There’s a chart and some findings in the report I mentioned earlier this week on executive compensation among Illinois arts organizations that are worth a moment’s reflection. The survey found that the large majority of arts organizations in their sample (and therefore in the state) were small in both money and staff (under $250,000). Says the report:
While the majority of arts organizations have at least one full-time staff member, 40 percent of the arts organizations in Illinois do not have full-time staff and nearly one fifth have no paid staff at all. Of those organizations that do have paid staff, 90 percent have less than 11 staff members. These figures point to the exceptional nature of the nonprofit arts economy, that is, many functioning organizations have budgets so small that they do not pay staff and are run totally by volunteers. Those that do have full-time, paid staff (61 percent) must still depend on a substantial amount of volunteer work, particularly from board members and other supporters.
And because there’s a particular difficulty in finding and counting the really small organizations (under $25,000 or unincorporated or informal), it’s easy to guess that the proportion is even more dramatic than the chart suggests.
The challenge in that reality is that it doesn’t match our efforts to support the arts. So many of us (me included) spend the bulk of our energy, funding, training, and policy thought on larger arts organizations in urban settings, and the managers thereof. These numbers should remind us that by doing so, we’re only speaking to a tiny fraction of the arts in America.
Once again, an analogy from science to make my point: Scientists have had all sorts of trouble understanding the dynamics of the universe because, as it turns out, most of its mass is invisible to them (they call it dark matter). When they focused only on the stars, planets, galaxies, and groovy, gaseous nebula, they were only seeing perhaps 10 percent of what made the whole system work.
Given the findings of the Illinois study (and others like it), it will be difficult for any of us to understand and support the creation, delivery, and experience of the arts in our country (or any other) if we only focus on the organizations we can readily see.
There’s a glorious mass of unpaid and unseen individuals, volunteers, civic leaders, community groups, amateur clubs, tiny organizations, and impresarios — spread out beyond the major cities — that comprises the bulk of cultural experience. We’ll need to include them in our calculations to really understand our particular universe.
