Andrew Taylor on the Business
of Arts & Culture
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Rethinking arts economies and arts exchange
Posted: October 21, 2009
Like the CSA model, Stolen Chair hopes to build a membership community, a "CST", which would provide 'seed' money for the company's development process and then reap a year's worth of theatrical harvests.The organization has received a grant to create the model as part of The Field's Economic Revitalization for Performing Artists (ERPA) initiative. More on the model and the metaphor in a future post. But in the meanwhile, I was struck by an extended quote from Stolen Chair's Jon Stancato (transcribed in his blog), which seems to suggest the motivation for their CSA idea:
There is no such thing as an arts economy since non-commercial arts by their very definition don't follow market logic and can't compete in the market place without dependence on non-profit support structures and the government. So we can embrace our role in the margins of the economy and struggle the way that performing artists have struggled since theatre and religion parted ways, or we can model ourselves on the only other two positions left to us in a market-driven economy: as charity (quite like an endangered species) or as community resource (like a neighborhood garden)....For which he received both boos and applause. While I would nudge Stancato's definition of an economy, which seems to assume an exclusively commercial marketplace (which is only part of an economy), I think his central question is a rather important one:
I don't want to be a charity, in large part because I don't think our social cause has enough merit to compete with other charities who actually change lives on a grand scale. So, the only round hole we can force our square peg of a "business model" into is as community resource.
In this interconnected, digital age, if our art can serve as a meeting place for communities of like-minded individuals to connect, celebrate, and be challenged, then we might find a way of restoring theatre's primacy in people's lives and creating sustainable theatre-making organisms (not organizations).