Does business practice transform artistic expression? Theater maven and Second City co-founder Bernie Sahlins thinks so, and explains how in his brilliant keynote speech now available on-line.
The speech was a highlight of the annual conference last week of my colleagues in the Association of Arts Administration Educators. And it captures the elegant interplay of management decisions and artistic opportunity that vexes and inspires the work of the cultural manager.
Sahlins constructs the argument around James Burbage, a sixteenth-century English entrepreneur in the arts, who ”invented” the box office. Said Sahlins:
When Burbage had that brilliant notion…he not only changed forever the structure of play presentation but (and here is the delightful and wondrous point; here is the ultimate value of what an arts administrator does), he started the process of transforming the actor from being a beggar, who humbly passed the hat, to being an artist, who was held to be of great worth to the community. And there you have the indispensable, the crucial role of your teaching: to bring to art the world’s respect and to the artist, self-respect.
Great speech. Great insights. With some high ideals for what it is we’re here to do.
A dialogue about what we are here to do is invaluable. It is anything but simplistic. When I hear arts professionals complain that I can’t keep the catagories straight — all the ticky tacky little boxes — I am reminded that Michaelangelo was not simply an artist. He managed a studio. With that management came personalities that varied from the adolescent assistant to the Pope.
Where is it written that someone who manages a studio cannot be an artist. I know artists who work at MOMA during the day — managing — and who go home at night to tend to their art.
The boxes the “professionals” (the funding rules and regulations that support nonprofits have this in spades) want to keep me stuffed in just don’t fit and I cannot for the life of me stay in my place. As an artist OR a manager. I’m both. One is NOT divorced from the other. The Other is the Other.
One of my jobs (one that arts managers never want to discuss the likes of because it leaves them confused as there are no rules) as a manager is to give the young, vibrant, mad, talented, spirited, rebellious, experimenting, visionary, magical, anguished, alive, on fire artists who work with me as much ROPE as the culture will allow me to give, and often, I give more than I am alloted.
To do what they need to do. To support them because supporting them is supporting me. As an artist.
I’m just not listening anymore to the dinosaurs who tell me to keep the distinctions distinct. No can do. My young people are out there writing, painting, dancing, rock and rolling, and redefining “Art” at every available opportunity. And filming it as they go. And putting it on YouTube.
And you want me to stay in the categories. What “they” do will not only change the insular world of Art but it will change commercialism, too; it will change any art institution they leave me for to grow. And I will push them out the door and out of the nest to do it.
Categories. Boxes. They roll their eyes and someone reminds me to mention Warhol. Another dead artist who could not stay in his place.
Who managed a studio.
I need more elbow room and if you’re not going to give it to me as an artist and the manager of a studio that does make art, I’m going to take it anyway because there isn’t a soul in this room I’m pounding this out in who can or will be contained. What we are here to do is something we rediscover every day and every minute of every day. The notion that we must “manage” ourselves to stay in our “place” is laughable. Been there. Done that. It doesn’t work. Time for new ideas because the old ones are the real antiquities.
Of course there is a very close relationship between business practice (which is in its turn based on certain philosophies of value and the requirements of a free-market economy) and the work and core concerns of artists in their different fields.
There’s as much relationship between the artist and business practice as there is between the work of a theoretical mathematician and business practice, of a neuro-surgeon and business practice. Whether they are given the time and can buy the tools and are given the place in which to do what constitutes their work in an excellent fashion depends on them receiving a fee for their work which bears a practical relationship to the economy in which they must survive. It also depends for some of those professionals on having an institution in their town which offers them work, which also means, practically speaking, access to a well fitted building.
If our market stops valuing the work of theoretical mathematicians or instrumental musicians, then artists will have to move underground by creating their own barter economy or by moving into the entertainment market where the masses, voting with their dollars, move the businesses which move “art”.
There are an infinite number of business decisions which always co-exist with the production of art in every discipline, and every decision makes itself felt in the end product or experience of art. Not all of those business decisions – like that brain wave of Burbage’s – will shake the world though! Nor is every artwork eternal or revolutionary!
It is fabulously creative if artists and arts administrators know the importance of business decisions at every stage along the way of the art process.
It is almost a definition of “amateur art” that its directors and producers cannot, or in ignorance, do not, value those decisions which involve money, and don’t recognize that they too must always support the artistic vision that is desired.
It also takes a strong artist or arts administrator to turn down offered money that is directed towards a decision which will deflect the art from its expressed vision.
Because so many do not understand the complexities of the healthy relationship of business and art, in many communities taking away the contributions money makes to their productions has become a symbol of artistic value. Very likely they themselves have not met artists or themselves lived through a lifetime of needing to make art with integrity and “production value” -to rent the music, hire the lighting technicians, costumers, set-designers, the right composer, take the time in the day to practice or make pots or sing scales, or rent a hall with good enough acoustics to be heard properly, and on and on and being able to eat and pay the rent. In their perception it has become a kind of guarantee of artistic merit to do all these things without paying anyone or taking pay themselves! Being “paid to do art” thus somehow becomes synoymous to such amateurs with “art prostitution”. It takes a few generations to evolve, but this is a consequence of the severence at the gut level of the real relationship of the business world and the arts world.
At the other end of the problem posed by “amateur” artists is that of the trend that elevates an arts decision (usually in arts organizations) simply because it was “good for business”. Not all positive business moves influence the arts positively. It depends on the glue provided by the act of those involved working towards the same artistic vision.
Art doesn’t heal without the healthy integrity of that common, woven environment.