Take the Money and Run: Power, Money and Counter-Power – Documentation

On Wednesday 19 June 2019 the Live Art Development Agency (LADA) and the Managing the Radical Action Group hosted Take the Money and Run: Power, Money and Counter-Power at LADA’s base at the Garrett Centre in East London.

Taking a moment to reflect upon some real successes achieved by campaigns such as Liberate Tate, the event invited artists, activists, curators, producers, researchers and anyone engaged with these issues to share ideas about how we might build for future struggles to free art and artists from their dependency on the proceeds of toxic capitalism. What might a politically and environmentally responsible approach to money in the arts look like today and tomorrow?

Take the Money and Run: Power, Money and Counter-Power featured contributions from Jess Worth of Culture Unstained, Jane Trowell of Platform, Elona Hoover of The Common House, Natasha Nkonde of Edge Fund, writer and artist Morgan Quaintance, and Cecilia Wee and Amit Rai from the Managing the Radical Action Group.

Take the Money and Run: Power, Money and Counter-Power built on Take the Money and Run, a 2015 event on ethics, funding and art organised by LADA, Artsadmin and Home Live Art as part of their Catalyst-supported research into ethical fundraising, and produced in collaboration with Platform. Documentation of that event can be viewed here.

Take the Money and Run: Power, Money and Counter-Power was the third in a series of Gatherings around the topic of ‘Managing the Radical’ (MtR) organised in part by the MtR Action Research Group in collaboration with LADA’s Restock, Rethink, Reflect Five project on Managing the Radical. The event was supported through Catalyst and the Collaborations Fund of the Faculty of Humanities and Social Sciences at Queen Mary University of London.

Documentation and Responses

“The reengagement with these ideas, four years after that earlier event … is itself reflective of one of the most important imperatives that emerged from the discussion – the need to continually reassess policies, best practice and personal boundaries. Referred to by researcher and activist Elona Hoover as an “ongoing critical evaluation” and by writer, artist and broadcaster Morgan Quaintance simply as “vigilance”, the idea that individual decisions and policies need to be re-examined in light of new developments and awarenesses is a challenge to the idea that simply having an ethical funding policy is enough.”

Writer Lewis Church was commissioned to produce a written response to the event, which can be read in full in this blog or downloaded.

Claire Nolan documented and edited footage of the event, which be viewed below.