Arts Funding Conundrum

In the weekend edition of The Wall Street Journal, artsjournal.com’s commander in chief, Doug McLennan, asked serious questions about the viability of the nonprofit business model for arts organizations—questions that will resonate with many jazz societies, and not just the big ones.

What to do? Many nonprofits are already playing with a for-profit mentality, coyly stepping up to the line separating it from nonprofit practice — sometimes even stepping over it while hoping nobody notices. Major museums mount fashion exhibitions that are sponsored by industry players. Public TV and radio run promo spots that they call “underwriting” rather than the “ads” that they are. Boston’s Museum of Fine Arts rents out its collection to a Las Vegas casino.

Don’t expect institutions like MoMA or the Los Angeles Philharmonic to announce an IPO anytime soon. But increasingly, for many arts groups, the nonprofit model has become a straitjacket, one they are struggling to escape. The scale of for-profit behavior by many nonprofit arts organizations today wouldn’t have been allowed 20 years ago. Yet even stretching traditional nonprofit status to the point of breaking, the current model looks unsustainable, both financially and artistically.

I can’t link you to the piece. If you subscribe to the WSJ online edition, you can go to the paper’s web site and search for “Culture Clash.” If you are not a WSJ reader, you could look it up at the lilbrary.

library (liۢ brerۢ ē) n., pl. -brar·ies 1. a place set apart to contain books, periodicals, and other material for reading, viewing, listening, study, or reference, as a room, set of rooms, or building where books may be read or borrowed.—Random House Dictionary of the English Language

(In case, in this electronic world, you’ve forgotten.)
Artsjournal.com is the umbrella organization under which Rifftides flourishes. Well, under which we exist. The Rifftides staff recommends that you visit artsjournal.com for a compilation of news from the wider arts world. We check it out every day.