expenditure forecast and a budget. Lecturers will select options which offer a range of art forms and scales, allowing students to follow individual interests. Personal tutor meetings will take place with each student in Week 3 of the term.

In less than two decades web 2.0 technologies have changed the way we view, make and consume art and culture. A global pandemic has accelerated this move towards online, remote and digitally mediated forms of cultural production and consumption. Whilst these changes may seem rapid and revolutionary, this module situates these developments within a broader history of art and technology and will provide students with the ability to critically engage with new technologies and examine possible use cases for these technologies in the production, consumption and management of art. In doing so, this module explores ‘digital cultures’ – ways of living and working online within fields of artistic production – in order to develop ‘digital literacy’ – an understanding how we, as practitioners, can better understand and utilise these online platforms.

The module takes a broad view of digital practice and examines the trajectory from the taxonomies of museum collections, anthropological approaches to categorising culture to metadata, search and google page rank. Moving from categorising culture to tracking behaviours, we examine how data and algorithmic decision making is becoming an important curator and commissioner in the music industry and explore the challenges and opportunities this presents.

Having established the seminal role that digital technologies have within contemporary arts and culture, we look towards the politics of platforms, control and emerging forms of expression and experience in a digital world. Through the study and critical reading of digital-first experiences – such as online gigs for example - and online fan communities, students will have the opportunity to develop critical ways of viewing, and a working knowledge of digital ethnography for arts managers. Students on this module will utilise the critical framework established in class to develop their own digital content through a strategic and reflective prism.

This is a digital-first module and will be taught online only with a range of video lectures, video call seminars, and web-based digital activities.

This module aims to provide a solid grounding in the different ways that the arts and culture are distributed. Using London as an example city, the module covers organisations of different sizes and status including commercial, state-funded, charities, social enterprises, volunteer-led and networks. Each of these forms pose a different set of challenges to the arts manager.

The module will also consider a variety of access needs (socio-economic, disability, those based on race, gender, sexuality etc.) and consider the opportunities and challenges that these pose to arts organisations and professionals.

The module combines academic materials and classroom-based learning with site visits to arts organisations.

In this module, subtitled ‘Everything is a Text’, you will consider the value of different types of texts and ways of imparting knowledge and ideas. You will reflect upon your identities as learners and future professionals in the world, considering a range of contexts: the academic/educational context, personal settings and the eco-systems that you live and work in. These reflections will be used to inform your practices as academic learners.

You will explore academic literacies, different ways of knowing and consider what counts as ‘legitimate’ knowledge. You will engage with critical thinking, making arguments and establishing criteria to defend intellectual positions and these skills will be acknowledged as social practices that produce and reinforce meaning and frameworks of understanding and knowledge.

Furthermore, you will engage with a wide range of academic and non-academic material, individuals and environments in order to contribute to discussions regarding attitudes and assumptions about ideas and experience, including within labour markets, cultural hegemonies, distributions of power and the relationship between the individual and society. In this way, the social interactions, relationships and contexts that underpin academic literacies in higher education will be made explicit.

You will discuss these ideas with students and tutors from the different subjects at Goldsmiths, and learn to be part of the wider university community. You will also be able to submit an assignment which could be a written, graphically designed, audio, video, or negotiated project. You will get to choose the assessment that best shows what you can do.

This module, subtitled ‘Researching Our World & Lives’, builds on the conceptual and contextual foundations of Identity, Agency and Environment 1.

You will learn how to conduct academic research and will be offered the opportunity to broaden and deepen your understanding of the relationship between your own interests, skills, values, career and non-career aspirations, the concepts, theories and contexts of your discipline, and the world.

You will reflect upon your identities as researchers, and learn how the research skills you’ve acquired both within your studies and the world more generally can be related to problem-solving in a wide range of contexts. You will consider your agency as researchers, what you can and cannot research, the ethical issues involved, and think reflexively about your position as a researcher in a range of environments and eco-systems.

Formal conventions of academic research and writing will be integrated into your individualised contexts and goals, enabling the expression of ideas and perspectives that may challenge the status quo. The module will encourage creativity, activism, decision-making and the formation of judgements leading to action-planning in relation to research topics and types of evidence, and professional planning.

You will learn to critique your own subject disciplines. Interdisciplinary sharing of knowledge will ensure that assessment and learning practices provide you with the opportunity to develop new lines of thinking and knowing, within formative collaborative learning and research communities.

The aim of this module is to introduce an understanding of visual culture and demonstrate different methods for understanding visual culture in today's society.  Visual culture includes such visual forms as painting, sculpture, photography, television, cinema, cartoons and manga, virtual reality and games, illustration and the internet.  These forms have been studied using various approaches: hermeneutic, formal, Marxist, feminist, semiotic, psychoanalytic, sociological, and anthropological amongst others.  Settings, bodies, and the built environment can also be studied with visual techniques. The module requires you to analyse contemporary visual materials and to apply a variety of visual techniques and methods in order to strengthen your understanding of theoretical and methodological approaches to a topic, in this case visual culture, and to develop a richer appreciation of visual cultures and visual materials. The module also introduces the importance of research ethics in doing visual research.

Indicative content includes:

• Visual culture defined
• Representation
• Visual Methods (for Images)
• Material Culture
• Lived Visual Culture (Built Environment)
• Living Visual Culture (Bodies)

The Events Management module provides the basic knowledge of the events management process, with a strong focus on cultural and artistic events. Through the module, you'll learn about the specifics of production and management of various kinds of events including music concerts, festivals, exhibitions, theatre, and contemporary dance performances.

You'll learn the basic principles of events management in the arts, with a special focus on event planning and evaluation, technical production and risk assessment, touring and arts law. You'll learn by using international case studies from the field and engage with relevant and leading professionals from the arts sector, which is also transferrable to the management of permanent cultural spaces (e.g., art centres, theatres, galleries, and museums) and entertainment and corporate events such as conferences, fashion shows, and promotions. Core principles of ecologically sustainable practice in the events management will be integrated in all module segments.

You'll evaluate the success of the art event they choose using the framed observation as a method and applying the relevant event industry standards. You'll also engage with the relevant UK and international arts law frameworks and apply them in the real-life simulation tasks, from the angle of producer and arts manager. In Week 3 of the term each student will have a personal tutor meeting reflecting on the learning process.

In this module, you'll explore how audiences are a crucial focus of arts managers. The module offers a practical focus, with a theoretical introduction to the study of audiences. Topics include imagining audiences, marketing, branding, and public relations, audience development, audience engagement and outreach, visitor behaviour, and evaluation research, including interviews, focus groups and understanding quantitative data.

You'll start by receiving an introduction to understanding of audiences, methodologies used to understand art audiences, and using ethical research processes. You'll then explore different techniques and tools in audience development and applies these to case studies. You'll be supported to develop your own audience development proposal for an arts organisation of your choosing. Personal reflection and development are central to this module and supported through personal tutoring in term 1 and term 2 and the reflective portfolio.

This module covers various understandings of Arts and Cultural Theory through theoretical and empirical approaches to the production, distribution and consumption of culture. The arts are conceived broadly as including fine arts and popular arts. The module considers the ways in which networks of individuals work together to create art works, how profit-seeking businesses and non-profit organisations work are situated in the cultural arena, and the differences and similarities in the two forms. It also considers how audiences from different backgrounds receive works, and how people use art and culture for extra-aesthetic reasons, such as claiming status and distinction. In each unit of the module, consideration is given as to how the academic work presented may be of use to an arts manager. Structurally, the module will take the form of lectures and seminars each week, and it includes two required study skills lectures. It will be assessed by an essay.

The goal of the Managing Arts Organisations and Cultural Businesses module is to provide a broad understanding of arts organisations and cultural businesses, describing different business models, as they apply across creative industries. The module discusses some of the difficulties or contradictions inherent in cultural organisations.

After this introduction, the module covers practical understandings of organisations, including organisational behaviour, organisational culture, strategic management, and entrepreneurship in organisational settings. These topics, drawn from the arts and business management literature, will help you develop skills that will allow them to work more effectively in organisational settings, and to gain tools that are useful in the management of art and culture that is set in non-profit organisations or for-profit businesses. 

The module will use a case-study approach, allowing you to apply knowledge from research on organisations to real-world situations. A variety of case studies and points of discussion will be introduced, reflecting the cultural and professional diversity of the field in the UK and internationally.

Central part of the module is a combination of group and individual research project. You will be divided into groups, researching different strategic aspects of the real arts organisations they have connected with. You will be responsible for a particular aspect of the analysis and needs to produce an individual analysis chapter that is a part of a case study report on the selected organisation.

This module will allow you to apply professional practice knowledge in a professional context. You'll undertake a practical case study based on or with an external arts organisation that engages skills developed so far in the classroom setting and develops an understanding of how to develop a project in a real-world environment. The module also provides groundwork for the professional practice project in your final year. The specific case studies will vary across the size of organisation and art form.

The module consists of 30 hours of practical/research experience at or with an external arts organisation and 10 lectures, followed by seminars and workshops from guest lecturers and site/online visits on a range of topics and future career options.

Assessment is based on the successful completion of a concise project report - analysing the case study organisation and an extended essay comparing the institutional operations and success, or otherwise, of the case study with another organisation which a different student has focused on. You'll have the opportunity to meet and work with professionals within the arts and cultural sector.

You'll gain practical tools for understanding how to produce projects as part of a career in the cultural and creative sector. You'll learn the building blocks to the final practical placement or event which is part of the core Professional Practice Project module in year 3. You'll be able to see how organisations are run and consider your personal skills and tools for engaging with the world of work in a practical way.

This module covers key issues in cultural policy as applied to the arts, including debates over the meaning of culture, the differences between individual nations' understanding of the term, and key contemporary debates around notions of cultural value. The module contains a comparative component, examining approaches to cultural policy in the UK and Europe, providing different models of cultural policy.

The module will equip you with knowledge of the key debates taking place in the field of cultural policy studies, and the contexts in which cultural policy-making takes place. You will also develop an understanding of the economic, social and political theories necessary to study cultural industries, especially the supported arts sector.

The module has three main aims:

1. To introduce you to the main debates in the field of cultural policy studies and related disciplines
2. To help you understand how cultural policy is similar and different around the world, including comparisons between UK and EU approaches
3. To encourage critical reflection on and independent thought about the topics covered in the module.