To be rather more serious about the Norman Lebrecht piece linked to in the posting below, here is his final paragraph:

The lyric arts will never thrive until executive directors are allowed as much executive freedom as the managers of any industrial installation. The key to running a good arts centre is not a bottomless budget or flow of singing talent but the simple, straightforward right to get on with the job.

Which is one way of looking at it.

Here is another. When you have a job that a lot of people understand, or think they understand, your hands are bound to be bound more tightly than if the job you are doing is one that hardly anyone else even realises exists, let alone even pretends to understand.

Suppose you are the lead singer of the Rolling Stones, circa 1970. You get to rule the roost, unless you are content to let someone else run your life for you in the manner of Elvis Presley, simply by virtue of being the only person who really knows what you are doing.

I did the pamphlets for the Libertarian Alliance for twenty years. I got paid nothing, but the principle still applies. Before the Internet, most people had no clue what I was doing. Why all those stupid pamphlets Brian, that no one is reading? Everyone else was obsessed with publishing, in large numbers, and distributing, in large numbers. If they couldn't do that, then what was the point? I knew that the important thing was that stuff was getting written, that some people were reading them, and that around all this writing and reading a London libertarian scene wasforming itself. Distribution would happen, by one means or another, some day. So long as the pieces were written in a way that would survive the delay, I knew I was doing something valuable, if not immediately so than some day. And because only I really understood and believed in what I was doing, I was pretty much left to get on with it, as I thought best.

Then came the Internet, and suddenly there was a mass distribution channel available, and everybody suddenly saw the point of what I had been doing. Also, lots and lots of people started writing (because now they could instantaneously publish) similar stuff to what I had been editing.

At which point I stopped enjoying it, because at that point I was suddenly surrounded, like Norman Lebrecht's beleaguered arts administrators, by people who understood what I was doing. I started to feel like a slave, doing what everyone expected. If lots of others could now see what needed doing, they didn't need me to be doing it any more. One of them could do it. And since, as I say (and unlike Lebrecht's arts bosses), I wasn't even being paid, I said to myself: enough. I made way for someone who doesn't have my problems doing what is expected of him by others.

And now I'm doing something else that lots of libertarians think is a waste of time, and which most of them have no clue about, and I am back to enjoying myself and doing things as I want.

So now back to those arts managers of Lebrecht's. The reason their hands are tied is because the institutions they manage have been part of the scenery for many decades, and have accumulated supporters and donors and helpers and underlings, all of whom know what is being done at least as well as whoever is nominally in charge, and all of whom have opinions at least as valid – or so they think – as those of the supposed boss.

The idea that somehow, in circumstances like these, the boss can be magically given more authority than reality will actually allow him is, well, unreal. To run such institutions as these, you need people who positively expect their hands to be bound up in bureaucratic tape and procedure, and who know how to live within such limits and make the best of them.

For Lebrecht to get the kind of arts managers he wants, they would have to be doing something radically different and new, and whatever he may say about it, the people now running opera houses and symphony orchestras are not and cannot be doing anything radically different from one decade to the next. "Radical" doesn't mean putting on slightly different operas in slightly different ways, or daringly deciding that the LSO should produce its own CDs. These moves are business as usual, slightly adapted for the changing times. Good business, admittedly, but hardly radical. Radical would mean something like completely rethinking the meaning of opera, and that isn't going to happen in a conventional opera house. It can't.