Arts Management : A New Discipline Entering the Millennium ?

This past decade saw the birth of AIMAC, the International Association for Arts and Cultural Management, which held its fifth conference at the Helsinki School of Economics and Business Administration, following previous conferences in Montreal, Paris–Jouy-en-Josas, London and San Francisco. With this birth, the question arises as to the possibility of the emergence of a new discipline – that of “arts management.” Indeed, the launching of the AIMAC conference can be taken as a sign that arts management was asserting its autonomy from cultural economics, which has in the past, through its conferences, served both the scientific communities, cultural economists and researchers in arts management. The founding in late 1998 of the International Journal of Arts Management (IJAM) contributed even further to stimulate research in arts management, to improve its standards of quality and to increase its dissemination, while at the same time reinforcing its legitimacy both at a practical/managerial and an academic level. This article takes advantage of the symbolic value of the dawn of the new millennium to raise a number of questions about this potential new discipline and to analyze the contributions it has made as well as the trends that characterize it. In the first part, we will look at the object of this discipline, its relationship to society at large and its closest neighbours (related fields of investigation). We will then show that arts management is not simply a transposition of general management approaches to a specific field of application, but rather that research developed within the arts sector can be said to contribute in several ways to general management knowledge. After identifying some of these contributions, we conclude with an analysis of the evolution of publications related to our field in scientific management journals, and argue that the evidence strongly suggests that arts management is becoming, if not a new discipline, then a major subfield of management.