AJ Chronicles: Hollywood, 6; Non-Profit Arts, 1

This week we collected 125 stories on ArtsJournal [subscribe]. Here’s what I learned:

Over the past six months we’ve collected dozens of stories about the death of Hollywood. The cumulative numbers are stark: roughly half of all Hollywood production jobs are gone, and the family businesses that built the production economy — prop houses, florists, craft services — are closing in droves. This week Hollywood’s production crisis became a defining issue in the LA mayor’s race, and the desperately consolidating studios are seeing their structures crack: Paramount’s credit rating slid further toward junk rating on the Warner Bros. deal that will cut still more jobs and productions. Studios skipped Cannes, and Warner Music cut a deal to mine its catalog for biopics — IP extraction, not creation, which is the behavior of an industry model running out of risk tolerance and cash.

But that’s the obvious half of the story, the Hollywood production model collapsing. The more interesting story is what may be happening beside and underneath.

Because perhaps we can see the first shoots of the next model of Hollywood being assembled. A working talent manager wrote last week that the action is migrating: under-$5 million features, international co-productions, management firms restructuring around brand-funded development.

The hot hot production company A24, now thirteen years old, runs its own New York theatre and a hip restaurant alongside a steady run of movie hits. A coordinated group of creatives is making 50 films in 2026 entirely outside the studio system — the NonDē (“non-dependent”) movement. And film-maker Ryan Coogler reportedly negotiated three terms on Sinners that would have been unthinkable a decade ago: final cut, first-dollar gross, and rights reversion in 2050. In twenty-five years the film is his.

Here’s the thing: Hollywood has reinvented its core model at least six times in a century — the studio system replaced the nickelodeon, the first indoor storefront exhibition space dedicated entirely to showing projected motion pictures; the Paramount Decrees broke up studio theatre ownership; the backlot machine model gave way to the deal-and-finance model in the 90s; followed by the studios-as-streaming model; and now a new model being invented as we watch. Each reinvention was painful and cost careers. Each produced a successor before the old model was fully dead. The point is: the industry, a very lucrative one, has been forced to repeatedly evolve its business and artistic models in order to survive, yes, but also to try to stay artistically relevant.

The nonprofit arts model has reinvented itself exactly once.

In 1965, the Ford Foundation and the NEA built the institutional architecture it is still running on. The 501(c)(3) regional theatre, the orchestra subscription season, the museum endowment, the university MFA pipeline — all of it is essentially the same structure that was in place when the Beatles were still touring.

The world is a vastly different place than it was in the 1960s. Business models have evolved and evolved. Audience behavior has radically changed. Philanthropy has transformed its priorities and expectations. And institutions of all stripes across our culture have sustained attacks and been forced to reinvent. The internet. Even our politics have… well, become whatever they’ve become. The point is that in almost every arena of endeavor, it’s inconceivable that the participants haven’t moved with the times.

Except for the non-profit arts model.

Though ailing for years, the model is now in full out collapse. The reasons are many and every week’s stories bring fresh evidence. But what to do? If we take the movie industry example, in a contraction, leverage moves to whoever can credibly walk away. Demand for movies has never been higher — people aren’t watching less. So interestingly, the power is shifting—it may be that the studios will need creators more than the creators need them, and so the terms of trade are being rewritten in real time.

So what about nonprofit arts?

I wonder if the failure to evolve is baked into the model’s founding premise: that these art forms can’t survive the commercial market and so must be subsidized. Survival is framed as dependency, as charity, and to question the premise is to threaten the foundation of goodwill the subsidy depends on.

Most of our biggest arts foundations have exited funding the arts. Not because they don’t believe in art. But because they have lost belief in the ability of arts organizations to evolve. Last year I met with the arts program manager at a major foundation who told me they had “given up” on opera companies and symphony orchestras. “They just don’t get it. They won’t change.” Then he pointed to some scrappy small startups that were innovating as examples of what interested him.

The problem with his examples, as scrappy and innovative as they were, was that they were adapting to the disfunction of a model that no longer works. They could be nimble and resourceful through extraordinary effort and survive. But their extraordinariness, as excellent as it was, didn’t allow them to thrive, as it would in a functioning landscape — just survive. And when they get exhausted, as so many before them have, they will go away. This is a systemic sector problem, not something that any one enterprise can solve. Should you have to be extraordinary just to survive?

Yet the “can’t survive the market” actually describes most of the American economy. The Biden Administration’s CHIPS Act put $39 billion in direct grants into semiconductor manufacturing. Fossil fuels collect roughly $35 billion a year in direct federal subsidies. The employer health-insurance tax exclusion runs about $300 billion a year, the single largest tax expenditure in the entire code. Defense contractors live on cost-plus contracts and keep the government-funded R&D as private IP. NFL team owners get tens of billions of dollars in assorted public subsidy.

We make these subsidy investments because they produce goods or services we need or want. Fair enough. But I’d argue that what we haven’t invested in is the civic health of our country, what I’ve come to call the middleware that connects us and helps develop the values and leadership America has so long prided itself on. We’ve let it develop haphazardly and allowed it to be kidnapped by platforms and self-interests. As those middleware structures have dissolved over time, our leadership and our common purpose has eroded. When we do make social investments, it’s to address emergencies, like healthcare and food and homelessness. But what about investments in civic culture? Not so much, and when we do, we classify it as charity rather than investment in a healthy nation.

None of America’s big corporations call themselves charities. Many pride themselves on being free-market cowboys. There are worthy subsidies on that list, funding things we genuinely need. But characterizing art culture as a subsidy case while waving the oil industry through as free-market cowboys is, frankly, obscene. Until we adjust the frame of the argument for the arts in this country, I worry that we are trapped in a systemic non-profit decline.

So here’s more of what this week added to this picture. While institutions hold the 1965 line, a scramble for survival is happening underneath them — not by design, but by improvisation. UK music venues have started letting touring bands sleep in the building because touring economics no longer pencil out. A Finnish museum is paying four artists a stipend and covering their health insurance. Artists are openly bartering work for haircuts, meals, and lodging. New Zealand is pushing most of its arts-funding decisions down to as many as 16 regional bodies. Ireland has been experimenting with a guaranteed artist income scheme. And fascinatingly, Colorado’s state senate has just approved a new business entity category for artists — the A-Corp, intended to give artists a new model. Perhaps this is a non-profit version of the NonDē movement, the replacement architecture forming amidst the collapsing buildings, in pre-market forms: patronage, barter, mutual aid, devolved decision-making.

But we should note a difference from Hollywood’s reinvention process, because it’s important. Hollywood’s reinvention comes with leverage and negotiated terms — Coogler walks into the room and rewrites the deal. The arts’ version is subsistence improvisation, and nobody is at the table negotiating anything. The bands get a couch, not first-dollar gross. The muscle Hollywood is flexing, the one that looks at a contraction and asks what’s the replacement architecture, who’s building it, and how do we move resources toward it before the old one falls in on us, the nonprofit arts establishment never really built. So the reinvention is happening to the field, not by it.

And those who have spotted this shift are taking advantage of it. Changes in the models, particularly regarding how AI will change things, aren’t primarily being set in legislatures and in courtrooms. The new policies are coming from the giant companies making deals amongst themselves — Universal Music and Spotify and Disney with OpenAI and Anthropic. With these licensing deals, they lock in favorable terms for themselves, which then entire creative industries have to fall in line with.

I suspect the institutions that survive will be the ones that recognize the bottom-up improvisation for what it is — the first rough outline of a successor — and start negotiating its terms while they still have leverage. The ones that don’t will learn what the LA prop houses are learning: that you can be essential to the old system and irrelevant to the new one at the same time.

I write this not to complain about a structure that no one wants to change. I believe most working in the non-profit system are more than aware of its inadequacies. There is, in fact, hunger for a better model. But it’s also a monumental challenge to reset the frame and make the case for the arts as essential civic infrastructure —like the oil industry and chips and national defense and health insurance—and wean us off the notion that the arts are a charity or a frill or an afterthought, an argument we can’t win.

The arts have become philanthropic patronage again, with the majority of income coming from donations. This is what they were before the non-profit model was created in the 1960s to create a systemic structure of support. We recognized the need for that new system back then. We need to do that now. Again.

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Also Worth Your Attention

Is an opera company doing what NonDē is doing in film? Washington National Opera unveiled a five-stage, post–Kennedy Center season, distributing itself across the city rather than orbiting a single damaged anchor. It looks like the same move, the same playbook: parallel-system mode, forced by circumstance. When the old anchor breaks, the network is probably the answer.

Brand capital is arriving in the arts whether we approve or not. Dance Magazine documents how Cartier, Chanel, and LVMH have moved from sponsoring galas to underwriting actual choreography — the Sugar23 brand-funded model crossing into the nonprofit world. The creative-integrity questions are legitimate; so is the patronage gap left by contracting public and foundation money. The useful version of the conversation isn’t “is brand money good or bad.” It’s what the terms of trade are, and who is negotiating them on behalf of the field. Coogler negotiated three. So far, dance appears to be negotiating none.

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