Jumper

Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

Theatre Bay Area’s “Counting New Beans”

Clay Lord and the fine folks at Theatre Bay Area have a new publication out: Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art, which includes interviews with 20 prominent artistic directors and essays by Alan Brown, Rebecca Ratzkin, Arlene Goldbard, Rebecca Novick, and Clayton Lord. It also includes an interview with yours truly.

Here’s an excerpt from my long and winding conversation with Clay Lord. I’ve edited together excerpts (elipses mark missing sections) from two different parts of the interview.

Clay Lord: You’ve written about “creative destruction,” this idea that we either need to take control of our growth and make decisions about what survives, or natural forces will do it for us.  But what is the rubric for understanding where the culling of the herd needs to happen, and who does the culling?  Foundations? Market forces? Attendance figures? What are the evaluative terms? If the art isn’t going to stop, then how do the organizational structures decrease? Who decides?  Who are the arbiters of which organizations are “valuable,” and what are the terms? 

DER: Artists and communities make up a constantly evolving and changing environment. It’s the institutions that are stuck, holding onto beliefs and practices about what is or is not [a] “legitimate” [artistic experience] and denying the changing tastes, habits and demographics of their communities. […] When we say we need to try to find a way to make things “more sustainable,” what are we talking about? Sustaining middle class livings for those salaried professional administrators that have them? Sustaining the capacity for artistic risk-taking? Sustaining broad and deep community engagement with the theatre? The “what” is really important. And if we’re talking about nonprofit, mission-driven organizations, then we need to be able to answer the “what” with regard to the social value we are trying to sustain or create.

We keep saying we want to see the next thing arrive, but at the same time desperately try to preserve what we’ve already created. It’s very difficult to do both; most often, you need to destroy the old in order to allow for the emergence of the new. This is the idea behind “creative destruction.” […]

I think the “impact” question makes the field a little nervous—and so does the supply/demand conversation—because we sense that we’ve arrived at a day of reckoning. The money is tight and the environment is hyper-competitive. The conversation has been controlled for a long time by a small group of people. For years we’ve had a field-wide understanding of who were the field leaders, and there was no displacing them.

To some degree we’ve gamed and worked the system to maximum output of whatever could be derived from it, and now we have come to the end of the line. It’s time to start asking ourselves the disruptive questions. Does it make sense to subsidize large resident theatres and not commercial theatres? Does it make sense to subsidize professional theatres and not amateur theatres performing in churches or high school gymnasiums? Does it make sense to subsidize those that are most able to garner patronage from wealthy, culturally elite audiences? […]

We’re rather protectionist in the U.S. nonprofit arts sector because we know, or at least suspect in our gut, that if we start measuring intrinsic impact—testing our assumptions about the impact of the art we make— we might find out that there is greater intrinsic impact from watching an episode of The Wire than going to any kind of live theatre. Or we may find that small-scale productions in churches or coffee shops are just as impactful (or more so) than large-scale professional productions in traditional theatre spaces. Are we prepared, if we find this sort of evidence, to change the way we behave in light of it? […]

Because right now it appears we have a winner-take-all system in the arts. The few at the top continue to grow while the rest of the sector is forced to divide a shrinking pie among an increasing number of organizations. Assuming we’re not going to have significantly more resources coming into the sector, […] can we allow for a different idea to emerge about which are the most important organizations to fund? Who’s at the top? Who’s at the bottom? Who’s considered leading? These are rankings that were established decades ago and it’s nearly impossible for even an incredibly worthy and high-performing entrant to displace one of the ‘pioneering’ incumbent organizations at the top of the pyramid. […]

We need data that can help us see the field differently. Sure, if you rank theatres by budget, if you rank them by how many thousands of people they perform to in a year, then you will continue to rank them 1, 2, 3, as they are currently ranked. […] We need new ways of ordering the sector, and understanding what contributes to a healthy arts ecosystem. A lot of money has come into the sector, but it hasn’t been distributed very well. The ecology is out of balance. […]

Who gets to decide which theatres stay and which go? Well, we have a decentralized, indirect subsidy system, meaning, in theory, “everybody” could get to decide. But in reality don’t we see that those with money get to decide? And by extension, then, friends of those with money are the winners and everyone else loses. And then some say, “No one should decide; we should let nature take its course.” But what do we mean by “nature?” Do we mean that we should let “the market” decide?

That’s not valid. You can’t, on the one hand, say “We have to subsidize this particular form of art  in order to compensate for market failure,” and then on the other hand say you’re going to let “the market” decide. Many organizations exist today because someone saw them as meriting support 40 or 50 years ago. Why do we resist the idea that some entity or entities should be able to intervene now and discontinue funding for certain organizations (that seem less worthy or relevant now) and encourage or enable funding for others?

The system does not seem to deal with underperforming organizations proficiently or effectively. And if you can’t eliminate underperforming organizations, over time, they compete with other, more worthy organizations for resources. Of course somebody has to decide. A bunch of ‘somebodies’ has to decide. But how do you coordinate that? This is the challenge with our decentralized, indirect subsidy system.

I’m a big believer in Alan Brown’s work, and what you are doing, and I’m hopeful that it can help reframe the conversation about social value and about what it means to be a “leading organization.” Right now, though, what we know is that major foundations provide an imprimatur; they are able to change the perceptions of organizations as they give money and take it away. The press matters. Service organizations matter. And there are others. Any of these can stand on a bully pulpit and say, “Here are the organizations that we perceive to be leaders.” And if it’s a very different list from the list that we’ve had in our minds for a long time, if the names are not simply those that we’ve historically perceived to be leading, it will begin to shift our understanding of what we mean when we say “leading” (i.e., not just oldest and largest). It also provides leverage to the new leaders, increases their ability to fundraise, and changes the way others perceive them. […]

The formation of the nonprofit arts sector was essentially an effort to create exclusive organizations to serve wealthy people – that was the goal. That was the idea at the outset. We have reached a logical result of having created such a system. Arts organizations are sleeping in beds they made. […] And the idea that we need to keep sustaining it—well, I’m not convinced that this particular thing we’ve created, this current model, needs to be sustained. It is proving to be unsustainable perhaps because it caters to a few rather than serving the many. […] Maybe it’s time to blow things up, rather than sustain the status quo.

Counting New Beans is an impressive 464 pages long, including the full final research report, four original essays commissioned for this report, and full transcripts of the interviews with artistic leaders and patrons. It is $24.95, and will only be available here, on the Theatre Bay Area website.

On my Soapbox: Digitization of Live Performance

The Wooster Group

Clay Lord has written a provocative and rather erudite post, The Work of Presentational Art in the Age of On-Demand Technological Empowerment, in which he cautions that as arts organizations embrace or respond to pressure to record and disseminate their live work that they not lose their identity and the core of what live performance (and theater in particular, perhaps) is all about.

Clay mentions my post from last week in which I wrote: “If our goal for the next century is to hold onto our marginalized position and maintain our minuscule reach—rather than being part of the cultural zeitgeist, actively addressing the social inequities in our country, and reaching exponentially greater numbers of people— then our goal is not only too small, I would suggest that it may not merit the vast amounts of time, money, or enthusiasm we would require from talented staffers and artists, governments, foundations, corporations, and private individuals to achieve it.” In response, Clay comments, “I’m not sure I can simply agree, much as I might want to. This, more than anything, reminds me of Veruca Salt, forever simply wanting more without pausing to ask whether that was going to truly get her someplace she wanted to be at the end.”

My encouragement towards reaching greater numbers of people through other channels (generally and in the post quoted) is not meant to be a rejection of the importance and distinctive joy of an intimate, high quality, live arts experience. Those opportunities exist in great numbers in many cities in the US, for those interested and able to attend. But perhaps a personal anecdote will help to illustrate my excitement over the possibilities of recording and streaming live performances.

Despite being a ‘theater person’ I did not encounter the Wooster Group until I was in my 30s when I was working at On the Boards. Why? Because the Wooster Group didn’t travel to Kansas City when I was in graduate school. Or Idaho, when I moved there in my 20s to work in theater and run a music festival.The Woosters have never traveled to more than a select number of cities in the US (for perhaps obvious reasons). I had read about the Woosters in my edition of Brockett back in the late 80s/early 90s (a few paragraphs, as I recall) but never experienced ‘that kind of theater’. When I finally saw the Woosters, live, in my 30s, it was a seminal experience.

The same with Anne Bogart, Miranda July, Felix Ruckert, John Moran, Deja Donne, Richard Maxwell and many other artists that I was fortunate to encounter only because I had the good fortune to live in Seattle and work at On the Boards and, in particular, with Lane Czaplinski. Eventually, I moved to NY and saw 150 performances per year and it was a pretty heady period of my life. And now I’m living in a small village in the Netherlands and for many reasons (financial limitations because I’m a student, transportation issues, family obligations, etc.) it is quite difficult for me to see even the great work that is happening here in the Netherlands, much less venture to various festivals around Europe. No more Wooster Group for me.

Thus, I am (now more than ever) incredibly enthused that (for example) the the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts and OtB TV now exist. I wish to God OtB TV existed in 1990 when I was trying to find a place for myself in the arts world and develop an aesthetic. If I were running an arts aministration or MFA program of any kind I would make such broadcasts/channels mandatory viewing. When I was in graduate school one of my professors screened a film of Laurie Anderson’s UNITED STATES LIVE. I had not yet seen Laurie Anderson live. It prompted me to buy a ticket to her next concert, in Lawrence, Kansas. That, too, was a seminal experience for me.

Enough with the nostalgia … Yes, hold onto the core. But, to be honest, I think the ‘core’ of theater is far more threatened by the preponderance of rather deadly small-scale teledramas that pass as ‘dynamic live theater’ in many of the regional theaters in the US than by, for instance, a broadcast of the fabulous Young Jean Lee’s SHIPMENT on OtB TV.

If the ‘live’ experience is still mattering to people I believe it will compel people to go to the theater, buy a ticket (or stand in line for free tickets) and attend in person. But I would implore you not to dismiss these mediated experiences by assuming that they still generally ‘look like shit’ (as Clay suggests in his post and as they mostly did in the 20th century). Have you seen one of the Met HD Broadcasts? Personally, I think they are amazing and, as a ‘theater person’, I prefer them to the live experience as I can see the faces of the performers. Furthermore, having seen the broadcasts I now find the live experience all the richer. Not only is the technology improving but so are our skills at capturing the ‘liveness’ in a digital medium. And OtB TV is showing us that it can be done well without the price tag of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

The major institutions in this country are now quite large and hungry beasts, demanding incredible resources to be sustained. It is quite hard for me to imagine how we can continue to justify such expenditures in the face of the declining live audience trend (that seems to have begun in the 80s according to the various studies). But if we could begin to talk about a rising ‘online’ or ‘cinema’ or ‘DVD’ audience (which the Metropolitan Opera and others have been able to do) then I begin to see the logic of ongoing large investments in these institutions. And these recordings are not just about reaching audiences that can’t access the live work. Arguably, they could play a crucial role in helping artists (more easily or quickly) build a larger global audience, be ‘in dialogue with’ other artists, and have greater impact.

We can also avoid that path, preserve the current experience, and hunker down with the goal of serving the people that (again) have the interest and ability to join us at our venues. But if that’s the case then we probably need to be prepared to downsize our infrastructure over time if the audience for what we do continues to diminish over time.

I would argue that if organizations with the potential for wider reach (that is, they are producing work for which there is demand beyond their local community) can do it well, and affordably, and strategically, and ethically (paying artists their fare share), then they should embrace the possibility of mediated experiences, trusting that they can live side-by-side with the live performance (and decades of recordings by musicians that primarily make their money doing live concerts should give us some hope here). Or even better, that new, exciting art forms may emerge (think Dance on Film) geared especially to the medium.

While the recording may be a substitute for some, I also believe it will be a complementary good for others. Do I think that if mediated experiences grow in number and reach that we will necessarily maintain our current (some would say ‘overbuilt’) infrastructure in the US? I don’t. But like others, I think that some of that infrastructure needed to be dismantled anyway – long before the Met broadcasts disrupted our sector.

If I had seen a recording of the Wooster Group in my 20s I would have beaten a path to NYC or the next nearest city where they were performing to see them live. But I couldn’t conceive of what that experience would be before seeing it. (I was trying to place the Woosters within my rather limited LORT theater experiences.) That is, after all, why we call them experience goods. Giving more people an experience (even if it is a mediated experience) is better in my mind than having them sit outside the venues wondering what goes on inside or, even worse, being pretty sure they know and that they wouldn’t find it interesting.

POST SCRIPT: Coincidentally, I just came across an email about an opportunity to experience the Wooster Group on film and video. Anthology Film Archives are hosting a 7-day series that ends on the 23rd. Info here.

If you’re still awake at the end of this post (sorry for the length) grab a cup of coffee and make the time to read Clay’s thoughtful post as well as truly smart comments by Polly Carl and Linda Essig.

If our goal is simply to preserve our current reality, why pursue it?

About a month ago I read an article in the Atlantic (recommended to me by LINKED IN) on the phenomenal success of Finland’s primary and secondary education public school system—a success which, the article suggests, the US has failed to understand.

There are some notable differences between the US system and Finland’s:

  1. Teachers in Finland are given prestige, decent pay and a lot of responsibility.
  2. Finland has no standardized tests; teachers are trained to create tests and assess students independently. (Periodically the government assesses all schools.)
  3. The system is cooperative rather than competitive. Schools are not ranked or measured against one another.
  4. There are no private schools in Finland. You can shop around at different public schools, but they are all of the same high quality.
  5. Finland pursued education reform by aiming its teachers and schools at the goal of achieving social equity (“every child should have exactly the same opportunity to learn, regardless of family background, income, or geographic location”), not excellence.

This last point (no surprise) is the one that Americans studying the success in Finland seem to miss. Education in Finland “is seen first and foremost not as a way to produce star performers, but as an instrument to even out social inequality.” Finland has achieved excellence through the pursuit of equity.

A couple weeks later, with Finland’s approach and success still on my mind, I came across another intriguing article on education reform, this one at the university level.

The Chronicle of Higher Education ran a piece on Sebastian Thrun, a research professor of computer science at Stanford University, who recently gave up his tenure track position to found, Udacity, a start-up offering low-cost online education. What prompted Thrun’s move? Evidently the professor watched as the IRL enrollment for his artificial intelligence class dwindled while its popularity (among students at Stanford and around the globe) exploded online, eventually reaching 160,000. Thrun has set a goal of reaching 500,000 people with one of Udacity’s first course offerings.

When addressing his motivations for the move, Thrun commented that when universities were first being created, “the lecture was the most effective way to convey information” but that despite the invention of new tools (like film and digital technology) “professors today teach exactly the same way they taught a thousand years ago.”

Here’s what I’ve been thinking the past couple weeks, in large part because of these two articles.

In ten or twenty more years does the nonprofit arts and culture sector want to be the US education system: excellent art for rich people and mediocrity, lack of resources, and lack of opportunity for everyone else? Or do we want to be Finland’s: high quality artistic experiences (or “an expressive life’ as Bill Ivey might say) for every man, woman, and child? Like most universities, do we want to limit our reach to those that have the time, money, privilege, proximity, and courage/comfort (see Nina Simon’s brilliant post Come On In and Make Yourself Uncomfortable) to access us at our venues? Or do we want to collaborate as a sector with the goal of making it possible for anyone to have affordable (online, big screen, small screen, gaming system, etc.) access to high quality arts education and performances?

At the end of the Chronicle of Higher Education article Thrun is quoted saying:

I feel like there’s a red pill and a blue pill … and you can take the blue pill and go back to your classroom and lecture your 20 students. But I’ve taken the red pill and I’ve seen Wonderland.

The clock is ticking.

The arts and culture sector in the US needs to be reformed.

Just because the arts have been an elitist form of entertainment as long as most of us can remember is no excuse for that to continue to be our story in the future.

Just because we have wrongly and self-servingly bought into and sold to others the idea that to be ‘talented’ you had to be a ‘professional’ and to make ‘art’ you had to be a ‘nonprofit’ doesn’t mean we need to continue to make the same mistake.

We got it wrong the first time.

If our goal for the next century is to hold onto our marginalized position and maintain our minuscule reach—rather than being part of the cultural zeitgeist, actively addressing the social inequities in our country, and reaching exponentially greater numbers of people— then our goal is not only too small, I would suggest that it may not merit the vast amounts of time, money, or enthusiasm we would require from talented staffers and artists, governments, foundations, corporations, and private individuals to achieve it.

Let’s be Finland. Let’s pursue Wonderland.

PS: In an impromptu video chat with Doug McLennan a few weeks back as part of the Lead or Follow debate, I rambled on somewhat incoherently about the article on Sebastian Thrun. There is not much new information in the video, but if you read the comments section William Osborne has written a very interesting reflection on the Matrix red pill blue pill metaphor and the arts.

Image downloaded from Lenny’s Alice in Wonderland Site.

Making donor dollars stretch and perform miracles

The other day I received an email alert from the Philanthropy News Digest, which mentioned that a theater company had announced a $7 million endowment challenge grant. When matched, the 3:1 challenge grant (which requires the theater to raise $2.5 million) will boost its endowment from $500,000 to $10 million. Putting aside for a moment debates over the pros and cons of endowments for performing arts organizations, I was struck by the following quote by theater’s artistic director in the press:

When reached, this unprecedented offer will enable the theatre to continue growing far into the future. […] It will ensure the theatre’s ability to continue producing classic musicals and dramatic works, develop visionary new work, maintain state-of-the-art facilities for our theatre and conservatory, and remain a cultural treasure in the community.

My first (rather cheeky) thought was, “They understand they only get to spend the interest, right?” Of course, I know the theater has a smart staff and smart board and that it has accurately projected the annual income from a $10 million endowment. I do not doubt that the endowment will prove useful; and any midsized organization that can raise $10 million in this economy is to be commended. However, unless there is a crucial part of this equation I am failing to understand, a $10 million endowment cannot deliver all that is promised in that press statement.

According to Guidestar the theater mentioned in the article has an operating budget of approximately $4.5 million. Depending on how long the theater waits to begin drawing income from the endowment, and how its investments perform, it seems that the endowment will basically give the theater a boost of about 10% on its operating budget. When I glanced back through a few 990s I noted that total expenses were $4.9 million on its 2008 filing, $4.3 million for 2009, and $4.5 million for 2010. I also noted in its 2010 filing that the organization had interest payments of $271,336 related, one presumes, to the approximately $6 million debt that appears on the balance sheet (some or all of which may be for the state-of-the-art-facility).

And actually, an endowment to cover facility-related costs could be a smart strategy – though this doesn’t appear to be the primary purpose of the endowment in this case.

I recognize that the reason arts organizations put statements like the one above in materials and press announcements for endowment, ‘advancement’ and other capital campaigns is often because they feel they must do so to attract donors. But do donors believe such statements? For that matter, do the staffs and boards of organizations believe them? If so, is everyone confused five or ten years later when another capital campaign is required just to sustain current programs and put the organization on even footing again? If not, is there any reason to continue the charade?

While it may make everyone feel better in the short term is it possible this tendency to make it appear that donor gifts (large and small) can accomplish far more than is realistic has long term negative impacts on the organization and its relationship with its donors and the community-at-large? Is it possible we avoid telling the real truth because we don’t want to confront or invite others to look to closely at the total cost of ownership of our buildings, or the real costs of running our institutions and particular programs, or how much and how little (relatively speaking) is spent on various areas of operation and resources?

And on the other side of the table, it’s been more than a year since the lengthy discourse emerging out of GIA on under- and mis-capitalization of arts organizations. As we head into 2012, I’m curious whether the climate is changing and funders or individual donors (two different animals, I know) are more willing to support costs like debt service, deficits, cash reserves, sinking funds, or general operating?

If not, I’d be curious to know why not?

Image of hands stretching dollar by Sergej Khakimullin licensed from Shutterstock.

AJ Discussion: Lead or Follow?

In lieu of a Jumper post this week I have written a post (If this is leading, what is following?) for the Arts Journal Discussion, Lead or Follow.  Here’s the question that launched the debate, posed by AJ’s Doug McLennan:

Increasingly, audiences have more visibility for their opinions about the culture they consume. Cultural institutions know more and more about their audiences and their wants. Some suggest this new transparency argues for a different relationship between artists and audience.  So the question: In this age of self expression and information overload, do our artists and arts organizations need to lead more or learn to follow their communities more?

Doug McClennan has put together a diverse group of debaters: the Kennedy Center’s MichaelKaiser; John Holden of Demos; Chad Bauman, marketing director at ArenaStage; Michael Phillips, movie critic of the Chicago Tribune; culturalhistorian Lynne Conner; Josephine Ramirez, program officer at theIrvine Foundation; Jenny Byrd, a graduate student in arts management at Claremont Graduate University; Bob Harlow, an arts consultant; Stephanie Barron, curator at the LA County Museum of Art; Roberto Bedoya,director of the Tucson Pima Arts Council; Kelly Tweeddale, executive director of Seattle Opera; Trisha Mead, Director of Marketing and Communications for Oregon Ballet Theatre; and Stanford Thompson,Executive Director for the El Sistema-inspired program, Play On, Philly!

I hope you’ll check it out and jump into the discussion.

And if you want to know what the onion is about, read the post. 😉

 

 

A planned ending for Merce Cunningham Dance Co.

Merce Cunningham

In last week’s post on direct subsidies to artists, I expanded upon a premise from artist/economist Hans Abbing–that direct subsidies to artists may provide incentives to more people to become artists, thereby increasing competition, and making it more difficult for any to make a living–and suggested that the same may be true of arts organizations. I wrote, “We have incentivized the exponential growth of the arts and culture sector in the US and, despite significant resources (government and private) flowing into the sector on an annual basis, we now find that both artists and the large majority of organizations are poor. There’s a lesson there.”

What the lesson may be I’m not entirely sure, but the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the problem of chronic undercapitalization and its effects on the sector in the context of the final performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on New Year’s Eve. The planned closure (aka Living Legacy Plan) of this renowned company has been both refreshing and disconcerting to a field that has become accustomed to dance companies struggling to sustain themselves and preserve the legacies of their founders after death. Merce had witnessed the disappointing trajectories of more than a few companies; he understood what could happen to his own company over time if it tried to persevere without the infusion of new works and his presence.

In planning for its closure, Cunningham Dance Foundation raised funds to help support (among other things) a world tour, transitions for members of its company and staff, and filming/digitial recording of Merce and the company in rehearsal and performances. This past year we were badgered with claims that there are too many arts organizations and calls for the sector to ‘make it OK’ for arts organizations to close responsibly and with dignity. The Cunningham Dance Foundation’s decision and successful implementation of that decision could be seen as a model for how to realize a ‘successful’ closure. But the very planning of the closure seemed to be what was most disconcerting for some. Despite the emotional and financial toll they take on artists, administrators, and community members it seems we prefer our endings to be either a long and exhausting battle to the bitter end or a blindside collision we never saw coming.

To plan for them seems to be an acknowledgement that we recognize and accept that it’s the end of an era.

I adore the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. I truly regretted being unable to attend the Park Avenue Armory performances on New Year’s Eve and it makes me genuinely sad that there is no possibility of a performance by the company in my future. I am quite grateful that I lived in NYC at a time when Merce Cunningham was still alive and I saw his company perform many times; I will not soon forget those experiences. But if anything, the closing has made my experiences of him and the company all the more valuable. Of course, the effects of the closure are somewhat mitigated by the existence of an incredible archive (which many organizations do not have, btw, for many reasons). The MCDC archive is also all the more valuable (and may become all the more ‘alive’) now that the company is not performing.

In the end, it seems that Merce Cunningham made a decision that was both principled and pragmatic.

And perhaps that is one of the lessons in our miserably impoverished and wonderfully abundant sector. Perhaps now is the time for both principled action and clear-eyed pragmatism.

Does it seem likely that we can continue to generate interest and support for what we do, how we work, who we are? If not, can we adapt our organizational practices, structures, and purposes to ‘the times’ without crossing a moral line or violating core values (see Phills 2005, pp. 27-28)? If not, is it better to linger on and become a shadow of our former institutions, or is it better to plan for closure, document and celebrate accomplishments, and make room for something new to emerge ahead of us?

It’s a new era.

PS: You can now ‘subscribe’ to Jumper and receive an email alert when a new post has been published. To do so, enter your email address in the form on the right hand side of this page. Thanks for reading!

J. A. Phills, Jr. (2005). Integrating Mission and Strategy for Nonprofit Organizations.

Photo by Floor [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wiki­me­dia Commons

What are the aims of direct subsidies to artists?

Polly Carl has posted a new piece on HowlRound, A Virtual Theater Movement,  in which she remarks on a recent trend in arts philanthropy: increased direct support for artists. This philanthropic trend prompts me to ask, “What are funders hoping to achieve by providing direct subsidies to individual artists?” and to raise the ideas of a colleague from Erasmus, artist/economist Hans Abbing, who wrote a book in 2002 called Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, an excellent summary of the chapters therein you can read here.

Abbing crafts a well structured rationale to which I cannot do justice in this post; however, I will mention a few key points. Abbing suggests that the poverty of artists is structural and relates this to a number of factors, including:

  1. The social construction of ‘art’as something holy, a notion which is contradictory to the notion of commerce and monetary exchange. He writes: “Although the arts earn approximately half of their income in the market, the arts can only maintain their sacred status when people associate the arts with the values of the gift sphere rather than the market sphere.”
  2. While artists do care about money, they tend to care more (than other professionals) about rewards such as personal satisfaction, recognition, and status. He says that most artists have been socialized to this preference and that it is ‘hardly a virtue’. As a manifestation of these preferences, he says that (for example) most artists will work their day jobs only long enough to earn sufficient income to go back to creating artistic work.
  3. Given that artists tend to exchange money for rewards such as personal satisfaction, direct subsidies do not lead to higher incomes for artists. Instead, they may simply provide incentives to more people to become artists, thereby increasing competition, and making it more difficult for any to make a living. As Abbing writes, “Subsidization increases the number of poor artists per hundred thousand inhabitants and thus increases poverty.”

So, what is achieved through subsidies to artists? Here are my own reflections:

Direct grants to artists may make it possible for an artist, at a particular point in his or her career, to make (better or more ambitious) work (by removing the necessity to maintain a day job). Funds may be used to help an artist acquire a critical resource or asset that has longer term returns (a marketable artistic output, knowledge and skills, marketing and promotion, staff, representation, a piece of equipment, a studio, a car, etc.). And often direct grants (particularly if competitve or associated with awards) send a signal to other gatekeepers (funders, donors, producers, press, intermediaries, curators, etc.) that a particular artist is worthy of time and support and may result in more resources and attention flowing to that artist. (It may be worth noting, however, that this ‘signaling’ effect can contribute to the ‘winner-take-all’ phenomenon that sometimes exists in the arts and make it even more difficult for new entrants to emerge and find resources.)

However, it seems to me that direct grants to artists are unlikely to (1) solve the longer-term systemic issue (which Polly also points out in her post) that funding to arts organizations in the US seems to increase flows not to artists but rather to buildings and administrations; and (2) (if we agree with Abbing’s point about subsidies providing incentives more more people to become artists) improve the structural poverty of artists.

It seems that these two issues will require a re-thinking of some of the bedrock ideas of the arts and culture sector in the US, among them: (1) to be legitimate you need grants and to get grants you need nonprofit status and administrators; and (2) aesthetic value and market value are at odds. There are others …

And it perhaps goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) subsidies (grants, gifts, or other forms of support) may not only lead to an  increase in the number of people who want to be artists but also the number people who want to form arts organizations. We have incentivized the exponential growth of the arts and culture sector in the US and, despite significant resources (government and private) flowing into the sector on an annual basis, we now find that both artists and the large majority of organizations are poor. There’s a lesson there.

***

Postscript: I want to close by giving a shout out to David Dower, Polly Carl, Vijay Mathew, Jamie Gahlon and everyone working at the New Play Institute. The move from Arena to Emerson strikes me as inspired and I am excited to see what comes of placing the Institute (now The Commons) in an environment suited to both academic study and practice. David’s vision for the Institute came to life through the talent and hard work of a dedicated crew of interns and staffers at Arena. And it is staggering to consider the impact of HowlRound (the brainchild of Polly Carl) in its first year (not even) of existence. Kudos to all and I look forward to seeing what emerges from The Commons.

 

 

Time to start pulling off the duct tape …

In his article, Occupy the Arts, a seat at a time, NY Times critic Anthony Tomasini (like others) pounced on recent allegations of ‘elitism’ in the arts (growing out of the Occupy movement), decrying that there are loads of free and affordable arts events and that even those organizations that charge $400 per ticket also have cheap seats (and the experience is just as great from the nosebleeds, thank you very much!). Not only do Tomasini and others seem a tad defensive when they fly their Free Tickets Flag in the face of those seeking to raise a conversation about social inequalities in the arts, it seems they rather miss the point.

Tomasini writes:

But as we try to grasp what the committed Occupy Wall Street activists are saying to the performing arts, can we all agree to put aside at last the charge of elitism? Especially, I would say from my partisan perspective, regarding classical music? At least in New York and in many other American cities, as well as most college towns, there are abundant opportunities to attend free or very affordable concerts and operas.

What arouses allegations that fine arts organizations are elitist is not (primarily) that their ticket prices are sometimes high, but rather that they are (more often than not) governed by a select group of (generally wealthy, well-educated, and often white) people whose beliefs and tastes are presumed to be ‘the best’ and, therefore, good for society as a whole. Many fine arts organizations are perceived as elitist because they seem to cater to the needs, capacities, and desires of this select group of people rather than serving their communities-at-large.

Communities in which, evidently, a lot of people are quite poor. Russell Willis Taylor of National Arts Strategies and I were chatting the other day and she mentioned that the most recent US census shows that 1 in 2 people in the US are living at the poverty level (Census: 1 in 2 Americans is Poor or Low Income).

And yet, attending a fine arts event in the US one steps into a world that seems to be (and often is) completely out of touch with the reality of that census statistic …

Arts organizations could do something in response to that statistic. Several years ago now, Appalshop (an arts and education center located in the Appalachian mountain region) realized there was a tremendous (and rather sobering) ‘growth market’ in its community (and the US generally) that was not being served by the arts: people who have been or are currently in prison, or those who know people who have been or are currently in prison. A staggering number of people fall into this category—enough that the good people at Appalshop felt that their perspectives and needs were worth taking seriously and that it was important to develop programming with them and for them. To read about this extraordinary program go to the Thousand Kites homepage.

Oh, but wait just a darned minute! Isn’t Appalshop one of those ‘community-based’ organizations? So that’s different. They’re supposed to serve the needs the community-at-large. That’s their mission. As opposed to ‘Arts’ organizations which are supposed to serve … ummmm … oh, never mind.

Pffffffff.

There is a growing financial, artistic, and psychic gap between the ‘nonprofit fine arts world’ in the US and the ‘rest of the US’.

And we’ve been trying to bridge this gap with duct tape (aka, friends with money) for at least 30 years.

It’s a new year.

What better time to tear off the duct tape, see what holds, and start building something better?

On artists being tossed off the truck

About a month ago I wrote a post on ‘‘on artists making a living and artistic directors that could make a difference but don’t.’ I had a significant number of comments (relative to other posts on my blog) including several from actors (thanks, all). One of the most inspiring posts came from Ron Russell of Epic Theatre in NYC.

Epic (founded in 2001) has operating expenses of approximately $1.7 million (according to its 2010 990 filing on Guidestar) and recently renegotiated its contract with Actors Equity Association (AEA) to enable it to (among other things) (1) put an ensemble of actors on a 20-week off-Broadway contract that includes teaching responsibilities and (2) to pay each actor a weekly salary of $900 per week (which, according to Ron, is ‘higher than the highest non-commercial minimum of any contract in NYC’). This 20-week contract also allows actors to get a year of health insurance at the end of the period. You can read about the specifics of the contract in a post on Ron’s own blog (evidently the first in a series).

Ron writes that, for years, Epic had an unspoken rule of thumb that the weekly salary of its actors would be equivalent to 1% of its total operating budget. The ratio began with its first show, which paid actors $200 per week (at the time its budget was $200,000 per year). But Ron remarks in his post that in recent years the ratio was not maintained. It was out of concern for this trend and a strong feeling that artists are critical to a thriving theater company that Epic condensed its production schedule, thereby enabling it to offer an ‘ensemble’ of actors nearly half a year’s work and a salary increase. He mentions in the post that AEA was cooperative when Epic approached the union to discuss its ideas.

In my post this was exactly the sort of thinking and action I was encouraging – however, I wasn’t aiming my comments at smaller theaters like Epic (which are often lightly institutionalized). I was directing my post to larger theaters.

If you’ve browsed the comments you’ll note that the response to the post was mixed. While most artists and many running theaters agreed that it’s an important issue and should be addressed, some theater staffers were quick to point out that theaters are barely getting by as is and that, in the most recent recession, it was administrators that took cuts to their salaries even while the weekly salaries of actors working at their theaters increased. (I feel compelled to point out that, while trimming administrative costs, many theaters also reduced the number of shows in their season, or their productions weeks, or the size of their casts, or all three–changes which would seem to negatively impact the total wages paid to artists even if their weekly rates were increased.)

More than a few people asked, “Where’s the money going to come from to pay for this?” Looking at Epic as an example, I would suggest that the short (and admittedly rather glib) answer is from other areas of the budget–as a result of restructuring and getting priorities straightened out.

While there were several comments that were quite moving, I was perhaps most struck by a comment from Zak Berkman (also from Epic) who wrote:

Reading your post and response to Carl reminded me of my experience reading OUTRAGEOUS FORTUNE – and something Zelda F told us co-founders of Epic Theatre Ensemble ten years ago. I’m paraphrasing but it was essentially this: “when we started the regional movement, somewhere along the way the playwright fell off the truck and we never turned around to pick them back up.” I think as the economics and cultural dynamics of the regional theater evolved with various larger theatres disbanding or diminishing their rep/resident companies it does seem like even more artists are tumbling from the truck… And in the process the image of the artist as someone outside of the institution, outside of the community, is more and more perpetuated: not just by the public or by funders, but even by the artists themselves.

I read Zak’s comment and imagined a jalopy filled with artists lumbering across the US and all along the route a hand reaching out and hauling arts administrators onto the flatbed while quietly giving artists a gentle shove over the side. When the vehicle arrives at its destination it is filled with a bureaucracy of administrators, who have traded in their dilapidated wheels for something spiffier that they can proudly park at the Country Club when they meet with donors.

I recently listened for the 3rd or 4th time to a terrific 2005 TED talk on ‘institutions vs. collaboration’ by Clay Shirky, in which he discusses the ways that technology and the shrinking costs of communications have enabled systems to be designed that allow groups to coordinate their activities without institutional models (this is the theme that he addresses at length in his terrific book Here Comes Everybody). In his talk, Shirky describes four side effects of institutions: (1) institutions don’t simply require employees, they require managers to oversee employees; (2) institutions require structures, which bring costs; (3) institutions are exclusionary (they can’t hire everyone); and (4) as a result of this exclusion institutions end up with a ‘professional class’.

Shirky posits that there is a tension between institution as ‘enabler’ and institution as ‘obstacle’ and elaborates on this point saying:

Institutions hate being told they’re obstacles. One of the first things that happens when you institutionalize a problem is that […] the first goal of the institution immediately shifts from whatever the nominal goal was to self preservation.

He goes on to say that when institutions are told they are obstacles they go “through something like the Kubler-Ross stages of reaction to being told you have a fatal illness.”

For decades the goal of the nonprofit arts sector was institution building. We celebrated each time an organization could beef up its administrative staff and increase its budget and survive a leadership transition. Today, many arts institutions are increasingly perceived to be obstacles rather than enablers. And as Shirky and others might predict, their impulse to this threat is to self-preserve: to say, “No matter what, I think we’d all agree, that this institution must exist; the only question is, how do we sustain it?”

Instead, as difficult as it seems, I think the impulse needs to be to ask ourselves quite seriously whether the institution (as we currently conceive of it) needs to be sustained in order for great art to be created, presented, distributed and preserved. We’ve spent decades building exclusionary, professional, hierarchical institutions; perhaps it’s time to start moving to a cooperative infrastructure model (as Shirky suggests) and releasing control of at least parts of our major institutions to artists, community members, and other stakeholders.

It’s time to get not only artists back on the truck (as Epic has done) but the ‘communities-at-large’ that presumably ‘own’ our nonprofit institutions.

Instead of more data perhaps we should discuss why we keep ignoring the data we have?

I finally had found some time this week to read Scott Walter’s excellent second post in his trilogy (all three now published) looking at the 1% vs 99% issues in the US arts and culture sector. A compelling string of comments follows this post, led by one of my other favorite bloggers, Clayton Lord, who argues two points: (1) Is it effective to turn against the ‘top’ arts organizations at a time when the arts generally are under attack? and (2) We need to collect more data to understand how to improve the system. Walters responds that the time for action has come and that collecting data has become, essentially, a way of postponing action.  As much of a data geek as I have becomenow that I’m working on a dissertation (and as much as I would advocate for transparency and the collection of better data in the sector generally), I tend to agree with Scott Walters that data is probably not going to make the difference here.

My suspicion arises from what I pointed out in a Jumper post written in response to the Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change report when it was first published: the issues outlined in that report have been in existence, and have been reported on, for decades. Furthermore, every single year that I was a grantmaker I read the annual ‘funding snapshot’ published by Grantmakers in the Arts, which discussed (among many topics) the distribution of funding. Every year, GIA seemed to report that the majority of funding was distributed to a minority of organizations and every year the percentages remained about the same.

Here’s another example of funders and arts organizations disregarding data (and a bit of a tangent, but I think it is a related and serious issue). I was recently at a meeting looking at the findings of a major new study examining the causes and impacts of the massive investments in arts facilities in recent decades. At the convening, it was discussed that at least one (and I suspect more than one) study had been done prior to this one – perhaps not as comprehensive, but certainly raising many of the same issues and concerns – and that the behavior of funders and arts organizations had not changed in response to learning the findings.

How many arts leaders (and their capital investors) were told when planning to build/expand/renovate facilities and (invest in such facilities projects) the statistics on what happens to organizations in the first five years after those buildings are built? Probably all of them. How many went ahead anyway? Probably most of them. How many arts groups struggled  to pay off debt or laid off staff or struggled to stay true to their missions and keep the building open 3-5 years after completing the project? How many donors who made ‘one time’ gifts to the capital campaign were asked to consider large operating gifts to help the organization after opening because audiences and contributed income were not as high as projected and expenses were higher than projected? Again, I’d wager a majority of them. (We could get into the related issue of the opportunity costs of so much funding getting sucked into a single organizations, but I’ll stop here.)

It seems to me there are two issues here. The first one I raised in my post a few weeks ago. The wealth/class/race disparities that we are experiencing today are, I believe, to a large extent by design. High art / low art, upper middle class / ‘the rest of us’ distinctions were very much embedded in the development of the ‘fine arts’ end of the nonprofit arts sector. For all the talk about the ‘blurring’ of lines and democratization of the arts, in reality, we seem to have a system that is still trying to maintain these distinctions. There are arts leaders and those that would fund them that would wholeheartedly agree that they are elitist and would say that this is a positive thing (meaning  that they want to do the finest work possible for the people that have the time, money, and education to appreciate it). I’ve wondered in a previous post whether such organizations should perhaps be restructured as country clubs (and have the nonprofit tax status that is given to such clubs rather than the kind that goes to charitable or educational institutions).  But that’s a topic for another day ….

The second issue is that data (facts) do not seem to change behavior unless people have an emotional connection to them, especially if the status quo is working in their favor. I tend to think that change will come in the arts sector with a change in leadership (which will bring with it a changed worldview). When I look at my generation and the generations below mine (I’m at the upper end of ‘X’) I am inspired. Of course, if we don’t turn the reins over to people now 40 or under for 20 more years and if they have no interest in working for the arts when ‘their time’ comes, then my hope in the next generation may be for nil.

In the meantime I would offer this: foundations and service organizations should not be collecting data unless they are prepared to take firm action when they get the results. I have repeatedly seen both types of organizations pursue strategies that seem to be in direct contradiction to the very research that they have commissioned. If you are not prepared (if the data implications suggest it) to stop funding or celebrating the practices of the historically leading institutions of this country then do not commission research that may lead to this conclusion. It’s a waste of tax deductible individual gifts and grant dollars.

Even better, before paying for any new studies perhaps funders and service organizations should take several months and simply read all the studies that have already been done and see whether there isn’t a preponderance of evidence already in existence that might compel us all to make different choices. I suspect it’s out there and that what we need is not more evidence but a candid discussion about why nothing has changed despite the evidence that already exists.

And to Clayton’s excellent question about whether we should turn against the leaders at a time when the arts are under attack – I am probably oversimplifying things here, but it seems to me that the majority of the attacks against the arts are political and stem from them being perceived or easily portrayed as elitist and out of touch with (and doing very little for) the majority of Americans. Just punting here, but … I wonder what would happen if the top 1% of arts organizations (who capture the majority of foundation, corporate, and individual support) willingly gave up their federal, state, and local government cash grants (perhaps the grants could be tapered off over 3 years, giving them three years to develop individual donors to replace those funds) so that those funds could be redistributed to the 99%?

Perhaps we would remove the largest weapon that the other side has to use against the arts while simultaneously redistributing government funds to smaller organizations that (let’s be honest, Mr. Kaiser), will never be competitive in the fight to attract board members or individual donors when battling against organizations 10 or 100 times their size that are armed with glossy publications, celebrity-studded galas, Fortune 500 CEOs on their boards, well-branded if not exceedingly talented artistic leaders, and a battalion of development staffers.

1% image by ThreeArt and licensed by Shutterstock.com

 

On artists making a living and artistic directors that could make a difference but don’t

Ethan Lipton

Saturday night I went to Joe’s Pub to see playwright-lounge lizard Ethan Lipton & His Orchestra perform  his new work, No Place To Go, about a playwright-lounge lizard that must decide whether to relocate or stay in the ‘the city’ when the company that has provided him with a steady ‘day-job’ (part-time no-benefits employment) for a decade decides to relocate to Mars.  It’s funny, satirical, and poignant. As you might have inferred, the piece is inspired by events in Lipton’s life.

Some of my friends who are actors, playwrights, composers, or directors are able to make something close to a living alternating between paying gigs and unemployment (if you can call having a gross income just above poverty level and no health insurance ‘making a living’); but many of them have (like Lipton) been able to pursue their careers as artists only by working day jobs (many of which have become harder to obtain or hold onto during the rather brutal current economic climate).

There was a time when one of the first principles of resident theaters in this country was that they would hire a company of actors and then cast them in multiple productions throughout the season in a combination of large and small roles. I recently re-read a speech given by W. McNeil Lowry at the Ford Foundation in which he mentions that Ford started investing in theaters in the 1960’s in part to improve circumstances for actors. While ‘acting ensembles’ still exist they are mostly in the form of ‘artist-driven collectives’ that produce shows but operate with a bare bones administrative budget. There are exceptions, but by-and-large, and for a variety of reasons, resident theaters lost their resident acting companies decades ago.

Over the same period of time, however, the administrative staffs of these same theaters became quite substantial to the point where  NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman has recently questioned whether we need “three administrators for every artist” in America. I’m not familiar with the research that underpins that question/statistic, but it certainly seems that artists with salaries are generally artists that have become arts administrators.

The past year or two I’ve begun to hear artistic directors express dismay at the fact that we give administrators salaries but we hire actors, directors, designers, and writers on a ‘contract’ basis. Unfortunately, these conversations never seem to go anywhere. I don’t hear anyone going so far as to suggest that theaters try to ‘get the acting company back together again’ or even that theaters should be paying higher wages to artists to compensate for the fact that they no longer provide stable employment.  They all seem to shrug their shoulders and shake their heads as if to say, “I wish I could do something about this”. It’s like they’ve forgotten that they are the leaders of these organizations and responsible for setting the priorities and values.

I’m no artistic director, but I can think of a few things larger theaters in the US might do for actors short of reconstituting their acting companies and their repertory models:

  • What if theaters maintained a minimum ratio between ‘wages or fees paid to artists’ and the total operating budget?
  • What if investments in the buildings, administrative budgets, and salaries of full-time staff of theaters were matched with a relative increase in artistic budgets and, specifically, wages or fees paid to artists?
  • What if LORT A theaters paid wages to artists comparable to a Broadway production contract?
  • What if, in consideration of the fact that an actor must begin working on a role before rehearsal begins and often needs time to find employment after a show ends, actors were paid a minimum of 12 weeks of salary at any LORT theater (even though they were working at the theater for only 8 of those weeks)?
  • What if theaters opting to do a play with 5 or fewer characters doubled the weekly wages of the actors?

I know …these ideas are preposterous.

I remember hearing Michael Halberstam at Writers’ Theater in Chicago speak at a TCG conference (at a brilliant session with Mike Daisey discussing his insightful and rather incendiary work How Theater Failed America) and learning that Writers’ Theater had long ago made a commitment to invest in actors (and local ones at that) and pay wages comparable to the wages paid by larger theaters. It sounded so right when I heard it, and it was clear that in this room filled with artistic and managing directors from around the country that Michael Halberstam was considered a radical for doing this.

Why is it an outlandish idea to pay as much as you can to the artists and to keep administrative or other production costs as low as possible in order to do so?

And why do we accept this strange idea that doing a play with more than 5 characters is going to bankrupt a theater with a $5- or $10- or $15 million operating budget?

Pffff.

Ethan Lipton is clearly a talented artist. As much as I’d like to hope that he will suddenly be able to make his living fulltime as an artist in this country, realistically I know that I should probably hope that he gets another part-time day job that will let him continue working as an artist.

This makes me sad. I bet it makes many artistic directors sad, as well. But we need to do more than shake our heads when we discuss that arts administrators can make a living wage in this country and that even really talented actors (and musicians and dancers) too often cannot.

We want to tell ourselves that it is not possible to do more for artists but this is simply not true.

At large institutions across this country, of course more can be done.

I welcome other outlandish suggestions …

 

So I’m at this meeting and, you’ll never believe it, there are NO press.

So, I’m attending a meeting at Arena Stage in Washington DC today. The attendees are staff members at Arena Stage, about 18 nonprofit and commercial theater producers, and a handful of artists (playwrights, composers). The purpose is to discuss issues of common concern around developing and producing new work. I am here primarily to help document the meeting. There are no press at the meeting.

A few months ago I attended a meeting of about 25 or 30 performing arts presenting curators and nonprofit theater artistic directors. The purpose was to discuss issues of common concern around the development and production of new work. I was there to help moderate the discussion. There were no press at the meeting.

Putting field conferences and such events aside, over the past ten years, on almost a monthly basis, I have attended meetings of anywhere from 15 to 100 people, various types in the arts and culture sector, who have gathered for anywhere from ½ day to 3 days to talk about issues of common concern: heads of major university presenting organizations, the artistic and managing staff  of one arts discipline or another to talk about ‘issues in the field’, staff and board members of leading orchestras in the country, those running single choreographer dance companies, those running dance presenting institutions, independent producers, people interested to come together and talk about the L3C model, etc.

I could fill this page with examples of such meetings. And in spirit and intent they were all rather similar to the meeting I am attending now. Meetings, in case anyone has never attended one, can be an effective way to have conversation with other people that you’d like to talk with. They can also, incidentally, be a colossal waste of time.

So, anyway, this will perhaps not be surprising to people who attend meetings on a regular basis but the press were not invited to, nor were they in attendance at, any of these meetings I have attended on an almost monthly basis to address various issues of common concern to people in the arts and culture sector. They just happened. People showed up and talked. Sometimes things were said that were really, really boring. Sometimes things were said that would perhaps been quite interesting to the world-at-large. However, there was an understanding that the purpose of the meeting was not to speak (at least not immediately) with and to the world about the topic, but rather to enable a productive conversation about the topic among a particular group of people.

While I’m not 100% certain about this, I would hazard a guess that the press were not alerted beforehand that these meetings were happening.  The reason is probably pretty obvious but I’ll just state it here. If the purpose is to get a group of people together to talk about something and you don’t think it will be interesting to the press or you don’t want the meeting to be a public one, you don’t send out a press release about it beforehand.

For some reason, after having invited 20 or so people to a meting, which all attendees were told was not going to be streamed on the web or in any other way made public, Arena Stage sent out a press release. And because the topic of the meeting sounds rather interesting, members of the press were eager to attend. But the agreement Arena had with all of the attendees going into this meeting was that the press would not be in attendance.

By agreeing to come to this exclusive meeting Peter Marks at the Washington Post has suggested that I and other people are part of the “1%” and “that we are required with opportunities such as this one to fling open the doors to the other 99”.

Really?  I am a big fan of transparency in the nonprofit sector and in documenting and sharing field discussions, but I think it is rather crazy to suggest that every meeting or gathering of people in the nonprofit cultural sector should be required to be open to everyone for viewing and that if attendees go to meetings that are not open to the public they are somehow betraying those who were not invited.

Leonard Jacobs (Clyde Fitch Report) Tweeted and asked me whether by ‘condoning’ this meeting “I truly believe that the 1% vs 99% argument couldn’t apply to you?” The implication that I’ve endorsed something rather egregious by showing up and documenting a meeting is strange to me. I wonder if every meeting that Leonard Jacobs attends has press in attendance?

Meetings happen. Some are intended to be public discussions and some are not.

This one, evidently, was not.

Arena did nothing wrong by wanting to have a meeting that was not public.  This happens every week of the year in nonprofit arts institutions and foundations across the US and around the world.

The only questionable move from my perspective was sending out a press release, which put the meeting on the radar of the press and then put Arena in the position of needing to defend why it had decided not to make the meeting public. Peter Marks deserved better and so did the attendees of this meeting who have now been made to look like jerks just for saying yes to an invitation to come together and talk to each other.

 

It’s been a great year. Thanks!

I may be unable to post much the next few weeks as I’m on planes and trains, buried in research materials, visiting friends and family that I too rarely get to see these days, and sprinting to the finish line on a few projects. But I want to take the opportunity to thank Doug Mclennan for the opportunity to launch Jumper on ArtsJournal.com (a gift for which I will be forever grateful) and to thank everyone that has taken the time these past twelve months to read posts, post comments, send emails, Tweet, ReTweet, republish, or otherwise engage.

In a year of transitions — single to married, no kids to stepmom, living in the US to living in the Netherlands, living in a cultural capital and seeing shows several nights a week to living in the suburbs and cooking potatoes several nights a week, working fulltime at a private foundation to going back to school — the transition to ‘blogger’ has been one of the best.

OK, not better than marrying my amazing husband, becoming a stepmom, and being adopted into my amazing Dutch family, but truly rewarding.

I will continue to challenge myself to make it worth your time to check out Jumper now and again; and I will continue to be grateful whenever you do so.

I will be back in full force in December.

Until then, gobble gobble.

 

The times may be a-changin’ but (no surprise) arts philanthropy ain’t

The Philanthropy News Digest recently sent me a bulletin with the headline, “Arts Funding Does Not Reflect Nation’s Diversity, Report Finds” which linked me to an AP Newsbreak article with the headline “Report finds arts funding serves wealthy audience, is out of touch with diversity”. My initial thought was, “Seriously? We need a report to tell us this?” The report, Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy, was produced by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and written by Holly Sidford.

Here are a couple paragraphs from the executive summary:

Every year, approximately 11 percent of foundation giving – more than $2.3 billion in 2009 – is awarded to nonprofit arts and culture. At present, the vast majority of that funding supports cultural organizations whose work is based in the elite segment of the Western European cultural tradition – commonly called the canon – and whose audiences are predominantly white and upper income. A much smaller percentage of cultural philanthropy supports the arts and traditions of non-European cultures and the  non-elite expressions of all cultures that comprise an increasing part of American society. An even smaller fraction supports arts activity that explicitly challenges social norms and propels movements for greater justice and equality.

This pronounced imbalance restricts the expressive life of millions of people, thus constraining our creativity as a nation. But it is problematic for many other reasons, as well. It is a problem because it means that – in the arts – philanthropy is using its tax-exempt status primarily to benefit wealthier, more privileged institutions and populations. It is a problem because our artistic and cultural landscape includes an increasingly diverse range of practices, many of which are based in the history and experience of lower-income and nonwhite peoples, and philanthropy is not keeping pace with these developments. And it is a problem because art and cultural expression offer essential tools to help us create fairer, more just and more civic-minded communities, and these tools are currently under-funded.

I am as discouraged as anyone by where many (but certainly not all) private foundations and wealthy individual donors give their support, and where they do not. However, my sense has never been that this behavior persists (and has perhaps become more pronounced as the demographics of the country are shifting dramatically) because the heads of foundations or the wealthiest donors in America were lacking a report explaining that too much of their money was going to arts organizations producing Western European ‘high art’ for white, upper middle class audiences.

The book Patrons Despite Themselves told very much the same story back in 1983 in its analysis of the ‘indirect’ system of funding the arts (that is, via the tax system rather than via direct grants from government). Feld, O’Hare, and Schuster concluded (among other things):

On balance, income to the arts is paid for disproportionately by the very wealthy and is enjoyed more by the moderately wealthy and the well educated. The demographic characteristics of the audience – the beneficiaries of the government aid – do not vary much across art forms. While the system tends to be redistributive, it is only so in a limited sense: from the very wealthy to the moderately wealthy.

Three of the recommendations in PDT regarding philanthropic decisionmaking are: (1) “decisions should reflect expertise in the subject”; (2) “public decisions in allocation of government support for the arts should reflect many varied kinds of tastes”; and (3) “arts decisionmaking must be independent of malign influence, that is, influence represented by narrow partisan politics or self-serving interests.”

We can see how much traction the authors had in the arts and culture sector with this message given the ‘elitism redux’ (and with more urgency) message in the new National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy report.

This is why I find it ironic when funders throw their arms up in the air, discouraged by declining attendance at ‘out-of-touch’ symphony orchestras and other fine art forms. It would seem that the growing gap between these organizations and their communities exists in large part because they continued to find support and legitimacy from high profile foundations even as they were raising ticket prices and failing to update their programming and becoming increasingly ‘non-representative’ of their communities over the past 30 years.

Moreover, if we are wondering why this decades-old message just doesn’t seem to ‘stick’ and change behavior, it may be worth taking a moment to recognize the “alliance between class and culture” that emerged with the very development of our nonprofit arts system in the US: “High art” was meant to serve the needs of urban elites and the hierarchical distinction between “high culture” and “popular culture” was meant to distinguish not simply two forms of culture but the types of people that patronized these forms of culture (DiMaggio 1982).

We have (and have had) a cultural divide in the US and the arts continue to contribute to it – not all arts, but certainly a large part of the sector that is often heralded as ‘leading’, ‘excellent’ and ‘world class’. You don’t end up with the large majority of your audience being white and wealthy by accident. Nor do you end up with the large majority of your funding portfolio going to assist those organizations that are primarily serving those white and wealthy people, by accident.

This is by design, folks.

I by no means want to suggest that it is a waste of time to periodically document the fact that private funding for the arts continues to primarily support upper middle class white people. This is, perhaps, a message that needs to be transmitted continually if the situation is to change. And, as the report accurately suggests, this issue is becoming more acute as arts funding fails to keep pace with dramatic socio-economic changes that are occurring.

Indeed. Taking the message one step further, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that organizations whose value is reliant upon old institutions, old habits, and old social networks (centered around an old concept of ‘the cultural elite’) may very well find themselves on the wrong side of a cultural change in the years to come.

Arts organizations and their funders would seem to have a choice: be part of the change or fight to the death to uphold the dying system that for decades gave their work meaning. Perhaps their own survival (if not an interest in fairer and more civic-minded communities and a sincere desire to upend social norms and support social change) will ultimately prompt some of these institutions to change their behaviors?

 Poster designed by adbusters for #OccupyWallStreet.

 

 

Digitisation in the arts: Is there a do-over if we get it wrong?

I’ve recently come across four articles/papers that have me grappling with the promise and the potential threats of digitisation in the arts and culture sector.

At the end of September I read an article in “Inside Higher Ed” discussing some truly exciting advances in the ‘digital humanities’, a branch of the field that uses “technology-heavy approaches” to study and provide new ways of understanding and experiencing history, language, art and culture. The National Endowment for the Humanities recently hosted a conference with the 60 recipients of its Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants. Here’s how one is described in the article:

Heidi Rae Cooley, an assistant professor of new media studies at the University of South Carolina, presented [a]project, called “Desperate Fishwives.” The game “intends to introduce students to the kinds of social and cultural practices that would have been in play in a 17th Century British village,” Cooley explained. Students will be tasked with accumulating resources, completing social rituals, and solving some societal ill “before church or state intervene,” she continued. Afterward, students would render a prose account of their experiences — “and thereby learn of the nature and complexities of historiography.”

On the heels of reading about these innovative projects, which appear to have the potential to not only enrich research but also rejuvinate the humanities and open them up to a wider audience, I received an announcement from the NEA about the winners of the Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge, which awards seed funds to projects pursuing innovative models for local arts journalism.

It’s also a terrific list of projects representing a diversity of approaches: a collective of trained journalists publishing across media platforms (Charlotte, N.C.), mobile video booths where audience members can record reviews (Detroit), an online marketplace and mobile app where citizen journalists can pitch stories on the local arts scene, team up with traditional media outlets, and produce the stories (Miami); a partnership between a university (staff, student, faculty, journalists) and a daily newspaper to expand arts coverage (Philadelphia); and a local arts event mapping feature + mobile app which enables people to add comments, reviews, and images (San Jose).

I was sincerely buoyed by the openness and forward-looking enthusiasm by those leading the projects featured in both of these articles, and  by the government agencies and private funders providing a platform for them along with some seed funding.

Then, last week, I came across the article on the Metropolitan Opera’s Fundraising Feat for FY11: it was announced that the Met had successfully raised $182 million for its most recently ended season. [To be honest, I’m not sure that I would characterize this as ‘great news’ …] In any event, the article also highlighted that the Met’s HD broadcasts had made a “profit” of $11 million (though the article does not clarify how this profit is calculated) and that, since 2008, attendance has flattened and even declined modestly for its live performances at Lincoln Center. On this point, the article states:

Mr. Gelb acknowledged for the first time that competition from the HD transmissions may have cannibalized box office sales, particularly from people in nearby cities like Boston, who might have traveled to New York before. But the financial loss was offset, he argued, by donor contributions from across the country that were generated by the excitement surrounding the broadcasts.

***

As I think I may have mentioned in a previous post, I was assigned as the lecturer for a course called “The Creative Economy and Creative Organizations” at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. One of the texts we read and discussed this term is a paper by David Hesmondhalgh, “The digitalisation of music” (a chapter in Pratt & Jeffcutt’s 2009 book Creativity, Innovation, and the Cultural Economy). Hesmondhalgh’s primary argument is that we need to understand the competing interests between those that produce and circulate “goods and services based on acts of symbolic creativity” (think: ‘operas’) and those that create the devices and processes on and by which they are increasingly experienced–many of which change the way we experience culture (think: file sharing, smart phones, etc.). He makes the point that these two sectors of capital have differing goals, notions of  creativity, and abilities to lobby government.

The Hesmondhalgh paper and the articles mentioned above have been circling each other in my mind for the past few days and have raised some questions for me related to the nonprofit arts and culture sector:

  1. Are we conscious of the competing interests of different sectors of capital and how they may be shaping our future?
  2. As we embrace digitalization, is the nonprofit sector, in particular, holding itself accountable for making sure that artists are supported and not further exploited by the progress that digitalisation provides in reaching more people with great art? Put another way, in this ‘knowledge economy’ race to own, control, and exploit the global intellectual property rights in perpetuity to anything and everything, will and should nonprofits hold themselves accountable for fostering diversity and not consolidation, keeping culture accessible, and making sure that artists are able to retain rights to the work they produce or, if not, get their fair share of profits?
  3. As new media technologies enable us to develop new tools and methods for creating, distributing, documenting, and discussing the arts and humanities are we conscious that we are not simply providing additional outlets, we are forever influencing the ways that people experience these forms of culture and that in all likelihood a good number will prefer these new methods to the old ones. I don’t know the statistics on this, but I would imagine that it’s likely that HD broadcasts are a complement for the live performance for some and a substitute for others and that this balance will evolve over time (that is, that for more and more people the broadcasts may become a substitute for the real thing).

This last point, in particular, I do not put forward in an effort to quash enthusiasm for the HD Broadcasts (or Desperate Fishwives, for that matter). I am a fan of the broadcasts and they have clearly expanded the reach of the Metropolitan Opera productions in a way that is pretty mindblowing. But when I read the line in the article noting that Gelb suspects that the broadcasts “may have cannibalized box office sales” for the live performances in NY I thought, “Of course … it’s only natural that they would. And surely you thought about this before you pursued the HD path? Surely, having come from Sony, you understood where this would lead?”

These three projects are not the same and by lumping them into one post I don’t intend to imply that they are easily compared. But I would suggest (following Hesmondhalgh’s point) that they are all changing the ways that people experience the arts and humanities. It’s good we are marching forward with the times … these are exciting developments. One of the best parts of these NEH and NEA programs is the opportunity to experiment with new models and discover what happens as a result.

If there is a point I want to make at the end of this way-too-long post it is perhaps this: Better that we in the nonprofit sector wrestle sooner than later with commerce v. art, principles v. pragmatics, preservation v. advancement of art forms, tradition v. innovation, diversity v. consolidation, local v. global, and the ethics and legalities of it all than simply follow the practices of the commercial herd and hope for the best.

 

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