The following text was part of a plenary panel at the 2003 Social Theory, Politics & the Arts conference in Columbus, Ohio, on October 9. Each panelist was asked for a ten-minute history and status report on their area of specialization (from sociology, to cultural policy, to economics, and so on). My assignment was arts administration—the management of primarily nonprofit and public arts and cultural organizations. A longer version of these remarks will appear in a future issue of theJournal of Arts Management, Law and Society.
Social Theory, Politics & the Arts Conference
Columbus, Ohio
October 9, 2003
Opening plenary session remarks of Andrew Taylor, Director
Bolz Center for Arts Administration
In preparing for this session, I reviewed what articles and writings I could find on the history of arts administration. As I reread the classic and recent histories of performing arts, visual arts, nonprofits, and the like, an old joke my father used to tell kept creeping into my head. With your forgiveness, here’s how it goes:
“Just raise your left arm,” he or she says, “and bend it slightly. Now, bend your right leg and extend your left. And hunch your shoulders, tilting your head to the side, and there you go!” Seeking to be an accommodating customer, and because he or she has urgent things to do, the individual assumes this position, and limps out of the shop into the street. At just that moment, two medical students are walking by. Upon seeing our suited friend, one says to the other, “Have you ever seen such a textbook example of that particular disorder?” And the other says, “No, I haven’t, but doesn’t the suit fit nicely?”
Such is the life and work of the nonprofit arts and cultural manager. Governed by an 18th-century board structure borrowed from universities and zoological societies, guided by a 1950s concept of corporate practice, and tugged by a broadening array of revenue streams and constituents, arts administrators have made a craft of contortion, and have made contortion a craft. Alongside the creative and technical professionals, arts administrators have fostered an astounding industry by adapting tools that never quite fit the job, and leveraging resources that never quite fit the need.
And yet, the suit fit nicely, just the same. The growth in the number and size of professional arts and culture organizations over the past four decades has been astounding, as many great researchers in this room will tell you. And the corresponding growth of arts management programs, executive training opportunities, professional associations, consultants, researchers, and funding sources seemed to follow suit.
As it evolved, the arts management field came to be defined by its creative solutions, its contortions in the face of challenge, its war stories, and its increasing attempts at business disciplines. Phrases like ‘yield management,’ ‘best practices,’ ‘core competencies,’ and ‘customer service’ started popping up at national conference workshops. Foundations and other funders became increasingly sophisticated in their interventions, and in designing measures and incentives to help arts organizations grow in what they defined as the appropriate direction.
Over time, however, contortion itself becomes a habit. The bends and twists of our efforts enter our muscle memory and begin to feel like our natural state. The resourceful shortcuts of a previous age become the ‘best practices’ of management training. To an outside observer, after four decades, our industry has come to look much like that patron leaving the suit shop—strangely contorted, but impeccably dressed.
Nowadays, signs of that dichotomy are everywhere. They are in the recurring conference theme of ‘blurring boundaries,’ that miss the point that the boundary was never real. They are in the increasingly sophisticated functional disciplines—from marketing to development to education to outreach—that seem to speak in separate languages rather than dialects of the same endeavor. They are in the ‘best practices’ and ‘critical success factors’ that pop up in research reports, implying that action and context can be separated. They are in the growing challenges of leadership succession, where general management positions at the highest level have only specialists available to fill them. And they are in the fitful struggles of arts organizations in the face of this year’s ‘perfect storm’ of funding constriction (earned, individual, foundation, government, and corporate).
Winston Churchill once said about architecture, “We shape our buildings, and afterwards our buildings shape us.” This has certainly been the case for the last forty years of arts administration. We are an industry of emergence, formed by the accrual of millions of individual choices made by millions of seemingly independent actors.
Lucky for us, we are just beginning to realize that the architecture that shaped us is movable and malleable. It wasn’t built with bricks and mortar, but with myth, with metaphor, and with a collective construction of purpose, identity, and meaning.
It’s a striking irony and a sign of hope that these are the very elements of art itself. Perhaps a more elegant and responsive metaphor for management has been hiding right in front of us all this time. Perhaps, if we look at ourselves with clarity and honesty, we’ll see that we don’t have to contort to fit the suit, but that we can change the suit to fit our needs. There’s a growing feeling among my peers and associates that, in fact, we have a full wardrobe at our disposal, if we can open our minds enough to see.
