This was the conclusion reached at the Performing Arts Network of South Africa and Business and Arts South Africa (Basa) Arts and Culture Marketing conference that ran from May 21 to 23.Gone are the doom and gloom outpourings of the past. These days the talk is of arts industries that offer corporates and governments good returns in areas where sponsors wish to appear well meaning.Speaker Annie Williamson, managing director of sponsorships for FCB Agency, whose main clients include Vodacom, Toyota and FNB, said ‘there is a new attitude towards sponsorship”, although the present climate ‘is not a pretty hair day for sponsorship”. Many decisions are based on what is called ‘chairman’s folly: what he loves and what his wife loves”.Audiences are changing rapidly, calling the living standards measurement system into question. Today we find individuals like ‘a merchant banker who plays golf and is gay”, living and consuming in more than one category. As a result of past experience we have a consumer backlash in which the public reacts against ‘sneaky product placement.” Williamson spoke of the downside of ‘one-stop shopping: in which sponsors, like Sprite, become property owners — they launch music tours and choose their own co-sponsors.”For culture there is hope on the horizon as sponsors look to ‘intangibles” such as prestige, heritage, audience loyalty and awareness as opposed to ‘tangibles” such as signage, product sampling and media and publicity.Corporates want to ‘demonstrate value” to get ‘more bang for your buck”. Apparently, we’re looking to a future where ‘families will ultimately be brought together through choice and not by birth — won’t that be lekker,” Williamson said.International guest speaker Heather Maitland, a United Kingdom based arts consultant whose clients include the Arts Council of England and the Scottish Arts Council quoted managing director of the Barbican Centre John Tusa as saying: ‘Art is adventurous, marketing is safe — art is orgasmic, marketing is anal. Yet we need both. Both want to make money — to have the best audience. We have no alternative but to work in a constructive way.”In competing with home entertainment, as well as the incapability for some groups to participate in culture, there would be a need for cultural marketers to go out, ‘not just for more audiences but for the right audiences”.Gordon Cook, school director of Vega: The Brand Communications School, spoke of the ‘national imperative of the African renaissance being empty if people in this audience don’t add flesh and blood to this imperative”.’Business has to become more decent, more socially responsible. And arts and culture offer opportunity for relevant business to achieve this objective” Cook said ‘The purpose of art is to keep us awake [while] the purpose of business is to keep us alive.”An after-hours highlight on May 22 was the Business Day Basa Awards that celebrated corporate involvement in the arts for 2002. This high- profile event was accompanied by a message from President Thabo Mbeki in which he called arts sponsorship ‘the most honourable form of sponsorship. It should be done for the intrinsic sake of promoting the arts and not in a commercial spirit where art becomes a mercenary.”Guest of honour Alec Irwin, Minister of Trade and Industry, said: ‘Something is happening in South African society that I find immensely exciting — the creativity, the diversity, the artistic capacity are more and more associated with success on every front.”The conference culminated in the formation of the Arts and Culture Marketing Association of South Africa on May 23.