The old British expression, ”horses for courses,” references the fact that certain race horses run better on certain tracks (dirt, mud, etc.). A primary challenge of the thoroughbred owner was therefore matching the horse to the course for the best results. The idiom now suggests that you match the right people to the task, or the right strategy to the goal.
In professional-grade arts and culture, however, we’ve bet disproportionately on a single horse — the nonprofit, tax-exempt, 501c3, board-governed, vaguely hierarchical, and formally organized critter we call the professional nonprofit. It’s not a bad horse, and it continues to run well on certain courses. But we’ve rarely explored (at least in the past decades) the other means of transportation at our disposal for the range of terrains we now are navigating.
Even if we were to have that conversation, we’d likely limit the options to a certain genus — the formal organization or institution with explicit goals. We would encourage arts enthusiasts and professionals to match the organizational form to the task at hand, whether it was nonprofit, for-profit, private, public, corporate, limited liability company, partnership, co-operative, sole proprietorship, or hybrid.
But as Clay Shirky so elegantly suggests in his TED talk from 2005 (and in his related book, Here Comes Everybody, which I’ve talked up before), such an exploration would miss completely an increasingly viable option for fostering, producing, stewarding, delivering, and interpreting cultural expression — not with an institution or organization, at all, but through non-planned and emergent coordination of distributed individuals.
Watch Shirky’s talk and you’ll get the larger gist: That many collective endeavors that used to require institutions no longer require them (and in fact, those institutions are now often blocking productive activity rather than advancing it), and that many collective endeavors that used to be impossible or improbable are now possible and even probable given the proper social tools.
Why is this an important issue for advocates, managers, and supporters of creative expression and cultural experience? Because if you’re using an institution or organization when you don’t need to, you’re dragging around all sorts of extra costs and complications that sap your energy and diffuse your purpose. If you could select, with elegance and intent, the most appropriate organizational structure or non-organizational system for the goal you have in mind, you might find that you’re moving with the tides rather than across them.
The formal, strategic, and structured nonprofit organization will remain an important option for non-market-supported, professional-grade artistic expression. But if we truly love our art forms and hope to foster their vital future, we might occasionally choose to leave that particular horse in the stable.
Andrew, that is a very insightful commentary. Having been in the trenches for most of my life and involved with arts organizations of all sizes I now find that “lean and mean” is working best for my purposes. And it is all-legal. But no board, no building, no brochures, no bother. My group – Theater by the Book – uses venues throughout South Florida where we present staged readings of large classics. It is going great guns and does not require reinventing the wheel. Meanwhile I hear horror stories from 501c3’s all around me.
This is great food for thought. Another piece of the discussion is how changing organizational structures change the art forms themselves. The structure that gives rise to the creative expression isn’t wholly separate from the creative expression itself. So it’s no surprise that when we shake up our systems for creating work, we shake up the work itself. Look at the rise of site specific work, web-based art, hard-to-categorize collaborative work, etc.
And maybe that’s why we hang on to our “war horses”…because there is still a need for art forms as we know them, and there’s a need to balance the new & innovative with the familiar and time-honored.
The challenge for a FUNDER with donors from the private and public sector who expect a modicum of accountability is how best to structure support.
Latitude in individual artist grants, e.g. allowing for collectives in the category is one avenue. Providing “fiscal agency” for groups who have demonstrated some kind of stability is another. (This is often done for filmmakers). Philanthropists have been trained to enjoy not only the warm fuzzy feelings in their hearts but the tax deductability of their gifts.
I consistently urge artists NOT to be in the 501(c)3 proliferation business without SOLID artistic and business reasons. “Getting money” is NOT a good enough answer. It matters to some, less to others.
But, in general, I agree the SYSTEM I’ve been a part of for the better part of 30 years can be a blessing as well as a curse.
This is a great conversation for public and private sector funders to have along with our partnering artists.