For a long while, my teaching in arts management has emphasized “balance”…the nuanced navigation of opposing forces, the careful and reflective response to instability.
cc flickr Wendell
But now I’m noticing that talking about “balance” means accepting and building on a rather essential underlying premise: That there are opposites. That the tension we’re balancing is between two sides or two choices. That we’re finding a workable place between them.
This assumption comes up a LOT in arts management and in the support of creative enterprise. We’re balancing commerce and creative expression; popular and purposeful; practical and passionate; mission and markets. Of course we’re living in the tension involving those things. But is it useful to consider them choices or opposites?
I’m wondering now whether there’s a more thoughtful and productive way to consider these tensions. Not as opposites. Not as choices. But as parts of a complex whole. More yin and yang, less Sturm und Drang.
I’m not invoking incense and mindfulness and meditation (although, sure, those things are cool). Rather I’m suggesting a simple nudge on our reflexes and challenge to our assumptions.
The next time you feel like you’re balancing opposites in your work – between what your audience wants and what you or your artists want, between arguing “instrumental” or “intrinsic” value to your legislators, between making money and making meaning – pause for a moment, and suspend the premise. See what comes from a both/and perspective, rather than the instinctual either/or.
Great stuff as usual, Andrew. For me the ideal outcome of both/and thinking is an alignment of mission and money, populism and purity, etc. That’s when you start to experience what Jeff Bezos calls a “flywheel” – essentially a self-reinforcing system where success in one area provides fuel for success in other areas and it all loops back on itself in a beautiful, recursive cycle.
I love this concept: it is a refreshing approach–this idea of complementary forces–that has widespread applicability. The myth of unfettered, pure artistic pursuit is just that: myth. Art is produced in the world, a real world subject to the forces of audience opinion, fickle taste, commerce, union regulations and the laws of physics to mention just a few. Not all of these forces should be regarded as having equal footing, but in the end, an artist production is inevitably shaped by the pressures of some of these forces–which is often what makes the outcome so transporting.