I’ve been staring at this screen for several days (weeks, actually, if I’m being honest) trying to write about what the pandemic and the lockdown means for the arts. It’s not that I don’t have anything to say — it’s the opposite. Anything I begin to write seems reductive. There’s too much to say and where to start? So this is maybe the start of a series of pieces on the topic.
When everything shut down there was the panic of uncertainty. First, the virus is scary; it’s killing lots of people, and we don’t know enough about how it works and how it spreads. Fear of the unknown is the worst — my imagination can quickly go to dark places. But it turns out that there are plenty of amazing people in our midst — those you expect: medical workers and first responders, and those you might not have thought of: grocery clerks(!) and bus drivers(!) and many others — who heroically continue to perform essential jobs to keep us going.
As the shock set in and our public life shut down, survival instincts kicked in. For weeks, my email inbox has filled up with fundraising pleas. Our global arts supply chain went down overnight as theatres, concert halls, museums, bookstores, production studios, rehearsal facilities and support services shut down.
Foundations kicked in quickly to try to help. Some — like Colorado’s Bonfils-Stanton — tore up the usual rules and quickly distributed money to existing grantees without much red tape. A group of national foundations put together a $75 million fund. Cities such as Seattle moved to waive rent in City-owned spaces. After considerable debate, Congress included $300 million for culture as part of its $2.2 trillion bail-out bill, including $75 million each for the National Endowments for the Arts and Humanities.
Despite these and many other heroic attempts, the help is completely overwhelmed by the scale of the crisis. Americans for the Arts reported $4.5 billion in economic losses for the arts by the first week of April. The Metropolitan Opera alone estimated $60 million in losses. Whatever financial aid arts funders could muster is swept away by the size of this tsunami. To put the scale of the problem in perspective – the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation, one of the few remaining national funders of the arts, could throw its entire $7 billion in assets at the problem and be broke in a few months having failed to “save” America’s arts organizations. The size of the problem facing the arts sector is simply too massive for our existing cultural infrastucture to cope.
And it’s unlikely that significantly more help will be on the way. While the city of Berlin quickly made $320 million available to its cultural workers and Germany’s national government added €50 billion (yes with a “b”), with its culture minister saying that “artists are not only indispensable, but also vital, especially now,” America’s national and state governments have been for the most part indifferent at best and even downright hostile. Republicans in Congress pointed to the $150 million for the NEA and NEH in the $2.2 trillion bailout bill (about .07% of the whole) as wasteful spending in a time of national crisis. Former Trump administration ambassador Nikki Haley mused that the money for the arts should have been spent on something useful instead (“It could have helped so many people.”). This, even though we know the arts account for $763 billion in annual economic impact and more than five million jobs nationally. To put this in perspective, commercial airlines employ about 600,000 and earned $240 billion in 2018 and just got $25 billion in the bailout bill after spending $48 billion in the past two years buying back their own stock after a generous Republican tax break.
Now, it must be said that in addition to direct government aid to the arts, the bail-out included the Paycheck Protection Program, which many arts organizations applied for and some got. So there’s that. But most artists are self-employed or contract workers and many weren’t eligible.
Given the scale of the national crisis facing all sectors of the economy in the months and years to come, the pandemic is a historic disruption that represents an existential crisis. What to do?
I’ve come to think of it in the following frame:
Restorationists versus Opportunists
The world is settling loosely into two camps: Restorationists, who believe that this was a catastrophic event we have to survive until we can resume the important work we were doing before, and Opportunists, who believe that everything has changed going forward and that we have an historic opportunity to reinvent.
Restorationists are deeply invested in their business models and want to rebuild as quickly as possible. They have built, often painstakingly over generations, pipelines to talent and support and the means to reach audiences. They’re terrified that the infrastructure that supports them will collapse and they’re desperate to shore it up and get back to work.
Opportunists have long seen cracks in the cultural infrastructure and suddenly find themselves (along with the rest of us) in a place where all the usual rules and structures have been turned upside down. They see a world that could look considerably different AV (After Virus) and perhaps opportunities to rewrite better rules going forward.
A Crisis of Infrastructure
What the pandemic has exposed is the shocking impoverishment of our infrastructure at every level: medical, political, financial, industrial, media, logistical, and yes, cultural.
Our cultural infrastructure has been a mess for years. Technology has detached the making of cultural goods from the ability to get paid for them. The non-profit model, created in the 1960s to address 1960s funding realities, hasn’t been up to the task for decades. Old institutional models haven’t adapted to keep up in the internet age. Delivery of arts education has been frail for long time, in spite of heroic attempts to make it better. Our arts institutions are badly under-capitalized. Artists can’t afford housing or studio space in many of our cities. Equity and diversity are still big problems. We’ve lost most of our arts media. We have significant and persistent leadership failure issues. And while we’re at it — after all these years of tech innovation, why is it still so difficult to just find out what cultural events are going on around us?
Restore? Really? Why would we want to restore infrastructure that has been sputtering and misfiring for a very long time?
New Realities
It’s instructive to look back at the 2009 financial crisis. When the bottom fell out, those who were already vulnerable had to struggle just to stay alive. Those who were secure saw opportunity to invest while the bottom had fallen out. In the years since, those investments rose spectacularly, powering a historic gap between the wealthy and everybody else. This gap also opened up in the arts, I would argue, where superstar museums and mega-galleries and giant film studios grew at a furious pace, while small and medium arts organizations and most especially average artists, never recovered. Now, it has been observed, you can do fine as an artist if you are superstar. You can be okay if you’re content to subsidize your work with some other employment. What you can’t be, increasingly, is a successful middle class artist whose work as an artist is full time.The economics mostly don’t work. A broken system.
So think of the economy as a giant puzzle where the pieces fit together. The pandemic has thrown all those pieces up in the air and it’s not clear yet how they will be reassembled. Those with means are busy trying to grab as many pieces as they can. Those who are focused on simply surviving are waiting for the pieces to come back together, and will inevitably get stuck with the leftovers and a smaller share even than they had before. It shouldn’t have to be that way.
Opportunities
Every sector is in the same boat right now. Higher education spent decades on a building spree while under-investing in their actual product (shifting teaching from tenured, employed faculty to poorly-paid adjunct contract workers), leading to unsustainable tuition burdens and an expensive infrastructure that is no longer supportable. Students are demanding refunds for their newly-virtual classes and enrollment this fall is likely to plummet.
Commercial real estate is likely to crater as companies decide they don’t need workers to come in every day to a physical office. Retail shopping — already hanging by a thread — will collapse. The industry estimates fifty percent of America’s malls could be closed by next year. Airlines are preparing for radical downsizing. Cities and states are bracing for smaller tax revenues and the need to rewrite their tax codes. The movie industry has to rethink release strategies as audiences are reluctant to go into theatres. And on and on.
You can see this as nothing but loss. Or perhaps some of our most intractable debates are now suddenly shaken free of their old moorings. That everyone should have medical insurance is a moral good. But arguing that it is didn’t win the argument. If instead, medical coverage is now a public safety issue because the uninsured are a risk to us all, and 30 million newly unemployed means a whole lot of people just lost their medical care, it’s an entirely different debate going forward. Suddenly Medicare-for-All doesn’t seem so scary to a newly-terrified populace.
Climate change will make the pandemic seem like child’s play, and yet it’s been difficult to get voters to focus on it. But the taste of this global threat makes the next one palpable in ways it wasn’t until now. The cleaner air and lack of congestion that has resulted from this lockdown reframes the debate. Paris has already announced it won’t let cars into the downtown when it reopens. “We can no longer let Paris be dominated by automobiles,” says the mayor. It’s a quality of life issue. The fossil fuel industry, shattered by collapsing demand, is teetering on the brink. Given the choice, most governments will now invest in renewables.
Global supply chains shown vulnerable in this crisis have industries rethinking where they make things and how they get them to markets. The legal profession is rethinking how it hears arguments and hold trials. The medical industry is rethinking tele-medicine and how it charges for services. Everywhere you look the pandemic is now an opportunity to rewrite the rules of the road — not just to address those things that have broken, but to take advantage of new opportunities to do better.
And the arts? If we only focus on rebuilding, we’ll get stuck with a lesser version of a model that already didn’t work very well. Theatres are likely to be shut on-and-off for much of the next year or so, and besides, the first research indicates it will be considerable time before audiences are willing to go back. Performances will resume, but if we have to keep social distancing, does that mean 200 people in a 1000-seat hall? How does that work – both as a supportable business model as well as aesthetically?
Our funding system is stretched and broken. Do we triage and let a high number of institutions and an untold number of artists fail? The Association of American Museums says one third of America’s museums could go out of business this year. Or do we figure out a better system?
Do we continue with our under-performing non-profit model or design a new hybrid? Can we finally figure out a virtual content model that pays, now that we have a significant audience for it? Can we rethink the relationships between artists and institutions that make both more sustainable? Can we design a more equitable education model that enriches non-artists and prepares more versatile artists for successful careers? These and dozens of other issues are there to be addressed. In the old world all these issues were urgent. In the new they’re existential.
I would argue that the cultural sector will fail if it tries to figure this out on its own, let alone just the non-profit arts sector which is an even smaller subset. Looking around, I see many other sectors with similar issues, many which might benefit from learning from the arts, just as we could learn from them. The question is — can we look up long enough from trying to survive to think bigger?
NEXT: leadership and opportunities
Top image by Siggy Nowak from Pixabay
I look forward to hearing more. Very well stated.
Philanthropy is doing all it can to boost arts and culture, but it simply will not be enough. The pandemic has touched every segment of the arts community, from anchor institutions to individual artists. I concur that we have an opportunity to create new structures and systems that address long-standing inequities, particularly in the US, and especially in the arts world. The good news is there are folks who’ve been fighting for justice all along. The arts community would do well to join them. We must equally compel our elected and appointed government officials to put people and art first, before global corporate interests. Carpe Diem!
Well, I joke that I might be a lousy planner, but I am great at gap analysis, and DC, where most of my professional career was spent, is full of gaps. Especially as it relates to the development of a locally focused arts and culture ecosystem, as opposed to that provided by the federal government, which in turn overwhelms the development of a local ecosystem in the face of flawed or incomplete planning processes.
I am more an analyst and writer, I am not a culture planner, but I have written extensively about how I think local culture planning should be focused and carried out. E.g., this piece in response to what I thought of as a poorly executed DC local cultural plan:
http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2019/04/what-would-be-transformational-projects.html
It builds from trying to figure out why so many locally focused cultural institutions have failed, as well as arts-based revitalization, e.g.,
http://urbanplacesandspaces.blogspot.com/2019/01/reprinting-with-slight-update-arts.html
In short, without a good base for how to redo cultural planning, opportunists won’t be particularly successful (one off projects vs. an integrated system are most likely) and restorationists won’t have a compelling enough argument.
Doug – couldn’t agree with you more – it’s not the “next normal,” but a “new normal” our sector will be facing. We offered a framework and some thoughts here:
https://www.ams-online.com/long-runway/
‘And the arts? If we only focus on rebuilding, we’ll get stuck with a lesser version of a model that already didn’t work very well.”
…. now is the time, now, in the lock-down, for all arts leaders to look at what we have been and to carefully RETHINK IT ALL.. What can we be, what should we be, what must we do? These huge questions will take a long time to resolve but visionary, radical leadership NOW, RIGHT NOW will be required if anything good is to come from this catastrophe.
It may be time for those who got us here to step aside and for them to invite those who have been aspiring to create what’s needed come to the fore.
Yes!
Thank you for this thoughtful commentary and evaluation. Certainly, a lot for us in the arts to consider. We are certainly at a crossroads and we have the opportunity to hopefully make changes for the better.
This is an excellent article, realistic and to the point.
It truly addresses the unbalance we chose to ignore for so long.
Especially appreciated is the acknowledgement of how the last ten plus years really segregated talent because of the format followed – “he who has the gold makes the rules”.
This was the same for many sectors.
Hence it can be said we essentially put ourselves in this present climate for two simple reason – in addition to not planning for the present scenario we intentionally ignore and pass up amazing ideas/solutions..
Maybe the ideas were too advanced at the time or the decision makers felt its too far fetch or unrealistic, but then this happens.
From experience I have seen solutions for many of the things addressed in the article, (and there still are) but they did not fit at the time for the decision makers.
Maybe the solution is that we need a better system for who sees the ideas being put forth and transparency on deciding factors.
The system should be balanced to benefit all.
At the end of the day, it is a very very small percentage of the world that comes up with the amazing ideas that the masses end up using or following.
These idea makers are the people that do not have the financial means and this is where the unbalancing occurs.
A better model is definitely needed before a ACT II.
Thank you for the thoughtful post.
IMO – Artists need to change their posture from hands out begging (Donors / Government / Grantors / Audience) and feeling “less than” to organizing and demanding. In Los Angeles, a City of Millions – it takes an average of 20k votes (and as low as 15k votes) to win a City Council seat, How many artists do we have in these council districts? How many people who support and value arts and culture in their community?
IMO opinion arts support organizations have been missing the mark. As most arts non-profits since 2008-9 the object has become survival. The mission becomes secondary to food on the table – understandably. Leadership stays too long, passion grows comfortable and complacent or just cowed. Too risky to push envelopes with programming and creativity, Must serve the donors. What happens is we all end up competing with one another for the scraps.
Imagine the opposite. Imagine all of us. Every musician, painter, actor, writer, director, designer, producer… All of us pledging to act as one at the ballot box. The power is the numbers.
What we need is political organization. What we need is every single individual artist, every arts organization to come together in a union or coalition and approach city leaders with POWER.
We must unite, not compete. We must demand increased funding. We demand better access to health care. We put our own supporters and advocates in office and if the current city leaders refuse to change policies and priorities we remove them.
An example of a prominent local musician running for local office. His tenure will be exciting to watch. https://www.msn.com/en-us/news/video/louisville-musician-educator-jecorey-arthur-to-run-for-metro-council/vp-BBY0rzA
I get excited when I read the title of a piece like this. But I think the genius of any proposals will be in the granular details, which are so far missing.
One such kind of granular idea: I am part of a gallery at a museum that has a rental sales model. In normal times it provides an ongoing income 12 months a year rather than a windfall (if lucky) every 18 months when a standard gallery gives an artist a solo show. Much of the established gallery community tends to reflexively dismiss the word “rental“ as though it somehow tarnishes the (spiritual?) (pure?) enterprise of selling art without trying it out first.
Renting art to buy is one of those populist micro steps in between the consumer and the maker that can be a game changer for sustaining the arts. One of the things I would like to see change in the existing models is understanding that artists who make objects like sculptures and paintings need overt patronage or a retail infrastructure to survive. Museum shows may build a resume but artists are often expected to foot all the bills for those shows and they may sell nothing in a museum when the work is large, site-specific or expensive. You can’t pay the rent with prestige only.
Populism is rising throughout the globe in some of the worst ways imaginable. Racism, xenophobia and authoritarianism are all rising in its wake. Yet many good things can come from populist turmoil. In the conversation about the pandemic my online community is divided between those who think the world should stay shut down for however many years it takes until there is a vaccine or a cure and those who want to start to reopen. 99% of the stat-shut people are comfortably retired and over 60 and they will barely feel the economic loss of the shutdown. On the other side are the people who actually need a job. They will not survive the global shut down. This polarization is echoed in the dynamics of the art world. The gap, the extremes, the lack of empathic connection between the two worlds. I look forward to hearing more about the concrete ways you suggest to mind the gap and close it.
“99% of the stay-shut people are comfortably retired and over 60 and they will barely feel the economic loss of the shutdown.” Really? And presumably they lack an ‘an empathetic connection’ as well. Interesting.
I am speaking here of a perhaps distorted subset of the population– I have no idea how representative my Facebook community is. Every time I have posted suggestions of how the economy might begin to open, (the first suggestion being naturally distanced businesses like dog walking and art galleries) the reaction has been swift and at least publicly harshly negative, although behind the scenes some people have been willing to send notes of support. When I briefly did an experiment advertising an art opening to my Facebook community two years ago I saw the demographics.
The lack of empathy is truly shocking to me. It seems directly correlated to age and degree of immunity to economic damage, coupled with vulnerability to the virus. (Although don’t these people have children and grand children…..?) The discussion has been further turned into a caricature with labels of “Republican/Trump” and “Democrat.” It appears if you are pro-job you are a Trumpite and if you are pro-health and safety you are a Democrat. Not terribly useful, or promising for bringing people together moving forward. Overall the feeling among this cohort seems to be “life goes on, it will all bounce back,” regardless of whether the lockdown lasts another month or many. Nobody desperately trying to keep their job or their housing can think that way.
Many of the most promising pre-Covid ways to bring art to new audiences was through the culture of food. The tech communities, to continue with virus metaphors, have been resolutely immune to supporting art. Yet the restaurants before pandemic were filled with Amazon and Google employees happy to spend thousands every month eating out, and building the massive luxury eating sector of places like San Francisco and Seattle. Now the link between food and art will be tenuous at best, with predictions that only 1 in 4 or 5 restaurants will even survive. A small point of light may be that people will entertain more at home. Perhaps there will be a place for the original idea of the “salon” to revive, with small gatherings in homes where art and food come together in celebration and patronage.
A very sobering article. And as an arts executive, it is much the same that I’ve read from other media outlets and arts leaders. We need to rethink our models. We need to work together with our artists to create new opportunities. I need the artists I employ to help bring these new ideas forward to be considered. I need union rules to be flexible, especially when it comes to use of technology. Luckily, these conversations have begun in my institution, and I only hope that this can create a better union between management and artists.
It brings to mind the many letters in the historical record penned by artists caught in incredible upheavals in times past. The wars of the Enlightenment, the World Wars, epidemics, pandemics, and the inevitable unweaving of the cultural fabric down to constituent threads. In days past, culture was not easy to measure as a constituent percentage of a country’s GDP. Today, the arts are imbedded in our economies in such sophisticated, and indirect ways that I am surprised by the “19th Century” flippancy of the argument in the Artsjournal: as if all there was to the arts was Patronage, and Artist output, and not sophisticated algorithms of say, artist neighbourhood renewals, or the high ACTUAL ROI governments make on the residual tax effects from public spending in the arts sector. The alpha and omega of organizing as a not-for-profit is NOT the Income Statement and Balance Sheet, as might be inferred from this article. It certainly isn’t barter style supply and demand either between governments and artists. Even a rudimentary marginal analysis would reveal the social profit component extant in and driving the Not-For-Profit arts sector. Change is always upon us, as the historical record confirms.
Great reasoning Doug! Thanks for the opportunities to point out 1) how inevitable this was since well before the Great Recession, 2) how the Great Recession gave a taste of the need for systemic change, 3) how the fine arts industries have been sliding back into complacency with the rising Dow, and 4) little has fundamentally changed because our bread is buttered by the status quo and not straying far from it.
As an artist working for a major institution, I witnessed first-hand the almighty dollar preventing us from progressively broadening our mission to become indispensable to the larger public. At inevitable times like this, those chickens may be coming home to roost. So I quit that institution years ago to grow as an artist (I don’t use the term entrepreneur any more because I don’t make money for investors) and do the right thing; offering my art form so anyone can afford to come and learn in casual places without sacrificing their social life. This is at once both truly charitable and commercial.
Here the art becomes about user design, craftsmanship and authentic engagement, rather than authority, academia, money or having a foreign accent. If we can do this from our institutions, collaborating with key community partners, in many, very small and flexible groups during Phase 1 Reopening, and keep it going as a core mission out of genuine love for each other, we stand a chance to remain relevant and functioning back inside post-virus. It’s a mighty big gap, esp. financially. So I’m not optimistic my industry can afford to be so generous or smart. But a single artist can indeed make a difference, esp. amplified.
When you say “offering my art form so anyone can afford to come and learn…,” do you mean like doing a show in a park or someone’s home so people can give donations and might pay a small fee? Or?
Institution wise: do you mean instead of relying on patrons who usually become part of an institution’s board ergo things become more controlled …do you mean find community partners like local neighborhood businesses?
Hi Tanyah!
Yes. House concerts, park concerts.… I’ve played PARKING LOT concerts! They are all examples of making the classical arts, or any arts really, part of a “new” tradition… but only if done regularly. Instead of always thinking big, I think classical music need to restart small, intimate and really make sense of classical, esp. when it may someone’s ONLY chance to see music performed up close. A huge difference will spin out from a good small start. Your suggestions are a “new classical” transaction, where serving the mission (audience-centric), balances all the formal playing we (hopefully) do (art-centric). When we give ourselves that permission, we can think of many more ways, places, people to engage. No, we just need the donors, funding opportunities such as Knight and Kresge Foundations offer in Detroit. Permission to entertain and be bold, and also to be vulnerable by telling a quick story of how we got hooked.
Re: Question 2: Yes. That would be one good source. Try many church leaders: one might give you a place to rehearse and perform, an audience AND pass the HAT for ya! Try anyone you know is interested or curious about your music. I’d jump on that! Tell them a great, true and SHORT story why you do it (elevator speech). Of course, a good board remains critical to fund the mission. But I want to ensure the mission is the audiences of strangers 1/3 of my time, audiences of friends, donors and touring, and finally 1/3 of my time for creation. CutTime was bent on starting a franchise of new chapters across the country that Americanizes classical music… with American qualities (how ’bout that?)… since my string quintet’s been playing in bars, clubs, street festivals, homes, etc. for 10 years. Always wanted to try FUDGE SHOPS of Traverse City!