April 16, 2015 marked the opening session of a conference held at the School of Public and Environmental Affairs at Indiana University Bloomington, on Advancing the Field(s) of Nonprofit Management: New Structures, New Solutions. I was asked to speak about the arts, specifically about relationships between nonprofit arts organizations and the commercial and public sectors. Our session chair, my SPEA colleague Beth Gazley, asked us to say something ‘provocative’ in our allotted few minutes. So, for what it’s worth…
Artists, and nonprofit arts organizations, have always worked collaboratively across sectors. A nonprofit organization books commercial touring artists to perform in a city-owned facility the nonprofit has been contracted to manage. A nonprofit film festival receives funding from a public arts agency to show independent films whose producers hope to sell to a commercial film studio. A nonprofit orchestra performs in a publicly-owned facility and records with a commercial record label. Works of visual art that eventually make their way into nonprofit museums make their debut in commercial art galleries, and are subsequently exchanged at commercial auction houses. None of this is particularly new.
Is there much to be gained by thinking about the aggregation of nonprofit organizations in the arts as a ‘sector’? I don’t think so.
I will begin with a paragraph from former National Endowment for the Arts Chairman Bill Ivey’s book Arts, Inc. (2008). He writes:
Because the fine arts are mostly organized as nonprofits and because the fine arts are viewed as markers of sophistication, educational accomplishment, and virtue, the sector has come to think of itself as the only significant source of quality arts programming in the United States. When arts people talk about the cultural industries the dismissive term used to characterize the for-profit arts is commercial, suggesting an arena in which bottom-line concerns consistently trump the demands of artistry. In contrast, the nonprofit arts are seen as “mission driven” – purveyors of “excellence.” This assumed qualitative distinction, of course, does not hold up even to superficial scrutiny – many of our most highly regarded arts activities are almost exclusively organized for profit – but the notion survives as an often-invoked mark of nonprofit distinction – one that has allowed long-standing elitist prejudice to insert itself into policy. Over time the dismissive attitude of nonprofit advocates has taken on the character of a full-blown ideology – an explanation of reality that is widely shared but unexamined. Thus, the notion that a nonprofit business model invariably produces higher-quality art is a tenet of nonprofitism, an ideology that has encouraged a smug sense of entitlement in the arts community. In addition, nonprofitism has kept the sector isolated, preventing arts organizations and arts advocates from engaging real cultural issues like fair use, media regulation, trade in cultural goods, and the scope of intellectual property protection. Unfortunately, nonprofitism’s intellectual bookends, disdain for the commercial sector combined with an obsessive concern for public and philanthropic support, have to date pretty much defined the limits of the U.S. cultural policy debate.
That nonprofits are the exclusive domain of excellence in the arts is obviously wrong, as Ivey points out. Yet the notion that nonprofit arts are somehow better, or, to use an old term, high brow, persists to this day. Just a few days ago I read a new paper on the nonprofit sector that claimed for-profit arts cater to “popular culture and entertainment” such as “romance novels”, without informing us of what sort of organizations the authors believe publish award-winning literary fiction and nonfiction. The Gagosian Gallery, Farrar, Straus and Giroux, and Deutsche Grammophon present the highest quality art.
Furthermore, nonprofit arts organizations adopt many of the business methods of commercial firms, and always have. I recently wrote a book on pricing in the arts, and we can see every method of profit-maximizing price discrimination – market segmentation, two-part pricing, nonlinear pricing based on quality and quantity of purchase, tied sales, and now dynamic pricing – employed by nonprofit theatres, orchestras and museums. The “bottom-line” is just as relevant in nonprofit arts organizations as it is in commercial firms.
Although Ivey’s book is just seven years old, during that time I think we have seen an important shift in American cultural policy, one that begins to loosen the border between nonprofit and commercial arts firms.
The most influential book on cultural policy in this new century is Richard Florida’s The Rise of the Creative Class (2002). I don’t believe his intent was to write a book on cultural policy, but it happened nonetheless. Mayors and local economic development officials, and arts advocates, grasped on the idea that an interesting urban cultural life would attract human capital-loaded individuals to want to move to their city – the cluster of artists and other creative types would improve productivity and invention (and, in turn, incomes), and would also provide a pleasant place to spend one’s leisure hours. “Vibrant” became the buzzword.
As a result of all this, arts policy began to shift away from simply directing grants to nonprofit arts organizations (typically the only arts organizations eligible for grant funding) and, in some cases, individual artists, and towards thinking about neighborhoods and cultural districts. But cultural districts are not just about the nonprofit arts. Click on any town’s cultural district website and you will read about nonprofit museums and the local symphony, but also about local commercial galleries, cinemas, coffee houses and craft breweries. Which, of course, makes sense: any interesting neighborhood has all those things; we cannot be entertained by nonprofits alone.
Even the National Endowment for the Arts has been a part of this shift away from an exclusive focus on nonprofit arts organizations. Consider these examples:
- In 2014 the NEA held, jointly with the UK’s Arts and Humanities Research Council, a symposium on measuring cultural engagement. A theme through the report of the conference is on broadening definitions of cultural participation and engagement beyond in-person attendance at nonprofit “high arts” performances.
- The NEA partnered with the U.S. Bureau of Economic Analysis to try to measure the size of the cultural sector and its proportion of total U.S. GDP. The figures, released earlier this year, do not distinguish between nonprofit and commercial creative industries.
- The NEA began its “Our Town” program, about which it says:
Through Our Town, subject to the availability of funding, the National Endowment for the Arts will provide a limited number of grants for creative placemaking projects that contribute towards the livability of communities and help transform them into lively, beautiful, and resilient places with the arts at their core. Our Town prioritizes partnerships between arts organizations and government, private, and nonprofit organizations to achieve livability goals for communities.
There are certainly some interesting issues involving nonprofit arts organizations as a specific class of organizations: governance issues between management and board, or trends in fund raising, for example.
But if we want to talk about art – how people experience it, what it means to local economies and to city life more generally – focusing on nonprofits with the exclusion from consideration of other sorts of organizations no longer makes sense, if it ever did.
One driving force of President Kennedy’s idea to establish the NEA was that the Arts exist and function under different economic realities. We have lost sight of those words.
Those who think about what art does for us (philosophy) and the artists who produce our culture have shown us that producing great works of art have little to do with whether it is markable or can add to the bottom line of your community. It may in fact end up doing or being those thing but that is not the driving force behind why art is made.
That change began in this country with Richard Floridas’s pop/sociology books which were bought hook, link and sinker, by local governments and arts organizations desperate for a way out of the economic recession.
Unfortunately we have come under the spell of false thinking that entrepreneurialism is the cure for our social ills and for the future of how Art functions in society.
As an artist today you can barely get a grant or fund a project without have to prove that it engages community and even better if that engagement is economic. Just read the fine print of the NEA’s ArtWorks grants if you don’t believe me.
We are on a road to becoming cultural bankrupt if we believe art exists to solve our social problems or improve our financial bottom lines.
Actually, just the opposite of what you say is true. The leveling of high and low art is a corner stone of postmodern philosophy and neoliberal economic thought in the USA that has dominated the arts since the early 1980s. The idea was helpful and liberating for the first 15 years or so, but it has since become the stomping ground of orthodoxy.
We thus hear again and again the mantra of shifting the arts to more market-oriented values. This became a mainstay of neo-conservative philosophy in the 1970s as advocated by neoliberal economists like Milton Friedman and others at the University of Chicago. The philosophy eventually expanded to a rather totalizing concept of capitalism that insists the marketplace should be the sole arbiter of almost all human endeavor. As Dick Cheney put it, “government should be reduced to the smallest size possible and then drowned in a bathtub.” One result was the free trade laws that helped create the American rustbelt.
The implications concerning for-profit vs. non-profit art are obvious, though the neoconservative political agenda is seldom mentioned. Better business practices and improved entrepreneurship not only serve the arts better than public funding, but even more, public funding is unnecessary and only weakens the arts by decentering their market orientation.
The USA is the only developed country in the world that follows this philosophy. Unfortunately, cross-national comparisons for the number of arts institutions and funding per capita show that America’s neoliberal concepts do not work as well as public funding systems. Advocates of entrepreneurship in the arts thus seldom offer empirical evidence to support their claims. The philosophy has been around for about 30 years, but has not solved the problems created by America’s lack of a public funding system.
Most of the people advocating musical entrepreneurship in the USA do not know the origins of the philosophy or its relationships to neo-conservatives’ economic policies, because the political agenda is kept carefully hidden. In Europe, on the other hand, where the political spectrum is wider and more sophisticated, the resistance to neoliberalism is strong and openly discussed.
“The Arts” provide a slice of economic pie for every level of arts-related professional, just not the artist. What the artist actually gets to do is hold the ever-empty bag at the bottom of the trickle-down economic chute called “The Arts”. As they operate now, most artists feel little reason to value what arts organizations do for them. For nearly as long as there have been arts foundations, artists have hoped for and asked for usable aid. With staggering amounts of money currently flying over our heads in the name of art, artists find themselves with an abundance of arts administrators, revitalized art towns, a vacant contemporary art market that is all about money laundering and tax shelters, museums that rarely buy from decent living artists and the few individual artist grants available being so only by nomination.
In these hard times, artists have been asking for survival kits in the stifling jungle of art’s marketplace, and instead it is as if arts organizations and such have been sending us care packages containing wool sweaters and handbooks on how to pull ourselves up with broken bootstraps. After all, research tells us that funding artists doesn’t expand economies, but apparently funding “the arts” does. Taking the journey to avail oneself of resources provided by “the arts” is like walking a yellow brick road to nowhere that resembles a dream nightmare where the artist is in a never-ending unpaid internship, stretching to reach elusive, high hanging fruit that is always out of reach. The few artists awarded “project” budgets for “socially good” public art from such an improbable lottery distort their creativity for what mostly looks like giant crib toys to capture the attention of short attention span voting public and vacationers; the rest waste oceans their time working up drawing proposals on speculation of winning the project.
When artists passively expect and allow others to structure their field with ladders to climb and ripe plums to pick, they find the route unnecessarily circuitous with bitter fruits. The exasperated artist may eventually reach a small fruit only to find that it’s filled mostly with seeds instead of sweet pulp; they wind up painfully passing the seeds to disseminate and germinate the schemes of others who view artists as a reason for someone else’s season, all with little benefit to the artist.
I often get emails and calls from arts organizations asking for my enthusiastic vocal support in voting “yes” for more arts funding, and to spread the word to lay people. Why should I support “the arts” as an accomplished visual artist who finds this all a waste of time and money?