Jumper

Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

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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On “looky-loos” and the institutions who are desperate for them and desperate for them to behave

Bathroom Celebs at the Met Gala. Photo: Courtesy of Twitter/victuuris95

On the recommendation of a couple friends who are artists I recently read Dave Hickey’s fantastic 1997 memoir Air Guitar: Essays on Art & Democracy.

As I was reading a couple essays, in particular, I kept thinking about the recent tizzy over the behavior of a pack of celebrities attending the Met gala, who hid out in the bathroom to socialize, take selfies, and smoke.  AJ blogger, Judith Dobrzynski, who commented on the incident in her post, If This Can Happen at the Met and the British Museum … We Have a Big Problem, suggests that the Met is just one (though perhaps an extreme and high profile) example of a growing trend: people who don’t know how to behave in cultural institutions. In her post, Dobrzynski also recounts that the British Museum suffers approximately 50 acts of “pencil graffiti on its ancient sculptures” each year (mostly by schoolchildren).

Her conclusion:

I’ve increasingly noticed the posting of Don’ts, and sometimes Dos, at museums. They do not seem to be enough.

Reading Hickey’s memoir this past week I was suddenly struck by the way arts organizations have set themselves up for this very situation.

There are a few essays in Hickey’s memoir that I suspect will become lifelong touchstones for me. One is called “Romancing the Looky-Loos.” Looky-loos is Hickey’s dad’s term for those who pay “their dollar at the door” for concerts or art experiences, “but contribute nothing”–spectators, rather than participants. Hickey distinguishes these two types writing, “while spectators must be lured, participants just appear, looking for that new thing.”

Participants show up (no luring necessary) Hickey argues, because they have a “passion for what is going on” and because showing up is a way “to increase the social value of the things you love.” Participants show up for the conversation (both literal and metaphorical). While participants decide what they love and then give it their attention, Hickey says spectators love whatever is the winning side—”the side with the chic building, the gaudy doctorates, and the star-studded cast. They seek out spectacles whose value is confirmed by the normative blessing of institutions and corporations.”

The very next essay in the volume—also a new favorite—is called “The Heresy of Zone Defense.” Among other themes, Hickey riffs on basketball and how it has evolved since 1891 from being a “socially redeeming” activity for recidivist, working-class youth to a sport that is “more joyful, various, and articulate.” That evolution, Hickey argues, is a result of “changing the rules when they threatened[ed] to make the game less beautiful and less visible.” Put another way, the rule changes in basketball over the past century all have been designed to improve the game’s aesthetics.

Hickey contrasts the sort of rules that seek to liberate from those that seek to govern and says that “nearly every style change in fine art has been, in some way, motivated” by the latter. He contrasts the evolution in basketball from that of art, writing:

Thus basketball, which began this century as a pedagogical discipline, concludes it as a much beloved public spectacle, while fine art, which began this century as a much-beloved public spectacle, has ended up where basketball began—in the YMCA or its equivalent—governed rather than liberated by its rules.

Putting the two essays together I’m left with a few thoughts on both the Met smoking-in-the-girls’-room scandal and the more general “problem” (as it is being framed) of people “misbehaving” at cultural institutions:

First, if our economic models depend on drawing exponentially more looky-loos than participants then is it really reasonable to expect those lured to our events by aggressive marketing or buzz to be sincerely interested in the arts experience and aware of the rules of the game, so to speak?

Second, while concerns around smoking in the building or drawing on valuable artworks are, indeed, warranted, it strikes me that the big problem is not that people are no longer following museum rules on how to behave. The big problem is that, in response to this situation, museums seem to think the answer is to post more rules–a strategy that has already taken much of the joy out of arts experiences. Of course the celebs that are forced to make a command performance at the Met gala, or risk the wrath of Anna Wintour, rebel in the bathroom. Of course the school kids, confused perhaps because in other areas of life they are encouraged to create and participate, mistakenly draw on the sculptures.

So what’s the solution if, as Dobrzynski suggests, over time an increasing portion of the culture doesn’t seem to get the rules, or seems to grasp them but not to respect them?

Perhaps to find a solution we first need to reframe the problem from a version of “How do we survive in this world that is clearly no longer good enough for us?” to something else. Rather than trying to figure out how to police the culture, perhaps arts institutions could ask themselves:

  • Where are we aggressively luring looky-loos rather than inviting participation? and
  • Where are our rules seeking to govern artists and participants, rather than liberate them?

And let’s be honest: How many arts organizations actually want or expect meaningful participation from their version of the looky-loos? I’d wager most are lured primarily for the optics and economic gains to the institution.We want to eat our cake and have it, too. We want everyone to show up but we don’t want to widen our conception of what makes for a great arts experience. Inviting everyone and then shoving a long list of rules in their hands is a short-term solution likely to result in many of those people henceforth looking elsewhere for an experience that is participatory, relevant, and joyful–the NBA finals, perhaps.

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Is artistic leadership at America’s arts institutions lacking? Is this at the root of declining relevancy?

Joe Horowitz has written a stirring essay on the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, and New York Philharmonic on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Lincoln Center. In response, ArtsJournal has asked a number of people to consider the essay and to weigh in on a series of questions (paraphrased):

Is artistic leadership at America’s arts institutions lacking? Moreover, is this at the root of declining relevancy of the arts? Is something more, or better, needed from America’s arts institutions, particularly at this vexing and critical time?

This essay explores these questions through the lens of the American theater. At the heart of this essay rests the paradox of the Public Arts Institution—a paradox captured beautifully in this passage from a 1970 essay by Arena Stage co-founder, Zelda Fichandler, Theatres or Institutions?[1]

I am not very strong on community giving, except perhaps when it represents only a small percentage of the total. I think we could well do without the hand that rocks the cradle, for the hand that rocks the cradle will also want to raise it in a vote and mix into the pie with it. For while a theatre is a public art and belongs to its public, it is an art before it is public and so it belongs first to itself and its first service must be self-service. A theatre is part of its society. But it is a part which must remain apart since it is also chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter.

This is a paradox I also wrestled with in an essay published in the most recent issue of Artivate called On Entrepreneurialism and Publicness (or Whose Theatre is it, Really?). 

Part I: Are We Weeding, or Breeding, Artistic Leadership Out of the Field?

Joe Horowitz’s story is a tale of three organizations, only one of which (New York City Ballet) succeeded in changing the face of its art form. What made the difference at the Ballet? By my reading, there was first and foremost a will on the part of both Balanchine and his impresario, Kirstein, to do so; and second, conditions were ripe for these institutional entrepreneurs to make their move.

Last year I worked on a case study on the Margo Jones Theatre, founded in 1947 (in Dallas, Texas) and hailed by most theater historians as the prototypical modern resident theater. Jones produced exclusively new plays and classics. In an average season Jones produced 4-5 premieres and two classics; in contrast, of 23 resident theaters surveyed in 1965 by journalist Sandra Schmidt, 15 produced no new plays at all and four produced only one.[2] At the time, most resident theaters exemplified the vibrant museum model described in Horowitz’s essay.

Historians often chalk this up to a discomfort with new fare on the part of both institutional leaders and their audiences. Perhaps. It seems Jones overcame discomfort by reading a minimum of one new script every day of her life from her college days onward and, more importantly, she made her audience comfortable with new fare through the same process: repeated exposure.

Like Balanchine, Jones had a vision and the will to execute it. Importantly, she also had a business manager who supported her commitment to new plays and a board of directors that gave her free reign. Equally as important, resident theater in America was in its pioneer period. But the first condition is critical. Jones was devoted to playwrights and preached far and wide that nonprofit regional theaters had a moral duty to produce new plays being rejected by the commercial stage, in lieu of relying on Broadway revivals–fare favored by both commercial winter stock companies and community theaters at the time.

We seem to have few such zealots running American LORT theaters these days.

Why is that?

I don’t believe it’s because none exist.

Consider the driving emphasis on instilling arts institutional leaders with business skills since 1960; the now mandatory requirements of a track record of raising money and delivering box office hits (that will fill Broadway-sized venues) to attain the job of artistic director at a major theater; the lack of artists on nonprofit boards, or even many individuals with an aesthetic sensibility; and the dramatic power shift from artist-leaders to business-leaders, generally.

Maybe we have been breeding, or weeding, artistic leadership out of the field?

Margo Jones didn’t like to raise money from the community, she demanded 100% control of her theater, and she walked into the job interview saying to the board, in essence: Count me out if you are planning to be a theater of the past, “striving to exist on box-office hits,” as I am only interested in creating “a true playwright’s theatre, presenting original scripts and providing playwrights with an outlet for their work.”[3]

If Margo Jones were applying to run an American theater in the hinterlands of the US today she probably wouldn’t stand a chance.

Part II: Artists are Getting it Done … But Are Institutions Getting in the Way?

I recently had the privilege of attending a Salzburg Global Seminar called The Art of Resilience: Creativity, Courage and Renewal. Among many inspiring presentations was one by artist Anida Yoeu Ali, a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. Anida talked about a number of her works, including a performance installation called The Red Chador: Thresholds, created for a 2016 Smithsonian event called Crosslines: A Culture Lab on Intersectionality. The work asked viewers: “Can we accept a Muslim woman as a patriotic woman?”

The Red Chador: Threshold, Washington DC, USA | May 28-29, 2016. Commissioned by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Performance by Anida Yoeu Ali.                               Photo Courtesy of Les Talusan

Over breakfast one morning I asked Anida, “So how would you respond to the question, ‘What is the role of the artist post-Trump?” and she said, “Same as always. No different. Get up and do the work.”

The day after the election Anida took to the streets of Seattle, where she is now based, wearing the red, glittering chador she created for the Smithsonian performance installation and holding a sign that on one side said, I AM A MUSLIM and, on the other, BAN ME.

The Red Chador: The Day After, Seattle, USA | Nov 9, 2016. Performance by Anida Yoeu Ali.  Photo courtesy of Studio Revolt.

What’s my point?

Artists are doing something about it, same as always.

However, most artists depend upon institutional outlets for protection, platforms, and resources for that something to be fully realized.

To this very point, the New York Times recently ran an article on a new play by Robert Schenkkan, written in a “white-hot fury” in one week. Characterized as a “disquieting response to the Trump era,” it’s called Building the Wall.  Schenkkan says in the article:

We no longer live in a world that is business as usual—Trump has made that very clear—and if theater is going to remain relevant, we must become faster to respond.

While the article goes on to mention that a group of theaters has committed to producing the play within the next few months, it’s worth noting that (a) this sort of response is exceedingly rare; and (b) the theaters that have stepped up are largely part of a small alliance of exemplary midsized theaters (the National New Play Network) that has fought the past decade or so to shift stultifying practices around new play development in the US.

Most institutions are not able to respond quickly to artists (doing something about it) in large part because artists exist outside of institutions rather than within them. While resident theaters were initially idealized as homes for actors, writers, and designers what they have become in reality is homes for administrators and technicians. Even when artists are in residence they quite often have minimal (if any) power within institutions, or influence on them. And we have had a number of instances of institutional cowardice (if not censorship) in recent years. (See, e.g. this article on the experience of Anida Yoeu Ali and Gregg Deal at the Smithsonian event mentioned above.)

I have heard playwrights say that they write for television these days not only because they make more money but because it is a more creative and validating environment than the nonprofit American theater. That is a sobering thought.

Perhaps any lack of courage, vision, or moral imagination in arts organizations is related to the extent to which arts leaders have managed risk by disempowering artists or placing them outside the institution?

Part III: Do arts leaders identify too much with their upper middle class donors?

I was at a conference a few weeks ago and heard a development staffer bemoaning over her morning croissant that she had spent the better part of the prior two weeks trying to learn everything she could about some Ultra-High-Net-Worth-Couple in her city so that her institution could launch a stealth courtship and, with any luck, land a major gift. She commented that, as far as anyone could tell, this couple had never stepped foot in the doors of the institution. She fretted over the fact that she was dedicating every working moment to deeply understanding two wealthy people with no relationship whatsoever to the institution; while nary a nanosecond was being expended trying to learn about the values, hopes, dreams, and challenges of the loyal patrons who were not in a position to make an extraordinary gift to the institution.

While donor research and cultivation has become a serious science, the ideology driving such behavior has been with us since the founding of the nonprofit-professional arts sector in the US. I am amazed that we are able to say with a straight face that America’s 20th century nonprofit-professional theater companies were largely established to serve the general public when many institutionalized a practice (at their inceptions) that would ensure they paid attention to the needs of the upper middle class at the expense of all others.

In the 1960s Danny Newman persuaded theaters that it was better (not just economically better, but morally better) to focus their time and resources on the 3% of the population that is inclined to subscribe and to ignore everyone else. Though some artistic directors rebelled mightily against this approach in the theater industry—Richard Schechner and Gregory Mosher were among the most vocal who noted that it was undemocratic and had a stultifying effect on programming—it was embraced wholeheartedly by a majority of institutions. This was in large part because it was strongly encouraged by the Ford Foundation and its proxy at the time, Theatre Communications Group.

Today marketing firms promulgate customer relationship management models like this one promoted by TRG Arts. This sort of philosophy upheld over time will invariably orient an organization toward caring more about those who can buy more tickets and donate more money.

Arts institutions cannot uphold Zelda Fichandler’s notion of the theatre as belonging to the public but first belonging to itself if they are, essentially, social clubs for the upper middle class. The institution cannot be “chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter” if it has neither independence nor publicness.

Perhaps a driving focus on cultivating the patronage of the upper middle class has skewed the politics and purposes of arts institutions, and also has been a major factor in declining relevancy? On the most fundamental level nonprofit art institutions are among the cultural spaces that are able to bring people together across divides on equal terms—a vital function that is, at times like these, in and of itself a political act. However, it seems we have too gladly ceded that role to sports and (lately) to some exemplary libraries around the world (see, e.g., the library parks in Colombia) that have transformed their purposes for the 21st century.

Part IV: Good We Are Awake. Now, Can we Stay Awake?

Shortly after Trump was elected a particular a phrase from Tony Kushner’s masterpieces Angels in America, parts I and II began to appear on my Facebook feed, which is to a great extent populated by liberal arts types like me. That phrase: “The Great Work Begins.”

The statement, in turns hopeful and harrowing depending on its context in the plays, provoked two questions for me:

What is our Great Work in the arts? (which I addressed in this Jumper post); and

Why is this Great Work beginning only now, after Trump’s election?

Put another way, why does it so often take a crisis for those of us working in the arts, in the so-called civic sphere, to engage with the struggles, the pain, the hopes, the dreams, the fears … of our communities-at-large?

The extraordinary observer of the human condition, writer Rebecca Solnit, reflects in her beautiful book, Hope in the Dark:

Americans are good at responding to crisis and then going home to let another crisis brew.

She says this is, in part …

… because we tend to think that political engagement is something for emergencies rather than, as people in many countries (and Americans at other times) have imagined, as part and even a pleasure of everyday life.

“The problem” as she puts it, “seldom goes home.”

Unlike television (and libraries) the American theater didn’t use the Digital Revolution combined with the Great Recession as an opportunity to radically transform itself so as to become more relevant, more vibrant, more accessible, more vital—and yes, more economically sustainable.

It seems we have another shot as, for many in the arts sector, Trump seems to represent a wake-up call.

Perhaps now is the time to prioritize artistic vision over business skills; to grant artists primacy within the arts institution; and to shift attention from wealthy donors to the community-at-large. Perhaps now is the time to embrace the paradox of being Public Arts Institutions: a part of society—but a part which must remain apart in order to fulfill its multifaceted role as “chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter.”

Finally, perhaps engaging in public affairs for the next four years will remind arts institutions that this is not the Great Work we must do now, this is the everyday work–the doing something about it–we should have been doing the past 30 years and that we must continue to do post 2020.

PS – Huge shout out to Deborah Cullinan at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I love her notion of art centers existing to ignite radical citizenship and I love the YBCA campaign that resulted in the tagline pictured in the photo at the top of this post, which was an inspiration for this piece. 

***

[1] Fichandler, Z. (1970). Theatres or Institutions? The American Theatre 1969-70: International Theatre Institute of the United States, Volume 3. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), p. 110.

[2] Schmidt, S. (1965). The Regional Theatre: Some Statistics. The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 50-61.

[3] Sheehy, H. (1989). Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press), p. 88.

When communities become markets, citizens become consumers, and culture becomes an exploitable product

Photo by Duncan C, Flickr

Photo Chapman’s Homer, Christchurch by Duncan C, published on Flickr, Creative Commons License.***

A couple weeks back I had the privilege to give a talk in Christchurch, NZ at an event called The Big Conversation—hosted by Creative New Zealand, the major arts funding body for the country. The talk, Transformation or Bust: When Hustling Ticket Sales and Contributions is Just Not Cutting It Anymore (click on the link and it will take you to a transcript) was intended to address the general conference theme, Embracing Arts / Embracing Audiences. It was assembled on top of four cornerstone ideas:

  • Michael Sandel’s argument that we have shifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society in which, as he puts it, market relations and market incentives and market values come to dominate all aspects of life.
  • The notion that, paradoxically, the arts are facing a crisis of legitimacy (says John Holden) at the very moment when we have so much to potentially contribute as a remedy to the erosion of social cohesion that is resulting from global migration, economic globalization, a culture of autonomy, and the Internet (see the David Brooks op-ed, How Covenants Make Us).
  • The four futures for the social sectors predicted by NYU professor Paul Light in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis: (1) the unlikely scenario that nonprofits would be rescued by significant increases in contributions; (2) the more probable scenario that all nonprofits would suffer; (3) the most likely scenario that the largest, most visible, and best connected nonprofits would thrive while others would fold; and (4) the hopeful scenario that the sector would undergo positive transformation that would leave it stronger and more impactful, likely only if pursued deliberately and collectively by nonprofits and their stakeholders.
  • And a concept I encountered on Doug Borwick’s excellent blog: transformative engagement, by which Doug means engagement with the community that changes the way an organization thinks and what it does.

Building on these, I argue that in the US arts and culture sector we have for too long ignored or denied the costs of so-called progress in the arts–meaning, for instance, the costs of professionalization, growth, and the adoption of orthodox marketing practices including so-called customer relationship management and I suggest five ways that arts organizations may need to adapt their philosophies and practices in relationship to their communities if their goal is deeper, more meaningful engagement.

Ultimately, I pull the various threads of the talk together in a framework that seeks to conceptualize the difference between embracing the community and embracing the market. In setting this up, I build on Internet guru Seth Godin’s notion of, essentially, competing worldviews that inform the way companies approach marketing. In an interview with Krista Tippett on her NPR show, On Being, Godin remarks:

There’s one view of the world called the Wal-Mart view that says that what all people want is as much stuff as possible for as cheap a price as possible. … And that’s a world based on scarcity. I don’t have enough stuff. How do I get more stuff?… There’s a different view, which is the view based on abundance. [And] in an abundance economy the things we don’t have enough of are connection …and time.

Here’s the PPT slide of the framework I created that synthesizes the various ideas in my New Zealand talk:

worldviews

In many ways, this talk explores an idea that I first began to ponder when I wrote a blog post for the Irvine Foundation in response to its question: Is there an issue in the arts field more urgent than engagement? If so, what is it?

In my post, I answered the question in the affirmative and then offered the following as a more urgent issue:

While lack of meaningful engagement in the arts is indeed troubling, I would offer that a larger problem is that the nonprofit, professional arts have become, by-and-large, as commodified, homogeneous, transactional, and subject to market forces as every other aspect of American society. From where I sit, the most important issue in the arts field these days may be that the different value system that art represents no longer seems to be widely recognized or upheld — by society-at-large, or even within the arts field itself.

For the New Zealand talk I tried to explore the ramifications of the loss of this “different value system” (Jeanette Winterson) and how it relates to the issue of engagement.

Gap Filler: On Sustaining the Social Cohesion that Emerges out of Disasters

Because the conference took place in Christchurch (where two devastating earthquakes struck in 2010 and 2011) I reflected at the top of the talk on the solidarity and social cohesion that often arise in response to natural disasters. In his new book, Tribe,  Sebastian Junger introduces the seminal research of a man named Charles Fritz to explain why this is. Fritz asserts “that disasters thrust people into a more ancient, organic way of relating.” … “As people come together to face a threat,” Fritz argues, “class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group” (Junger 2016, 53-54).

Yet, as Junger reports, all too often, these effects are temporary. One of the best parts of the conference in New Zealand was being introduced to some amazing organizations and projects here—including Gap Filler, an intiative that began with a few people asking how they could sustain the sense of fellowship, volunteerism, and community that arose out of the first earthquake. One of the co-founders of Gap Filler, Dr. Ryan Reynolds, gave a truly inspiring presentation at the conference. It struck me listening to his story that Gap Filler could be the poster child for Creative Placemaking.

gap filler

Gap Filler’s first ten-day project was launched in November 2010. It began because Reynolds and others wanted somehow to fill the gaps in the physical and metaphysical landscape of Christchurch left by the loss of hundreds of buildings, including dozens of bars, clubs, and restaurants. They had the idea to gather a group of volunteers together to transform the empty lot where a popular restaurant, South of the Border, once stood into a temporary space for citizens to once again come together and eat, drink and socialize. Over the course of ten days—and driven largely by citizens who showed up on their own initiative to contribute to and enjoy the temporary space—the site came to host a temporary garden café, live music, poetry readings, an outdoor cinema, and more. The success of this first project led to further initiatives including art installations, concerts, workshop spaces and eventually semi-permanent structures. You can read more about Gap Filler’s projects here. (And here is an article, written in 2013, about the revitalizing influence of the earthquake on the Christchurch arts scene.)

Gap Filler was only one of several remarkable organizations/projects I heard about at The Big Conversation.

In any event, if you read the talk, I hope you find it worthwhile and will share any responses to it on Jumper.

And speaking of things worth reading …

ninas book

Nina Simon has a new book out! Those who have read Jumper for a while, or have heard me speak at conferences, know that the topic of matteringness or relevance is one I have been circling and diving into with some regularity for the past decade—and I am by no means alone in this. One of the greatest minds on this topic is Nina Simon at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and she has a new book out—The Art of Relevance. I won’t be united with my copy until I’m back in the US next month, at which point I look forward to reading it and writing about it on Jumper. In the meantime, I strongly encourage anyone interested in the topics of relevance, engagement, or participation in the arts to buy it and read it, as well.

***This photo is of the stunning sculpture by Michael Parekowhai, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,  and it was taken at one of the many sites where the work was situated in Christchurch following its presentation at the 54th Venice Biennale. It is currently housed at the Christchurch Art Gallery and is considered to be a symbol of the resilience of the people of Christchurch following the earthquakes.

On tipping the dominoes then walking away …

shutterstock_77378713A couple months back I was one of a number of people interviewed for a research project of Grantmakers in the Arts. The interview was aimed at understanding my influences as a funder (when I worked at the Mellon Foundation) and drawng out some lessons learned. At one point in the discussion I found myself saying that I had probably left grantmaking just in time because I was not sure I understood how to be an effective arts grantmaker over the long haul.

While at Mellon I found myself continually questioning whether it was better to provide stable support to a few over a very long period of time (forsaking all others) or to “cycle out” grantees after a reasonable period of time in order to make room for new entrants.

No matter the choice, the questions that ensued were maddening: If “fewer but larger” which few given that so many worthy organizations needed support? If “spreading the wealth” then what was a “reasonable” timeline for ending support given that organizations and their projects were chronically underfunded?

Without a doubt, a common funder’s dilemma.

And there were other aspects that troubled me.

For one, since no single funder is generally a “majority stakeholder” in most arts organization, the fate of any organization is a factor of actions by quite a number of private and public donors, who can have competing values, rationales, measures of success, and goals.

And perhaps most disconcerting, as time went on it felt increasingly difficult to see the sector with clear eyes. As in any organization, attention in a foundation is focused on some problems but not others. The lens is narrowed and the field is seen through the logic of the current “regime” and through the eyes of current grantees. Problems are problems only insofar as they can be addressed by and classified within existing program areas and can be grasped and articulated using the house rhetoric. Whole swaths of the sector and their issues, by necessity, become invisible in order for the funder to maintain any sense of purpose and potency; to think about everything one can’t fund is to invite a nervous breakdown on an organizational level.

***

About a month ago, I was reading an oft-cited essay from 1970 by Zelda Fichandler, co-founder of Arena Stage in Washington DC and pioneer of the resident theater movement. The essay is called Theatres or Institutions?* Perhaps because this GIA interview had been on my mind I found myself circling back to a couple of paragraphs in which Fichandler questions and reflects upon the impact of first receiving funding (when the Ford Foundation, NEA, and others first began to support theaters) and then losing it a little over a decade later. (Emphases added by me.)

She writes:

What happens when the money comes in a little? When you get enough from the Ford Foundation or the National Endowment to move ten squares and buy the Atlantic City Boardwalk? Is it migraine headache time? What time is it when you are suddenly endowed with all the blessings of institutionalization? (Mind you, the blessings aren’t something that are forced on you. They’re something you asked for without quite knowing what you’re getting.) Time for the Table of Organization? Time for the specialization of labor? Time to begin to consider the internal distribution of wealth now that you’ve got some? The promoting, marketing and distribution of the product? Ways to increase efficiency, ways to rationalize use of time and manpower, ways to diversify so as to appeal to a broader base, ways to close the gap between income and spending? It’s headache time and Surprise! Surprise! Time. One has become a private enterprise in a capitalistic society. The “not for profit” in your papers really says No Parking. Shades of Adam Smith and the Ford Motor Company of American and Pan, where hast thou fled? (p. 109)

[…]

We’ll need more money than we are getting and we must get it in a different way. Arena Stage has just received a terminal grant from the Ford Foundation which, partially matched by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts will just about cover our deficit for the last season and for this one and the next. We have also received other grants from these and from other foundations, among them a three-year grant for a workshop program for our acting company, a three-year grant for the training at minimal salaries of young craftsmen under a production intern scheme, a three-year grant to increase the salaries of a ten-person nucleus of an acting company. This was very early on, around 1958 or 59—to entice actors from the magnetic field of New York. …

I mention these in particular to make the point that while it may be better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, these grants had such a seminal meaning for our organization that when they were withdrawn, or, more accurately not renewed, the trauma was so intense that one wondered whether it would have been better not to have had them than to have had them and lost them.

Not knowing from one year to the next whether there will be a spring, or only summer, winter and fall, one simply does not know how to organize one’s closet. I suggest an end to this tithing tease. I suggest a recognition that subsidy is here to stay or we cannot possibly. (p. 110)

Reading this last line, in particular, brings to mind some of Scott Walters’ recent posts on the need for artists to create new business models that are not dependent on contributions in order to maintain their independence (summarized here by Laura Axelrod).

I am compelled by the dead-in-your-tracks ending of the last sentence of Fichandler … or we cannot possibly. Cannot what? Cannot conceive of any way, perhaps, to continue the revolution that the resident theater movement was intended to be if our comrades in the large private foundations and federal arts agency abandon the cause.

Less than a decade after she spoke these words major funding from Ford would be evaporating and funds from the NEA would begin to flatten before beginning their descent. And by 1978 there would be a palpable sense that the resident theater movement had taken a wrong turn at some point along the way.

I keep returning to these paragraphs from Fichandler’s essay because they illustrate poetically and potently what happens in the psyche of a grantee when a little bit of money comes in and when it, inevitably, goes away. In response to the question, Would it have been better not to have received these grants than to have received them and lost them? I finding myself wanting to shout back at the page, “Yes! You would have been better off never having received the money!”

No matter how good the intentions of most foundations over the past several decades it seems the “tithing tease” has debilitated rather than strengthened the sector. And by debilitated I mean weakened the ability of organizations to enact their missions.

So what is the problem? I find myself wanting to push past questions like whether or not the field would benefit from more GOS and less project-based support, or from longer-term rather than shorter-term grants and ask a more  philosophical question … Something like …

Is it ethical for funders to start what they cannot finish?

Cannot because they do not have the resources … Or cannot because they are unwilling to commit to full funding or long-term support because it is believed that these create an unhealthy resource dependency …  Or because there is a desire to keep options open in order to be able to pursue new initiatives or respond to new grantees at will.

The assumption embedded in the term “start” is that I’m not talking here about the kind of helping hand that simply wants to support ongoing programs or operations. I’m talking about the kind of hand that seems to want to push, pull,  prod, coax, launch, build, expand, change, or otherwise disrupt the status quo.

Some follow-on questions …

  • Is it ethical to de-fund organizations that are achieving agreed upon goals, if you know that removing support will destabilize the organization or the funded program?
  • Is it ethical to provide “seed funding” if the organization is unlikely to be able to raise the remaining funds needed to finance the initiative (in the start up phase and over time).
  • Is it ethical to start relationships with new organizations (i.e., cut the pie into smaller pieces) when those that are currently funded are already receiving inadequate support?

Fichandler says it all in those paragraphs: (1) Even small amounts of money can have undue influence. She isn’t just talking about new programs being started, she’s talking about a shift in the logic, the goals, and the processes of her theater. (2) When money goes away it can be traumatic–not simply because it’s hard to replace the cash but because it feels like, and signals to others, a withdrawal of support for the cause.

As far as I can tell not much has changed with funders since 1970. We continue (at times) to give organizations just enough money to encourage them toward one path rather than another (a choice that we know will consequently enable certain future paths and disable others) and then we walk away when they are just far enough down the path that they can’t really turn back.

We still call it philanthropy but perhaps we need another name for an action that essentially amounts to tipping the dominoes and then walking away.

***

PS – I am delighted (!) to have been asked to attend and blog about the 2013 Grantmakers in the Arts conference in Philadelphia in early October. I will be posting on the GIA website and also on Jumper.

*Essay published by the International Theatre Institute (US) in a journal called Theatre 3 (one of five such journals).

On organizations evolving: when short-term coping mechanisms become the new way of doing business

icebergsA couple weeks ago, one of my favorite arts bloggers, Andrew Taylor (a/k/a The Artful Manager) wrote a post whose title conveys a pretty strong thesis: Organizations don’t evolve; they cope.  While I share Andrew’s skepticism of the field’s use of natural world metaphors (ecosystem, ecology, evolve, adapt, sustainability, etc.) it’s not because I think the metaphors don’t apply (within limits); it’s because I think we sometimes misapply them.

Andrew begins his analysis with a comparison between individual organizations and individual organisms, writing:

We’re calling on existing organizations to evolve to the new environment, as living organisms evolve to theirs. Only, individual organisms don’t evolve. They only cope. So, we can tell a nonprofit corporate organization to evolve just as effectively as we can tell a fish to grow opposable thumbs. Its traits and tendencies were inherited at birth. It can adjust its tendencies, it can retrain its reflexes, but it’s still a nonprofit corporate organization, even if it can do new tricks.

He then rightly points out a couple paragraphs later that there are differences between an organization and a fish:

An organization is a bundle of people, things, processes, and traditions, bound by contracts and covenants, and restricted in its operation by laws, codes, and norms. A fish is, well, a fish.

The distinctions that Andrew makes between an organization and a fish are critical; indeed, it is these very distinctions that would seem to make it possible for an organization to evolve and impossible for a fish to do so.

Moreover, I would argue that (legally constraining, in principle, as the form may be) the nonprofit corporation has demonstrated that it can be rather easily manipulated to ends (goals) other than the (educational or charitable) ones which any given 501c3 organization is presumably formed to pursue. In other words, where there’s a will to evolve, there seems to be a way.

***

Organizations are socially-constructed systems with goals, presumed to be shaped by the contexts in which they are established. Typically, variations in organizations have been perceived to come about primarily through the deaths of old forms and the births of new ones. With the birth of new organizations, variations may be introduced, some of which will be retained in the population.

The introduction of the nonprofit form in theater is a nice example. In the first half of the twentieth century it was relatively rare to find a professional, nonprofit theater company in the US. With the emergence of funding from the Ford Foundation, and later the NEA, the nonprofit form became (in the words of Arena Stage founder, Zelda Fichandler) the apava for resident theaters across the US. In a 2011 talk, she remarked:

There’s an expressive word, I believe it’s Sanskrit – and the word is apava – that translates as “the effective means to make a vision concrete” or workable or real. Our apava, strangely enough, turned out to be the nonprofit corporation. Some of us might take that fact for granted, but we shouldn’t. It’s the basic reality of our existence. Before nineteen hundred and fifty something, theatre was excluded from the benefits given to science, universities, charities, the church, opera, and maybe dance – but not theatre, because it made a profit. We knew that without the nonprofit blanket we could not exist, for it allows us to receive gifts and grants and to be free of taxes on tickets.

Beginning in the 1960s there was an exponential growth in the number of nonprofit theaters. Organizational ecologists would suggest this was a reflection of the legitimacy of the form over other forms and that this growth would continue until the population had reached its carrying capacity, and then it would begin to decline. The carrying capacity is the maximum population size that an environment can sustain indefinitely given available resources.

As an example of the growth and decline in a population, as part of HowlRound’s recent weekly series on Black Theater in the US, Sade Lythcott noted in her essay that “in the roughly ten-year span of the Black Arts Movement in New York alone (1965-1975), over two hundred black theaters emerged; today there are less than ten.” The decline in that population (not only in NYC but across the US) has been considered by some in the theater field to represent the struggle of black theaters to attain legitimacy, resources, support, meaning, etc: they were birthed in a certain context and as the environment around them shifted they were unable to compete and survive.

Likewise, it is rare these days to see a young contemporary choreographer form a permanent company in NYC with a large number of dancers on the payroll, or a resident theater company (in any city) formed with a permanent acting company.

And it’s not just certain forms of arts organization that are now harder to sustain; reading the “bracing” conclusion of the executive summary of the 2010 National Arts Index (as reported by Ben Davis), one wonders if we have reached the carrying capacity for the nonprofit form in the arts generally:

Given the profusion of underfunded organizations, the nonprofit model may have to be abandoned in favor of more experimental or market-oriented business models for the arts.

This is frequently how evolution in an organizational population is seen to occur: through the death, birth, and (importantly) growth of some organizations (and not others) in response to a shifting environment.

But as we have seen now and then, and as more recent research has theorized, it’s not only populations that can evolve. Individual organizations themselves can transform (sometimes dramatically, sometimes incrementally) and do. While a fish may not be able to grow a new central nervous system, an organization, in essence, can.

An organization can “unlearn” practices and beliefs and norms and strategies, and learn new ones. It can shift its “dominant logic.” One paper on this topic (Bettis & Prahalad, 1995 – The Dominant Logic: Retrospective and Perspective) asserts that this “unlearning” and “shift in logics” may be more likely to occur out of a period in which an organization experiences a high degree of instability. (Of course, this is not always the case: other possibilities arising from instability are that the organization will survive and revert back to the status quo, or simply fail entirely).

It’s not hard to identify arts organizations that have been transformed out of periods of duress. The Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestras is a musician-owned and –led orchestra that formed after the demise of the New Orleans Symphony. The fact that the name has changed is less important than the fact that many of the same people re-organized and re-formed with new goals and a different structure and relationship between management and musicians.

Or consider the new strategies introduced in the opera world when Peter Gelb traveled from Sony to the Metropolitan Opera (which was, at the time, struggling with declining audiences and financial challenges). Consider the way the HD broadcast adaptation, specifically, has begun to influence the creation, production, and distribution processes not only at the Met but in other organizations, as well, and has begun to change the relationship of audiences to the art form of opera.

Or look at how Diane Paulus has radically re-interpreted the mission of the American Repertory Theatre. She has changed the goals, relationships, identity, structure, and strategies of the organization in response to not only a changed “world” (i.e. larger societal context) but also changed expectations from ART’s “host,” Harvard University.

Of course, organizational evolution is rarely this dramatic. More often, it happens so slowly we don’t recognize it. Paulus did in one season what other theaters took two decades to enact.

We tend to talk about the arts and culture sector these days as though it is “stuck” – unable or unwilling to change – but it might also be useful to consider how the present state is a function of small adaptations (in structure, people, processes, culture) in response to a shifting environment and the persistence of some of those changes over time (i.e., those that were perceived to increase the chances of survival).

Evolution occurs both through adaptation and through the perpetuation of whatever is working well. In The Resilient Sector, Lester Salamon has suggested that we have been witnessing a long creep towards commercialism in the nonprofit sector in the US generally (not only in the arts), because this is, essentially, what the slings and arrows of the US system encourages.

With the lack of subsidies and increased competition for funding, what options exist for staying alive? Do an enhancement deal and produce a new musical; reduce production expenses and beef up the development and marketing staff; find a corporate sponsor and produce a sensational exhibition of some kind; hire a celebrity and charge $300 for tickets; avoid producing works that require a large number of actors or musicians or dancers and more than the standard amount of rehearsal time; replace an unknown work by an emerging playwright with last year’s Tony Award-winning work; or better yet, a revival of a well-known title by a household name.

These strike me as coping mechanisms. Tactics to enable short-term survival.

In this sense, I agree with Andrew. Organizations often adopt coping mechanisms in response to changes in the environment and uncertainty. However, sometimes a coping mechanism, perhaps because it’s working in the short-term, becomes a longer-term strategy. It gets re-framed as a process innovation and becomes a new way of doing business — a model for existing organizations, or new ones being formed, to replicate. Eventually, one adaptation can begin to have repercussions on the audience, the art, and the identity of not just one organization, but on an entire organizational field.

Some of these changes may strengthen nonprofits and their ability to realize their missions and goals. Some may not.

Therefore, from my perspective, the question is not whether or not organizations can (and thus should be expected to) evolve; they do evolve. The question is how, and in response to what?

***

BTW, closely related to this blog, I’ve endeavored to tackle the concept of sustainability in the arts in a recent talk that I’ve given in Minneapolis, Lyon, Salzburg, and Belfast. It’s called, “Holding Up the Arts. Can We Sustain What We’ve Created? Should We?” There is a permanent link in the sidebar “Stuff I’ve written”.

Can we change our definition & measures of success? Do we really want to?

preacher-pulpit2Happy New Year a week late. I picked up a book at the university library a few days ago called Morals and Markets and have read a few chapters, which have been tumbling around in my mind with an excellent New Year’s essay by Polly Carl on the measures of an individual playwright’s success, a New York Times op-ed on trying to measure the impact of social media using “yardsticks” of traditional marketing, and a much cited New Year’s prediction for the arts by Rick Lester at Target Resource Group that appeared on Thomas Cott’s Year End Predictions issue. These provocative texts have me thinking about the process of changing measures of success.

Part I: A short story about life insurance:

Morals and Markets is an academic text written in 1979 by sociologist Viviana Zelizer about “the development of life insurance in the US.”  Zelizer recounts that while the first life insurance company was established in the US in 1759 it was not until the 1840s that sales of life insurance began to take off. Then, within a relatively short period of time, life insurance policy sales grew at an astonishing rate. Why had life insurance failed to get off the ground in the late 18th and early 19th centuries? And why, in the mid-19th century did it eventually become adopted with such fervor? While most historical accounts, written by economists, laid the sudden success at more aggressive advertising and sales techniques (most notably the introduction of the charismatic life insurance missionary/salesman), Zelizer felt something else was going on. She ultimately argues that it was cultural factors at play, among them religious beliefs. She writes on pages 150-151:

In the first place, the development of the insurance industry reflected the struggle between fundamentalist and modernist religious outlooks that worked itself out in the nineteenth century. … The cultural incompatibility of life insurance with literalist and fundamentalist beliefs hindered its development during the first part of the century. In opposition, the emerging liberal theology tended to make the enterprise legitimate. … The history of life insurance helps us understand the problem of establishing monetary equivalents for relations or processes which are defined as being beyond material concerns … With life insurance, money and man, the sacred and the profane, were thrown together; the value of man became measurable by money. …  Life insurance threatened the sanctity of life by pricing it. … By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the economic  definition of the value of death finally became more acceptable, legitimating the life insurance enterprise. However, the monetary evaluation of death did not de-sacralize it; far from ‘profaning’ life and death, money became sacralized by its association with them. Life insurance took on symbolic values quite distinct from its utilitarian function, emerging as a new form of ritual with which to face death and a process of the dead by those kin left behind.

Another cultural factor explored in the book is initial resistance that stemmed from perceptions of life insurance as a form of “betting on lives.” That resistance waned after the 1870s, however, when certain financial practices which had theretofore been perceived by a “traditional economic morality” to be “deviant speculative ventures” became legitimized by a new entrepreneurial ethos. Changing views on life insurance reflected this general shift in attitudes about economic risk taking.

In the last paragraph of the book Zelizer writes (p. 153):

America was, and remains, a land of economic magic. In the case of life insurance the trick was to sell futures—pessimistic futures. The task of selling a commodity to a materialist civilization is relatively simple. The task of converting human life and death into commodities, however, was highly complex. The universe of believers and theologians became involved with another universe of hard-headed businessmen. Out of this interaction emerged a compromise credo which was a far cry from the vulgar marketplace linkages and at the same time a giant step beyond simplified heavenly rewards. Theology yielded to the capitalist ethos–but not without compelling the latter to disguise its materialist mission in spiritual garb.

Part II: Redefining Success

In a post on the measures of success in her own life and the lives of artists, Polly Carl describes what has become the “tired trajectory of success for playwrights”:

Theater artist gets trained >Theater artist emerges >Theater artist gets small gigs in small theaters >Theater artist gets big gigs in small theaters >Theater artist gets small gigs in big theaters >Theater artist gets big gigs in big theaters.

She then observes that this journey is problematic because it suggests that success is linear, that we can and should define what success looks like ahead of time, and that success can be measured in terms of economic growth (bigger house, bigger paycheck, etc.). Within hours of reading her post I was sent a link to the NY Times op-ed mentioned above, Can Social Media Sell Soap? on the problem of attempting to calculate the ROI of social media using traditional marketing media measures. The two pieces got me thinking about the yardsticks of success that we now use in the nonprofit arts.

Notwithstanding the past four years where the definition of success seemed to have been temporarily replaced by the more essential goal of simply finishing the year without a life-threatening deficit, it seems that, by-and-large, the sector is and has been for some time now measuring its success primarily in economic terms: butts in seats, increased revenues, budgetary growth, inches of press, and (how could we ever forget) economic impact.

I would extend Polly’s observation of a success-definition-rut among artists, to arts organizations. Lately I keep hearing admonitions to arts groups to shift their focus from “surviving” to “thriving” but how, as a sector, are we defining this thriving?

Has the recession helped us to interpret “thriving” to mean something deeper or outside of the realm of economic measures? Or (despite all the buzz about intrinsic impacts) are we really only comfortable in our skin if we can flash our numbers (and not just any numbers … butts in seats, budgetary growth, inches of press, economic impact).

I get it.

Believe me, after walking away from a great job that I loved (actually two decades of jobs in the arts that I loved and that defined my success pretty handily) I have spent many sleepless nights these past 2 1/2 years wondering how the heck to define success or, put another way, assess my value. Candidly, most days I feel like an under-performing and illegitimate scholar (as all practitioner-turned-academics will understand); a frustratingly sporadic blogger (sorry!);  a hapless stepparent and homemaker; a too-distant and out-of-touch friend, daughter and sister; and a headstrong and difficult spouse.  What I would give for a job that I “was born to do” and through which my value in this life would be immediately recognizable.

But wouldn’t it be even better if I could redefine success so that my life has value even if I don’t have a great job?

Of course it would.

But still. Would anyone in the world buy into my definition, I wonder? I mean, my mom would probably be proud of me no matter what. But it takes a lot of courage to do what Polly is proposing. To live by your own definition of success—a definition that may be illegitimate in the world we live in.

Part III: Big Data

So we are in this pickle. The value of the arts and culture sector in the US has been declining in recent decades (at least by our cornerstone measure of success: butts in seats). It would seem that we either need to get more people to show up or we need some new measures that can tell people that we’re valuable even if the old metrics don’t look so great. I suspect that Rick Lester at TRG would probably comfort us with the knowledge that we are now in the era of “big data”— which shall enable us to embrace a customer orientation and, “armed with facts,” make better decisions about what to program, who to target, with what product, at what price, on what day, etc.  And others (Alan Brown and Clay Lord, most notably) might suggest that big data could also help us make the case for our value beyond butts in seats—that is, for our intrinsic impacts.

It strikes me that these two uses pull us in different directions. (More on that a bit further on.)

I love data more with every passing day, but I can’t help but think that if we make an analogy with Zelizer’s story of life insurance (and the role of cultural factors in legitimizing it as a key determinant of its adoption), that big data (while an important factor) is probably not going to solve our success/valuation problems. Increasing arts participation and redefining success are less dependent on data than on the values and ideologies that underpin our sector and society-at-large.

We may be able to use data to do better marketing but if kids heading off to college in 2030 still have little-to-no exposure to the arts by their parents or at schools is there anything we could target them with in 2040 that would get them to walk in the door of an opera house producing Don Giovanni or a traditional regional theater doing a production of the Death of a Salesman? And if the data tell us we probably could get them in the door if we radically changed programming, would it matter if those leading and funding arts organizations the next twenty years are unwilling to consider such shifts because they consider them to be immoral?

We may be able to use Twitter to, for instance, understand the social impact of a professional theater piece on a given neighborhood; but will it matter if most boards, government agencies, and funders do not consider the impact of a conversation on Twitter to be as or more important than how many people bought tickets and whether income targets were achieved? We may be able to collect data on the social and cultural impact of amateur groups but does it matter if the training programs and the professional arts sector continues to dismiss such contributions as illegitimate?

We may have the possibility of new data, but we seem to be stuck with the same old values and yardsticks.

Part IV: Time to look in the mirror:

Like Polly, I think it’s time to dig deeper. We can start trying to solve our problems with data, but like a prescription of Paxil, it’s not going to be nearly as effective if we’re not willing to acknowledge the disconnect between some of our fundamental values and ideologies and those of society. Moreover, once acknowledged, we are unlikely to make progress by simply bemoaning our circumstances and calling ourselves victims of a philistine society or simply abandoning the social purposes we were formed to uphold and taking the for-profit route because it’s just too damned hard to fight the good fight anymore.

We are, without a doubt, a sector with conflicting values: excellence versus equity (among others). And as the lines have blurred with the commercial and amateur worlds our identity and the values we stand for (conflicting though they may be) seem to be eroding to the point where it feels like we stand for everything (which is arguably the same as standing for nothing).

No doubt society has changed. The alternative ideals that supported the massive growth of the nonprofit arts sector in the mid-twentieth century were out of favor by the 80s and with it, so were we. But we’ve changed too. Perhaps we have been unsuccessful with getting American society to value what we do not simply because their values changed but because ours have. Is it clear what we stand for? It might be clear to the 70-year-old who takes-for-granted that we stand for something important and good because we once did; but is it clear to the 20-year-old? And if we shout, ‘We stand for something important and good!” does that 20-year-old believe us? Based on what evidence?

I’m not advocating a monolithic conception of the sector, but I am (like Polly, I think, if I interpret her essay correctly) advocating for some honesty and transparency about the core, enduring, distinctive identity and values that we do stand for and, with them, our definition of success.

But as we see in Zelizer’s accout, from there begins the hard work of advancing these ideals and values and measures of success.  What changed the religious fundamentalists that initially rejected life insurance? Among other factors, other more entrepreneurial clergymen, who saw the value of life insurance and began to preach about it from the pulpit.

What caused nonprofit arts organizations to adopt marketing practices? Among other influences, corporate boards and trade associations that encouraged and expected them. Marketing, like life insurance, was an idea that was initially downright distasteful to people working in the arts.

Part V: Can we change the measures of success? Do we really want to?

The arts (like life insurance) long ago became a commodity (having previously operated in the realm of the gift economy), though (also like life insurance) one with values (social, cultural, and symbolic) beyond utility. We came up with our own “compromise credo.” As I observe the heated debates on cultural blogs (including, for instance, the dueling that happened in the comments section of my recent post on the arts cliff), I wonder if this compromise position is becoming untenable and, moreover, as a sector we are deeply divided on how to resolve the tension.

It feels to me like we’ve got big data in our corner and we don’t know whether to stand at the bully pulpit and (A) use the data to get really good at selling our commodity and to make the case that we count in this extended era of economic rationalization (a glance at AFTA’s National Arts Index is but one indication that we’ve actually gotten pretty darned good at that); or (B) use the data to make the case that the measure of success in this world should not be limited to growth in the economy and to identify and measure the something else that matters as much or more.

As I wrote in the executive summary of In the Intersection (a report on partnerships between commercial producers and nonprofit theaters), “Recognizing that the metrics of success and the values of nonprofits have changed is one thing. Changing them back is quite another.”

It wouldn’t be easy to pursue path B. We would have to organize and work together and invest resources in creating and living by such alternative definitions and measures of success. We would have to argue against many of the moves we’ve made the past 30 years.

We would have to use our pulpits.

We would have to believe these other things matter.

As I look across the nonprofit arts and culture sector landscape I see some who believe but I perceive that way too many of us have lost faith.

My wish for us in 2013 … that we can find, keep, and spread the faith.

PS I resolved at the end of the year that I would start posting on Jumper more frequently (weekly at least) and failed in the first week. It’s still a goal. Although after reading this, my longest post-to-date, you may be grateful that I’m not posting with much regularity. Congratulations and thanks to any who manage to stick with it to the end. 🙂

Nonprofit Arts Orgs and the Boards That Love Them

Last week I read an article by Pablo Eisenberg in the Chronicle of Philanthropy in which he argues that greater oversight of nonprofits is needed because nonprofit boards can no longer be trusted to make sure the institutions they govern are serving the public interest, which they are legally obliged to serve. Eisenberg mentions hospitals and universities in particular, citing the recent debacles at University of Virginia and Penn State as evidence for why we can no longer put our faith in boards. However, I think it’s fair to say that the arts sector is not immune to “poor performance, corruption, and a lack of public accountability.”

Let me ask you: Do these seem to be reasonable questions to be asked of a nonprofit arts organization?

Why was the board unaware that the organization had been, for years, overspending? Who made the decision to spend funds that were restricted and on what were they spent? What is motivating what appears to be a radical shift in the programmatic strategy for the theater? How do you reconcile your mandate to be accessible with the fact that you are charging over $100 per ticket for this show? Why did you cancel the new play scheduled for this season and replace  it with a revival? Can you explain why, over the past five years, administrative salaries and costs have grown at a faster rate than artistic salaries and costs? Do you think audiences may be declining because the quality of the programming has declined? Why did the board approve significant raises for the executive and artistic director even though the last three seasons have ended with deficits? Why are no female writers, or writers of color, featured in the upcoming season? Is it true that the work of a political artist was censored by your chief curator?

I think these are reasonable questions–difficult and complex to answer as they may be.

And yet, nonprofits often seem unable or unwilling to answer such questions directly, or they bristle at the idea that someone (a funder, a journalist, a new board member) would ask them in the first place. But one could argue that nonprofits shouldn’t need to be asked such questions at all–that they should be more transparent in the first place about the decisions they take, presumably in the public interest.

Which raises more questions: How seriously do nonprofit arts groups take their ‘public interest’ mandate? Do board members actually see themselves as representatives of the community’s interests (which they are)? Or rather do they consider themselves to be primarily advocates for the needs and goals of the institution?

Here’s Eisenberg on why boards cannot be trusted to look out for the public interest:

The reasons we can’t trust boards are most obvious at colleges and hospitals, which account for a large share of the assets of nonprofit institutions.

Most trustees at public universities and nonprofit hospitals are essentially political appointees, named by governors and state officials because of their political connections, as financial supporters, party members, or close allies to universities and the medical profession. The large majority are not experts in either health or education. Nor are they a cross section of their communities. They are among the wealthiest people in America, and they largely serve as lobbyists to attract more government aid to their institutions.

And at most colleges, public or private, it’s rare for boards to include students, professors, or members of the public in their boards, although some hospital boards include patients, nurses, and people who represent the community.

Also missing from the boards of most national and regional, and even community, groups are the blue-collar workers, teachers, small-business owners or grass-roots community leaders. It may be a cliché to say that we have become much more of a class society, but increasingly the nonprofit boards reflect that truth, and with it the problems of democratic representation and public accountability.

Instead, most trustees of large nonprofits mirror corporate America.

With the exception of the phrase about “political appointees” much of the same could be said of the boards of the largest arts organizations in the US.

Reflecting on Eisenberg’s article, I wonder:

  • Is  this failure of nonprofits to look out for the public interest a new phenomenon? Or is it possible that boards and executives have always used nonprofits to achieve institutional rather than public aims? Put another way, is the problem with the nonprofit form itself (and the fact that it lends itself to manipulation) or with board members who have become, perhaps, more likely (for whatever reason) to use it to misguided ends? Or both, perhaps?
  • If a nonprofit fails to act in the public interest, what can the public reasonably do in response? If a community decided that a nonprofit was not well run what would its options be? A leveraged buy-out would clearly not be possible but is there an equivalent for nonprofits? And if not, why not, and do we need such a process?

Eisenberg’s suggestions for improving nonprofit oversight include: requiring all nonprofits with budgets over $5 million to appoint an inspector general or hire an ethics or compliance officer; appoint an independent ombudsman to investigate complaints by whistle-blowers; or appoint an oversight committee of citizens to communicate with boards about possible infractions.

The arc of the first five comments (each made by a different person) posted by readers in response to Eisenberg’s article made me chuckle:

“I’d like to be one of those new Ethics Officers. I would imagine that to be a $2m/year job, with the primary role being to not object to the Board’s or my own salaries.”

“No more regulators or regulations or layers of accountability.”

“Regulation on top of regulation is useless. As soon as one of Eisenberg’s ethics officers cheats or steals, we’ll need ethics officer overseers. Yes, some boards will be inept — so are some professors, and writers, and editors. Over-regulation solves nothing.”

“Sure…let’s pile bureaucracy on top of regulation on top of oversight on top of more bureaucracy. And while we’re at it, make sure we never, ever trust the private sector to govern itself. Typical academic clap-trap! I guess Eisenberg proves that when your only tool is a hammer (bureaucracy), then every problem looks like a nail. We already have more-than-sufficient regulation. Let’s start by simply enforcing the existing rules. The last thing we need is more government inserting itself into the situation.”

“I can’t help but think that the previous comments are not coming from people who provide the funds for the charities.”

Reading through the comments posted in response to his article, I noted that many people were skeptical of Eisenberg’s suggestions. Nonprofits are often offended or annoyed by the suggestion that greater oversight is needed, and assert that they are capable of self monitoring. But Eisenberg asserts that boards have proven over and over again that they are not.

In last week’s post I shared the Marshall W. Meyer and Lynne G. Zucker theory of permanently failing organizations: organizations that persist despite the fact that they are not achieving their goals. Arguably, permanently failing nonprofit organizations do not serve the public interest. But as the responses to Rocco Landesman’s 2011 supply/demand salvo showed, arts organizations seem to find it unacceptable that the NEA or the IRS or state arts agencies or any outside entity, really, would weigh in and mandate the closure of some organizations.

Thus, it seems that if permanently failing organizations are going to be encouraged to either take the necessary risks to become high performing, or acknowledge defeat and close their doors, board members are the ones that need to make that demand–on behalf of the public interest. Board members are in the driver’s seat when it comes to approving organizational plans, budgets, and (often) finding resources that allow an organization to persist.

Of course, if you were appointed to a board exclusively because of your ability to give or get money, or if you mistakenly believe your job is to keep the institution alive rather than on mission, or if you are reluctant to admit defeat “on your watch” … well, it’s easy to see why nonprofit board members may be prone to tolerate a permanently failing existence.

I’m not sure how to address the failure of nonprofit boards to, at times, do their jobs (and for the record I do not think all boards are failing in their responsibilities to the public); but it would seem that if the public is, indeed, losing trust in the ability of boards to act in their interest then we might very well expect increased calls for greater oversight to be imposed–for the ultimate good of the nonprofit and the public it serves.

Nonprofits and those who love them, eh?

 

 

Are we a sector defined by our permanently failing organizations?

A few weeks back I wrote a post responding to a session at the Theatre Communications Group conference in which an esteemed leader of a resident theater (Michael Maso) called “bullshit” on some criticisms being lobbed at large theater institutions. I am incredibly grateful to all who took the time to read or respond to the post. The comments, including a link to Mr. Maso’s response, are well worth reading if you have not done so. I want to pick up on some of the ideas raised by Maso and others in a future post, but today I want to draw attention to comments posted by Corey Fischer at the recently closed Traveling Jewish Theater. In talking about the struggles the organization faced in trying to maintain its commitment to its mission and goals, Corey writes:

The sad part is that in the years leading up to our decision to finally close down, it seemed as if we were being punished for our commitment to be a home for artists. Some foundations and consultants implied and sometimes said straight out that to attempt to have artists at the center of the company and pay them a living wage was frivolous, unrealistic and irresponsible. Perhaps. But as economic conditions forced us to change that basic aspect of our identity, it became harder and harder for us to accomplish our mission of creating and presenting original work. When we recognized that the only way to even have a chance of surviving was to become one more theater producing plays that could just as easily be done by a host of other companies, we saw no reason to continue.

When I read Corey’s posts I was reminded of the 1989 book “Permanently Failing Organizations” by Marshall W. Meyer and Lynne G. Zucker, which I recently read on someone’s recommendation. The authors define permanently failing organizations as those that persist even though they are no longer achieving their goals. While economists and others have long theorized that higher performing organizations persist and those that are not high performing are driven out of business, Meyer & Zucker found that persistence and performance can become decoupled and companies that are no longer achieving their performance goals (e.g., profits to owners/shareholders in the case of for-profits; and artistic and social mission goals in the case of not-for-profits) can continue to exist for quite a long time.

Without going too deeply into the theory in this post, the researchers postulate that organizations reach a so-called ‘permanently failing’ state when those who are ‘dependent’ on the institution (primarily but not exclusively, managers who depend on the institution for a paycheck and who, therefore, often value maintenance of the organization over other performance goals) begin to amass power, which they then use to keep the organization alive, but in a low performance state. Why do these managers fail to pursue strategies that might lead to higher performance (e.g., higher profits or higher quality)? Because such strategies often entail taking risks that might lead to “outright failure”–something those running permanently failing organizations want to avoid at all costs.

It strikes me that in nonprofit arts organizations–in which there are no owners (or shareholders) in the legal sense, in which permanence is often a goal of the institution, in which mission and goals are notoriously difficult to define and measure, and in which it is actually quite difficult for up-and-coming innovators to access the resources and power necessary to give the most established institutions a run for their money–it would be particularly easy for organizations to drift towards a permanently failing state (or to become ‘nonprofit arts zombies’, to use the phrase coined by Brian Newman in his chapter in the book 20 under 40).

Interestingly, Traveling Jewish Theater clearly felt it had the option (and encouragement by funders and others, even) to pursue persistence at the expense of its mission and goals by becoming “just another theater company doing work any other theater company could do.” However, TJT chose the road less travled in the nonprofit arts sector. Laudably, TJT felt it was “more important to accomplish the mission, than to survive” (a phrase used by Woolly Mammoth board member, Pete Miller, at the Scarcity to Abundance conference at Arena Stage in January 2011).

In the nonprofit sector we have come to associate age and size with performance; and yet we have also become a sector in which there is an almost constant call for innovation and new models. Perhaps the two are not unrelated? Perhaps we perceive the arts sector itself as being in the doldrums not because there are no innovators in our midst (there are plenty), but because we have, for too long, held up our permanently failing organizations as leaders and, by doing so, have permitted them to define our sector’s goals and its performance.

When did being pro-artist make one anti-institution?

I attended the Theatre Communications Group conference in Boston a couple weeks ago. On the first day of the conference Michael Maso, managing director of the Huntington Theatre, was presented with an award recognizing his contributions to the American theater. Towards the end of a humorous and lovely acceptance speech, Maso switched gears and used the opportunity to share thoughts on those that would question the priorities and processes of large institutional theaters. He said:

Over the next few days we will be engaged in an exploration of new ways to sustain our movement. I wholly endorse that exploration. We need new ideas. But we must not forget that this movement is one of the great success stories in the history of American theater. […] Our job, each in our own way, is to empower artists to make great art and to share it as widely as possible. And in that fundamental task our theater has not failed America. I’m not arguing for complacency. I believe that we can more fully integrate artists into our institutional lives. I believe that we can expand our audiences so that we’re serving more of our citizens, not just those that can afford dynamic prices. But I will admit my impatience with critics of our theaters, who seem determined to drive a wedge between individual artists and institutions. I hope over the next few days, and in the conversations that should follow for years to come, we can resist finger-pointing and ideological purity. Real conversations require a foundation of mutual respect and understanding. And fundamentalism is just as dangerous in the theater as it is in religion or on the Supreme Court.

So I am here to confess. My name is Michael and I run a large institutional theater. Yes, we built new spaces with multiple performance halls in order to produce new plays and create programs for local playwrights and provide first class facilities to other local theaters. Yes, we sell tickets to get an audience. Yes, we raise money because tickets alone don’t pay the bills. Yes, all of that takes people. Does that make us overstuffed bureaucracies? Bullshit!

The first thing that popped into my mind when I heard Maso’s lament was a TED talk by Clay Shirky, “Institutions versus Collaboration,” in which he remarks that institutions hate being told they are obstacles and that when an institution is told it is an obstacle it generally goes through something like Elizabeth Kubler-Ross’s five stages of grief over dying: denial, anger, bargaining, depression, acceptance.

It would appear Maso is somewhere between stage one and stage two.

Second, I wondered “Who are the ideological purists and fundamentalists to which Maso is referring?” These terms are loaded. Perhaps they were chosen for dramatic effect but, having chosen to use them, Maso might have given a few examples.

Third, I shook my head when I heard the phrase “determined to drive a wedge between artists and institutions.” I don’t even understand this idea. I see many people trying to encourage institutions to make deeper commitments to artists and bring them further into the institution. Are these the dangerous, fundamentalist, wedge-drivers to which Maso is referring?

With rare exception, artists (in this instance meaning writers, actors, directors, and often designers) are not generally part of the institution (meaning resident theaters). Administrators, marketers, and development staff have a home. Production and technical staff have a home. Literary managers and dramaturgs have a home. But artists are not part of the institution. They are jobbed in as needed and then sent home to live their precarious lives, unattached (in every sense of the word) to theater institutions.

How does one drive a wedge between two things that are not attached?

The artistic director of a large institutional theater referred to me as “pro-artist” a few years back. It was meant to be a derogatory comment. When did being “pro-artist” make one an enemy of resident theaters? When did large theater institutions begin to see their own interests as threatened by the interests of artists? And do we think this is a positive development for the American theater?

I find it disturbing that those that have attempted to shine a light on the needs of artists and the fact that those working in institutions have fared rather well relative to the artists they employ over the past thirty years, are now seen as divisive.

When I write about artists like Ethan Lipton, who has had to work a day job his entire life to continue working as an artist, I’m not trying to drive a wedge. I’m asking what I believe are quite legitimate questions—Can we do more for artists? Can we rethink where the money goes? Have we prioritized buildings over art and artists? Have those with access to the budgets and the board looked out rather well for their own welfare and fought not quite as hard for the welfare of artists?

And yes, I am specifically challenging large institutions—which own large buildings and have large staffs—to do more for artists and to take more artistic risks. The primary goal of the institution is to self preserve. And as institutions grow they become increasingly risk averse. This is not an American theater problem. This is the nature of institutions. It is a pattern one sees over and over again in industry after industry. Does the American theater think it is immune to such things?

It’s not.

I will continue to ask questions about where the money goes and whether more of it can go towards the art and the artists.

I am not trying to drive a wedge.

I’m trying to ask what I believe are important questions.

And I welcome responses. I welcome debate. I welcome the opportunity to sit around a table and break bread and talk about the financial challenges of the American theater.

I agree with Michael Maso that we should be respectful of each other—which is why I won’t call bullshit on Michael Maso. I will simply say, “I hear you.”

Is Opera a Sustainable Art Form? Excerpts from a new keynote …

I’ve been on hiatus in order to concentrate my time on the weekends to learning Dutch (state exam coming up). My last post was before Mike Daisey unhinged Ira Glass and Ira Glass exposed Mike Daisey and the whole world wrote about it. I’m not going to write about Mike Daisey. Instead, because I’m still concerned about the state of the arts and culture sector in the US (despite its “turnaround” according to Americans for the Arts), and because I’m still studying Dutch and neck-deep in my research at the moment, I’m going to share an excerpt from a new talk that I gave in February at the Opera Europa Conference. The conference asked me to do a keynote on the topic, Is Opera a Sustainable Art Form?  This is just one section (from an hour-long keynote), in which I discuss the paradoxes of sustainability. I’ll be back next week.

Is Opera A Sustainable Art Form? (Excerpt)

I recently came across a paper, Paradoxes of Sustainability, by a scholar named Alexey A. Voinov from the Institute for Ecological Economics. Here are four key points from Voinov’s paper:

  1.  After examining the definitions of sustainability of many scholars, Voinov determined that all of the definitions had one thing in common: an assumption about “keeping something at a certain level” – that is, a resource, system, condition, or relationship. In other words, a goal of “avoiding decline.”
  2. Voinov says, however, (and here’s where the first paradox comes in), that this kind of behavior—the sustaining of something at a certain level or state—seems to belie the fact that living systems tend to go through life cycles: growth, followed by conservation (or inertia), followed by release (obscurity or death), followed by renewal and new growth. This life cycle is what contributes to evolution in response to a changing environment.
  3. Sustainability is, thus, an unnatural attempt to break this cycle and extend a certain stage of the life cycle and avoid decline. Whereas renewal is about development; sustainability is about preservation. The term sustainable development, thus, contains a paradox.
  4. Furthermore, there is a hierarchy of systems; and here’s where the second paradox comes in. Sustainability of a certain level of the hierarchy may impede sustainability of systems at a higher level that are potentially more important. For any ‘supersystem’ to evolve and renew its sub-systems or components must be set free to recombine.

So, what is Voinov talking about? Forest fires naturally occur and burn down portions of ecosystems so that the forest ecosystem as a whole can persist. If we begin to prevent forest fires we damage the forest ecosystem.

And so what, specifically, could this mean for the opera world and the question at hand? Well, if we agree with Voinov and think his ideas could apply to organizational systems and not just natural ones, it means that we should ask ourselves where we may be seeking the “unnatural perpetuation of what might otherwise die”? It means that we need to think very carefully about which level of our ecosystem we are seeking to sustain. So I want to return to the question at hand, which I find compelling, in large part because of the way it is phrased. Is opera a sustainable art form? It begs a question: What shall we permit to be a legitimate and sufficient form for the passing on of the opera genus?

  •  Does vinyl count? A CD? A digital download?
  • What about a diehard opera lover who has an extensive collection of recordings, listens to opera broadcasts on the radio throughout the day, and even sings it in the shower every morning?
  • What if this diehard opera fan never purchases a ticket to see a production at his local professional grand opera house?
  • What about an amateur opera company that performs in, say, churches, community centers, or senior centers?
  • How about a children’s chorus? Or 5th graders composing and performing puppet operas?
  • What about independent artist collectives creating avant-garde and experimental works?
  • Or smaller chamber companies?
  • What about the Philadelphia Opera Company’s Hallelujah Chorus Flash Mob performed at the department store Macy’s, which has been downloaded more than 7.75 million times on YouTube?

Are these what we mean by sustaining opera as an art form? Or when we talk about wanting to achieve sustainability, are we really, pretty much exclusively talking about … well, your opera house? Or even better, all of your opera houses?

So then how do we feel about San Francisco Opera’s broadcasts at the baseball park, one of which, evidently drew 32,000 people to see Aida (see picture above)? Or The Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in movie theaters which continue to expand in reach and numbers (and as I understand it, earning higher revenues and profits) year after year?

On the one hand, we need the San Francisco Opera and the Metropolitan Opera to create those broadcasts. But, over time, one could also imagine that some people would start to go to the movie theater exclusively, and not to their local opera house. Perhaps there have even been moments when we have wondered at two in the morning, sweating in our pajamas, whether the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts in a movie theater might, in fact, eventually displace some opera companies somewhere?

Is opera a sustainable art form? It’s a different question from ‘Is opera a sustainable industry?’ Or ‘Are nonprofit opera houses sustainable?’ Or even ‘Is my opera company sustainable’?

When we say we need to try to find a way to make things “more sustainable,” what are we talking about? Sustaining the reputations, salaries, and vacation packages for directors and other professional arts administrators that have them? Sustaining all historically leading institutions? Sustaining our buildings? Sustaining a canon of great works through the recording or ongoing performance of certain works? Sustaining very specific productions, or performance practices? Sustaining the capacity for artistic risk-taking? Sustaining a pool of talented artists who, perhaps, even have the resources to self-produce their works, independent of major institutions? Sustaining broad and deep community engagement with the opera? The “what” is really important.

One of the things that is most interesting to me about the conversations in the arts sector about sustainability is that the implicit goal seems to be preservation of the oldest and largest companies, and often their venues. While we seem to recognize that some deaths are inevitable, history and good sense tell us that the renewal in the sector should happen in the ongoing churn of small organizations.

That’s natural.

As opposed to the collapse or 180-degree transformation of established, historically leading institutions, which we would find not only unnatural but probably truly alarming. Hence, one concludes, the strategy of the Dutch government and others. Sustain the large institutions and let the rest of the sector churn, which we presume leads to innovation, and not to the loss of innovation from the sector.

There is an assumption that the ‘supersystem’ we are trying to sustain and grow is the infrastructure of existing large, leading professional opera houses. But what if the ‘supersystem’ is the relevance of opera as an art form as demonstrated by its ongoing practice and enjoyment? That could mean that everything else (large, historically leading companies, smaller amateur companies, training programs, the recording industry, and on and on) is part of a sub-system and may need to evolve in order for opera as an art form to be sustained.

Voinov, A. (1998). “Paradoxes of Sustainability” in Journal of General Biology, 59:1, pp. 209-218.

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.

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

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.

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