There’s a word that’s guaranteed to cast a glaze over the eyes of my arts management students, to encourage a silent slouch in the nonprofit board room, and to dampen even the liveliest discussion of the arts. The word is ‘policy,’ and it’s arguably one of the most important words that arts managers don’t want to say.
The deadening dullness the word inspires in most conversations is a result of a skewed perception of what it means. It calls to mind European cultural ministries, impenetrable stacks of documents written in legalese, and congressional debates among elderly former-attorneys with watch fobs. Policy is boring. Policy is bad. Policy is contrary to the creative spirit.
But what would happen if we perceived policy in a different way:
Policy is constraint on behavior.
Constraint is the essence of art.
Policy is ultimately an individual, an organization, a community, or a larger collective saying: ‘we can choose to do things a thousand ways, but together we are going to choose one particular way.’ When used properly, policy can direct our attention to appropriate goals and means, and can make our work clearer and more transparent to those around us.
But why, you say, would creative people want to limit their choices? Because that’s, actually, what exceptional creative people do.
When a poet chooses to write a haiku, when a painter chooses a certain canvas size to work with, when a composer chooses an instrumentation or musical style, they are choosing a set of rules that constrain their available choices. They do so because, in part, those rules help direct their creative energy, provide them an obstacle to push against, and focus their work. The creative constraints of these forms can often be quite unforgiving. But it is the struggle of creative vision against constraint that makes great art.
It may be difficult to see the connection between choosing a haiku form and drafting returns policies for a box office, or fiscal policies for the annual budget, or grant policies that determine a foundation’s funding preferences. But all of these are constraints on behavior, self-imposed for the most part, that are designed to help a creative endeavor channel its work in appropriate ways.
Policy is only dry and dull because we’re not seeing it right, and worse yet, not using it as an essential and intentional element of our creative work.
As G.K. Chesterton stated decades ago:
”Art is limitation; the essence of every picture is the frame.”
