A member of our board sent through a link to “>this blog, which feels very well timed. There is a move amongst independent arts organisations in Birmingham to collectively undertake a ‘cultural benchmarking’ process, in which you feed a load of stats into an on-line database and it tells you if you are doing better or worse than similar organisations. The notion is that it will help you appraise your company and help you prove your worth to others.

We’re slowly coming to the conclusion that there aren’t enough hours in the day for this kind of effort. If lobbying Birmingham City Council is part of that agenda then it seems entirely futile. We have seen the figures and know that the council essentially disregarded their own measures of success and value when making funding decisions.

The major problem, as the blog title suggests, is attempting to attach a monetary value to something that measures itself by an entirely different value system.

My favourite contribution to the blog so far quotes Nietzsche before asking “which is a more fundamental question — the monetary value of culture or the cultural value of money?” priceless!