The old British expression, ”horses for courses,” references the fact that certain race horses run better on certain tracks (dirt, mud, etc.). A primary challenge of the thoroughbred owner was therefore matching the horse to the course for the best results. The idiom now suggests that you match the right people to the task, or the right strategy to the goal.<\/p>\n
In professional-grade arts and culture, however, we’ve bet disproportionately on a single horse — the nonprofit, tax-exempt, 501c3, board-governed, vaguely hierarchical, and formally organized critter we call the professional nonprofit. It’s not a bad horse, and it continues to run well on certain courses. But we’ve rarely explored (at least in the past decades) the other<\/i> means of transportation at our disposal for the range of terrains we now are navigating.<\/p>\n
Even if we were to have that conversation, we’d likely limit the options to a certain genus — the formal organization or institution with explicit goals. We would encourage arts enthusiasts and professionals to match the organizational form to the task at hand, whether it was nonprofit, for-profit, private, public, corporate, limited liability company, partnership, co-operative, sole proprietorship, or hybrid.<\/p>\n
But as Clay Shirky so elegantly suggests in his TED talk from 2005<\/a> (and in his related book, Here Comes Everybody<\/i>, which I’ve talked up before<\/a>), such an exploration would miss completely an increasingly viable option for fostering, producing, stewarding, delivering, and interpreting cultural expression — not with an institution or organization, at all, but through non-planned and emergent coordination of distributed individuals.<\/p>\n Watch Shirky’s talk and you’ll get the larger gist: That many collective endeavors that used<\/i> to require institutions no longer require them (and in fact, those institutions are now often blocking<\/i> productive activity rather than advancing it), and that many collective endeavors that used to be impossible or improbable are now possible and even probable given the proper social tools.<\/p>\n Why is this an important issue for advocates, managers, and supporters of creative expression and cultural experience? Because if you’re using an institution or organization when you don’t<\/i> need to, you’re dragging around all sorts of extra costs and complications that sap your energy and diffuse your purpose. If you could select, with elegance and intent, the most appropriate organizational structure or non-organizational system for the goal you have in mind, you might find that you’re moving with<\/i> the tides rather than across them.<\/p>\n The formal, strategic, and structured nonprofit organization will remain an important option for non-market-supported, professional-grade artistic expression. But if we truly love our art forms and hope to foster their vital future, we might occasionally choose to leave that particular horse in the stable.<\/p>\n \n