Jumper

Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

On a Strategy of Indeterminacy: Or, the Value of Creating Pathways to the Unforeseen

Inspired by work and writings of John Cage and Rebecca Solnit

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

This passage is from one of my favorite writers and favorite books on the creative process, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost (5). In a series of beautiful essays Solnit evokes, meditates upon, and illustrates the experience of being lost and its relationship to creation, transformation, shapeshifting, or simply making one’s way forward each day.

This question of Solnit’s ”How do you calculate upon the unforeseen?” is one I love chewing on and I have returned to time-and-again since I first read Solnit’s book in 2014. It is a question inspired, Solnit writes, by a declaration of Edgar Allen Poe that “all experience, in matters of philosophical discovery, teaches us that, in such discovery, it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely” (5).

In this #creativeleadership post I want to reflect a bit on the inevitability, the purpose, the lessons, the possibilities, and the power of the unforeseen. While the unforeseen is something that many of us might like to avoid (I’m now thinking of any number of cataclysms of the past 5 years), artists (in the main) seem to dance with the unforeseen, draw it out, seek it out, and sense it long before others. Across a range of disciplines, one might even conceptualize the creation process that many artists engage as they make new works as a pathway to the unforeseen.

One of the forebears and exemplars of “collaborating with chance,” as Solnit puts it, was the composer and music theorist John Cage. Over winter break I re-read Kay Larson’s fantastic biography Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists as a handful of students in the MA Creative Leadership at MCAD were keen to engage with it. The book is largely an exploration of the influence of Zen Buddhism, including the writings and talks of seminal first carriers of Buddhism to the United States (such as D.T. Suzuki), on Cage’s life and work.

In this second reading I made the connection between Solnit’s “pathways to the unforeseen” and Cage’s principle of indeterminacy. Larson describes indeterminacy and encapsulates Cage’s use of it, writing:

Indeterminacy means, literally: not fixed, not settled, uncertain, indefinite. It means that you don’t know where you are. How can it be otherwise, say the Buddhist teachings, since you have no fixed or inherent identity and are ceaselessly in process?

Inspired by Suzuki’s class, Cage had been exploring ways to write music that was indeterminate both in original intention and in outcome. By using methods of divination (his favorite was the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes) Cage could write music with the help of chance. In that way, he could begin with an intention and open it up to the unpredictable. The next step was to write music that obliged the performers to make some of their own choices.

Larson, Where the Hear Beats, 19-20

Cage characterized his work as an experience “the outcome of which is not foreseen” identified with “no matter what eventuality” (Larson, 348). He adopted the use of the I Ching as a method in large part to remove himself (his ego) from the decision-making process with new works. While he quite often set up elaborate constraints or rules in advance of rolling the I Ching, ultimately the work that emerged was the outcome of chance.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all artists work by a principle or process of indeterminacy, the capacity to work in such a way (moving towards the unknown, allowing chance events to influence the work, beginning without a plan or articulated end in sight) does seem to be common among many artists.

Within the frame of organizational processes, I would argue that the opposite of indeterminacy is strategy. What do I mean by strategy? Michael Porter describes it as the big picture of how the organization is going to win in its environment, whatever that is. Put another way, how will you achieve competitive advantage (deliver a distinctive value proposition) given known and unanticipated threats and opportunities?

Since Porter’s initial formulation, and in response to uncertainty and continual disruptions and therefore the difficulty of engaging in long-term strategic planning we have witnessed the turn towards adaptive strategy. While applied to business it grew out of software development and, akin to the scientific process, involves hypothesizing, experimenting, and adjusting as necessary. In other words, try-out short-term strategies and adapt as you need to in pursuit of your longer-term goals.

Lately, the concept of emergent strategy (first coined by Henry Mintzberg but of late most associated with adrienne maree brown) has been gaining ground. Emergent strategy (as it sounds) is not deliberate and does not involve planning. It is developed in response to fluid or unforeseen circumstances (like, say, a pandemic). I am a big fan of brown’s book.

What I have been wondering since re-reading Larson’s book on Cage is whether, to prepare ourselves for a future that we anticipate will be radically different, humans and businesses alike would benefit, at times, from adopting a strategy of indeterminacy. By that I mean an embrace of processes that will by necessity and with intention ensure that we arrive at destinations we cannot imagine, much less describe. 

What might a strategy of indeterminacy — a process for putting our organizations on a pathway to the unforeseen–look like? I work at a college running a master’s program. I spent a bit of time lightly pondering this possibility within that general context and came up with a few ideas:

Idea #1 – Wild Card Courses

What if my program annually scheduled a wild card course – a course that would never be logically included in the program. Moreover, what if that course was determined in part by chance? Each year someone would roll the dice to select one of X possible courses. Here are 10 courses that I would never strategically build into the program I currently direct (all but #10 inspired by headlines I’ve noticed recently):

  1. Tomorrows Deities, Doctrines, & Denominations: What is the Future of Religions?
  2. Whither Water and Wastewater?
  3. The New Canary in the Coalmine? Autonomous Mobile Robots & Workplace Hazards
  4. Building and Using a Vertical Hydroponic System to Grow Vegetation
  5. Gene Therapy: Risks, Rewards & Quandaries
  6. Gun Control Policies in China and the US
  7. GIS Data: Applications in Business, Social Change, and Everyday Life
  8. Climate-friendly Eating
  9. Frontiers in Animal Science: Ethics, Economics, and Environmental Sustainability
  10. Woodcarving

Another idea could be to create a campus-wide course whose content is determined by whomever shows up for it and their interests. No syllabus. No plan. No clear outcomes. It simply emerges in response to the questions, curiosities, and goals of the individuals that come to form the course ensemble.

Idea #2: An admission lottery system

This is not a new idea as admission lotteries already exist; but they are a great example of an indeterminate strategy. Lotteries are already used in Charter schools and some public high schools (in NYC, e.g.). Some institutions of higher learning also use them for incredibly competitive programs. But what if they were adopted at most colleges and universities?

Idea #3: Where’s the College President?

What if every day the president of the college used a random outcome generator to select a spot on campus where he/she/they would set up a laptop and work for two hours?

What would be the outcome of these actions? No one knows; and that is the beauty of them.

I’m by no means suggesting we toss aside strategy in favor of indeterminacy; but I believe there are lessons in the ways that John Cage approached the creation of work and, in particular, engaged processes that enabled him to extend real and imagined boundaries, encounter the unknown, and make what could not have been imagined in advance of the making.  

Given widespread recognition of the need to find radically new and beautiful alternatives to many of the ways of being, doing, and knowing that we embraced throughout the 20th century—new ways of relating to the natural world, to ourselves, to each other, to work, to learning, to organizing, to healing, to sustaining ourselves, etc.—it is perhaps worth asking whether we could benefit from engaging creative processes and practices that are, essentially, pathways to the unforeseen.

I’ll leave you with a quote from a talk with Brian Eno and Donna Gratis on the arts’ role in tackling climate change that I attended today.

Surrender is a valuable thing to do. … A lot of our problems come from an excess of control and an absence of surrender.

Brian Eno

What do you think? And have you seen examples of strategic indeterminacy? Or do you have thoughts on how to apply the idea? I’d love to hear from you.

Co-Creating with a Conscience: Or, Why Study Leadership at an Art & Design College?

A Walk-n-Talk through N. Commons Park in Minneapolis, led by Paul Bauknight (Center for Transformative Urban Design) and Brett Buckner (Coalition Convener at Seeds to Harvest), with faculty and students of the MA in Creative Leadership 8/1/2022. Photo credit: Nick Lents.

Seven years ago I was in the process of completing an essay in which I brought forward an argument for teaching beauty in a business school—a document that would form the basis for a 12-week course for business students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was to be a visiting guest artist/lecturer. At the outset, my goal with the “beauty course” (as I and the students came to call it) was to create an alternative approach to business ethics. I was deeply curious about how aesthetic experiences and examination of beauty might foster wiser, more responsible decision-making—essentially, moral imagination.

Among other outcomes, students reported that through the course they learned how to slow down, attend to process (and not just product), see different perspectives from their own, think about relationships differently, notice things previously overlooked, do things they wouldn’t do (i.e. take risks), approach challenges with creativity rather than dread, and care for others.

Hearing such responses, I began to refer to it as a course in human development—and began seeing the value of such a course not only for those studying business, but arguably any field of study. Let’s face it—you don’t need to go to business school to see the world and all of your relationships through an economic lens. As Harvard University professor of political philosophy Michael Sandel argues in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, market values and market thinking have now come to dominate nearly every area of social life. 

The beauty course was experimental and successful; however, it was a one-off by design. While many business schools are attuned to creativity and ethics these courses are mostly icing on the cake; at their core they are oriented around such courses as accounting, finance, statistics, strategy, economics, marketing, business analytics, operations management, and the global macroenvironment. And, yes, at the core one will often find a course in leading organizations / people / teams; however, such a course often reinforces the overall capitalist logic of business school. Leadership is quite often conceptualized as achieving the company’s (i.e. owners’ or shareholders’) goals, taking action quickly and efficiently, besting the competition, getting employees onboard with change strategies developed by senior leaders aided by a consultant, and motivating high performance.

As 2022 comes to a close, I am six months into the launch of a new MA in Creative Leadership at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD)–a program for folx in any industry or sector (the more diverse, the better), working at any scale. For instance, at the moment we have a student working in food justice as a volunteer, a student working in an educational nonprofit with a budget in the tens of millions, and a student working for a dental-care related corporation with a budget in excess of $750 million.

The MCAD program is, in a sense, an inversion of this business school cake; and that inversion is the topic of this post. More specifically, this essay attempts to address a question that I am asked quite frequently: What would you say to someone trying to choose between this program and an MBA program? I’ll aim to do this in three parts:

  • “What is creative leadership? 
  • “Why study leadership at an art and design college?” 
  • “Why pursue an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA?”

Much of what I am writing here has benefitted from and also reflects to a great extent almost two years of conversations with leaders at MCAD, administrative colleagues, co-faculty, field colleagues, and students in the program. I am particularly indebted to my research partner of the past three years, Shannon Litzenberger and to MCAD’s VP of Academic Affairs, Robert Ransick, who has held a goal to create a program like this ever since he pursued and achieved an MBA, all the while imagining a different kind of curriculum and experience. Having said this, any shortcomings or deficiencies in the thinking in this essay are mine alone. Additionally, counter perspectives are welcome!

Part I: What is Creative Leadership?

I have encountered myriad definitions of creative leadership; and they all seem to boil down to some version of envisioning and realizing change and innovation while attending to shared values, mission, and social impact. A central tenet of the program at MCAD is that leadership is a collective capacity, functioning akin to an artist ensemble, and that all players, so to speak, need to be able to step-up and step-back as the moment requires. More specifically, we conceptualize creative leadership as a capacity to collaborate across differences with the goal of imagining and enacting necessary transformational change. Our particular program in creative leadership is built on four pillars:

  • Creativity, or the capacity to move towards uncertainty, as well as imagine and make beyond existing narrative frames, systems, and seemingly intractable problems.
  • Culture, or an understanding that the work of transformational change requires that we work at the level of values, beliefs, and ways of being, doing, and knowing; and that therefore, we must create conditions and structures, as well as develop individual and collective capacities, to converse and collaborate across differences in worldview.
  • Equity, or attention to and repairing of imbalanced social systems and the commitment to build new systems and cultures that are not structured to oppress, discriminate, disempower, or otherwise harm.
  • Sustainability, or attention to working within planetary limits in a way that is regenerative: that goes beyond reuse, reduce, recycle to improve projects, organizations, or systems in such a way that they become healthier, thriving, and capable of sustaining life. 

Much of this is relational work done at the level of embodied self with others—the work of dismantling, unlearning, exploring, and stretching to accommodate alternative worldviews. To begin, this work requires that “we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for,” as writer, activist, and facilitator adrienne maree brown writes, describing her take on the concept of Emergent Strategy.[1]  Much of the work takes place within and across the intersecting layers of transformational change at the level of self, organization, and system.

Part II: Why Study Leadership at an Art & Design College?

Creativity is consistently ranked as one of the most important skills for navigating the complexities of the 21st century. When I was teaching the beauty course at UW-Madison, the administration really wanted to get the word creativity into the title of the course; but I refused to use the word creativity. Creativity was equated in business schools with the scaling of innovations towards the ultimate goal of stimulating economic growth. I didn’t want to hook beauty onto that value chain. I would sometimes quip: This beauty course is not aimed at putting beauty in service of business. My aim is the opposite. I want leaders to put business in service of beauty. 

Likewise, creativity in the context a leadership program embedded in an art and design college has a conscience and is motivated by widespread recognition of the inequities and harms designed into the present “petro-capitalist”[2] and “modern-colonial”[3] world; the need to understand how we got here; and then, importantly, the desire and ability to work with others to collectively disrupt, transgress, imagine, iterate, and make radically new institutions, systems, logics, or worlds. 

The creation in creative leadership as we are interpreting it at MCAD is based in a foundational premise that there are ways of being, doing, and knowing that are inherent to artmaking and design that are both undervalued by society-at-large and incredibly valuable at a moment in which we are looking at the “end of the world as we have known it”[4] and the need to make a new one. Artists and designers know a thing or two about imagining and making new worlds. 

Among others, here are some creative leadership capacities that are inherent to training as an artist or designer that are central to worldmaking:

  • Imagination: The ability to disrupt patterns and make the new; or to engage in what Otto Scharmer calls, “presencing”—a combination of presence and sensing that involves listening or perceiving from the future.     
  • Discipline: Resourcefulness, attentional capacity, and the ability to shape future possibilities and scenarios within constraints.
  • Agility: A sense of play and the capacity for collective improvisation in response to volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and seemingly insuperable barriers and challenges.
  • Emergent Strategy: Comfort with moving in the direction of uncertainty, with making without a goal much less a plan, and with zig-zagging (or failing) towards the creation of something with structural integrity.
  • Care: Skilled at empathy and moral imagination, or the ability to imagine from the perspective of others and to take decisions with those perspectives in mind.
  • Comfort with Discomfort: Capacity to ask and sit with catalytic questions, give/receive critique, to facilitate difficult conversations, and to be receptive to opposing views or ambivalence.
  • (Eco)-Systems Thinking: Contextual intelligence, the ability to sense and analyze parts in relationship to each other and the whole, to recognize beauty and its opposite (injury), and to give sustained attention to that which tends to be neglected or invisible to others (e.g. the broken, harmed, orphaned, disempowered, colonized, extracted, injured, destroyed, etc.).
  • Disinterest: The ability to distinguish excellence from its potential byproducts: money, power, or fame. (H/T to CalPoly Finance Professor John Dobson for the germ of this idea.)[5]
  • Influence: Storytelling ability, the capacity to reframe, imagine alternatives, craft engaging narrative, and thereby shift perspectives.
  • Ensemble: The desire and ability to build trust, foster generalized reciprocity, engage with diverse aesthetic values, and balance individualism and collectivism in the process of co-creation.

Part III: Why an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA?

Which brings me to the question I am most often asked: Why should I pursue an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA? 

My assertion, in brief: because the cake of creative leadership contains the essential ingredients for 21st century living and working. Put another way, we do not need even more MBAs for the challenges facing the world at the moment; we need more creative leaders. Leaders and managers need to rethink everything (starting with shareholder primacy). They need to strengthen their capacities to adapt to the non-hierarchical, non-extractive, non-discriminatory, non-oppressive, cultures, structures, and practices that are increasingly demanded by both employees and customers. 

Is there also an argument for studying finance, accounting, strategy, macroenvironmental forces, business analytics, operations, and marketing (the business school cake, so to speak)? I would argue only insofar as such offerings are oriented to this dramatic shift in the wider cultural context; and anchored as they are in 20th century management practices, most business schools are not able to hold, much less realize, such an orientation with integrity.

The core elements of the creative leadership program at MCAD (an MBA alternative or complement, if you will), which arise from the values and capacities listed in parts I and II include:

  • Progressive organizations & management, meaning such things as flat structures, decentralized decision making, collective budgeting, cooperatives, community-driven change, DAOs, and hybrid workplaces.
  • Cultural competence and inclusive workplaces, including anti-racism and anti-oppression work, decolonization, conversational receptiveness, collaboration across differences, and a culture of care.
  • Centering methods and practices of artists and designers, because we need to collectively sense, imagine, and make new worlds (systems, organizations, selves) that do not reproduce the harms of the present systems—and this work is inherent to the practices of artmaking and design.
  • Attention to and care for the natural world, most notably the wisdom of regenerative models coupled with an abiding belief that the climate crisis is something with which all leaders need to concern themselves and their organizations.

***

I want to end by mentioning one other aspect of this work.

We are intent on helping to mobilize and animate a much larger conversation on creative leadership; and one way we are working to do this is through the creation of a Creative Leadership Community of Inquiry, Practice, and Care. This community space is being initially built with our students, alumni, faculty, guest artists, and partners; however, we are already planning for it to grow over time to bring many others into the conversation, so to speak.

We want to locate and connect with others who share our goals, with whom we can ask questions, learn new practices, and offer encouragement and solidarity as we collectively build the next, more beautiful world. We know you are out there in your own organizations and networks, doing great work. We want to know about it and engage with you. 

Leave a comment, DM me me on FB or LinkedIn, or contact me through the contact form in Jumper if you’d like to connect and continue the conversation.

  1. adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, p. 3.
  2. Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation, p. 101.
  3. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. The author writes, “I have often referred to modernity as modernity/coloniality, Thesis term functions as a reminder that the benefits we associate with modernity are created and maintained by historical, systemic, and ongoing processes that are inherently violent and unsustainable. In other words, this term underscores the fact that modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, militarization, dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides,” p. 18.
  4.  Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World, p. 101.
  5. John Dobson, Aesthetics as a Foundation for Business Activity

Reflections on 2021 & Questions at the Top of 2022

In 2021 I took a hiatus from Jumper. I didn’t set out to do so; but 2021 was, to a great extent, a year spent strengthening my skills in listening and holding space for others; reading books that had been sitting for months if not years on my nightstand; figuring out with others how to “do” collective leadership; and tending to relationships—strengthening them, (re)-building them, transforming them, or consciously (and with as much care as possible) letting them go. I continually felt myself, by necessity, detaching from a focus on deliverables and products and instead slowing down and focusing on people, processes, and principles.

I thought I might start the year by sharing some takeaways and reflections from my work in 2021, followed by a handful of questions I am sitting with at the top of 2022. But first, a bit of happy news …

Building a New MA in Creative Leadership at MCAD

Institutional photo from the MCAD Website

Among my projects in 2021, in Q1 I did a bit of consulting with the Minneapolis College of Art & Design on the curriculum for a new program.

This is not the first time I have consulted on curriculum design with a college or university; however, quite happily for me, this particular consultancy eventually turned into an opportunity for me to join the MCAD community.

I am thrilled to now be building a new MA in Creative Leadership there, for which I will serve as program director and to which I will additionally contribute as a faculty member and scholar. Here is a Hyperallergic sponsored post that provides a nice summary of the program and its goals.

Now, to the reflections and questions …

On the Value International Presenting Houses & Festivals Now

In summer 2020 I was invited to work with an informal group of US presenters of international performance, who had begun to meet regularly to discuss challenges, strategies, and ways they might collectively draw attention to the value of international cultural exchange and the potential ramifications of its loss as a result of the pandemic. Over time they formalized as the International Presenting Commons and began to recruit others to join their conversation. You can read about their work on a special section of the HowlRound website, here.

In addition to meeting facilitation and sense-making, as well as supporting the development of the values section of the IPC website, I worked on two key projects with the group: an artist survey and a panel discussion on innovations in festival presenting.

Artist Survey Presentation at Under the Radar

In late 2020 I helped the group undertake a survey of artists and in January 2021 I had a 10-minute spotlight at the Under the Radar Creative Summit (online) to present a power point conveying the key findings from that survey (see this UtR Creative Summit video from ~2:24-2:34).

While it is important not to generalize from the findings given that we employed convenience sampling, some of the themes that emerged in the survey provided topics for discussion and further exploration. Among them:

  • While the pandemic devastated necessary infrastructure at many individual companies, many artists responding to the survey were able to adapt artistically and financially. Among the factors that appeared to influence the relative state of welfare of artists were geographic location (including dependence on air travel to tour and access to various forms of pandemic recovery support), new media skills and access to tools and Internet, and the nature of the creative work.
  • Those surveyed were evenly divided on whether they were enthused (or not) about the digital turn during the pandemic; but even those who expressed enthusiasm were not advocating for digital per se. Rather, they were eager to explore creative possibilities, to connect globally with new and more diverse collaborators and audiences, to gain new access to knowledge and cultural experiences, and to reduce their carbon footprint.
  • While many respondents indicated they expected to return to touring many also indicated that they expected to make changes (in some cases significant) to the ways they make and tour work in the future. Anticipated changes at the time of the survey included: making smaller shows, having longer residencies, and touring closer to home—in large part because of the combined influence of the pandemic and the climate crisis catalyzing a recalibration of personal/professional means and ends.
  • A recurring theme was that artists would like to see improved systems of support for artists and improved (less transactional) relationships to presenters and their communities.
  • Finally, while cultural exchange appeared to be as important as ever (for its own sake as much or more than the income it provides), there were real questions and concerns expressed about international touring per se and the form that cultural exchange can or should take in the future.
Conversation between Faustin Linyekula and Philip Bither at the Festivals in a New Age panel, produced by HowlRound and the IPC

Festivals in a New Age: Models of Responsiveness, Flexibility and Resistance

In June a small group of us working with the International Presenting Commons (IPC) created an online event with HowlRound focused on innovations among a range of international festival presenters. You can watch the entire event here. Some of my key takeaways from the fantastic speakers:

  • Festivals are not simply platforms for the presentation of work. In the present moment they hold the potential to initiate, shepherd, host, and hold space for critical local and global conversations; to bridge, translate, amplify, and connect voices across divides; to foster collective imagination, interrogate the taken for granted, heal harms, incubate the new, and steward change.
  • To realize this potential a new set of values needs to be centered. Festivals are being called upon to become more artist-centered, caring, flexible, joyful, improvisational, relational, collaborative, democratic, decolonized, equitable, inclusive, sustainable, locally rooted, and responsible.
  • Given the multiple crises of the moment, particular attention needs to be paid to protecting the capacity of artists to create; to enacting more ethical, transparent and user-friendly contracts and agreements; to updating outdated language/concepts and inequitable and unsustainable policies, models, structures, and practices; to advancing democratic cultures and fostering genuine exchange; and to exploring the capacity for digital and hybrid forms of producing and distributing work to reduce harms to the environment and increase access to both the tools and fruits of creation.
  • A key conversation at this moment is focused on necessary decolonization and expansion of the Western European aesthetic values that have historically underpinned many institutions and to the harms of cultural exchange that is not reciprocal (i.e. that results in cultural domination by the US). As a result, many are embracing (or are seeking to explore) decentralized curation models. Many are also turning attention locally, even as they recognize the importance of global exchange. Rather than transcontinental exchange they now see local diasporic communities as a tremendous gift/asset and source for necessary and transformative cross-cultural exchange.

Takeaways from My Work with Three Sets of Cultural Leaders in CA

#1. Catalyzing Engagement.

The year began with my wrapping up a 22-week engagement with a group of 10 cultural organizations in California. In collaboration with Karen Ann Daniels and Robert Martin, we designed an initiative that we conceptualized as a thought experiment centered on a single question:

In the midst of the disruptions of 2020, when the core of many cultural institutions has been hollowed out, what would happen if we put the values, beliefs, practices, processes, and structures of engagement departments at the center of the institution?

Among other work, participants used the time to listen deeply internally within and across departments; and when they felt ready, they turned their attention to the community and listened deeply to their partners and other stakeholders. For many, the internal work was THE work. It was both challenging and rewarding for artistic, marketing, management, and outreach personnel of institutions to sit together to talk about concepts like engagement, community, audience development, outreach, and education. How to define them? Are they harmful (in the sense of being holdovers from colonialism)? What to do about conflicting conceptualizations and goals? And a whole host of other questions.

The original premise of this program still strikes me as one worth pursuing. What happens if we apply the values upheld and applied in engagement departments across our institutions? Might we start with a single process in the institution and make this change?

#2. Cultural Leaders in Conversation.

Twice this year I was invited to design a two-day workshop for participants in an executive leadership program run by the association that produces the Canadian Arts Summit, Business/Arts. In advance of creating the workshops I asked if I might interview each of the participants for 30-40 minutes to get to know them a bit and check-in on their states of mind, current challenges, goals, needs, etc.

A wide range of topics, challenges, and goals emerged which I synthesized and shared back with the groups, which then went through a collective process of determining the topics they would most like to discuss. Here are the 5 topics that emerged across the two groups:

  1. How to foster belonging and manage people while working virtually?
  2. How to lead and collaborate at the same time? How to make shared or distributed leadership work in practice?
  3. How to address conflict in a healthy way (especially as it relates to flexibility versus accountability)?
  4. How to build confidence in the value of ongoing hybrid practices?
  5. How to radically transform our assumptions in terms of organizational structure, diversity, and power dynamics?

I wager these are among the critical questions that will be relevant in the arts sector for years to come.

#3. The Creation of a Faculty Ensemble and A Community of Inquiry, Practice and Care.

Since 2017 my work at the Banff Centre has been incredibly rewarding, due to the subject of the program–helping leaders in the arts and cultural sector respond to a changing cultural context–and due to the beautiful and talented faculty, participants, and staff of the Cultural Leadership Program. Although the CLP was in hibernation much of pandemic –awaiting staff and other resources to be restarted–the time was not lost. I used much of the past two years to focus on two things:

A Shift to Collective Leadership

From 2018-2020 I was a co-director of the Cultural Leadership Program–first with Howard Jang and then with Lexi McKinnon. For the most recent (2019-2020) iteration of the CLP, Lexi and I worked together not only to co-facilitate the program but to consciously braid Indigenous and Western perspectives and practices. In examining the evaluations of the program, it became clear that a huge value for the participants was witnessing this shared leadership and braiding of worldviews in action.

In 2019, when I wrote a memo proposing a philosophy of cultural leadership to help animate our work I adopted the position that Cultural Leadership was a collective capacity; and in 2020 as I began to imagine a next evolution of the program I wanted to challenge us to model this idea by creating a genuine Faculty Ensemble–a diverse collective of 6-8 individuals who would work as co-equals to co-create a next online version program, adapted to the current moment, from the ground up. Throughout the year, we also undertook surveys and brought in alumni of the program to provide feedback and feedforward as we sought to iterate the curriculum in a way that would be maximally valuable and values aligned.

This was slow, sticky work. It was not easy work. It was messy work. It was also joyful and meaningful work that I am confident will bear fruit for years to come even though the Cultural Leadership Program was recently cancelled and our Faculty Ensemble has been disbanded as a result.

Piloting of an online “community of inquiry, practice, and care”.

I have been interested in creating structures and spaces for ongoing exchange, learning, and support with and among students ever since I created my course Approaching Beauty for business students at UW-Madison in 2015. The pandemic year finally provided the opportunity to try out this idea. Since we were not given the green light to launch a new public program at Banff Centre in 2020 it seemed a perfect time to develop a mechanism for better supporting and connecting alumni of the program.

I am not the first to observe that too often leadership programs end and participants return to their individual workplaces and something critical is lost. It’s not just the camaraderie and conversations and care–though those are critical–it’s the potential of what might be co-created if such groups were to continue to gather to gain new necessary skills and knowledge, discuss issues of the moment, learn from each other’s successes and failures, and collectively research, develop, and prototype new ideas. So in November we (the CLP Faculty Ensemble and Producing Team) managed to undertake a small pilot of this idea at Banff Centre. We called it the Cultural Leadership Commons and we used the Mighty Networks platform.

While it was a modest first effort–a knee-deep wading into the water rather than a cannonball–I learned a ton and am now more interested than ever to further develop this concept at MCAD and in other contexts.

A Podcast Episode, 3 Panel Conversations, and a Keynote

I had the great privilege and pleasure to contribute to several events this year. If you click on the hyperlinks you can listen, watch, or read my remarks.

In April I was a guest on the new podcast, The Three Bells, exploring challenges and possibilities at the intersection of culture and urbanism. I had a great conversation with Stephanie Fortunato on Transformational Leadership, after which AEA’s Adrian Ellis weighed in to share his reflections.

Also in April, I moderated a panel featuring Shannon Litzenberger, Sophia Park, and Joann Lee Wagner for Work. Shouldn’t. Suck on Mental Health and Well-Being Amid a Global Pandemic.

In May 2021 I was a co-panelist with Sanjit Sethi (president of the Minneapolis College of Art & Design) for an event hosted by the Museum Trustee Association. The MTA published my remarks here, which I continued to develop and expand for an annual conference of Arts CFO’s, at which Ben Cameron and I spoke (virtually) in November 2021. You can read a transcript of the full keynote (and see the PPT slides) here.

In June, I participated in a panel for the Festival Academy in Dusseldorf on the topic of Festivals, Inequality and International Collaboration. You can read my remarks here.

Finally, in September I was one of three respondents to a major report written by Canadian scholar, artist & cultural institution leader, David Maggs, called Art and the World After This. You can read the executive summary here and the entire report here. I was asked to respond to a section of the report titled, Is this an Ecosystem or Zoo? in which Maggs asks “how ‘rewilding’ practices from ecology, used to restore ecosystem health, might be applied to Canada’s cultural ecology as well.” You can read my remarks here or, if you have time, I encourage you to watch the entire panel discussion to hear Maggs cover the key ideas in his report and hear my excellent co-panelists, artist Marcus Youssef and NESTA’s Director of Creative Industries Policy and Evidence Centre, Hasan Bakhshi.

Beyond these presentations I taught my workshop in Aesthetic Values in a Changed Cultural Context for Yale University’s Theater Management MFA; worked with an arts organization facing the question of whether to persist and evolve, or wind-down, in anticipation of the founder’s departure; and facilitated the first of an anticipated series of conversations with a university college examining its culture and structure as part of a strategic planning process.

BOOKS READ

People often ask me what I’m reading. Here is a list of 35 notable books I found the time to read these past 18 months.

CREATIVITY / ART RELATED

ON NEXT STAGE MANAGEMENT / LEADERSHIP

ON CONFLICT, (DE)COLONIZATION, ARTFUL FACILITATION, AND HEALING DIVIDES

ON AESTHETICS & BODY/MIND CONNECTION

ON INTEGRITY, SELF-TRANSCENDENCE, BELONGING, COURAGE, AND CARE DURING THE PANDEMIC

FORTHCOMING ESSAY

Finally, I wrote an essay for the forthcoming Routledge Companion to Audiences and the Performing Arts.

The essay is called Post-Show. Counterintuitively, it is not about after-performance talk backs or the like. I am essentially asking whether the arts and culture sector is dominated by a showbiz logic and whether we are overdue to move on from this orientation and place something else at the center of our institutions.

5 QUESTIONS AS I BEGIN 2022

Here’s what I’m sitting with at the moment:

  1. How do we build our conflict resolution and restorative justice capacities in the arts?
  2. What would it take to form a national or global community of inquiry, practice and care to collectively consider the problems and opportunities facing the arts and culture sector and imagine possible pathways into the future; to learn together what it means and what it takes, from a practical standpoint, to respond to this moment and be a culture change agent; and to provide mutual support and encouragement to each other—that is, to create a space grounded in love & well-being?
  3. Should all nonprofit cultural institutions be nonprofit cooperatives? If not, why not?
  4. So much has been theorized about social innovation but what is meant by cultural innovation? What are its aims? Is it at odds with cultural heritage or are they two sides of the same coin? Much as we have tended to undervalue artistic processes because of the dominance of “design thinking” and its adoption by business schools, I believe we undervalue cultural innovation as a distinctive conceptual, organizational, process, or product development with different aims and outcomes from social innovation. If there is a robust conversation about this and I am simply out-of-the-loop I would love to find that conversation. 🙂
  5. Where are the levers / mechanisms for holding powerful, too-large-to-let-fail nonprofit 501c3 organizations (or their equivalent in other countries) accountable? When nonprofits are large enough to control their resource and political environments and are no longer serving their missions or the public interests, what are the options for rectifying this situation? Are there any? Or have we created institutions that are unaccountable by design?

To close, here is my New Year’s Postcard with a few updates and a wish for you all. Thanks for reading!

On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now

El suplicio de Cuauhtémoc, 1892. Óleo sobre tela, 294.5 x 454 cm. Museo Nacional de Arte. Available on Wikimedia Commons.

A little over a year ago I had the great pleasure to be a guest on Erik Gensler’s podcast, CI to EYE (a program of Capacity Interactive, of which Gensler is the founder). We delved into a handful of topics including beauty and ethics, the relationship between the commercial and nonprofit theater, cultural leadership, and the costs of “permanently failing organizations.” (The episode can be accessed here.) Gensler ends his episodes by asking his guests what advice they have for the sector and he asked if I would pose mine in the form of a question. My question: What’s holding your feet to the fire?

I elaborated on this question, with the following reflections:

Missions are squishy; and buildings and bottom lines are not. And judgments about art are subjective. And human beings are often self-interested. And the nonprofit form lends itself to manipulation and to serving the interests of a few rather than the general public. …

I think that arts organizations need to be aware of these dynamics and can’t hang their hats [on], or trust, or lean into mission statements and values statements as enough to keep them moored to their purposes. … [W]e need non-negotiable principles or policies that … hold our feet to the fire so that when these forces are in play we are compelled to constrain ourselves from certain behaviors and actions that might otherwise lead us to … program an entire season that is white, western and womanless, for instance. …

I worry that boards and leaders sometimes stop short of setting those policies and instead want to trust themselves to make the rights decisions … but can then get edged off of doing the right thing when the bills need to be paid.

This blog post is about the relationship between the aesthetics, economics and ethics of cultural institutions and asserts that arts organizations need ethical and aesthetic guardrails that are as clear and firm as their financial ones, particularly in times like the present when truly consequential decisions are being made.

Part 1: On Aesthetic, Economic, & Ethical Judgments, Values, & Limits

Much of my work the past several years has been underpinned by an abiding concern with the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and economics. My interest in these three forms of value and valuation began when I was working on my dissertation (examining the relationship between the commercial and nonprofit theater) and additionally teaching a class on beauty to business majors. My journey along this path has been greatly aided by discovering the work of scholar of finance, John Dobson, author of the Aesthetic Manager, who participated in an academic symposium I put together back in 2015.***

To begin, I would propose the following as essential questions asked from the perspective of each of these three forms of judgment / valuation.

  • An aesthetic judgment asks: Is it beautiful, excellent, or interesting?
  • An economic judgment asks: Is it profitable, valuable, or useful?
  • An ethical judgment asks: Is it morally right or wrong? Who benefits and who is harmed from this action?

I tend to think of these as setting key boundaries on the dominant logic (the mutually interdependent structures, practices, processes, conventions, rules, and beliefs) of any given cultural institution.

Economic value is often calculated as exchange value and economic limits can come from both internal and external constraints. For arts nonprofits, such constraints may include, among others: net assets and liquidity; costs of inputs (e.g. content, people, and technologies); whether or not there are a significant number of competitors locally or nationally for content, talent, audiences, or contributions; local and federal laws, including tax laws; the strength of the local and national economy, including unemployment; local population size (and whether growing or declining), socio-economic demographics, and values; and whether or not there are foundations, civic leaders, and government agencies interested to invest in having a robust arts and culture sector.

Almost invariably arts organizations in the US are established as 501c3 nonprofits, which are prohibited from distributing their profits to individuals (so they have neither owners nor shareholders). Importantly, cultural nonprofits in the US have historically tended to be praised and rewarded (by foundations, government agencies, boards, and other influential gatekeepers) for economic growth including facility expansion. For much of the twentieth century these were generally assumed to be an unqualified good thing–along with professionalism (in artists and in the realm of administrative capacity building) and permanence. The high value placed on these led to choices made decades ago that are still influencing the economics (and therefore aesthetics and ethics) of arts organizations today.**

Aesthetic values are broad ranging and can include such sensory attributes of excellence as: simplicity/complexity; dark/light; local/global; coherent/chaotic; conventional/disruptive; individual/ensemble; scripted/devised/improvised; aural/visual; fast/slow; formal/informal; passive/participatory; intimate/distant; and resourcefulness/extravagance. Aesthetic limits could be thought of as the constraints that make an entity an art firm rather than a church, hospital, widget factory or any other kind of firm. Arts institutions are, among others, outlets for artists and are key gatekeepers who make judgments about which cultural artifacts and experiences to preserve, protect, produce, curate, and present–and which to disregard. Through that process they advance a set of aesthetic values that are shaped by and shape the world around them. Put another way, they are influenced by and influence collective, taken-for-granted norms and beliefs concerning what is beautiful / excellent / interesting, and what is not.

Many establishment cultural institutions in the US were formed at a time when the democratization of high culture was an assumed social good; and cultural policy therefore often included initiatives aimed at providing opportunities for “everyone” to experience and appreciate the touchstone of white, Western European culture. Organizations trading in such culture were (and still are) often classified as the “benchmark” arts. Because of this, despite appealing to a narrow demographic, the purposes and aesthetics of symphony orchestras, e.g., were not categorized as being culturally specific (that is, of/by/for predominantly white, educated, upper middle class people) in the same manner as those of e.g. Black or LatinX theater companies. (H/T to Jamie Bennett, the first person I heard articulate this.)

One result of this privileging is that predominantly white institutions systematically received exponentially greater financial support and were therefore better able to grow their operations, expand their influence, and increase their power over time relative to organizations that were identified as culturally specific or community-based. One present-day challenge is to increase understanding and appreciation in the sector for a much broader range of aesthetic values than those advanced by the so-called “benchmark” arts. An excellent resource if you want to further engage this premise, is this Animating Democracy framework, Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Art for Change.

Ethical values include such things as trustworthiness, fairness, respect, caring, and responsibility. Ethical (or social) limits to a great extent come to the fore when we think about the kinds of behaviors that we imagine could (or should) distinguish cultural nonprofits from commercial entertainment industries. For example:

  • Pricing models: we might assume that in nonprofits something other than what the market will bear will guide this decision;
  • How much to pay artists and whether or not to retain rights to their work: again, we might assume that nonprofits would strive to maximize income to artists, and avoid extractive or exploitative practices;
  • Pay ratios: we expect corporate CEOs to pay themselves handsomely while others in their firms are struggling, however, we might not expect nonprofit executives to do so;
  • Whether and how to distribute decision-making authority: not only might we expect nonprofits to embrace self-organizing or collective organizing over command-and-control hierarchical cultures/structures, we might expect leaders to take the time to listen to external stakeholders before taking key decisions about the institution;
  • Whether and how to reinvest profits: while a for-profit firm might redistribute profits to shareholders or increase pay/bonuses to top executives, we might expect nonprofits to reinvest surpluses into core programs so that they can better serve their missions;
  • Whether to accept contributions from those with opposing values: we might expect nonprofits to be discriminating in whose money they accept if they are serious about advancing values like climate consciousness, freedom of expression, peace, or social justice; and
  • Whether to adopt policies aimed at ensuring an anti-racist, anti-oppressive, non-hostile, climate-conscious, disability friendly working environment: we might expect nonprofits to care about harms against people and earth more than those in the corporate sector.

Part 2: Which of these is in the driver’s seat? Which should be?

Which way do the arrows run in your institution? Which way would you like them to run?

Within the context of an organization’s dominant logic (or business model if you prefer), I conceptualize these three elements as mutually interdependent. That is, a shift in practice/belief made in one area will influence the other two. The 2020 pandemic is an interesting case in this. The exogenous shock of prohibitions on gathering (and therefore live attendance at cultural institutions) forced many organizations to change their conventional practice of producing live performances. In place of live performances, many began to produce or distribute digital performances. In doing so, many also began to articulate beliefs that digital performances are valuable (even if they had historically upheld “liveness” as an aesthetic value and had long eschewed such practices).

Regardless of the motivations for the shift, this is a decision that has now, in many cases, shifted the aesthetics of the firm and with it, we see the other two areas are now effected. For example, economically, this shift has altered such things as: the complexity, scale, and costs of production and distribution; the types of skills and knowledge needed to bring a production to the market; the number of people and geographic locations that can be reached by a work; the prices that can be charged; the shelf life of content; and the nature and number of competitors/substitutes (if markets now shift from local to global and the product shifts from live to online).

Likewise, ethically, this shift has raised such questions as:

  • Do existing artist contracts (including rights & royalties) adequately and fairly deal with the sudden and dramatic shift from the hitherto presumed standard of live performance of concerts, plays, musicals and dance performances to the presumed standard of digital distribution of these through the Internet?
  • When the pandemic is over should we return to international touring practices that consumed scads of jet fuel, or are we beholden to find more climate conscious ways of engaging in cultural exchange?
  • Are digital educational experiences potentially more harmful than beneficial to the goals of learning and meaning-making?
  • Is there a vital role for artists in this moment and should we therefore be investing our resources to support that work, even if it’s not historically part of our mission?
  • Are digital forms crowding out something vital that can only be achieved with human bodies gathered in person?
  • Do nonprofit cultural institutions now have an ongoing obligation to try to provide free or low-cost digital access to experiences that are otherwise inaccessible to those without the means or ability to access them?
  • Do we need to revisit our policies regarding who is allowed to telecommute and who is not? Do we need to compensate employees for their costs of working from home and ensure they have the supplies and resources they need to do their work effectively?

I would assert that, for most cultural nonprofits, economic values have long been crowding out ethical and aesthetic ones–and not only because buildings and bottom lines are firm and many missions are squishy. For one, in the words of one of my musical icons, Cyndi Lauper, money changes everything. More to the point of this post, however, economics is and has been in the driver’s seat primarily because it is and has been what gets the most attention from institutional leaders.

Most boards have finance and audit committees and dedicate time at each meeting to understanding the financial position of the organization. Boards are equipped and comfortable setting limits on, e.g. how far over budget or into debt an arts organization may go. They may set targets for reserves or endowment. They may fail to approve a budget that is not balanced and may ask executive leaders to make cuts if income is falling short. They may implement give or get policies and recruit board members with high capacity to contribute to ensure that the organization is able to reach its income targets each year.

On the other hand, how many cultural nonprofits have explicit, sophisticated, depth conversations at the board level in order to understand or come to agreement on the organization’s aesthetic values or ethical principles? Even more pointedly, how many organizations hold their feet to the fire by establishing measurable policies to operationalize these. The kinds of policies that might enable or compel board members to ask awkward questions when, for example, the season is announced and there are zero writers or composers of color in the lineup? Or when a pandemic hits and the decision is made to lay off all the teaching artists but hold onto the majority of marketing and development staff for the time being?

Arguably, a nonprofit cultural institution should be distinguished from a for-profit entertainment company. And one of the ways we might expect it to be distinguished is in ensuring that economic decisions are made in service of (or within the limits and full consideration of) a clear set of guiding aesthetic and ethical principles or policies. Without such constraints economic exigencies hold sway and loosely defined aesthetic and ethical values are stretched to make economics work.

Part 3: On the necessity of discourse and debate, particularly in these times

As with the 2008 financial crisis, many nonprofit cultural institutions have fixed their attention first and foremost on surviving economically. There are practical reasons for this. Without cash, any business (even one with a great mission) can become dead in the water. But also, quite often the line between solvent and not solvent is much clearer to see than the line between “fulfilling our mission” or not.

Nonprofit goals like “equality” and “excellence” are perceived to be difficult to assess; however, I would argue that this is the case largely to the extent that one has failed to define them for oneself and one’s institution. Vague mission and values statements are common in the sector and seem to be intentionally designed to allow for maximum freedom and flexibility, rather than to provide a crystal clear North Star. Notably, these first arose out of the corporate sector.

Before arts organizations began writing corporate mission statements many were founded with manifestos or their equivalent. One reason manifestos are so valuable is that they often include a clear articulation of the ways in which values will be interpreted or operationalized. (BTW, my friend, UK-based consultant Andrew McIntyre with MHM Consulting has been leading cultural nonprofits through the process of writing manifestos from the ground up for the past several years.)

Even without a manifesto, however, it is possible to do this work if one is willing to engage in a process aimed at clarifying values and setting policies that will constrain interpretations of these values. With a hat tip to Deborah Fisher, longtime executive director of the arts organization A Blade of Grass for the analogy, this process is not dissimilar to the interpretation of the constitution.* While the constitution is grounded in values, much of the law is about making value judgments, a process that requires ongoing discourse and deliberation. Also similar to the constitution, though it tries, a mission statement can’t predict all future events that might necessitate its re-interpretation; therefore, from time-to-time organizations may need to amend their policies. This last point is an important one. As I heard a speaker say at a workshop last week: Don’t lose sight of the philosophy behind the policy or practice!

Here’s a quite straightforward illustration: In 1947 when Margo Jones founded the first recognized nonprofit-professional resident theater in Dallas, Texas she adopted the principle of three weeks of rehearsal for every play. At the time, three weeks was significantly more than the amount of rehearsal (typically one week) customary in summer stock companies. Quality was a core value of Jones and the philosophy behind Jones’s principle was: “Let’s rehearse long enough to make sure we can produce a high-quality show.” Fast forward and the US regional theaters have an international reputation for being among the most efficient in the world. Why? In part because theater leaders following Jones held onto the practice of a pre-determined number of rehearsal weeks, however, they lost sight of the value and philosophy behind it. Much to the frustration of some artists, a standard in many theaters was adopted and maintained, regardless of the scale or complexity of a production, or level of completion of the text. If the value to be upheld was “quality” then arguably the policy should have been revised once it became clear that the number of weeks of rehearsal was inadequate to achieving that goal.

***

Some concluding thoughts.

Cultural nonprofits are being challenged on multiple fronts and are being forced to make some truly consequential decisions. At all times, but particularly under duress, I believe that institutions are at high risk of undermining their distinctive purposes (as ‘Art Firms’ and as ‘Nonprofits’) if they have not engaged in necessary discourse and debate (up-down-and-across the organization, with key external stakeholders, and at the board level) aimed at defining, debating, or shoring up ethical and aesthetic guardrails that are as powerful as present economic urgencies.

This is an extraordinary moment in which to deeply examine the economics, ethics, and aesthetics of cultural institutions; to ask which of these three areas is driving the decisions being made; and to debate and discuss questions like these:

  • Should we keep going?
  • What do we mean by keep going. (Does maintaining a building and a core group of administrators constitute quality of life for a cultural institution?)
  • Is it better to hibernate and preserve cash or continue to pay people and create value even if that means we may run out of cash at some point?
  • Who should be involved in making that decision–or any significant decisions made at this time?
  • What (values, people, practices, processes, structures, beliefs) must be held onto at all costs and what would we be wise to drop?
  • Are we sure we’ve articulated the right problem to be solved at this moment?
  • Who are we if we cannot produce shows/exhibitions in a live venue?
  • How does this moment change our understanding of the nature of certain art forms and their role in society?
  • What does art need to be at this moment and for the foreseeable future?
  • Who stands to be harmed by the outcomes of our decisions and who stands to benefit most from them?

If economics is in the driver’s seat as decisions are taken in the Long Now, and if ethics and aesthetics are therefore merely riding along, arts organizations may emerge on the other side of this pandemic with buildings, leaders, and cash in the bank; but may find they have lost the people, principles, and purposes that were far more essential.

Thanks for reading. Those struggling to keep cultural institutions afloat and those unemployed and struggling to find a way forward outside of institutions equally have my admiration, respect, and gratitude.

NOTES:

* A Blade of Grass is a phenomenal arts organization and they publish some extraordinary articles, films, and other content on their website. The current theme is Artists Organizing for Racial Justice. Check it out.

**If you are interested in the topic of permanence and the question of “when to stop” you might find value in reading my essay, “To What End Permanence?”(which you can read here), penned for the book A Moment on the Clock of the World. Here is also a blog post with further reflections on the essay and its lessons for the moment.

*** John Dobson conceives of three universes (the technical universe, the moral universe, and the aesthetic universe) and asserts that while humans ‘naturally’ gravitate to a mode of decision making that embraces each of these that modernism tended to push managers to exclude the aesthetic. He argues that in post-modernity aesthetics is being restored and thus managers will increasingly have the ability and necessity to embrace the aesthetic, as well as the moral and economic, to lead in the 21st century. His name for this expanded ability (drawing on Heidegger) is “dwelling poetically.” While I have gone in a different direction with my own research inquiry – seeking to understand how these three areas become mutually interdependent in business models – I continue to be inspired by John’s ideas and contributions.

Changes Afoot: What’s Next For Me

For those who don’t know, for the past three years I have been working in NYC at The New School, a progressive university with a rich history, located in the West Village of Manhattan. I was hired in 2017 as an assistant professor and program director at The College of Performing Arts to help build a new MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship for artists.

That program (MA AME) has now come to fruition, having graduated two cohorts—a total of 30 talented and socially engaged artist-entrepreneurs—and has a third cohort of 15 terrific students slated to graduate in spring 2021. During my tenure, I also had the opportunity to help design and launch a new graduate minor in Creative Community Development—one of several projects across the US to receive support from ArtPlace America under its last round of grants to support institutions of higher education. The graphic above is from the launch event for that graduate minor—a webinar with Sarah Calderon, Marty Pottenger, Juanli Carrión, and Yasmin Vega discussing the role of artists in equitable community development that you can watch here.

My three-year contract with The New School ends next week. While the College of Performing Arts generously offered me the opportunity to extend my time, in January I made the difficult decision to leave The New School when my current contract ends. I am deeply grateful to have been part of building these programs the past three years–it has been both a joy and a privilege. However, my heart and mind have been calling me to other lands, to other ways of being and living in the world, and to center work that has been squeezed into the margins the past few years.

What’s next? Read on …

Clockwise: My appearance on Erik Gensler’s podcast CI to Eye (see link below); Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity; a big stack of texts related to my dissertation; a report on the Amsterdam City Doughnut; my moving boxes; a business student at UW-Madison doing an exercise at the Chazen Art Museum for my course, Approaching Beauty taught in 2015; my husband and stepdaughers.

Time for Family in the Netherlands & Missouri

First and foremost, I miss my husband, stepdaughters, and the rest of my Dutch family. For the foreseeable future I want to work in the world in such a way that I can be based in the Netherlands with them and also spend some solid chunks of time with my parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces, and nephews back in Missouri.

Cultural Leadership @ Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity

For the past three years I have been teaching periodically at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In 2019, I was offered the opportunity to become the external director of the Cultural Leadership Program and co-lead faculty with my colleague, Alexia McKinnon.

I feel incredibly grateful and privileged now to have the opportunity to continue working with this incomparable institution and to take on an expanded role with this particular program, which is focused on helping arts leaders transform themselves and their institutions in response to the changing cultural context. The co-leadership structure enables us to bring together Indigenous and Western ways of being, doing, and knowing as we approach the philosophy and practices of cultural leadership. The program’s goals have become even more vital over the past few months; and as July begins, we are actively re-imagining a revised and expanded suite of programs as we head into next year. I could not be more enthused to have increased time and energy to devote to this work (about which I’ll say more in future).

Given my increased bandwidth, I am also looking forward to continuing to deepen and expand my skills as a facilitator, adviser, coach, and teacher at a time of immense cultural differences (to be celebrated), divides (to be understood) and changes (to be navigated).This past fall I took a course in Working Creatively with Conflict: 40-hr Basic Mediation and Conflict Resolution Training, a week-long intensive in Truth & Reconciliation Through Right Relations at Banff; and Patti Digh’s month-long online course Hard Conversations: Intro to Racism. These were all three exceptional programs that are already informing my work as a facilitator at Banff and elsewhere. (Other course recommendations welcome!).

My Back-Burnered Doctoral Dissertation

Working full-time for an academic institution, ironically enough, afforded me little opportunity to work on my dissertation. I am intent on moving it to the front burner and getting it DONE. My topic is the the evolution in the relationship between the commercial and nonprofit theater in the US since the mid-twentieth century, if you’re new to my dissertation saga.

And, yes, that is a book on making no-alcohol and low-alcohol craft cocktails in the stack of research books above. While not related to the dissertation it is a text I picked up on a vacation in Porto, purchased at the amazing Livraria Lello, that I suspect I will reference on an ongoing basis.

“The Amsterdam City Doughnut”

I am incredibly inspired to be moving back to the Netherlands at a moment when it is, evidently, exploring Doughnut Economics as part of its Covid-19 recovery plan. I am curious to learn more about The Amsterdam City Doughnut and how Kate Raworth’s Doughnut concept is being applied as a tool for city-level transformation. More generally, as a Dutch Citizen, I am enthused to jump in with both feet and become much more involved in the culture, politics, and social life of the Netherlands (and Europe more generally) than I was my first seven years living there. (If you know people and want to make intros, or want to connect directly, please reach out!)

Ongoing Work with Aesthetic Values & Beauty

This past year I developed a new workshop on aesthetic values in a changed cultural context for the Theater Management MA at the Yale School of Drama. This is also a topic I cover as a faculty member at Banff within the context of Cultural Leadership. When I finish my dissertation I would love to turn my attention back to beauty & moral imagination and build on the work I began with my course for business majors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015, Approaching Beauty; and the leadership intensive I facilitated for social and cultural entrepreneurs at Banff in 2017, The Aesthetic Advantage.

Provocateur-at-Large

Finally, though I have never officially hung out my shingle, so to speak, I have had a steady stream of requests for consulting, facilitation, research, writing, and speaking engagements the past 10 years since leaving The Mellon Foundation. I am now looking forward to having more time to invest in such work. This image is from my guest appearance last fall on Erik Gensler’s podcast CI to Eye. It offers a nice intro to me and the basket of questions I carry around. Erik and I talked about beauty, the purposes of nonprofit professional arts institutions, and much more.

Click here to listen to the episode.

*

Needless to say, I will miss teaching my soulful, tenacious, visionary MA AME students and supervising them on their beautiful capstone projects. I will miss the luminous and generous MA AME faculty, without whom there would be no program, as well as my comrades in Arnhold Hall 620. And I will miss my talented, inspiring, and incredibly hard working colleagues Maggie Koozer, Alex Chadwell, Raphael Anastas (also a graduate of the MA AME program), and Mac Blair, with whom it has been a pleasure and privilege to work on an ongoing basis.

An extra shout out to composer, teaching artist, and administrator Alex Chadwell, who joined me in late 2018 as a program coordinator and quickly became indispensable in helping me manage the program and take it to the next level. Alex, you were a lifesaver; and it was intellectually rewarding and a great joy to work with you day-in and day-out these past 18 months.

Barring travel disruptions, I will be headed back to the Netherlands this time next week. I leave grateful that so many are now fluent in Zoom meetings, happy hours, dinner parties, coffees, coaching sessions, conferences, lectures, interviews, breakouts, workshops, and much much more.

If you need to reach me, as always you can get in touch through the contact form located in the About section of Jumper, or LinkedIn.

Stay safe, stay awake, and thanks for reading!

When to Stop? My essay in “A Moment on the Clock of the World” in the context of Covid-19 & Black Lives Matter

In a 2018 I was invited by Melanie Joseph to write an essay for a book that would mark the final production of the company she founded 25 years earlier, The Foundry Theatre. The book, A Moment on the Clock of the World (pictured above) was published by Haymarket last fall. I am deeply grateful to Melanie Joseph & David Bruin for the invitation to make a contribution as well as for their editorial support, which made it a much better essay than I could ever have written on my own.

Melanie Joseph is a true activist-aesthete and The Foundry Theatre is that rare institution that has seamlessly produced exquisitely beautiful work while upholding social justice values. I write in my essay, on p. 118 of the book:

Among its most distinguishing features, the warp and weft of the organization were art and social justice. While these began as dyadic complements crossing in the organizational weave they eventually blended to create an entirely new and unexpected hue.

There is a great lesson in the Foundry’s work and evolution in this regard for many arts organizations at this particular moment and thus I highly recommend the book itself.

My essay, “To What End Permanence?,” takes a broader lens than the Foundry, however. It grapples with Institutionalization and the difficult organizational question of When to Stop. More specifically, it seeks to get beyond the question of economic solvency to examine other signs that it may be time to shut a thing down and other motivations for closing. As I write on p. 121:

The decision for an arts organization to endure beyond the founder needs to be about something more than whether there is a stash of fixed assets, sufficient cash in the bank, subscribers and donors willing to renew, players wanting to play, and individuals technically qualified and desiring to take over. And this something more has to do with what it means to be a living art firm.

There are predictions that we could lose a significant number of cultural institutions in the coming months due to Covid-19. As I began to argue in last week’s post, we should care greatly which institutions persist and the values, cultures, and practices they advance, represent, and embody. Put another way, given expected closings, we find ourselves at an inflection point when, between Covid-19 and the more than 750 cities protesting as of June 8, it should be possible to allow / stimulate a long overdue evolution in the arts and culture landscape—an evolution specifically in the direction of pluralism and cultural democracy.

To be clear, the evolution in a field or sector suggests the death of some types of organization and the birth and growth of other types of organizations–that is, those with characteristics that are better suited to the present environment. Organizational deaths have tended to be emotionally difficult and operationally clumsy for arts organizations. On p. 115 I write:

Arts organization deaths seem to come in two varieties: the shockingly swift kind, which leaves staffers, artists, and audiences out in the cold wondering what the hell happened; or the painfully slow kind, characterized by drastic measures and multiple resuscitations in the form of eleventh-hour appeals to stakeholders to step up with cash infusions to keep the doors open.

This is in part because the ideal of permanence has been baked into the DNA of the nonprofit-professional form of organizing since its inception. To a great extent the essay is aimed at unpacking and challenging the merits of permanence (or institutionalization) in the living arts, while weighing in on the decision to close the Foundry Theatre, rather than invite a cohort of producers in the company to take it over.

What the essay does not address head-on is the present moment and the implications for under-performing White Arts Institutions. By under-performing I don’t mean financially challenged (as most nonprofits consider themselves to be thus); I mean failing to deliver on their missions and goals. Now is the time for such organizations to exercise some moral imagination. Now is the time to recognize that the persistence of an institution that is in decline—and that is unlikely to turnaround and emerge as more relevant to the changing cultural context—harms the field because its existence comes at the expense of the necessary evolution I am describing.

Beyond the economic or mission-based reasons for closing, there are moral reasons for privileged White Arts Institutions that persist decade after decade—in large part because day-in and day-out, as well as at times of crisis, historically and today, they quite often have had easier access to money—to consider the resources, as well as the physical and cognitive real estate, they are capturing and controlling year-upon-year at the expense of organizations largely staffed, governed by, and serving one or more BIPOC populations.

For those brave leaders who recognize in the coming weeks and months that Now is the time to bring things to a close, one final thought: Perhaps consider how you might further advance necessary change in the landscape of arts and culture in the US by gifting any remaining assets to an organization that is, again, largely staffed, governed by, and serving one or more BIPOC populations, or one that is perhaps advancing pluralism, cultural democracy, or social justice goals through its existence or work.

I hope you will read the full essay published in A Moment on the Clock of the World (linked below) and I would love to hear your thoughts in response to it, especially in the context of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter.

***

“To What End Permanence?” 

In A Moment on the Clock of the World, A Foundry Theatre Production, Edited by Melanie Joseph & David Bruin with a forward by Cornel West (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2019) 111-122.

My contract with the Foundry Theatre generously gave me permission to post and distribute my essay as per April 1, 2020. Given the number of organizations that are currently struggling and trying to determine next moves now seemed as good a time as any to share it with a wider audience. However, I hope you will still consider buying the beautiful book, A Moment on the Clock of the World, edited by Melanie Joseph and David Bruin. At the moment Haymarket is offering a 30% discount if you purchase directly through them. It contains essays by 15 thinkers and reflections on the Foundry Theatre by Melanie Joseph running through the footnotes.

Here’s the essay. It’s a little of 3,000 words (a 10-minute read) so perhaps grab a cuppa jo.

Stay safe, stay awake, and thanks for reading!

With a country “on the brink” does it matter if your arts venue is shuttered?

By Singlespeedfahrer – Own work, CC0

In three short months Americans have shifted from tuning into the daily drama surrounding the democratic primaries, to daily Covid-19 briefings and debates over whether or not lives matter more than money, to now 24/7 coverage of the protests erupting across a reported 350 cities in the US (as of June 2) in the aftermath of the horrific killing of George Floyd—an act that has quickly become emblematic of systemic racism and the longstanding and escalating hatred, violence and injustices toward people of color in the US and in particular black people.

News commentators are characterizing the present moment as a “tipping point”—a country “on the brink,” unable to contain or carry the collective grief, anger, humiliation, fear, and desperation that so many are feeling. It is profound that performing arts venues and museums are dark at a moment when so many are clamoring for their thoughts, emotions, embodied pain, and voices to be expressed and heard by others. While our first impulse may be to mourn that many arts venues are darkened, I find myself sincerely wondering to what extent it matters that “flagship” cultural institutions in this country cannot put on tonight’s Show.

Had theaters, performing arts centers, museums and concert halls still been open—how much of the planned programming would have mattered in the context of 100,000 people dying of Covid-19? How much would have mattered in the context of last week’s unjust killing of a black man in Minneapolis and the paranoid hostilities against another in Central Park–and the injustices that have continued to mount since then?

I hear from nearly all corners of the arts sector that there is “no going back to normal” with the accompanying recognition that something fundamental needs to be redesigned in our systems to make them more equitable, healthy, and sustainable. If this is the case, it matters which arts organizations survive the next two years and which go away. It also matters greatly how arts organizations are defining their short-term and long-term crises and goals.

Since March 18th or so I’ve had the opportunity to share some reflections here and there on the pandemic. I’ve included links to these at the end of this post, which is aimed at synthesizing and developing some of my thoughts, as I continue to shelter-in-place in my Jersey City sublet and start week 12 on pause. Mine is but one voice among hundreds at this moment weighing in on this topic. I hope if folx see things differently they will raise counter-points in the comments or share links to their own ideas (or ideas of others) so that my thinking can expand and be tested.

One caveat: There are cultural organizations that are providing extraordinary value to their communities right now. This is post is highlighting areas of concern and future posts will highlight bright spots.

I.

To transcend the pandemic, purpose must transcend the box.

Still from KSTP Video

The pandemic shuttering has revealed the extent to which mission and venue are conflated for many nonprofit cultural institutions and the extent to which institutions are essentially in Show Business.When Broadway went dark I assumed it would only be a matter of days before many if not all other nonprofit stages in the US would go dark. What I didn’t expect was that cultural institutions would put themselves into a kind of programmatic hibernation—some until next spring—ostensibly, in an effort to preserve cash. Not only are shows cancelled (leading to lost gigs for many artists) but commissions are drying up, teaching artists are being laid off, and education programs are being suspended, as well. (Not everywhere but at plenty of places–including some rather well endowed institutions.)

Many organizations have simply replaced live shows with online shows (whether performances, galas, or discussions). Given the messaging that tends to bookend these online offerings many clearly are designed to Spur Donations Now, Reinforce the Institutional Brand, and Deliver on a Promise to Subscribers & Donors (so they return next year)–rather than, say, to support the economic welfare of artists (whose compensation may be minimal), to bring forward a piece that speaks to the moment, or to genuinely experiment with the intersection and integration of liveness and online platforms. (There are exceptions including e.g. Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need To Talk About? at The Public Theater, which appeared to do all three of these things quite well.)

It is telling that these are a few of the gnawing questions I keep hearing cultural leaders ask:

  • “When can we get back into the theater?”
  • “What would safe social distancing look like in the concert hall / theater / museum?”
  • “What’s the post-pandemic economic model?”

Here are some different (and I would argue more interesting and essential) questions posed by independent curator Carmen Salas in a recent Medium post:

In a world where we are already confronting critical interconnected challenges: climate change, the refugee crisis, food scarcity, system collapse, etc. I think it is essential that we continue asking these questions: what is the role of art at a time of social transformation? Why do we make art, for whom and does it make sense to continue using the same formats and materials? What should art be focusing on and what difference can it make? How far can artists go in social transformation without renouncing their role as creators/artists? When does it stop being art? Can the art world provoke and drive social transformation, a shift in values, making us rethink our relationship to material culture? Can it reveal new definitions of what progress means? Without doubt, the current situation leads us to question/rethink/reimagine the way art institutions, art practices and artists operate.

If one were to deconstruct any given cultural institution and look with fresh eyes at its assets, technologies, resources, networks, relationships, capabilities, forms of knowledge, artifacts, and symbolic capital how might it be of greatest value in the Now and in the Future?

Here’s one possibility imagined by Salas and posed in that same piece:

I had a dream last night. In my dream, our cities, communities and the natural environment are the museums and galleries of tomorrow. In my dream, the traditional exhibition spaces and art objects (material objects) no longer exist, and artists, cultural agents and creative practitioners collaborate with citizens, communities and professionals from other sectors (scientists, farmers and politicians) to design better systems and to co-create activities and programmes that encourage creativity and bring about social change.

Salas’s vision is quixotic if cultural institutions cannot imagine a fulsome purpose in the world that transcends putting on shows in their spaces–in large part because mission and venue have become so closely coupled they are now inseparable if not conflated.

II.

Art could lead now and reshape our institutions for the future. So why are artists being kicked to the curb?

Screen shot of Hyperallergic website. Full article here.

Back in March the journal Artivate wrote to those of us on the editorial board to ask if we’d like to share some Covid reflections. In mine I riffed on a video by Liz Lerman talking about cultivating a Toolbox Mentality and a Guardian article by Rebecca Solnit reminding us that this pandemic is going to reveal the strong, weak, and hidden in our society. My takeaway from these two:

  1. Now will be a time of rampant grassroots experimentation; if we’re lucky some of what we land on will lead us to develop new “tools” that will help us forge our way into the future (even if some experiments will essentially lead to coping mechanisms that help us sustain the status quo).
  2. We need to pay attention as this pandemic can reveal a great deal (e.g. our strong bits, weak bits, hidden bits, and seemingly solid but hollow bits)–if we are open to learning from it rather than merely vanquishing it. Among other things we may learn to discern the difference between these two types of experiments.

God help us if, instead of approaching this time with deep listening and moral imagination, we end up with “change strategies” that emerge from senior leadership, propped up by a consultant, who set out to determine what’s best for everyone and then push out their ideas to the rest of the staff–who will then be expected to get on board, even though the new strategies are not, it turns out, actually in their best interest. (For more on this I highly recommend the Adam Kahane book Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree With or Like or Trust).

If arts institutions want to be relevant and responsive to the culture change, and if they want a mechanism for re-shaping themselves, they would be wise to begin by working in deep collaboration with artists (and others, as well, as I explore in the next section). Art leads. And yet artists are, for the most part, cut off from institutions at this moment that is demanding experimentation, observation, negative capability, courage, and empathy.

I was deeply saddened and frustrated, but not at all surprised, that actors, musicians, directors, and designers lost gigs and saw two-thirds of their income dry up overnight. I have been writing for the better part of the past decade about the ways that arts institutions have kicked artists to the curb over the past four decades (e.g. here and here). However, I was dumbfounded by cultural institutions who decided to suspend their education programs or lay off their teaching artists while holding on to a stable of marketing, development, or production types.

Teaching artists have not only personal relationships in communities but particularly valuable skills for this moment. They provide us with the means to share with one another what it means to be human; they give us tools to create joy and make meaning; they create scaffolds of learning all manner of things including, and through, an artistic practice; and they are great cultural translators, facilitators, mediators, and guides. If I ran a cultural institution right now, I’d be trying to hire as many artists as possible—and teaching artists and community-based artists, in particular—to help me understand how the institution might re-imagine itself and respond to the Now and re-build for the Future.

Now is the moment to care for the artists on whom cultural institutions depend—first for their welfare and second for their capacity to keep working, if desired. Now is the moment to develop covenants with artists, rather than contracts with Force Majeure clauses, and to take whatever resources remain from grants or donations intended to support cancelled productions and re-purpose them as, e.g., unrestricted artist grants. Now could be a time for artists to think, undertake research, plan, practice, experiment, document, reflect, read, learn, network, collaborate, design, build, write, develop new skills, care for the archive, flesh out a business plan (perhaps with some technical assistance from a larger cultural institution), or even relocate to a city with better prospects, to start anew.

III.

Governance must be addressed if we really want a better future for all. So do we?

Flyer for an event launching a new graduate minor at The New School in Creative Community Development. Photo from Marty Pottenger.

For all the talk about wanting to see the sector re-build in a manner that will leave it healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable, I haven’t yet heard much talk about re-vamping governance structures, policies, and practices. Many have been pushing for a revival of the W.P.A. and, like others, I have been thinking a lot about workers movements and, in particular, cooperatives.

On a hunch I Googled worker cooperative and 501c3 and landed on the page for the Sustainable Economies Law Center, which calls itself a Worker Self Directed Nonprofit (basically worker coop meets 501c3), and which seeks to help other such entities come into existence with training and a range of resources. Here’s a recent article on the growth in cooperatives this past decade, now primed for a significant bump as a result of the economic crisis stemming from Covid-19 and tens of millions of disenfranchised workers.

A couple key takeaways from browsing this overview page, which includes a one-hour webinar (which I recommend):

  • Every member of the organization is compensated equally for their work at a level that relates to the regional living wage (lawyers make the same as everyone else) and everyone works 30 hours per week and has a flexible work schedule and time off policy;
  • They have a decentralized governance structure in which all workers have the power to influence the programs in which they work, the conditions of their workplace, their own career paths, and the direction of the organization as a whole;
  • They work closely with an advisory board made up of a diverse cross-section of representatives working in community and designed to create an additional layer of accountability to other organizations, movements, and communities they exist to serve;
  • They have a traditional board that meets regularly that ensures that there is compliance with the mission, hires and fires leaders, sets policy, and approves the budget; and
  • They are fully transparent about their finances and operations.

On its website, SELC quotes a review of The Revolution Will Not be Funded edited by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence collective. The passage conveys the major downside of the traditional nonprofit governance model for those who want to change the world, for real:

The nonprofit system has tamed a generation of activists. They’ve traded in grand visions of social change for salaries and stationery; given up recruiting people to the cause in favor of writing grant proposals and wooing foundations; and ceded control of their movements to business executives in boardrooms.

UTNE Reader, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: It’s Time to Liberate Activists from the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

Here are just a few of the benefits SELC has discovered with its model:

… [W]e’ve found that giving our staff significant decision-making power and autonomy has made us 1) more effective at advancing our mission to create more just and resilient economies, 2) more accountable to each other and our community, 3) more resilient and adaptive to change, and 4) more fun and empowering to be part of!

Imagine that!

I am inspired and intrigued by this model and actively learning more.

In contrast to SELC, establishment cultural institutions tend to operate with a traditional hierarchical nonprofit governance structure that is loose, unaccountable to stakeholders, and designed to serve the special interests of: institutionalized philanthropy with their carrots and sticks, donors who serve on the boards of institutions, corporations and industry partners, and (not always, but often enough) the personal interests of their leaders who amass enormous top-down decision making power and quite often a correlating exponentially higher salary over time. All the while artists responsible for the actual substance and content of the mission and staffers on the front lines who are working round-the-clock running the programs and interfacing day-to-day with those the institution exists to serve have little autonomy, collective decision-making authority, or capacity to influence the direction of the institution.

And this dynamic shapes and is shaped by inequities in the sector overall, which are revealed in our hourglass-shaped, winner-take-all cultural sector comprised of a small number of giants at the top, thousands of lightly institutionalized entities in the bottom, and an exceedingly fragile and vital, often undervalued, middle that connects the two.

It is being predicted that we could lose a significant number of cultural institutions in the coming months and years. We should care greatly which institutions endure and the values and material practices for which they are carriers. As institutions approach or achieve collapse there is great potential for new, more equitable governance models to be explored within the existing 501c3 corporate form.

This is a critical time to re-think not only these issues–the role of art in society and the business that cultural institutions are in, the link between mission and venue, the relationship of artists to institutions, and governance structures more generally–but also growth in the sector (how it is defined and where it is taking us exactly), the natural lifecycles of cultural organizations (i.e. why permanence is an unquestioned goal in the nonprofit arts and culture sector in the first place), and the relationship between the economics, aesthetics, and ethics of institutions.

More to come on these over the next few weeks.

Stay safe, stay awake, and thanks for reading.

***

Here are the links to recent Covid-19 related reflections:

The Changing Face of Arts Engagement: My remarks at the Stratford Festival Forum

Rendering of the Tom Patterson Theatre, opening in 2020 at the Stratford Festival, designed by Siamak Hariri of Toronto-based Hariri Pontarini, an architect passionate about the transformative potential of architecture. Image: the Stratford Festival website.

Earlier this month I had the privilege and pleasure to speak at the Meighan Forum at the Stratford Festival–a public lecture series hosted by the renowned theater festival in Stratford, Ontario, launched in anticipation of the opening of the new Tom Patterson Theatre in 2020, which will feature a dedicated forum space. I was particularly grateful for the quality and depth of the questions, moderated brilliantly by Ted Witzel a theatre-maker and programmer who also has a blog, which I highly recommend. Since the Q&A was not captured in the transcript I thought I’d reflect on a couple of the questions here.

One of the first, centered on whether the Stratford Festival should be expected to focus on diversity in its programming and audiences, given that Stratford, Ontario is a largely white community. This is a question I’ve encountered before from arts leaders.

I responded first by suggesting that we have perhaps gone down an unhelpful path in the arts by channeling much of the energy around diversity, equity, and inclusion into the goal of having a “representative” staff and board and drawing a “representative” audience as this by-the-numbers approach may lead some to conclude that cities with low percentages of people who are non-White do not have an obligation to concern themselves with diversity. Moreover, focusing on quotients does not, in and of itself, address the racial climate of an institution.

I then talked about having grown up in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri and having known a grand total of four black people before I went to college in New Orleans: the one black girl in my all-girls Roman Catholic college prep high school; a cousin that was adopted into my family; and two men who worked for my father. I then remarked (and I’m paraphrasing from memory):

“Growing up and living as an adult without exposure to people who are different from you (on any number of dimensions of diversity) is part of what contributes to fear and misunderstanding and a feeling of “the other” and even “us” versus “them.” Thus, I would say it is perhaps more important in places like Stratford–or other places in the world that have low ethnic or racial diversity–that arts organizations tell the stories of those who are not represented. One of the ways we can gain empathy and understanding of people, places, and experiences outside of our day-to-day existence is by going to the theater where we can be asked to imagine them.”

Another patron asked what she could do to help engage the estimated 51% of the local population that is lower income and unlikely to be able to afford tickets. Among other suggestions, I took the opportunity to talk about Nina Simon’s book The Art of Relevance and her nudge to arts organizations to cultivate “open-hearted insiders … who are thrilled to welcome in new people.” I explained that cultural institutions can’t make this shift without their patrons moving with them. I’ve written more about this here.

In the past ten years I’ve given dozens of talks but none for the general public (as I’m generally speaking to those working in the cultural sector). I realized during the Q&A for this forum how much I miss talking with arts patrons–with whom I haven’t had much day-to-day engagement since co-leading On the Boards with Lane Czaplinski, and running the Festival at Sandpoint before that.

Those who have read previous talks will recognize some anecdotes; however, there are definitely new ideas throughout and particularly in the middle. It’s a relatively short talk (9 pages). Here, again, is a link to the transcript.

Thanks for reading and I am, as always, grateful for any comments you might like to share.

My panel remarks at the IU Center for Cultural Affairs Symposium: New Frontiers in Arts Research

This past Wednesday I participated in a symposium at Indiana University, as part of the opening of its new Center for Cultural Affairs. Among other programs, the Center features a new Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab launched in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts; and will also help to support a new a doctoral fellowship program.

It was a terrific day of discussions aimed primarily at surfacing possible areas of future research for the Center. I was on a panel moderated by Doug Noonan, Professor at the O’Neill School at IU. Others on the panel were Will Miller, President of the Wallace Foundation, Michael Orlove, Director of State, Regional and Local Partnerships at the National Endowment for the Arts, and Bronwyn Mauldin, Director of Research and Evaluation at the LA County Arts Commission. Our broad topic was “Demonstrating Impact of the Arts in Society” and we were asked (among other reflections) to identify questions that, if answered, would enable tangible progress in the arts and culture sector.

As we discussed on one of our planning calls, each panelist was approaching the topic from a different perspective. My own was, for better or worse, informed by having worked in a variety of roles: from being a practicing theatermaker early in my career, to working in various administrative and leadership roles at nonprofit cultural institutions, to being a philanthropoid at Mellon with Susan Feder, and finally to being an academic directing two programs in cultural leadership, as well as a blogger and ponderer and provocateur at large.

I’ll let my comments speak for themselves but will leave you with the following reflection from Iris Murdoch which was on my mind when I wrote my remarks:

A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.

Iris Murdoch (1997)
Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, p. 18.

Panel Remarks by Diane Ragsdale at the May 9, 2019 “New Frontiers in Arts Research” symposium at the launch of the Center for Cultural Affairs at Indiana University

Good afternoon!

It is a pleasure and privilege to be here. My sincere thanks to Joanna Woronkowicz, Doug Noonan, Michael Rushton, and others at the O’Neill Center at Indiana University for the invitation and opportunity to be here. And congratulations on the launch of this new Center!

I have wrestled for the past decade or so with, essentially, two sets of questions in my own research practice.

One set underpins my doctoral research, which examines the relationship between the nonprofit and commercial theater in the US. Essentially, I’m seeking to understand how interactions and distinctions between these two types of theater have evolved since the mid-twentieth century and how, in particular, artistic control and aesthetic values have shifted.

A second set of questions stems from having taught a course in beauty and aesthetics for business school students, aimed at helping them see the world (and valuate experiences in life) through something other than an economic lens–through, essentially, an aesthetic lens.

The enduring questions arising from that experience have been:

  • What is the relationship between beauty and human development?
  • Can developing the capacity to form aesthetic judgments help business leaders and other professionals approach critical decisions holistically and contextually?
  • If so, how do you cultivate such a capacity? What are the practices in the classroom, in the cultural center, in life?

I give you this context because it informs my opinions on the topic at hand.

Without further ado, here is an odd assemblage of six or so observations, provocations, pet peeves, and wishes.

First, an observation. I recently attended a small confab in Montreal organized and co-hosted by the Metcalf Foundation and Canadian musician and academic David Maggs who is artistic director of Gros Morne Summer Music in Newfoundland. The topic was art and social impact. One of the questions Maggs gave us to think about in advance of the meeting was this:

Who is authoring this expanding [“social change”] role the arts are expected to play? Artists? Researchers? Activists? Funding and policy personnel?

David Maggs, Phd

It’s a really good question. Anecdotally, it feels like quite a bit of arts research in the US that succeeds in getting traction is done by consultants hired by private foundations, government agencies, trade associations, or large organizations. This has no doubt skewed the kinds of problems and questions that are pursued.

Second, a pet peeve: I wonder if we could consider removing the term “intrinsic impacts” from our lexicons? As the sculptor and blogger Carter Gillies has schooled me, this pairing is incongruous (and also just awkward) as “impact” is “already the language of instrumentality and … denote(s) an effect … what something can be good for.”

In other words, not belonging to the nature of the thing itself.

Third, like others I have been critical of the widespread use of economic impact studies to justify investments in the arts. I have lately added to this lament an additional ethical concern about undertaking economic impact studies in the arts without additionally undertaking what are often called cultural impact assessments. I am following Arlene Goldbard in this who has been a fierce advocate for the adoption of such studies. As the people-powered US Department of Arts & Culture website states (for which Goldbard is Chief Policy Wonk):

Community development policy is marred by a widespread proclivity to see communities of color and low-income communities as disposable in the face of economic “progress.” Longstanding neighborhoods and cultural and social fabric are demolished to make way for new freeways or sports stadiums.

STANDING FOR CULTURAL DEMOCRACY
THE USDAC’S POLICY AND ACTION PLATFORM SUMMARY

Of course, it’s not just new freeways and sports stadia that harm the local culture. Things done in the name of arts-related “community cultural development” can do as well.

Fourth, and related to this, it seems we spend so much time these days trying to justify the value or worth of historic investments in what we’ve still got (and significant parts of that picture are enduring flagship institutions) we seem to be failing to assess the cultural consequences of what has been lost.

What is lost in the culture when the only theater company in the region dedicated exclusively to new plays is extinguished?

 Or when mergers happen in the arts and entertainment industries?

Or when vital (but often smaller) experimental or community-based arts organizations are weakened and sometimes made redundant as large flagship institutions expand their footprints or get hefty grants to essentially co-opt their missions?

Or when that flagship institution itself collapses?

Fifth, I wonder if we might undertake more research seeking to understand how the arts work on individuals over a lifetime; or on communities over generations. Mark Slouka once wrote of humanities scholar Danielle Allen, a trustee at the Mellon Foundation when I was there a decade ago: “[She] patiently advances the argument that the work of the humanities doesn’t reveal itself within the typical three- or five-year cycle, that the humanities work on a 50-year cycle, a 100-year cycle.”

I’ve long been compelled by this statement as it also seems to speak to the way “the arts” work.

Are we examining this 50-year cycle? This 100-year cycle? Cultural centers, arts ed programs, public arts programs, independent cinemas, bookstores, small shops and clubs that make a town distinctive, etc.—these all “work” on their communities over time; they “work” on the hearts and minds of individuals over time, as well.

And by work I mean a number of things but one of these arguably has something to do with influencing values–aesthetic values, economic values, and social or ethical values.

But philanthropy is impatient and so is government and we seem to abandon initiatives every five years sometimes because they haven’t shown results and this is in large part because we don’t have a realistic idea about how long this work takes.

And at the same time is it possible that some of the resource-and-energy-intensive institutions started 50 or 100 years ago may be coming to the end of their cycle? And, if so, now what?

Sixth, something woolly that is not yet clearly formed.

It seems we now have sufficient data going back 50-70 years on various global, national, and local (city, neighborhood, school district) cultural policy regimes to undertake historical comparative research aimed at understanding the relationship between divergent cultural policy approaches (including the aesthetic values prioritized or problematized by them) and any number of social dimensions. For example, cohesion, division, tolerance, trust, corruption, cognitive empathy, oppression, racism—all the stuff some of us are desperately worried about in the US these days.

Finally, two wishes.

Wish One: alongside seeking to measure the “impact” of “the arts” on the economy, on well-being, or on other social goods, I wish “the arts” could be understood and treated as one of several measures of a “good” society.

Wish Two: After presenting at a conference on “the arts” and well-being at University of Wisconsin Madison last year that pulled together philosophers, economists, medical scientists, sociologists, religious studies scholars, artists, anthropologists and historians I wish there were more such conferences.

Thank you for your kind attention.

My remarks at the 8th World Summit on Arts & Culture

This past week I had the privilege to participate in the 8th World Summit on Arts & Culture, produced by the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA). The Theme of the 2019 Summit, which took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was Mobile Minds: Culture, Knowledge and Change. And the panel on which I spoke was listed as a provocation called: Actors in Change. Below is a transcript of my remarks.

Good morning!

It is a privilege and pleasure to be here with all of you and to have an opportunity to offer some reflections today, which are rooted in my personal experiences within primarily a US context and consciousness. My sincere thanks to Magdalena Moreno Mujica, Kiley Arroyo, and others at IFACCA for the invitation.

A few weeks back, on a Zoom call, Magdalena suggested that I talk about “cultural leadership”—my current focus at both The New School and Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity—within the larger frame of “what makes change difficult.” She then remarked, “It’s important to know that this is not about Arts Practice. It’s about the Policy Space.”

I wrote down her statement thinking, “Got it!”

But later I thought, “Wait a minute …”

Because if I were to pinpoint anything that is making change difficult, anything in which I would center cultural leadership at this moment, it would be in aesthetic values and in practices that we might characterize as artistic.

So that’s what I have decided to talk about. (This is a 12-minute talk in three sections and the first section is the longest.)

#1. On Controlling the Means of Production

On February 28th, the American theater lost an important cultural figure: John O’Neal, who founded with a few friends the boundary-breaking Free Southern Theater, which was part of the Black Arts Movement in the US and allied with the civil rights movement. In a 1964 interview with The New York Times (cited in this recent New York Times obituary), O’Neal said of his troupe:

We want to strengthen communication among Southern blacks and to assert that self-knowledge and creativity are the foundations of human dignity. …

In the South it has been very hard for a Negro to look at and see anything but a distorted view of himself.

These words feel even more vital in the US today than in 1964. Between politicized news channels and filtered Facebook feeds, it feels like none of us has the possibility of a clear view of self or others.

The US is not alone in this. In so many places, the social imaginary is a highly contested space; and this is one of the reasons, of course, we need artists.

John O’Neal’s Free Southern Theater was practicing what some would call community cultural development, which my friend Dudley Cocke defines as: “developing the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and material traditions and features of a community.”[1]

Dudley is a legend in his own right and was a longtime friend and theatrical comrade of John O’Neal. With others he formed Roadside Theater in Whitesburg, KY to serve the people of the central Appalachian region of the US—to help them tell their own stories. He and others in his company then took their methods on the road to help others tell their stories.

If the arts hold the potential to bring people together across divides on equal terms, Roadside Theater is one of a handful of US cultural organizations I know that has actually done this for years. Its own artistic practices combined with policies in its contracts ensure that for every performance an audience shows up that is representative of the socio-economic demographics of the community.

Last year Dudley contributed a chapter in the anthology Arts and Community Change, in which he wrote, “Those who control the means of cultural production control the stories the nation tells itself.”[2] It is a common refrain of his.

The work of Roadside Theater has been squarely aimed at disrupting this production system and fostering the democratic culture that so many of us claim we want to see. However, in the US, such community-based cultural organizations do not have (and have not had for decades) an equal opportunity to develop and grow.

This is in large part because in the US we still embrace the notion of the democratization of elite culture and our notion of excellence in the arts is still largely based in an “aesthetics of dominion” copied from Europe.

What do I mean by that?

“Aesthetics of dominion” is a powerful, poignant phrase I first heard used by composer Ashley Fure the evening before I flew to Kuala Lumpur. She used the concept within the context of a brief but extraordinary talk on the long-term cultural consequences of music notation—which (as some of you may know) emerged from Charlemagne’s desire to control the means and quality of church music production in his empire. As her talk clearly demonstrated, we are living with these consequences to this day.[3]

Not dissimilar to the influences of Charlemagne’s intervention, one can see in the US the long-term cultural consequences of the desire of organized philanthropy and government agencies to ensure high quality throughout their “empires” by developing criteria, models, and indicators of success that have basically resulted in the exponential growth of a small number of large, well-housed, historically white institutions, who to this day capture most of the sector’s resources.

To wit, A 2011 report from Helicon Collaborative found that more than half of the sector’s revenue goes to less than 2% of cultural institutions. These larger, prestige institutions “focus primarily on Western European art forms, and their programs serve audiences that are predominantly white and upper income.” A second study released in 2017 found the picture had only worsened. 

If the flow of money determines to a great extent who controls the means of cultural production, in the US we seem to be dominated by commercial interests (on the one hand), or elite interests advanced through the nonprofit industrial complex (on the other). Imagine what distorted stories our nation continues to tell itself as a result?

Even though we’ve lately seen an embrace of “social justice” ideals across the sector, it is quite difficult to trust this turn—in part because if historically powerful institutions are the evident backers of this “social justice movement” one can be almost guaranteed that they will design their interventions to contain any possibility of actual revolution in the cultural sector and any genuine shift in the power balance. 

We can’t keep dolling out small grants to the actors of change in Horizon Two and expect control of the means of cultural production to shift.

No matter the rhetoric about arts and social justice, or cultural democracy, the status quo will persevere as long as corporate and elite interests continue to control the flow of resources and continue to funnel a majority of those resources to sustaining Horizon One institutions—whose economics, aesthetics, and ethics are decreasingly fit for future purpose.[4]  

#2. On Beauty in a Business School:

A few years back I designed and taught an experimental course in aesthetics and beauty for business students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The course was an opportunity for those trained to look at the world through an economic lens, to practice seeing the world through an aesthetic lens and thereby learn a different basis for valuation and decision making. 

To be clear, this was not a course in arts appreciation. I was not concerned with having students experience a canon of great works. A premise of the course was that beauty is whatever wakes you up, grabs your attention and breath, stills your mind and heart, and decenters you.

A child. A whale surfacing. A Giacometti sculpture. A tattoo. A story. The closing argument in a court case.

The beautiful experience was also not the end—it was the means, the spur, the teacher, the stimulus intended to stir these business students to imagine, create, and one day perhaps work to build a better world.

When asked how the course had affected them, students said:

  • I do things I wouldn’t do.
  • I look at things harder.
  • I see other people’s points of view. I think, “There might be more going on here so I won’t jump to a conclusion.”
  • I am re-evaluating relationships in my life. I am asking whether I’ve had the emphasis on the wrong things.
  • I am thinking about homework differently—how to make it creative, not anxiety provoking.
  • I’m trying to focus on the process, not the product.
  • I am slowing down.

One student said, “This course is teaching us how to care.”

I would say the beauty course was essentially a course in human development and moral imagination.

The US has become a “market society,” to use Michael Sandel’s term, in which market values, market incentives and market relations dominate.[5] We desperately need business leaders, lawyers, doctors, police officers, government workers, politicians, policy makers, heads of NGOs (including cultural institutions), and others in positions of power and authority to exercise wiser, more responsible, cultural leadership. To have skills in empathy, collaboration, and creative problem-solving. To be able to look beyond self-interest and distinguish excellence from its byproducts, money and fame (to quote John Dobson’s article, Aesthetics as a Foundation for Business Activity).

And for this to happen our education system must change and we in the arts and culture realm must care more about that than we presently do.

#3. On Cultural-Enterprise Skills for Artists

I am currently working—in one of my capacities—as Asst. Professor and Program Director at The New School, helping to launch an Arts Management and Entrepreneurship Master’s degree. There are dozens of arts management programs in the US; this is the only master’s program in arts management that is offered exclusively to artists, who are required to continue their artistic practice, as they learn about finance, and creative producing, and community cultural development, and a host of other things.

I agreed to help launch this program because I believe artists need such skills so they can have greater agency, autonomy, impact and influence in this world—so they can exercise cultural leadership.

If we are scratching our heads and wondering why things in the sector haven’t changed—if we are having a hard time moving towards the unknown future—perhaps this is in part because when we gather to deliberate and decide about important cultural matters in the US artists often don’t have seats at the table; or if they do administrators or other professionals outnumber them 20 to 1; or we have invited them in but have put them in service of pre-determined strategies and goals—rather than bringing them in as actors of change.

If we want to reduce the policy-practice gap then I believe practicing artists need to have keys to buildings, seats at the heads of boardroom tables, posts in government, power over budgets, and access to data.

In closing I’d like to offer three summary questions:

  1. Who controls the means of cultural production and how might existing policies, while celebrating and encouraging Horizon 2 activity, be perpetuating Horizon 1 power structures?[6]
  2. To what extent are existing cultural policies engaged with changing educational policies, which at primary, secondary and tertiary levels are more-and-more aimed at training future workers rather than well-rounded humans with the capacity to participate fully in our democratic experiment?
  3. Are practicing artists—representing in diverse ways the full spectrum of cultural production—central to and powerful within our institutions; and, if not, why not?

Thank you for your kind attention.

[1] Cocke, D. (2015). Community Cultural Development as a Site of Joy, Struggle, and Transformation in Max O. Stephenson, Jr. and A. Scott Tate (Ed’s) Arts and Community Change. (New York and London: Routledge) p. 136.  

[2] Ibid, p. 162.

[3] Ashley Fure was a speaker on a panel on the topic of Creating (in) a More Just Society, co-produced by The College of Performing Arts at The New School and International Contemporary Ensemble on March 7, 2019.

[4] The Three Horizons framework was discussed at the conference. If you aren’t familiar with the framework, it is a tool for structuring thinking about future innovations, including social change. Horizon One represents the present state of things, most aspects of which will be decreasingly fit for future purpose; Horizon Three represents the future state we imagine and hope to create; and Horizon Two represents the space of experimentation and green-housing that will help us make the transition between the two.

[5] See Michael Sandel’s 2012 book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

[6] See Footnote 5 for a description of the Three Horizons Framework

Is it time to resurrect the artistic leader discretionary fund?

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At one point in my tenure as a philanthropoid at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation I went back to the board dockets of decades past to try to piece together the evolution in the Foundation’s theater and dance grantmaking over time. In some early dockets I discovered a number of grants awarded to arts organizations to support what the Foundation called (if memory serves) an artistic leader discretionary fund. I was amazed by the discovery.

After a recent conversation with Arts Emerson’s David Dower, it struck me that the theater field (perhaps other parts of the arts and culture sector, as well) are overdue for some philanthropic entity (not necessarily Mellon) to resurrect something akin to a New Artistic Leader Discretionary Fund.

Not only have we recently witnessed a significant turnover in artistic leadership positions in the nonprofit-professional theater, but after decades of watching the sector play musical chairs with leadership positions, a number of top posts have gone to women, or people of color, or others who, though mid-career in many cases, are taking the helm of an institution for the first time.

HowlRound has recently published a series of posts on this seismic shift in the theater, featuring discussions with outgoing and incoming leaders, among others. (The screen shot above captures one of the posts.) In an essay introducing this series, David Dower writes:

There is a lot at stake here. Not just for the individuals or the institutions directly engaged in transitions. These risks are ours as a field. If the institutions with incoming individuals—many of them women and people of color who have been long kept out of these roles—stumble, we open the door to old arguments about “readiness” and “qualified candidates” that have masked and abetted the dominance of the white male in our field.

(BTW, I did an interview for this series with Bill Rauch, who is exiting his post at Oregon Shakespeare Festival this coming summer to take over the new Perelman Center in NYC, in which we discussed values alignment.)

To perhaps state the obvious, what I’m calling for is distinct from awarding funds to support a specific proposal 6-12 months into the tenure of a new leader, putting forward a new strategy that is aligned with the priorities of a foundation. I am advocating for a genuine discretionary fund that says, “Welcome to your new job! We don’t care how you choose to spend this money, we are backing you.”

Why do we need such grants–and why now? They would provide critical, immediate endorsement and leverage for these new leaders. When a new artistic director is the embodied mechanism for necessary change in an institution it seems important that this individual have power to effect a new strategy. It is naïve to assume that just because the roles may look equal on the org chart that new artistic leaders feel they can command the same authority over the institution and its budget, data, brand, staffing, programming, stakeholder relations, contracts, union negotiations, or board meeting agendas as their (perhaps longer-standing) managing directors or executive directors. There is nothing like bringing a nice chunk of cold, hard cash to an institution within one’s first few months (with perhaps the strong possibility of more where that came from) to gain a more solid seat at the table.

On a more tactical level, as anyone who has taken over an organization at the start of a season planned by a predecessor knows, it can be important early on to signal if change is coming and, if so, the direction of that change. Funds would enable these leaders to bypass existing budgetary and programmatic constraints and e.g. jump start a few initiatives, or make a few high profile commissions, or add an event to the season, or undertake some necessary research and development, or invest in more PR, or make a critical hire. Such early actions and investments can speak volumes and help to spur other stakeholders (many of whom are waiting-and-seeing) to jump on board.

For those rolling their eyes thinking, “An artistic leader discretionary fund is so … old school” I would counter by arguing that if we are, indeed, living in a time when those with different backgrounds, perspectives, identities, aesthetic values, and priorities are, at increasing rates, moving into critical leadership positions then quick and meaningful backing of these individuals would actually be quite strategic for those who care about, say, social justice or the role of arts organizations in culture change, or having a more vibrant and relevant arts sector.

For years many have been saying that necessary change in the arts and culture sector would not come until there was a new generation of leaders holding the reigns of the major institutions. Well, they’ve arrived. But to enact necessary change they need to be in a position in which they can afford to lose some longtime subscribers and ticket buyers, lose some donors, lose some staff, lose some board members, lose some sponsors, or even lose the plot for a bit—and carry on with confidence nevertheless.

Do the new artistic leaders coming into institutions today (particularly women and people of color) feel the backing of their boards? Do they feel authorized to make necessary changes? Has the risk capital been raised and set aside to support their first three years and possible financial losses? Or are they being cautioned from a few too many fronts not to rock the boat and not to do anything to disrupt the finances, the relationship to the community, or the general vibe of the place?

The New Artistic Leader Discretionary Fund concept hearkens back to a time when artists were trusted with money and when not every penny a nonprofit spent had to be accounted for in advance of spending it. Is it a coincidence that this was also a time when the leaders of establishment cultural institutions were quite often white and male?

I don’t know …

What I do know is that it would be incredibly refreshing to see one or more foundations grant this same level of historic trust to this new, beautifully diverse generation of leaders.

On artistic leadership and aesthetic values in a changed cultural context: A new keynote address

Last week I had the privilege, pleasure, and honor to give the keynote address at the Canadian Arts Summit–an annual gathering of the board chairs, executive leaders, and artistic leaders of Canada’s major cultural institutions. It was a terrific conference all around. Here is a link to a transcript of my keynote address. The talk was also live streamed and, as I understand it, a video will eventually be available for download.

Following a preamble (which highlights some of the key themes that I’ve been circling around for the past decade), the talk is divided into three parts:

Part 1: Can we talk about our aesthetic values? 

Do aesthetics get discussed at your own arts organization? If so, who is involved in the discussion?

  • The artistic staff?
  • All senior managers?
  • Board members?
  • Box office staff and front of house?
  • The janitorial staff?

Generally my experience has been that it is actually quite difficult for arts leaders, staffs, boards, and other internal and external stakeholders to talk about aesthetics, honestly, in this changed cultural context; but I think we must.

Part 2: Can we talk about how a season comes together? (Hat tip to David Dower at ArtsEmerson …)

How does a season, or a collection, come together? What’s the relationship between the economics, ethics, and aesthetics of our organizations? What’s the mutual dependence between judgments of artistic excellence; the non-negotiable principles that uphold organizations’ core values; and the willingness for particular bodies to pay? What holds everything together? Dare we ask?

Part 3: What does responsible artistic leadership look like? What’s the work in 2018?

The subsidized arts not only can—but must—play a vital, humanizing role in any society but to play that role, in these times, we must regenerate individual arts organizations. What does that work look like? (I share a few ideas.)

Many thanks for reading and sharing any thoughts!

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On playwrights attempting to be in the driver’s seat: my experience at Dominique Morisseau’s “Pipeline”

I’ve recently starting working as an assistant professor and program director for a new MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship (MA AME) at The New School. If you don’t know it, The New School is a progressive university based in New York City. Social justice is a core value of the institution and it ranks quite high on various dimensions of diversity. The MA AME is distinguished from other MA in arts management or administration programs in that it is intended for practicing performing artists only. When they apply, students are evaluated based on their artistic portfolios as much as their social goals or propensity for entrepreneurship; and while in the program students are required to maintain their artistic practice (and receive credit for this).

One of the things we tend to say about the program is that it is aimed at putting artists in the driver’s seat, so to speak, of their careers, the projects they develop, and the enterprises they found. I have been thinking about this programmatic aim in light of a recent experience seeing the play Pipeline at Lincoln Center Theater and last week’s announcement of its author, playwright Dominique Morisseau, as recipient of one of the Ford Foundation Fellowships for Social Change in the Arts.

While it is Ms. Morisseau’s powerful scripts that have, no doubt, earned her a spot on this prestigious list, I am equally interested in another area in which I see her as an agent of social change: Morisseau has made it her business to call out the cultural and racial biases embedded in taken-for-granted notions of what constitutes appropriate behavior at the theater.

To wit, in December 2015 Morisseau penned a candid, courageous, and unabashed article for American Theatre magazine called “Why I almost slapped a fellow theatre patron, and what that says about our theatres.” In it, she recounts a troubling experience at a theater performance–one in which she is confronted with a series of race-based microaggressions. Perhaps as a result of experiences like these, Morisseau created a program insert called Rules of Engagement for Lincoln Center Theater’s recent production of her play, Pipeline.

I attended Pipeline in the late summer. The play revolves around a young black man, who is facing challenges at the (almost entirely white) private boarding school that he attends, whose parents are divorced, and whose mom teaches in an inner city high school in New York City. As critic Jeremy Gerard noted in his review, the play’s title:

… refers to two different kinds of institutionalized segregation. In the first, “gifted and talented” students are culled from the public-school crowd and given accelerated classroom experiences. The second refers to the schools-to-prison syndrome that plagues poor, mostly inner-city, and mostly African-American families.

It’s perhaps worth mentioning at this point in the story that I had purchased discounted tickets for the show, as a member of Theatre Development Fund, for myself and a friend.

I didn’t actually notice Morisseau’s Rules of Engagement insert as I arrived at the theater just before curtain. What I did notice as I sat down was that my friend and I were the only two white people in the entire house right section, which was filled with black adults (young and old). And vice versa, after settling into our seats, we glanced around the room and saw a three-quarters sea of predominately white people. I gathered from the Q&A that among those seated in my section were some high school or college students attending with their teacher or professor. Whether the result of an ill-conceived seating policy (or the lack of any policy at all), the failure to integrate the recipients of “outreach” or “discount” tickets with the rest of the audience struck me as an embarrassing and serious gaffe–particularly given the themes of the play.

The show started and the students in our section appeared to be quite engaged: they were leaning forward, laughing, occasionally vocalizing, or snapping. At the end of the program there was a Q&A and all of the actors came out to participate. A majority of questions came from a small group of students seated in my section of the theater. At one point a student asked (and I’m paraphrasing):

So, is there a subtext to this play? Or is it essentially about “the pipeline”? I mean, is there another subtext besides the pipeline you are all playing as actors? I ask because I’m studying acting now and we’re talking a lot about subtext.

I thought it was great question given the socio-political nature of the piece. There was a long silence and then a black actor*** responded  (and I’m paraphrasing from memory):

I am going to put that question aside for a moment. I want to say something else because backstage we were all talking about this. It was incredibly challenging for us tonight because of all the snapping that you all were doing. I don’t know if you noticed the scene in which I looked at all of you like (and here the actor looked at the students with a raised eyebrow), but it was really distracting. And one person would start snapping and then someone somewhere else would start snapping. The playwright has given us her Rules of Engagement. You need to understand that we could hear you and that your behavior was incredibly distracting. And I’m here to tell you, there is no snapping in the theater! That does not happen.

I sat there a bit in shock. Remember, I had not opened my program. I had not seen the Rules of Engagement insert.

My first thought was: “Wait! This play opened with an actor speaking to the audience as though they were the students in her classroom. The fourth wall was broken by the production itself; and now the students are being chastised for, essentially, going with the convention???” I then became perturbed at the cultural implications. I turned to my friend and whispered heatedly, “How is snapping in the middle of a scene any different than people clapping when a star walks on stage?”

I had no idea what “rules of engagement” the actor was referencing; but in the context of the finger-wagging I began to think they must have been some sort of “rules of etiquette” that had been passed out to all the school groups. I felt sad for the American theater as it had just reprimanded one of the more engaged audiences I had witnessed in a long time. I left the Q&A shortly thereafter.

I got home and found Morisseau’s Rules of Engagement in my program. Reading this list one is immediately struck by the generous (and perhaps conflicted) spirit and aims of the piece.

On the one hand, the piece is clearly intended to invite (or protect the possibility of) more engaged participation by audience members. And on the other hand, Morisseau is also clearly trying to safeguard the actors from being obstructed by unruly behavior. Testifying is allowed but not so much that it is thwarting to the actors. As such, I immediately wondered whether or not she would agree with what had happened at the Q&A? Whether she would be more sympathetic with the actors, or the students?

This etiquette issue can be a hot-button topic for those who work or regularly attend live performance. In 2016 I moderated a rather feisty debate at the International Society for the Performing Arts on the question: Is there a correct behavior in a live performing arts venue? The debate was exploring whether, in the face of dramatic cultural, technological and demographic changes, the general rules of etiquette and other behaviors that are taken for granted at live performing arts venues also needed to change? Or whether there was still value in maintaining audience-performer conventions, most notably the expectation of reverent silence? At the heart of the debate was the growing recognition that historically white institutions have made it a policy to “open their doors to everyone” but have quite often been unwilling to allow the etiquette at the theater to evolve in light of the changing demographics of their communities (and therefore audiences).

As I continued mulling on the Pipeline experience I began to see another side. The actor was not incorrect. By-and-large, let’s face it, snapping is (still) not condoned by the institutionalized American theater. And if the actor wanted these students to be welcomed in historically white theaters in the future this finger wagging may have been an attempt to do them a favor by setting them straight.

I showed the program insert to a friend and relayed my experience. In response he asked, “I wonder how and when this insert emerged in the production process?”

It is a great question.

I interpret Morisseau’s Rules of Engagement as an attempt by an artist to be in the driver’s seat. By giving explicit permission for audiences to engage in certain culturally specific behaviors, Morisseau poked and prodded at longstanding, taken-for-granted norms about what is and isn’t appropriate at Lincoln Center, or other regional theaters generally run by and generally serving a white, educated, upper middle class crowd. In an interview for TheaterMania, Morisseau is described as taking “a breath when describing the pamphlet” and then saying:

My shows that have been programmed at theaters across the country have predominantly white audiences in their subscriber base. I have seen the sprinkle of audience members of color who have a conflict of engagement with those white audiences. Or maybe, those white audiences have a conflict of engagement with those audiences of color. There are moments I’ve noticed, repeatedly, where the people of color think they are guests in the space. They hush as though they’ve broken the rule of the space, instead of engaging with my work the way I think my work demands, which is with a little bit of an audible response. … What I’ve asked for is space for the community to respond to my work.

There is another recent, and quite high profile, example of a playwright seeking to influence how audiences can respond to his work–but with a financial penalty rather than an insert. This past summer playwright David Mamet (Oleanna, Speed-the-Plow, Glengarry Glen Ross, and many others) had the theater world up in arms because, as this Guardian article states, “the licence to stage a Mamet play now includes a clause that prevents producers from staging official debates within two hours of a performance. Any violation risks the loss of the licence and a fine of $25,000 for every post-show talk.”

While some interpreted this as short-sighted, diva behavior I found myself wondering if this didn’t arise from Mamet (who has made a public conversion from liberalism to conservatism) seeing his plays interpreted through a predominately liberal institutional lens at post-show talkbacks? Theaters are up-in-arms because they feel they should have a right to foster public discussion. Mamet evidently wants audience members to have the chance to make up their own minds about the work. It would be great to see an actual debate between some writers and some theater producers on this issue. Anecdotally, it seems that many playwrights abhor the post-show talk-back trend but are disinclined to say so publicly.

Returning to Pipeline, I would love to know how other performances went and how various audiences, Morisseau, the actors, and the theater felt about the insert and its effects. Ultimately, while I sympathize with the actors who evidently felt distracted by the snapping the night I saw the play, I remain troubled by the fact that these students were called out publicly for their behavior at the Q&A. That they were chastised even while holding a slip of paper in their hands–from the playwright–whose subtext, spirit and intent, seemed to be: “It’s OK. Snap. Say Amen. Be in the moment with this play rather than sitting and worrying about whether you are doing the right thing or the wrong thing in this theater filled with white, upper middle class people. You belong here.”

*** The word “actor” is used to refer to female or male performers.

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Tackling an inequitable arts funding system: A response to the report, Not Just Money

Helicon Collaborative, with a grant from the Surdna Foundation, has recently published a second report, Not Just Money, examining where US arts philanthropic dollars go. Some may recall that when the first report was published it set off a small quake across the arts and culture landscape—with many shaking their heads at the inequitable funding picture that emerged in the report and some (like me) finding it curious that this was news to anyone since these inequities are not only longstanding but, to a great extent, by design. (You can read my Jumper post on the 2011 report here.)

Here’s how the most recent report describes the issue, which is worsening:

Just 2 percent of all cultural institutions receive nearly 60 percent of all contributed revenue, up approximately 5 percentage points over a decade.

The 2 percent cohort is made up of 925 cultural groups that have annual budgets of more than $5 million (NCCS). These organizations are symphonies, opera companies, regional theaters, art museums, ballet companies and other large institutions – the majority of which focus primarily on Western European fine arts traditions. While most of these institutions have made sincere efforts to broaden participation in the past decade, their audiences remain predominantly white and upper income (NEA Research Report #57).

If the goal of the first report was not only to raise awareness but also to spur a shift in funding away from large, (historically) white, major metropolitan fine arts organizations to smaller, community-based, or culturally specific, or rural arts organizations … it appears to have failed, thus far. The winners have gotten richer and the losers poorer since the first report; and this is despite considerable attention having been paid the past handful of years to issues of diversity, equality, and inclusion by Grantmakers in the Arts (the national service organization for arts funders) and several individual philanthropies.

Helicon has published three posts on its key findings, which I highly recommend as an introduction to this discussion. The third post is focused on how to move the needle and recommends that private foundations: (1) set explicit goals for change; (2) engage wealthy donors to address equity with their funding; and (3) commit to collaborative actions.

These are great recommendations but I’m going to suggest that it may also be beneficial to focus attention on a few other players on this field if we want to see a more equitable distribution of funding for arts and culture in the US: government agencies (whose funding already tends to be more equitable than that of private foundations in large part because of the obligation to serve the public interest), small family foundations (many of whom do not currently fund the arts), and the winners in this winner-take-all system (the large, historically white, fine arts institutions).

***

To the National Endowment for the Arts: Graduate the Largest Institutions Out of Your Portfolio

As many know, the NEA does not have all that much money to distribute once the largest portion of the pie is sent to the states and the remainder is divided across the different programmatic areas. One consequence of this is that very large institutions often get NEA grants that represent a laughable portion of the budget (e.g. an orchestra with a $50 million budget might get a grant of $40,000). When I was a philanthropoid at the Mellon Foundation I would sometimes muse to colleagues:

How would it change the sector if there were a wholesale shift in funding from the largest organizations to the next tier down? What if organizations over a certain size (say $5-$10 million) were simply no longer eligible for certain pots of government money—on the argument that once government funding represents 0.1 percent of your budget (a) you no longer need the “imprimatur” of government to secure other funding; and (b) you can easily replace government funds with dollars from other sources?

In other words, rather than seeing all pots as pots over which all should compete for funding, what if government adjusted its priorities in light of the fact that individual contributions, private foundation support, and corporate support have proven over time to flow toward larger institutions? What if government recognized that–given its capacity to make grants that are more diverse on a number of dimensions–its primary value is to invest primarily in promising small and midsized enterprises, providing them with both an imprimatur and the early capital needed to grow their operations to the point where they might attract other sources of funding?

Having read the most recent Helicon report, I think it’s time to consider something along these lines. As a thought experiment: what if policies were instituted whereby organizations would “graduate” from NEA funding? That is, what if they would become ineligible for NEA funding once, for instance, any of the following conditions applied?

  • Total annual operating budget is greater than e.g. $10 million three years in a row;
  • One or more staff members has an annual salary greater than the president of the United States (~$400,000);
  • The wage ratio between the highest and lowest paid employee exceeds 1:5.
  • More than 50% of its end users (e.g. visitors, audiences, students, or artists) earn more than $50,000 a year (or perhaps more than the median income in the MSA where they are located).

One benefit of this approach is that it would not only begin to redistribute some arts dollars in the system; but it would blunt the tip of the sword of conservatives whose leading arguments for eliminating the NEA are that (a) multimillion dollar arts organizations can easily survive without it; and (b) it is essentially welfare for cultural elitists.

In a sense, the shift I’m proposing would put the federal government in the role of providing much-needed fertilizer to the most promising of the hundreds of Davids in the bottom and middle of the sector hourglass rather than sprinkling the equivalent of magic pixie dust on the handful of Goliaths that tend to dominate the top of the hourglass.

And, as we all know, none of this would preclude larger institutions from receiving other forms of recognition from the NEA (e.g. awards), or from tapping into other public pots (in addition to continuing to be the greatest beneficiaries of the indirect subsidies to the arts). Since driving place-based tourism and anchoring cultural/creative districts are often their highest value to cities-at-large, perhaps larger institutions should be beneficiaries of larger tourism grants, or economic development grants, rather than traditional arts funding?

***

To City/State Arts Agencies: Broker Relationships between Family Foundations and Small Arts Orgs

Helicon’s most recent report indicates that while private foundations seem to be acknowledging the importance of diversity, inclusion, and equity they are still defaulting to funding the same (large, white) organizations as always.  How to square these two findings? An all-too-familiar anecdote relayed in a recent brief article in American Theatre magazine covering the Helicon report, points to one possible reason why. AT reports:

The course of true fundraising never did run smooth. Just ask Randy Reyes, artistic director of Mu Performing Arts in St. Paul, Minn. In 2015, Mu applied for an arts access grant from the Minnesota State Arts Board to teach audiences about the history of Asian-American theatre. Though Mu’s mission and audience is Asian-American, they didn’t get the grant. “We were disappointed in that,” Reyes admitted.

But one organization that did get an arts access grant was St. Paul’s much bigger Ordway Center for the Performing Arts, which received $86,039 to present Notes From Asia, “a series of performances, films, conversations, and an exhibit that will highlight arts and culture of Eastern Asian communities for East Asian, Asian American, and broader audiences.”

This is, of course, a long lament of smaller, culturally specific organizations who quite often feel either co-opted or eaten alive by larger organizations—who will sometimes lightly affiliate with smaller, community-based or culturally specific organizations in order to get access to diversity funding, or simply emulate the longstanding practices of such organizations in order to snag limited “diversity dollars” available. More dedicated pots of money, or dedicated philanthropies, probably need to be established to pay attention to small and midsized organizations.

As I’ve written about here, more than a decade ago (after changing the tax laws to make it easier and more beneficial for individuals to set up small trusts and foundations), the Australia Arts Council started an arm’s length organization whose role was to broker relationships between small and midsized arts organizations and small private family foundations and trusts. This intermediary met with donors, talked to them about the importance of supporting the arts, and identified organizations that might fit with their values; it mentored arts organizations to help them develop realistic funding strategies and prepare effective proposals; and it made matches between the two.

I have long wondered whether that same model could be transferred and modified at the city or state level in the US. Again, as a thought experiment, could state or city arts agencies make use of a similar, arm’s length lightly staffed brokerage service designed to spur increased arts contributions from small family foundations (many of which do not presently fund the arts)–to SME’s, in particular. At the same time, like the Australia program, could these matchmakers provide mentoring to small organizations to help them prepare more effective proposals?

Attention might be more productively turned to speaking to a new generation of individual family foundations and getting them each to adopt, say, 10-15 small-to-midsized arts enterprises, while we wait for the older institutional philanthropies to catch up with changes in the world; modify their values, aesthetics, boards, presidents, staffs, and systems; and presumably launch new strategies, programs, or organizations, designed to help them reach beyond the 2% to organizations that will necessarily require different metrics, application processes, etc.

However broadminded and whatever their good intentions, it is clearly operationally or philosophically or emotionally difficult for large philanthropies to shift money away from large institutions, particularly when they keep knocking on the door and seeking funding.

Which brings me to my last provocation.

To Large arts organizations: It’s time to recognize your historic privilege and the physics of pie slicing

I’ve observed several times that when discussions in the field turn to expanding resources for under-privileged groups incumbent beneficiaries (and their trade/advocacy organizations) are often quick to say, “Yes, of course, philanthropies and government agencies must fund the smaller organizations. But they shouldn’t do so by taking away funding from the large institutions. That’s not fair.”

One is reminded of the phrase: To the privileged, equity feels like oppression.

Given that new money is not gushing into the NEA’s coffers or the arts budgets of most foundations, it would stand to reason that making more, or larger, grants to arts organizations with budgets less than $5 million will likely require taking some money away from larger organizations—who have many more sources to which they can turn to make up the difference.

It is time for large organizations to exercise some moral imagination: to recognize that they are the take-all winners of an unjust system and that aggressively (and generally successfully) competing for every single $5,000 or $10,000 or $25,000 grant available is greedy behavior that contributes to the starvation of other parts of the arts ecosystem.

Period.

***

A report came out 5 years ago intended, I think, to goad or shame arts philanthropies into adopting more progressive funding strategies. It appears most didn’t. San Francisco emerges as the North star in an otherwise bleak report. While it’s troubling that since Helicon’s first report, money has not shifted away from the 925 organizations with budgets greater than $5 million, it’s not surprising. One can imagine various reasons why the needle may not be changing.

It may be because this is a progressive political agenda that Helicon is proposing and some foundations are simply not interested to see their arts funds used to support what appears to be social activism. It may be because these things just take time given the nature of grant cycles and how long it takes to change policies, priorities, and guidelines. It may be because private philanthropies, a lot like individual donors, have a lot of ego in the game and quite often want to fund and be affiliated with arts institutions that they and their peers perceive to be “winners,” or “excellent,” or “prestigious” (qualitative valuations that are deeply tied to the culturally based aesthetic judgments and values of foundation decision makers). It may be because it’s hard to say no to organizations you have been funding for a long time, whose ADs and MDs have become close friends with program staff and board members. Or it may be because large organizations are quite savvy about how to exploit the system to secure funding no matter what the priorities are (yesterday it was innovation, today it’s diversity and inclusivity, tomorrow it will be something else).

Nevertheless, I applaud Helicon Collaborative for keeping the heat on this issue and pressing for discussion and change in the sector. I have no doubt the 2011 report spurred the leadership of Grantmakers in the Arts, much of the race-bias and implicit-bias training programs in the philanthropic community over the past five years, and many new grant initiatives aimed at diversity, equity, and inclusion.

Evidently, more is needed.

Perhaps it’s also time for the philanthropies who are presently allocating the majority of their resources to the 2% to more transparently address the questions and concerns raised in Helicon’s report? Perhaps Surdna (the funder of the most recent report) could host a roundtable of private foundation presidents to respond to the report? I, for one, would love to hear whether change is happening (but is just not showing up in the data yet because of the nature of grant cycles), or whether (and, if so, why) this is an area in which they are unlikely to implement changes anytime soon.

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Art for ____________’s sake. What would you fill in?

A few weeks back I was in NYC and had the opportunity to attend a Public Forum event featuring the brilliant Jeremy McCarter reading from his new book Young Radicals: In the War for American Ideals, and an equally brilliant panel of renowned activists and artists doing a staged reading of the timely, and at once harrowing and humorous, 1917 one-act by Susan Glaspell, The People. It was a great evening and McCarter’s book is now sitting on my Kindle, next in the queue. Toward the end of the evening McCarter turned to the rather large panel of activists and artists he had assembled and asked them to reflect on the phrase Art for Art’s Sake.

There was an awkward silence.

The first couple respondents squirmed a bit and then shrugged off the phrase as being all but useless these days. Others looked like they hoped they would not be called upon to answer.

Someone, as I recall, asked, “What do we even mean when we use that phrase?”

Indeed.

I remember thinking: This is so funny. A panel discussing ideals and art and activism, in a theater, and no on on stage seems willing or able to engage with the idea of art for art’s sake.

Then a visual artist from Cuba stepped up to defend the concept, suggesting that these words come to signify something quite specific and meaningful if you have ever lived under an oppressive regime that censors your ability to make the work you want to make.

Some nods of ascent.

Another panelist said he valued the phrase in the sense that his very existence as a black man making his living as a poet (a rare breed, he suggested) was meaningful to black and brown youth considering their own possibilities in life.

More nods of ascent.

But the question that it seemed most were wrestling with was: If not “for” someone else, or some other purpose, then why make art?

This seems to be the stance-du-jour on l’art pour l’art.

For the past three years I have led a variety of workshops (on business models, marketing, values, transformation, change) with arts admin types. Frequently, I include a slide in my deck with the following phrase and ask people to fill in the blank (it’s a question I stole from Clay Lord, who posted it on Facebook):

Art for ____________’s sake.

In three years, no one has ever said art.

The most common answers are “the society” or “the audience” or “the people.”

I get it.

I wrestled with art for art’s sake for much of 2014 as I designed my course on beauty and aesthetics for business school majors. That wrestling match ended the second week of class, when I brought in a graduate student from the art department, named Tara Austin, to do a drawing workshop with the students. At the end of her drawing workshop Tara talked about her own work, which is inspired by beauty in the natural world. At the time, she was doing a series of abstract orchids.

Tara Austin. Orchidaceae #4. Oil and Acrylic on Panel. 2015

Tara showed slides of several of her orchids and then asked if there were any questions. The first business student to raise her hand said something to this effect:

So, you said that you are only painting orchids. And, I mean, do you think this could be a problem? I mean, maybe people don’t want orchids, orchids, orchids. Maybe not that many people like orchids—maybe some like other kinds of flowers. Or something other than flowers? I mean, I just wonder, are you thinking about this?

Tara paused for a second and then replied,

Um. That’s a really interesting question. No, I’m not thinking about that, actually. I’m painting orchids at the moment because they are really interesting to me and so I guess I will keep painting them until I’m ready to move on to another idea.

After the fact, as I reflected on this moment, I thought it was quite brilliant. A quite reasonable question from a business school student: Is there sufficient demand for orchids? Do you know your market? Do you think you may need to diversify?

And a quite reasonable answer from an arts student: I’m interested in the idea for its own sake; right now, I’m not thinking about whether there is a market for orchids.

And I could not have architected a better moment to convey the different logics or rationalities of business and art, or what art for art’s sake, or research for the sake of research, or exploration for the sake of exploration, or excellence for the sake of excellence are all about. Through this brief conversation between an artist and  business student, I was able to experience the world of business and the world of art as parallel systems of value. This experience finally helped me make sense of, and come to terms with, the phrase art for art’s sake.

There are other parallel systems of value. In his 2010 monograph Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth, Bill Sharpe elaborates five “economies” and their “shared denominations of value” in a table. The last of these is the experience economy of art.

Economy Currency Statement of Shared Denomination of Value
Competitive Games Score The economy of scoring coordinates individual games of a particular kind into a collective competitive sport.
Democracy Votes The economy of democracy coordinates individual preferences into collective policies and powers.
Science Measurement The economy of science coordinates individual phenomena into collective ‘objective’ knowledge.
Exchange Money The economy of exchange coordinates individual use values of alienable property into collective markets.
Experience Art The economy of experience coordinates individual lives into the collective experience of being human

What Sharpe’s framework seeks to illustrate is the incommensurate nature of these various currencies of shared valuation. The score of a sports game may tell us who won or lost but it can’t help us understand the individual or shared experience of the game, for example. Sharpe elaborates on art as the currency of experience, writing (on p. 46):

To see something as art is to respond to it as an expression of personal experience, as the trace of life. To become art, something must move from being private to circulating amongst us as a means of sharing the experience of being human, taking its place in the continuous dance of our culture. In doing so, like dance, its meaning is made, shared, and reflexively remakes our experience of our selves.

Put another way: art is the way we share with one another what it means to be human. To embrace the notion of art for art’s sake in this sense, is also to say, “We need dance/poetry/theater because only the aesthetic form of dance/poetry/theater can allow us to share with one another the experience of being human, using the language of dance/poetry/theater.”

Something like this idea infuses the gorgeous 2012 book Artful by Ali Smith—an extraordinary piece of fiction cum art essay, or vice versa, that I just finished. The apt description on the back cover reads: “Artful is a celebration of literature’s worth in and to the world. It is about the things art can do, the things art is made of, and the quicksilver nature of all artfulness.”

In one of four sections, On Form, Smith writes (on p. 76):

Even formlessness has form.

And it suggests this truth about the place where aesthetic form meets the human mind. For even if we were to find ourselves homeless, in a strange land, with nothing of ourselves left—say we lost everything—we’d still have another kind of home, in aesthetic form itself, in the familiarity, the unchanging assurance that a known rhythm, a recognized line, the familiar shape of a story, a tune, a line or phrase or sentence gives us every time, even long after we’ve forgotten we even know it. I placed a jar in Tennessee. Once we know it, we’ll never not know it. Rough winds do shake the darling buds of May. They always will. Rhythm itself is a kind of form and, regardless of whether it’s poetry or prose, it becomes a kind of dwelling place for us.

Valuing art for art’s sake is about understanding the value of this dwelling place.

And a bit earlier, Smith writes (on p. 74):

Form never stops. And form is always environmental. Like a people’s songs will tell you about the heart and the aspirations of that people, like their language and their use of it will tell you what their concerns are, material and metaphysical, their artforms will tell you everything about where they live and the shape they’re in.

When I read this passage I thought about seeing a presentation, four years ago now, by Georgetown professor of public diplomacy, Cynthia P. Schneider, who has argued that an important method for understanding any culture is to observe the works of its artists. Schneider has spoken and written extensively on the lessons in diplomacy from the Arab Spring, and in particular has examined the question that many were asking in the days following the revolution—Why didn’t we (America), in particular the CIA, see the Arab Spring coming?

Schneider asserts that this is the wrong question because it reflects a “twentieth-century-men-in-suits-around-a-table version of diplomacy.” Ultimately, she argues that we missed the Arab Spring because we were looking in the wrong place. Instead of “governments talking to governments and authorities talking to authorities,” diplomats and intelligence agencies should have been listening to the music of Arab hip-hop artists, looking at the graffiti on their walls, and watching their films. If they had, they would have anticipated the revolution. While they might not have predicted its time and date, she makes the case (using lyrics, text, and visual images) that they would have, without a doubt, sensed that it was coming.

This is also what it means to value art for art’s sake.

***

Just as we understand the value of research aimed at answering a question that may not have immediate utility to industry, so too can we understand the value of a set of questions being pursued through art for no other reason than because they are of interest to the artist. Scientists must increasingly defend “pure scientific research” as it is a space being eaten alive by the demands of economically lucrative industry-university partnerships. In the same vein, we need to be able to defend the “art for art’s sake” end of the art world spectrum, alongside the other end, “art for civic purposes,” which we have now, perforce, grown quite accustomed to defending.

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