Up Close & Personal

Mr Tim Jacobs
Chief Executive, The Arts Centre, Melbourne

Meet Tim Jacobs, Chief Executive of The Arts Centre, Melbourne. In this issue’s Up Close & Personal, Tim shares with us another side of himself. Learn more about how Tim’s approach to life has guided him through more than 30 years of involvement in the arts. Read the interview...

I came to The Arts Centre, Melbourne 9 years ago from Sydney Opera House where I was Chief Executive. But I have been living in Melbourne for almost a decade before that so it was an opportunity to come back to Melbourne and run the Arts Centre, which I had always been interested in doing.

Although much of my secondary school education was science-oriented, I was more interested in literature and history. I studied humanities, theatre, literature, history, and philosophy in the university, and have been working in the arts area, promoting arts activities since 1975!

Some of the key principles that have guided me all these years:

• You are in charge of your own life and what is happening in the external world around you just needs to be dealt with.
  
  
• Everything can be made better than it is at the moment, you just have to work out how.

Stress is something unavoidable in my line of work. The first thing I do is to avoid getting stressed in the first place! Stress generally doesn’t help very much. What I try to do is to use experience and perspective to understand what is it that’s being irritating, and then deal with the causes of that rather than just the symptoms.

It is important, whether as an individual or an organization, to never lose your curiosity and willingness to learn more, because the world is changing around you. We have plenty of examples from the past where people who lost their curiosity and willingness to adapt, finished up feeling seriously out of touch with the world where they live. If the audience is not interested, then it is we, as arts centres, who have got to change.

The Arts Centre, Melbourne is a large and very busy arts centre. We have approximately 1.2 million theatre attendances every year. There is a lot going on, and there are also many people here to attend non-theatrical activities as well. We are looking into extending the programmes, and going into much more active international programmes. Exciting times are coming up ahead for us. Programming, market research, ticketing and customer management are big areas for us at the moment.

Being a 25 years old arts centre, we are also in the process of planning a major redevelopment. So I guess we’ve got a lot of optimism about the future. But we’ve also got a lot to learn from others as well, because all art centres are at different stages of development and have different specialities. We are keen to learn what we can from others.

Something about me that people do not know? Well, I used to make pottery. But there’s so much “art” in my working environment, I would prefer other sorts of activities for recreation. I also enjoy making useful and practical things, like woodwork. I’m actually fixing up a boat right now!