You can change the minds of the armies of pseudo-populists, but only one at a charitable time. Simple satire won’t cut it.
Over the next few years, your nonprofit arts organization will be tasked with trying to succeed in a local and national environment powered by zero-sum, anti-art, anti-intellectual, pseudo-populists that now hold sway. It is with that in mind that we start the discussion of how to become the most successful your organization can be. This is not to say that your US-based organization will be successful, but it may give you some comfort to know that your failure will not be because of the change in administration, but because your leadership continued to concern itself with the wrong things.
There are no miracles. Your organization can only maximize success, not ensure it.
Which leads us to Tip #3: your symbolic gestures may make you feel better, but in the short, long, and in-between run, they don’t mean anything. Do not fall into the trap of believing that throwing tomato soup on a painting does anything but make you look small and ineffective.
Satire used to be a good way to provide the kind of political or social protest that made a difference. But it was never meant as a tool of change. It was the equivalent of this:
Satire has been a part of political and social literature since the beginnings of art. From Lysistrata and The Birds to Candide and MacBird, it has served the purpose of bringing light to a social construct that didn’t make sense. BUT, they did not change the issue for the better. In fact, there are some instances where satire may have pissed off the wrong people — by definition, the droves of people marching to the beat of their autocratic, dictatorial drummer.
For example, speaking of drummers, were you to see a poem by Thoreau satirized to befit the times in which we now live, it might be seen as, at best, moderately clever. At no time, however, would it change the minds of the people for whom it was intended. To wit:
It is likelier, however, that this kind of sarcastic statement piece would make right-wingers feel angry, vengeful, and victimized by an unjust society, not the creators of one. The Charlie Hebdo massacre in France ten years ago was an aberration based on religious depictions of sacred totems, not on funny sendups of local politicians. Anti-anti-religious fervor is as dangerous as anti-religious fervor and terrorism is terrorism in any language. Empty-headed, 5th-grade level revenge plots rule the day in the US. But even so, sardonic treatments of Henry David Thoreau would likely not cause fanatical poetry lovers to break into your home office and kill you. Emphasis on “likely.”
All of this is to say two things: making symbolic statements (e.g., manifestos) cannot be the beginning and end of your commitment to a better organization. They’re not even necessary to the process, although, internally, it might be helpful in an employee handbook which requires signature and follow-up. If you intend to make sure that your nonprofit (of any kind) is diverse, equitable, and inclusive, for example, there is no need for you to shout it from the highest mountain with manifestos, join the “right” social organizations, or get photo ops for your White leaders holding hands with non-White leaders. In a society in which the political right laughs at the rule-followers of the left and celebrate their own wrongful acts of perversion while the political left wrings their collective hands with worry as they perform numerous acts of cancel-culture on other left-leaning people for perceived offenses, this is not the time for subtlety or puffery. It is the time for action, especially if you run a nonprofit arts organization, infamous for being among the most toxic, elitist portion of the nonprofit sector in America.
Secondly, when you stop producing art as a finished product and start producing impact using art as a tool, you will find success not in ambiguous, subjective, artist-driven words such as “excellence” or “vision,” but in unambiguous metrics of impact such as those listed as tax-exempt activities in Section 501(C)(3) of the IRS code. Here’s a cheat sheet listing those primary purposes. I suggest you print this out, clip it, and place it on your nearest wall.
To achieve unambiguous metrics of impact, of course, you will have to walk into rooms containing people who don’t like you — or better, don’t understand you. That is not to say that you have to agree with the disagreeable (that would be, at best, pandering), but instead recognize that their fears and slights are real, even if you believe that is only true in their own minds.
Important: you don’t have to succumb to their unfounded fears and various racisms, but it helps you to know how to proceed.
Crucially, this is where the nonprofit side of the nonprofit arts organizational duty falls, and what will save your organization from being cancelled or corrupted. When you decide to positively impact the specific items which the smallest populations of your community have requested (help us with our housing crisis or food insecurity or social justice, etc.) and succeed, you’ll build your coalition with results instead of manifestos. And funders will watch you more closely because instead of telling them what you’re going to do, you’ll be telling them what you did.
The key is not to believe your organization was meant to deal with giant issues like the current uninformed fascist movements that created this government. As an example, most of the Trump devotees believe that the massive tariffs that have been proposed (and placed) on imported products are paid by the country doing the importing. That’s a flat lie. US consumers are the ones who ultimately pay the tariffs. For specific details on why tariffs are going to hurt the very Americans who voted for him, watch this video courtesy of the mostly conservative Wall Street Journal:
The point is: this is just one issue. There are hundreds. Thousands. There are a number of issues over which your nonprofit arts organization has no power. Tariffs are one of them. Producing a play about it would only speak to those who already know this information, much like The Big Short spoke only to those who already knew the reasons behind the 2008 financial crash.
So, the secret tip to success in this environment is to go granular and deep, not far-reaching and broad. Help the people you can help with tangible resources that your art can provide. Prove that your plans worked. It’s not about being pretty or spectacular or poignant or any other adjective that describes the look of your art. What you can do — what you’ve already promised to do, based on your application for a 501(C)(3) status in the first place — is to listen to those in your community who need help, regardless of their political affiliation or skin color, and help them. Document that help in quantifiable ways, and you’re golden.
Leave a Reply