Jumper

Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

On artistic leadership and aesthetic values in a changed cultural context: A new keynote address

Last week I had the privilege, pleasure, and honor to give the keynote address at the Canadian Arts Summit–an annual gathering of the board chairs, executive leaders, and artistic leaders of Canada’s major cultural institutions. It was a terrific conference all around. Here is a link to a transcript of my keynote address. The talk was also live streamed and, as I understand it, a video will eventually be available for download.

Following a preamble (which highlights some of the key themes that I’ve been circling around for the past decade), the talk is divided into three parts:

Part 1: Can we talk about our aesthetic values? 

Do aesthetics get discussed at your own arts organization? If so, who is involved in the discussion?

  • The artistic staff?
  • All senior managers?
  • Board members?
  • Box office staff and front of house?
  • The janitorial staff?

Generally my experience has been that it is actually quite difficult for arts leaders, staffs, boards, and other internal and external stakeholders to talk about aesthetics, honestly, in this changed cultural context; but I think we must.

Part 2: Can we talk about how a season comes together? (Hat tip to David Dower at ArtsEmerson …)

How does a season, or a collection, come together? What’s the relationship between the economics, ethics, and aesthetics of our organizations? What’s the mutual dependence between judgments of artistic excellence; the non-negotiable principles that uphold organizations’ core values; and the willingness for particular bodies to pay? What holds everything together? Dare we ask?

Part 3: What does responsible artistic leadership look like? What’s the work in 2018?

The subsidized arts not only can—but must—play a vital, humanizing role in any society but to play that role, in these times, we must regenerate individual arts organizations. What does that work look like? (I share a few ideas.)

Many thanks for reading and sharing any thoughts!

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On playwrights attempting to be in the driver’s seat: my experience at Dominique Morisseau’s “Pipeline”

I’ve recently starting working as an assistant professor and program director for a new MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship (MA AME) at The New School. If you don’t know it, The New School is a progressive university based in New York City. Social justice is a core value of the institution and it ranks quite high on various dimensions of diversity. The MA AME is distinguished from other MA in arts management or administration programs in that it is intended for practicing performing artists only. When they apply, students are evaluated based on their artistic portfolios as much as their social goals or propensity for entrepreneurship; and while in the program students are required to maintain their artistic practice (and receive credit for this).

One of the things we tend to say about the program is that it is aimed at putting artists in the driver’s seat, so to speak, of their careers, the projects they develop, and the enterprises they found. I have been thinking about this programmatic aim in light of a recent experience seeing the play Pipeline at Lincoln Center Theater and last week’s announcement of its author, playwright Dominique Morisseau, as recipient of one of the Ford Foundation Fellowships for Social Change in the Arts.

While it is Ms. Morisseau’s powerful scripts that have, no doubt, earned her a spot on this prestigious list, I am equally interested in another area in which I see her as an agent of social change: Morisseau has made it her business to call out the cultural and racial biases embedded in taken-for-granted notions of what constitutes appropriate behavior at the theater.

To wit, in December 2015 Morisseau penned a candid, courageous, and unabashed article for American Theatre magazine called “Why I almost slapped a fellow theatre patron, and what that says about our theatres.” In it, she recounts a troubling experience at a theater performance–one in which she is confronted with a series of race-based microaggressions. Perhaps as a result of experiences like these, Morisseau created a program insert called Rules of Engagement for Lincoln Center Theater’s recent production of her play, Pipeline.

I attended Pipeline in the late summer. The play revolves around a young black man, who is facing challenges at the (almost entirely white) private boarding school that he attends, whose parents are divorced, and whose mom teaches in an inner city high school in New York City. As critic Jeremy Gerard noted in his review, the play’s title:

… refers to two different kinds of institutionalized segregation. In the first, “gifted and talented” students are culled from the public-school crowd and given accelerated classroom experiences. The second refers to the schools-to-prison syndrome that plagues poor, mostly inner-city, and mostly African-American families.

It’s perhaps worth mentioning at this point in the story that I had purchased discounted tickets for the show, as a member of Theatre Development Fund, for myself and a friend.

I didn’t actually notice Morisseau’s Rules of Engagement insert as I arrived at the theater just before curtain. What I did notice as I sat down was that my friend and I were the only two white people in the entire house right section, which was filled with black adults (young and old). And vice versa, after settling into our seats, we glanced around the room and saw a three-quarters sea of predominately white people. I gathered from the Q&A that among those seated in my section were some high school or college students attending with their teacher or professor. Whether the result of an ill-conceived seating policy (or the lack of any policy at all), the failure to integrate the recipients of “outreach” or “discount” tickets with the rest of the audience struck me as an embarrassing and serious gaffe–particularly given the themes of the play.

The show started and the students in our section appeared to be quite engaged: they were leaning forward, laughing, occasionally vocalizing, or snapping. At the end of the program there was a Q&A and all of the actors came out to participate. A majority of questions came from a small group of students seated in my section of the theater. At one point a student asked (and I’m paraphrasing):

So, is there a subtext to this play? Or is it essentially about “the pipeline”? I mean, is there another subtext besides the pipeline you are all playing as actors? I ask because I’m studying acting now and we’re talking a lot about subtext.

I thought it was great question given the socio-political nature of the piece. There was a long silence and then a black actor*** responded  (and I’m paraphrasing from memory):

I am going to put that question aside for a moment. I want to say something else because backstage we were all talking about this. It was incredibly challenging for us tonight because of all the snapping that you all were doing. I don’t know if you noticed the scene in which I looked at all of you like (and here the actor looked at the students with a raised eyebrow), but it was really distracting. And one person would start snapping and then someone somewhere else would start snapping. The playwright has given us her Rules of Engagement. You need to understand that we could hear you and that your behavior was incredibly distracting. And I’m here to tell you, there is no snapping in the theater! That does not happen.

I sat there a bit in shock. Remember, I had not opened my program. I had not seen the Rules of Engagement insert.

My first thought was: “Wait! This play opened with an actor speaking to the audience as though they were the students in her classroom. The fourth wall was broken by the production itself; and now the students are being chastised for, essentially, going with the convention???” I then became perturbed at the cultural implications. I turned to my friend and whispered heatedly, “How is snapping in the middle of a scene any different than people clapping when a star walks on stage?”

I had no idea what “rules of engagement” the actor was referencing; but in the context of the finger-wagging I began to think they must have been some sort of “rules of etiquette” that had been passed out to all the school groups. I felt sad for the American theater as it had just reprimanded one of the more engaged audiences I had witnessed in a long time. I left the Q&A shortly thereafter.

I got home and found Morisseau’s Rules of Engagement in my program. Reading this list one is immediately struck by the generous (and perhaps conflicted) spirit and aims of the piece.

On the one hand, the piece is clearly intended to invite (or protect the possibility of) more engaged participation by audience members. And on the other hand, Morisseau is also clearly trying to safeguard the actors from being obstructed by unruly behavior. Testifying is allowed but not so much that it is thwarting to the actors. As such, I immediately wondered whether or not she would agree with what had happened at the Q&A? Whether she would be more sympathetic with the actors, or the students?

This etiquette issue can be a hot-button topic for those who work or regularly attend live performance. In 2016 I moderated a rather feisty debate at the International Society for the Performing Arts on the question: Is there a correct behavior in a live performing arts venue? The debate was exploring whether, in the face of dramatic cultural, technological and demographic changes, the general rules of etiquette and other behaviors that are taken for granted at live performing arts venues also needed to change? Or whether there was still value in maintaining audience-performer conventions, most notably the expectation of reverent silence? At the heart of the debate was the growing recognition that historically white institutions have made it a policy to “open their doors to everyone” but have quite often been unwilling to allow the etiquette at the theater to evolve in light of the changing demographics of their communities (and therefore audiences).

As I continued mulling on the Pipeline experience I began to see another side. The actor was not incorrect. By-and-large, let’s face it, snapping is (still) not condoned by the institutionalized American theater. And if the actor wanted these students to be welcomed in historically white theaters in the future this finger wagging may have been an attempt to do them a favor by setting them straight.

I showed the program insert to a friend and relayed my experience. In response he asked, “I wonder how and when this insert emerged in the production process?”

It is a great question.

I interpret Morisseau’s Rules of Engagement as an attempt by an artist to be in the driver’s seat. By giving explicit permission for audiences to engage in certain culturally specific behaviors, Morisseau poked and prodded at longstanding, taken-for-granted norms about what is and isn’t appropriate at Lincoln Center, or other regional theaters generally run by and generally serving a white, educated, upper middle class crowd. In an interview for TheaterMania, Morisseau is described as taking “a breath when describing the pamphlet” and then saying:

My shows that have been programmed at theaters across the country have predominantly white audiences in their subscriber base. I have seen the sprinkle of audience members of color who have a conflict of engagement with those white audiences. Or maybe, those white audiences have a conflict of engagement with those audiences of color. There are moments I’ve noticed, repeatedly, where the people of color think they are guests in the space. They hush as though they’ve broken the rule of the space, instead of engaging with my work the way I think my work demands, which is with a little bit of an audible response. … What I’ve asked for is space for the community to respond to my work.

There is another recent, and quite high profile, example of a playwright seeking to influence how audiences can respond to his work–but with a financial penalty rather than an insert. This past summer playwright David Mamet (Oleanna, Speed-the-Plow, Glengarry Glen Ross, and many others) had the theater world up in arms because, as this Guardian article states, “the licence to stage a Mamet play now includes a clause that prevents producers from staging official debates within two hours of a performance. Any violation risks the loss of the licence and a fine of $25,000 for every post-show talk.”

While some interpreted this as short-sighted, diva behavior I found myself wondering if this didn’t arise from Mamet (who has made a public conversion from liberalism to conservatism) seeing his plays interpreted through a predominately liberal institutional lens at post-show talkbacks? Theaters are up-in-arms because they feel they should have a right to foster public discussion. Mamet evidently wants audience members to have the chance to make up their own minds about the work. It would be great to see an actual debate between some writers and some theater producers on this issue. Anecdotally, it seems that many playwrights abhor the post-show talk-back trend but are disinclined to say so publicly.

Returning to Pipeline, I would love to know how other performances went and how various audiences, Morisseau, the actors, and the theater felt about the insert and its effects. Ultimately, while I sympathize with the actors who evidently felt distracted by the snapping the night I saw the play, I remain troubled by the fact that these students were called out publicly for their behavior at the Q&A. That they were chastised even while holding a slip of paper in their hands–from the playwright–whose subtext, spirit and intent, seemed to be: “It’s OK. Snap. Say Amen. Be in the moment with this play rather than sitting and worrying about whether you are doing the right thing or the wrong thing in this theater filled with white, upper middle class people. You belong here.”

*** The word “actor” is used to refer to female or male performers.

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Is artistic leadership at America’s arts institutions lacking? Is this at the root of declining relevancy?

Joe Horowitz has written a stirring essay on the Metropolitan Opera, New York City Ballet, and New York Philharmonic on the occasion of the 50th anniversary of Lincoln Center. In response, ArtsJournal has asked a number of people to consider the essay and to weigh in on a series of questions (paraphrased):

Is artistic leadership at America’s arts institutions lacking? Moreover, is this at the root of declining relevancy of the arts? Is something more, or better, needed from America’s arts institutions, particularly at this vexing and critical time?

This essay explores these questions through the lens of the American theater. At the heart of this essay rests the paradox of the Public Arts Institution—a paradox captured beautifully in this passage from a 1970 essay by Arena Stage co-founder, Zelda Fichandler, Theatres or Institutions?[1]

I am not very strong on community giving, except perhaps when it represents only a small percentage of the total. I think we could well do without the hand that rocks the cradle, for the hand that rocks the cradle will also want to raise it in a vote and mix into the pie with it. For while a theatre is a public art and belongs to its public, it is an art before it is public and so it belongs first to itself and its first service must be self-service. A theatre is part of its society. But it is a part which must remain apart since it is also chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter.

This is a paradox I also wrestled with in an essay published in the most recent issue of Artivate called On Entrepreneurialism and Publicness (or Whose Theatre is it, Really?). 

Part I: Are We Weeding, or Breeding, Artistic Leadership Out of the Field?

Joe Horowitz’s story is a tale of three organizations, only one of which (New York City Ballet) succeeded in changing the face of its art form. What made the difference at the Ballet? By my reading, there was first and foremost a will on the part of both Balanchine and his impresario, Kirstein, to do so; and second, conditions were ripe for these institutional entrepreneurs to make their move.

Last year I worked on a case study on the Margo Jones Theatre, founded in 1947 (in Dallas, Texas) and hailed by most theater historians as the prototypical modern resident theater. Jones produced exclusively new plays and classics. In an average season Jones produced 4-5 premieres and two classics; in contrast, of 23 resident theaters surveyed in 1965 by journalist Sandra Schmidt, 15 produced no new plays at all and four produced only one.[2] At the time, most resident theaters exemplified the vibrant museum model described in Horowitz’s essay.

Historians often chalk this up to a discomfort with new fare on the part of both institutional leaders and their audiences. Perhaps. It seems Jones overcame discomfort by reading a minimum of one new script every day of her life from her college days onward and, more importantly, she made her audience comfortable with new fare through the same process: repeated exposure.

Like Balanchine, Jones had a vision and the will to execute it. Importantly, she also had a business manager who supported her commitment to new plays and a board of directors that gave her free reign. Equally as important, resident theater in America was in its pioneer period. But the first condition is critical. Jones was devoted to playwrights and preached far and wide that nonprofit regional theaters had a moral duty to produce new plays being rejected by the commercial stage, in lieu of relying on Broadway revivals–fare favored by both commercial winter stock companies and community theaters at the time.

We seem to have few such zealots running American LORT theaters these days.

Why is that?

I don’t believe it’s because none exist.

Consider the driving emphasis on instilling arts institutional leaders with business skills since 1960; the now mandatory requirements of a track record of raising money and delivering box office hits (that will fill Broadway-sized venues) to attain the job of artistic director at a major theater; the lack of artists on nonprofit boards, or even many individuals with an aesthetic sensibility; and the dramatic power shift from artist-leaders to business-leaders, generally.

Maybe we have been breeding, or weeding, artistic leadership out of the field?

Margo Jones didn’t like to raise money from the community, she demanded 100% control of her theater, and she walked into the job interview saying to the board, in essence: Count me out if you are planning to be a theater of the past, “striving to exist on box-office hits,” as I am only interested in creating “a true playwright’s theatre, presenting original scripts and providing playwrights with an outlet for their work.”[3]

If Margo Jones were applying to run an American theater in the hinterlands of the US today she probably wouldn’t stand a chance.

Part II: Artists are Getting it Done … But Are Institutions Getting in the Way?

I recently had the privilege of attending a Salzburg Global Seminar called The Art of Resilience: Creativity, Courage and Renewal. Among many inspiring presentations was one by artist Anida Yoeu Ali, a first generation Muslim Khmer woman born in Cambodia and raised in Chicago. Anida talked about a number of her works, including a performance installation called The Red Chador: Thresholds, created for a 2016 Smithsonian event called Crosslines: A Culture Lab on Intersectionality. The work asked viewers: “Can we accept a Muslim woman as a patriotic woman?”

The Red Chador: Threshold, Washington DC, USA | May 28-29, 2016. Commissioned by Smithsonian Asian Pacific American Center. Performance by Anida Yoeu Ali.                               Photo Courtesy of Les Talusan

Over breakfast one morning I asked Anida, “So how would you respond to the question, ‘What is the role of the artist post-Trump?” and she said, “Same as always. No different. Get up and do the work.”

The day after the election Anida took to the streets of Seattle, where she is now based, wearing the red, glittering chador she created for the Smithsonian performance installation and holding a sign that on one side said, I AM A MUSLIM and, on the other, BAN ME.

The Red Chador: The Day After, Seattle, USA | Nov 9, 2016. Performance by Anida Yoeu Ali.  Photo courtesy of Studio Revolt.

What’s my point?

Artists are doing something about it, same as always.

However, most artists depend upon institutional outlets for protection, platforms, and resources for that something to be fully realized.

To this very point, the New York Times recently ran an article on a new play by Robert Schenkkan, written in a “white-hot fury” in one week. Characterized as a “disquieting response to the Trump era,” it’s called Building the Wall.  Schenkkan says in the article:

We no longer live in a world that is business as usual—Trump has made that very clear—and if theater is going to remain relevant, we must become faster to respond.

While the article goes on to mention that a group of theaters has committed to producing the play within the next few months, it’s worth noting that (a) this sort of response is exceedingly rare; and (b) the theaters that have stepped up are largely part of a small alliance of exemplary midsized theaters (the National New Play Network) that has fought the past decade or so to shift stultifying practices around new play development in the US.

Most institutions are not able to respond quickly to artists (doing something about it) in large part because artists exist outside of institutions rather than within them. While resident theaters were initially idealized as homes for actors, writers, and designers what they have become in reality is homes for administrators and technicians. Even when artists are in residence they quite often have minimal (if any) power within institutions, or influence on them. And we have had a number of instances of institutional cowardice (if not censorship) in recent years. (See, e.g. this article on the experience of Anida Yoeu Ali and Gregg Deal at the Smithsonian event mentioned above.)

I have heard playwrights say that they write for television these days not only because they make more money but because it is a more creative and validating environment than the nonprofit American theater. That is a sobering thought.

Perhaps any lack of courage, vision, or moral imagination in arts organizations is related to the extent to which arts leaders have managed risk by disempowering artists or placing them outside the institution?

Part III: Do arts leaders identify too much with their upper middle class donors?

I was at a conference a few weeks ago and heard a development staffer bemoaning over her morning croissant that she had spent the better part of the prior two weeks trying to learn everything she could about some Ultra-High-Net-Worth-Couple in her city so that her institution could launch a stealth courtship and, with any luck, land a major gift. She commented that, as far as anyone could tell, this couple had never stepped foot in the doors of the institution. She fretted over the fact that she was dedicating every working moment to deeply understanding two wealthy people with no relationship whatsoever to the institution; while nary a nanosecond was being expended trying to learn about the values, hopes, dreams, and challenges of the loyal patrons who were not in a position to make an extraordinary gift to the institution.

While donor research and cultivation has become a serious science, the ideology driving such behavior has been with us since the founding of the nonprofit-professional arts sector in the US. I am amazed that we are able to say with a straight face that America’s 20th century nonprofit-professional theater companies were largely established to serve the general public when many institutionalized a practice (at their inceptions) that would ensure they paid attention to the needs of the upper middle class at the expense of all others.

In the 1960s Danny Newman persuaded theaters that it was better (not just economically better, but morally better) to focus their time and resources on the 3% of the population that is inclined to subscribe and to ignore everyone else. Though some artistic directors rebelled mightily against this approach in the theater industry—Richard Schechner and Gregory Mosher were among the most vocal who noted that it was undemocratic and had a stultifying effect on programming—it was embraced wholeheartedly by a majority of institutions. This was in large part because it was strongly encouraged by the Ford Foundation and its proxy at the time, Theatre Communications Group.

Today marketing firms promulgate customer relationship management models like this one promoted by TRG Arts. This sort of philosophy upheld over time will invariably orient an organization toward caring more about those who can buy more tickets and donate more money.

Arts institutions cannot uphold Zelda Fichandler’s notion of the theatre as belonging to the public but first belonging to itself if they are, essentially, social clubs for the upper middle class. The institution cannot be “chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter” if it has neither independence nor publicness.

Perhaps a driving focus on cultivating the patronage of the upper middle class has skewed the politics and purposes of arts institutions, and also has been a major factor in declining relevancy? On the most fundamental level nonprofit art institutions are among the cultural spaces that are able to bring people together across divides on equal terms—a vital function that is, at times like these, in and of itself a political act. However, it seems we have too gladly ceded that role to sports and (lately) to some exemplary libraries around the world (see, e.g., the library parks in Colombia) that have transformed their purposes for the 21st century.

Part IV: Good We Are Awake. Now, Can we Stay Awake?

Shortly after Trump was elected a particular a phrase from Tony Kushner’s masterpieces Angels in America, parts I and II began to appear on my Facebook feed, which is to a great extent populated by liberal arts types like me. That phrase: “The Great Work Begins.”

The statement, in turns hopeful and harrowing depending on its context in the plays, provoked two questions for me:

What is our Great Work in the arts? (which I addressed in this Jumper post); and

Why is this Great Work beginning only now, after Trump’s election?

Put another way, why does it so often take a crisis for those of us working in the arts, in the so-called civic sphere, to engage with the struggles, the pain, the hopes, the dreams, the fears … of our communities-at-large?

The extraordinary observer of the human condition, writer Rebecca Solnit, reflects in her beautiful book, Hope in the Dark:

Americans are good at responding to crisis and then going home to let another crisis brew.

She says this is, in part …

… because we tend to think that political engagement is something for emergencies rather than, as people in many countries (and Americans at other times) have imagined, as part and even a pleasure of everyday life.

“The problem” as she puts it, “seldom goes home.”

Unlike television (and libraries) the American theater didn’t use the Digital Revolution combined with the Great Recession as an opportunity to radically transform itself so as to become more relevant, more vibrant, more accessible, more vital—and yes, more economically sustainable.

It seems we have another shot as, for many in the arts sector, Trump seems to represent a wake-up call.

Perhaps now is the time to prioritize artistic vision over business skills; to grant artists primacy within the arts institution; and to shift attention from wealthy donors to the community-at-large. Perhaps now is the time to embrace the paradox of being Public Arts Institutions: a part of society—but a part which must remain apart in order to fulfill its multifaceted role as “chastiser, rebel, lightning rod, redeemer, irritant, codifier, and horse-laughter.”

Finally, perhaps engaging in public affairs for the next four years will remind arts institutions that this is not the Great Work we must do now, this is the everyday work–the doing something about it–we should have been doing the past 30 years and that we must continue to do post 2020.

PS – Huge shout out to Deborah Cullinan at Yerba Buena Center for the Arts. I love her notion of art centers existing to ignite radical citizenship and I love the YBCA campaign that resulted in the tagline pictured in the photo at the top of this post, which was an inspiration for this piece. 

***

[1] Fichandler, Z. (1970). Theatres or Institutions? The American Theatre 1969-70: International Theatre Institute of the United States, Volume 3. (New York: Charles Scribner’s Sons), p. 110.

[2] Schmidt, S. (1965). The Regional Theatre: Some Statistics. The Tulane Drama Review, Vol. 10, No. 1 (Autumn, 1965), pp. 50-61.

[3] Sheehy, H. (1989). Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones. (Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press), p. 88.

What is our “Great Work” in light of this election?

Several hours ago now, Donald J. Trump was elected the forty-fifth President of the United States. I haven’t slept in 36 hours. As the results of the election became clear, more than a few theater friends on my Facebook feed began to post the words: “The Great Work Begins”—a reference to a phrase in Tony Kushner’s Angels in America and Angels in America, Part Two: Perestroika. Fueled by confusion and concern, and with a desire to spur myself and others to both reflection and action, I offer this post (a combination of new thoughts and those I’ve generated elsewhere over the past two years). I hope I can enjoin others to engage in a practical and hopeful conversation about where we go from here and the perhaps “painful progress” that we in the arts need to make.[1]

By the way, I am honored and delighted to announce that I recently began a 15-month fellowship as a (mostly virtual) Arts Blogger/Writer in Residence at the Thomas S. Kenan Institute at North Carolina School of the Arts. In the coming months you may see some of my Jumper posts syndicated on the Kenan website and vice versa.

From the Wikipedia Commons

From the Wikipedia Commons

At 10:58 pm Eastern—before the game-ending number of electoral votes had been reached and while Hillary Clinton still had at least a few pathways to 270—columnist Paul Krugman posted:

We still don’t know who will win the electoral college, although as I write this it looks—incredibly, horribly—as if the odds now favor Donald J. Trump. What we do know is that people like me, like most readers of the New York Times, truly didn’t understand the country we live in.

From where I stand, those working in nonprofit professional cultural organizations across the US—we in the so-called Creative Class—are, without a doubt, among those who did not understand our country, its culture, or its values. If we are shocked and outraged by the election results this only seems to prove the point. And this lack of understanding is disappointing given that art can be—arguably, should be—the way we share with one another what it means to be human (a powerful and democratizing notion I first encountered in Bill Sharpe’s wonderful monograph, Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth).

Looking at the programming on our stages it seems that many of us have existed inside a bubble, utterly out of touch with the Trump-supporting working poor in America, among many others.

How did this happen?

Virginia Woolf writes in her book, Three Guineas:

If people are highly successful in their professions they lose their senses. Sight goes. They have no time to look at pictures. Sound goes. They have no time to listen to music. Speech goes. They have no time for conversation. They lose their sense of proportion—the relations between one thing and another. Humanity goes.

This statement is hauntingly resonant when I think about the arts and culture sector in the US. The price of success has been the loss of our humanity as organizations. We appear to have lost our senses.

I came to this realization in June 2014 at a residential training with the organization Common Cause, which seeks to encourage NGOs and others working in the social sectors to join up to advance a set of common values in society—values like A World of Beauty, Social Justice, Equality, A Sense of Belonging, Broadmindedness, A Meaningful Life.[2] At the first gathering, when we went around a circle and talked about why we had chosen to come on the training, I said something to this effect:

I’m here because I don’t know if I can continue to work on behalf of the arts if the arts are only interested in advancing themselves.

I’m here because I’m worried about things like growing income inequality and suspect that growing income inequality may actually benefit the arts. And what are we going to do about that? I’m here because I’m worried about cultural divides and that the arts perpetuate them more than they help to bridge them.

I believe the arts could be a force for good, but I believe we will need to change as leaders, and as organizations, in relationship to our communities, for them to be so.

I was despairing about my life working in the arts when I spoke these words and I felt that same despair this morning in the aftermath of the election. But it is incumbent upon us to move on from sorrow as there is important work to be done. Earlier this year, New York Times columnist David Brooks argued in this article that there are forces coursing through all modern societies that, while liberating for the individual, are challenging to social cohesion—meaning the willingness of members of a society to cooperate with each other in order to survive and prosper together.

Friends, this is our crisis today. And we need to wake up to it.

Do we really want to be #strongertogether? If so, who better than the arts to help repair the divides in our country? Who better than we to contribute to the fostering of social cohesion? And do we understand that, without this, many other aspects of society—including the economy—will continue to break down?

So how do we begin again?

Honestly, it feels impossible at the moment. Nonetheless, I’d like to suggest that we might start by borrowing a page out of the play book of a colleague in the UK, Andrew McIntyre. For the past few years Andrew has been leading workshops in which he guides arts organizations to write manifestos. He justifies this work saying:

If you just want to organize the world a little more efficiently, you’ll get away with just a business plan. But if you want to change the world, leave your artistic mark, make a cultural impact or have ever used the word transform, then nothing short of a manifesto will do. Manifestos are open letters of intent that are fundamental and defining. They terminate the past and create a vision of new worlds. They demand attention, inspire and galvanize communities around us and knowingly antagonize others. They provoke action.

As citizens of a country that feels dangerously unstable, incoherent, unmoored, precarious, and divided, I suggest we begin by tearing up the generally lifeless and useless corporate mission statements that currently guide many of our organizations. In their place let us compose manifestos grounded in the reality of the present moment. Here are some questions to get you started:

What are you laboring for that transcends your organization and position within it—what values, goals, or progress in the world? Indeed, what are we laboring for collectively? Do we have a common cause?

It’s a small way to begin.

In his 2014 keynote address for a reunion of Asian American alumni at Yale, Vijay Ayer remarked:

Now that I am hanging my hat each week at that other centuries-old corporation of higher learning, just up the road in Cambridge, I am more and more mindful of what the British-Nigerian artist Yinka Shonibare has called complicity with excess.

And as we continue to consider, construct and develop our trajectories as Americans, I am also constantly mindful of what it means to be complicit with a system like this country, with all of its structural inequalities, its patterns of domination, and its ghastly histories of slavery and violence.

Many of us are here because we’ve become successful in that very context. … Whether you attribute it to some mysterious triple package or to your own Horatio Alger story, to succeed in America is, somehow, to be complicit with the idea of America—which means that at some level you’ve made peace with its rather ugly past.

As we write our manifestos, let us do so cognizant of the possibility that the success of our institutions may be related to decades of “complicity with excess” and let us also temper any tendencies toward self-righteousness, bearing in mind the words of American feminist, author, speaker, and social and political activist, Courtney Martin.[3]  Perhaps, she says,

…our charge is not to save the world after all, it is to live in it, flawed and fierce, loving and humble.

If we are to fulfill our highest purposes as communal organizations—places where art can provide a way for people to share with one another what it means to be human—then it seems that we arts workers will need to let go of the notion upon which many nonprofit professional cultural organizations were founded: that we exist, essentially, to save the world with art (and, quite often, with Western European Bourgeois Art, specifically). Instead, it seems that our first charge is to live fully in our tragically divided country and participate fully in our tragically broken democracy. Fleeing physically, mentally, emotionally, or spiritually is to deny both our culpability and power to make a difference. (And, yes, in case you are wondering, I’m planning to move back to the US when I finish my dissertation.)

It’s time to walk out into our communities, with our senses wide open, and absorb “the relations between one thing and another.”

It’s time to find our humanity and help others to find theirs.

***

[1]  “The World only spins forward. We will be citizens. […] More Life. The Great Work Begins.” “Painful progress” is also from Kushner’s Angels in America, Part Two: Peristroika: “In this world, there is a kind of painful progress. Longing for what we’ve left behind, and dreaming ahead.”

[2] These values are taken from the research of Shalom Schwartz. You can read more about this at http://valuesandframes.org/handbook/

[3] From her book, Do It Anyway, as cited by Krista Tippet in the session: Parker Palmer and Courtney Martin – The Inner Life of Rebellion. http://www.onbeing.org/program/parker-palmer-and-courtney-martin-the-inner-life-of-rebellion/7122

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When communities become markets, citizens become consumers, and culture becomes an exploitable product

Photo by Duncan C, Flickr

Photo Chapman’s Homer, Christchurch by Duncan C, published on Flickr, Creative Commons License.***

A couple weeks back I had the privilege to give a talk in Christchurch, NZ at an event called The Big Conversation—hosted by Creative New Zealand, the major arts funding body for the country. The talk, Transformation or Bust: When Hustling Ticket Sales and Contributions is Just Not Cutting It Anymore (click on the link and it will take you to a transcript) was intended to address the general conference theme, Embracing Arts / Embracing Audiences. It was assembled on top of four cornerstone ideas:

  • Michael Sandel’s argument that we have shifted from having a market economy to becoming a market society in which, as he puts it, market relations and market incentives and market values come to dominate all aspects of life.
  • The notion that, paradoxically, the arts are facing a crisis of legitimacy (says John Holden) at the very moment when we have so much to potentially contribute as a remedy to the erosion of social cohesion that is resulting from global migration, economic globalization, a culture of autonomy, and the Internet (see the David Brooks op-ed, How Covenants Make Us).
  • The four futures for the social sectors predicted by NYU professor Paul Light in the wake of the 2008 economic crisis: (1) the unlikely scenario that nonprofits would be rescued by significant increases in contributions; (2) the more probable scenario that all nonprofits would suffer; (3) the most likely scenario that the largest, most visible, and best connected nonprofits would thrive while others would fold; and (4) the hopeful scenario that the sector would undergo positive transformation that would leave it stronger and more impactful, likely only if pursued deliberately and collectively by nonprofits and their stakeholders.
  • And a concept I encountered on Doug Borwick’s excellent blog: transformative engagement, by which Doug means engagement with the community that changes the way an organization thinks and what it does.

Building on these, I argue that in the US arts and culture sector we have for too long ignored or denied the costs of so-called progress in the arts–meaning, for instance, the costs of professionalization, growth, and the adoption of orthodox marketing practices including so-called customer relationship management and I suggest five ways that arts organizations may need to adapt their philosophies and practices in relationship to their communities if their goal is deeper, more meaningful engagement.

Ultimately, I pull the various threads of the talk together in a framework that seeks to conceptualize the difference between embracing the community and embracing the market. In setting this up, I build on Internet guru Seth Godin’s notion of, essentially, competing worldviews that inform the way companies approach marketing. In an interview with Krista Tippett on her NPR show, On Being, Godin remarks:

There’s one view of the world called the Wal-Mart view that says that what all people want is as much stuff as possible for as cheap a price as possible. … And that’s a world based on scarcity. I don’t have enough stuff. How do I get more stuff?… There’s a different view, which is the view based on abundance. [And] in an abundance economy the things we don’t have enough of are connection …and time.

Here’s the PPT slide of the framework I created that synthesizes the various ideas in my New Zealand talk:

worldviews

In many ways, this talk explores an idea that I first began to ponder when I wrote a blog post for the Irvine Foundation in response to its question: Is there an issue in the arts field more urgent than engagement? If so, what is it?

In my post, I answered the question in the affirmative and then offered the following as a more urgent issue:

While lack of meaningful engagement in the arts is indeed troubling, I would offer that a larger problem is that the nonprofit, professional arts have become, by-and-large, as commodified, homogeneous, transactional, and subject to market forces as every other aspect of American society. From where I sit, the most important issue in the arts field these days may be that the different value system that art represents no longer seems to be widely recognized or upheld — by society-at-large, or even within the arts field itself.

For the New Zealand talk I tried to explore the ramifications of the loss of this “different value system” (Jeanette Winterson) and how it relates to the issue of engagement.

Gap Filler: On Sustaining the Social Cohesion that Emerges out of Disasters

Because the conference took place in Christchurch (where two devastating earthquakes struck in 2010 and 2011) I reflected at the top of the talk on the solidarity and social cohesion that often arise in response to natural disasters. In his new book, Tribe,  Sebastian Junger introduces the seminal research of a man named Charles Fritz to explain why this is. Fritz asserts “that disasters thrust people into a more ancient, organic way of relating.” … “As people come together to face a threat,” Fritz argues, “class differences are temporarily erased, income disparities become irrelevant, race is overlooked, and individuals are assessed simply by what they are willing to do for the group” (Junger 2016, 53-54).

Yet, as Junger reports, all too often, these effects are temporary. One of the best parts of the conference in New Zealand was being introduced to some amazing organizations and projects here—including Gap Filler, an intiative that began with a few people asking how they could sustain the sense of fellowship, volunteerism, and community that arose out of the first earthquake. One of the co-founders of Gap Filler, Dr. Ryan Reynolds, gave a truly inspiring presentation at the conference. It struck me listening to his story that Gap Filler could be the poster child for Creative Placemaking.

gap filler

Gap Filler’s first ten-day project was launched in November 2010. It began because Reynolds and others wanted somehow to fill the gaps in the physical and metaphysical landscape of Christchurch left by the loss of hundreds of buildings, including dozens of bars, clubs, and restaurants. They had the idea to gather a group of volunteers together to transform the empty lot where a popular restaurant, South of the Border, once stood into a temporary space for citizens to once again come together and eat, drink and socialize. Over the course of ten days—and driven largely by citizens who showed up on their own initiative to contribute to and enjoy the temporary space—the site came to host a temporary garden café, live music, poetry readings, an outdoor cinema, and more. The success of this first project led to further initiatives including art installations, concerts, workshop spaces and eventually semi-permanent structures. You can read more about Gap Filler’s projects here. (And here is an article, written in 2013, about the revitalizing influence of the earthquake on the Christchurch arts scene.)

Gap Filler was only one of several remarkable organizations/projects I heard about at The Big Conversation.

In any event, if you read the talk, I hope you find it worthwhile and will share any responses to it on Jumper.

And speaking of things worth reading …

ninas book

Nina Simon has a new book out! Those who have read Jumper for a while, or have heard me speak at conferences, know that the topic of matteringness or relevance is one I have been circling and diving into with some regularity for the past decade—and I am by no means alone in this. One of the greatest minds on this topic is Nina Simon at the Santa Cruz Museum of Art & History and she has a new book out—The Art of Relevance. I won’t be united with my copy until I’m back in the US next month, at which point I look forward to reading it and writing about it on Jumper. In the meantime, I strongly encourage anyone interested in the topics of relevance, engagement, or participation in the arts to buy it and read it, as well.

***This photo is of the stunning sculpture by Michael Parekowhai, On First Looking into Chapman’s Homer,  and it was taken at one of the many sites where the work was situated in Christchurch following its presentation at the 54th Venice Biennale. It is currently housed at the Christchurch Art Gallery and is considered to be a symbol of the resilience of the people of Christchurch following the earthquakes.

Valuable data, questionable field recommendations. (A response to Irvine’s latest report on arts participation.)

risk question markA few years ago I had a meeting with a PhD advisor in the US to talk through the proposed chapter breakdown for my dissertation. When discussing the key components of my final chapter I conveyed that it would include a major section covering policy implications and recommendations for arts organizations, artists, and funders. My advisor smiled a bit and said, “Well, let’s see if you earn that section, first.” It was a good lesson. Whenever I come across a passage in a research study that begins, “The evidence suggests that arts organizations should, could, might …” my antenna goes up and I ask whether the recommendations are merited, or whether liberties have been taken.

I share this anecdote because I recently reviewed the findings from a very good study commissioned by the Irvine Foundation—The Cultural Lives of Californians, undertaken by the National Opinion Research Center at the University of Chicago. While the report itself is chock-full of both data and provocative questions that I imagine could be of great value to arts organizations who are sincere about such things as broadening, deepening and diversifying audiences (the motto brought to us by Wallace and Rand back in the day), the Irvine Foundation seems to be overreaching with its follow-on recommendations for arts organizations.

A brief exposition:

A few years ago the Irvine Foundation (located in California) made a dramatic shift in its arts grantmaking strategy. As executive director of the LA County Arts Commission, Laura Zucker, once put it, “Irvine’s constituency seems to have shifted from arts organizations to people in the community not being served by arts organizations.” *

Irvine’s current aim is to promote engagement in the arts for all Californians. Here’s the text that appeared in 2011 when it announced its plans:

Under the new strategy, the foundation will work to boost participation among low-income and ethnically diverse populations that have traditionally been underserved by arts nonprofits; support programs that expand how Californians actively participate in the arts, including the use of digital technology to produce or curate art; and use diverse, non-traditional spaces, especially in regions with few arts-specific venues.

In support of this democratic ideal the Foundation launched in 2013 a new Exploring Engagement Fund to support projects that “aim to engage new and diverse populations by adding active participation opportunities and/or incorporating the use of nontraditional arts spaces” (emphases added). While some nonprofit professional arts organizations in its portfolio met this news with enthusiasm, evidently uptake on the new program was slow. Many of the Foundation’s historic arts grantees seemed unwilling to follow the carrot.

I addressed this resistance a couple years ago in two blog posts (here and also here).  My view, in a nutshell, was (and still is) this: While the Irvine Foundation may have been justified in pursuing a brave new strategy, its grantees were also justified in rebuffing it. I wrote:

Irvine appears to be interested in bringing about a kind of diversity (i.e., change) in the arts sector we don’t often talk about: aesthetic diversity. … However well-researched and justified, Irvine must recognize (and I think it does) that its strategy is out of line with the missions of a majority of professional arts organizations, which were formed to present work by professionals for audiences that come to appreciate that work, not make it. … Irvine needs to recognize that it is endeavoring to coax organizations into uncharted territory. It wants to coerce a change that many cannot make, or do not want to make.

On The Cultural Lives of Californians

So here we are two years later and Irvine has released the findings from its latest study, which investigated differences in  arts and culture participation behaviors across California’s diverse population. It probably goes without saying that many of those surveyed are not patrons of traditional fine arts organizations. Researchers sought to understand (1) what counts as culture, (2) where culture happens, (3) its value to people, and (4) the role of technology in the cultural lives of Californians.

One outcome of the study is an expanded concept of arts participation–one that reflects seven types of behavior researchers encountered: art-making, arts-going, arts-learning, media-based consumption, supporting arts and culture (i.e., volunteering time, money or resources), using social media, and the nebulous category additional activities.  Irvine is not alone in expanding the aperture on arts participation. The NEA has made a similar shift in its periodic survey of public participation in the arts (discussed in this NEA blog post written by director of research Sunil Iyengar).

So, what’s the headline of Irvine’s latest report? Well, it seems to be a good news/bad news message.

First, the report “reframes” the broken-record lament that arts participation is in decline by advancing the much more optimistic perspective that if the definitions of ‘art’ and ‘participation’ are expanded to encompass such things as salsa dancing at the community center, singing at church, knitting at home, watching a YouTube video demonstrating how to knit, writing fan fiction, posting a comment to Facebook about an artist, or taking a photograph and posting it on Instagram–then, actually, significantly more people participate in the arts and culture than previously acknowledged.

(That this might not be encouraging news for orchestras whose audiences for concerts are in decline seems to be a perspective the report doesn’t want to indulge.)

However, the report is not simply a pep rally to drum up enthusiam for the breadth and diversity of cultural participation in California. The bad news? While the levels and varieties of arts and cultural participation overall are “encouraging, there is significant disparity between different groups of Californians.”

It strikes me that, to a great extent, Irvine is trying to grapple with this disparity and, in particular, trying to harness the energies of nonprofit professional arts organizations to solve this problem. To that end, the report includes several sets of provocative questions—all versions of, “So how might a professional arts organization help improve this situation?”

  • What tools or points of access can organizations offer to support individuals in their own art making and learning?
  • What are the opportunities for nonprofit arts organizations to entice and engage those who typically make art in private?
  • How can nonprofit arts organizations make their expertise and resources accessible to people who choose to engage culturally in non-arts-specific spaces, including private settings, such as the home?
  • What are the opportunities for the nonprofit sector to work in and with community spaces without being disruptive to the activity already underway?
  • How can nonprofit arts organizations make their expertise accessible to people who choose to engage culturally online or through mobile devices

I wonder if I am alone in bristling a tiny bit at these questions, which lead a bit too obviously in the direction of Irvine’s grantmaking strategy. Nonetheless, the market is changing, disparities exist, and it’s not unreasonable to at least turn to professional arts groups and ask, “So, what about this market? Do you think you might have something to offer here?”

While the report merely hints at possible strategies for arts organizations, a blog post by Irvine president Josephine Ramirez introducing the report is more direct.  In What Arts Organizations Should Know About the Cultural Lives of Californians, Ramirez states, “this study, and a growing body of research, point to several important opportunities and implications for arts organizations and the sector.” She mentions five, three of which are:

  • Respond to the high demand for more active arts participation;
  • Expand offerings to meet people where they are; and
  • Explore how the arts can stimulate greater participation and connection among California’s largest and growing demographic groups.

Sound familiar?

Basically, the conclusions drawn from the research are that arts organizations need to develop the sorts of programs and initiatives that Irvine has been trying to spur through its Exploring Engagement Fund.

Overreaching?

And this brings me to my basic concerns about the report. While it is extraordinarily worthwhile for a foundation to shine a light on arts and cultural participation among those disinclined to participate in traditional fine arts institutions, and while smart arts organizations will look at this data and seek to understand what it conveys about arts participation behaviors across diverse populations, I’m not sure that the implications proposed by Ramirez are realistic.

Essentially, Ramirez is suggesting that nonprofit professional arts organizations need to develop new products (e.g., those that meet the demand for active participation and those that happen where people are rather than in the traditional arts space) for new markets (e.g. first generation immigrants and other growing groups who are not currently participating in the arts). This is a move that carries enormous risks.

This Ansoff Matrix demonstrates the point.

ansoffmatrix

If a business is doing well, then (from its perspective) the best strategy is to continue to create the product it knows for the market it knows (market penetration). However, when that market is in decline (and one could argue that this is the case for many professional arts groups at the moment), its least risky move is either (a) to develop new products for existing markets (product development), or (b) to develop new markets for existing products (market development).

Asking arts organizations to develop new products for new markets sends them diagonally into the box marked diversification and is a high-risk move; there can be a significant chance of failure. And while Irvine might be willing to underwrite some of the financial risks associated with experiments in this realm, it can’t underwrite the strategic, operational, compliance, social, and psychological risks associated with such changes—organizations need to be ready, willing, and able to bear these on their own.

bridge jumping

Areas for further research?

There seem to be a few assumptions embedded in Ramirez’s recommendations to arts organizations to venture into this realm.

The first is alluded to above. It’s the assumption that profesional museums, theaters, opera companies, dance companies, and orchestras have the capabilities and resources to do this work. This assumption may derive from the difficult reality of an overbuilt nonprofit sector and a desire to see existing assets (whose value may be declining anyway) redeployed in service of a new set of needs. It may derive from the loyalty Irvine feels to its historic grantees and a desire to continue to support them in some way (rather than abandon them for others). Whatever the motivations underpinning the assumption, however, I am not sure it’s sound.

A related concern is that the emphasis on spurring traditional arts organizations into this realm seems to overlook the excellent work being done (for decades now) by grassroots or community-based organizations. They have the necessary skills, values, and ties to diverse populations. Many are already reaching representative audiences (which seems to be Irvine’s primary goal). They are also, quite often, underresourced. Would a better recommendation be that grassroots and community-based organizations merit greater investment to meet this growing need?

The second assumption is the flipside of the first: it’s that first-generation immigrants, the elderly, and the other populations about whose cultural lives Irvine is most concerned desire deeper engagement with opera companies, orchestras, dance companies, museums, and theaters. Is there evidence that this is true?

The third assumption seems to be that art-making is swallowing arts-going whole and that there will be no demand in the future for receptive arts experiences and organizations that are uniquely qualified to offer them. And yet reading the report I was struck by how much interest there still seems to be in good, old-fashioned, “passive” arts-going. Will professional arts organizations that avoid developing active participation strategies be at a disadvantage in the future? Or is there still a healthy market of people who want to buy a ticket, sit in a seat, and watch a show?

Has research already been done that could help address these questions? If so, please comment and send links. If not, would it be worthwhile to probe these assumptions?

***

From my perspective, the report is definitely worth a read. I was particularly interested in a section that reports on the relationship between use of social media (to experience, educate oneself, gather information, or tell others about art or artists) and ethnicity (p. 38). I also spent quite a bit of time examining two infographics that show the relative size of audiences for various forms of music and dance (pp.19-20), one that examines venues for arts-going by type of arts activity (p. 41), one showing rates of arts-going across income levels (p. 24), and one that maps the seven modes of arts participation (p. 12).  Again, it is chock-full of data and I would encourage arts organizations to dig into it.

Here are some links (that Irvine asked me to pass along) to get you started:

I would be keen to hear what others have made of Irvine’s new report or its field recommendations.

* Laura Zucker made this comment at a Grantmakers in the Arts panel that I was invited to attend and blog about in 2013. You can read the full post here.

 

The Arts in a Civic World Upside Down

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A couple months back I was asked to give a talk on civic leadership to a group of arts leaders participating in the fantastic UK-based Clore Leadership Programme. We tend to take for granted that subsidized arts organizations are, by default, key players in civil society–that is, civic leaders.

But are they?

I believe arts organizations can, and should be, civic leaders but that such a role will require that many organizations pursue a different relationship to their communities.

What follows is an excerpt/adaptation from the full talk.

occupy-wall-street-posterThe Civic World Upside Down

In their article, Thinking About Civic Leadership, David Chrislip and Edward O’Malley convey that in the nineteenth and early-to-mid-twentieth century what generally was meant by civic leadership in America was “those at the top organization levels” that were “part of an elite, guiding force for civic life.”[1]  In other words, a network of white powerful men who knew what was best for their communities, and had ability to get things done. They operated from a position of authority, the authors write, doing things for their communities without input from their communities-at-large.

Among the institutions such civic leaders advanced, in the US, was the arts and cultural sector:  museums, symphony orchestras, opera companies, ballet companies, and eventually regional theaters. This was the era in which private foundations and governments alike justified and promoted such investments on the basis of the ideals of “excellence and equity,” –by which they meant, generally, access for everyone to the art deemed most important by those vested at the time with the power to decided what counts as art.

But Chrislip and O’Malley also suggest that this view of civic leadership—a view that granted power for a small group of elites to control the lives of everyone else—began to be challenged in the 60s and 70s with the emergence and impact of the civil rights movement, the environmental movement, the women’s movement, and other grassroots social movements.

In fits and starts, as movements have emerged, gone underground, and re-emerged, over the past 30 years ideas about what is meant by civic life and who gets to participate in it have been challenged and slowly redefined–most recently in the US by such events as the Occupy Movement.

And today, we are living in “a civic world turned upside-down”—an era in which citizens with the freedom and means by which to access the Internet have the tools to more easily self-organize, mobilize, express their concerns and desires to a global audience, and thereby participate in the civic world (if by that we mean the relationship of citizens to each other and to government) and potentially influence the political decision-making process.[2]

Is this civic world upside down a good thing for the arts?

Our first instinct may be to shout, “Of course!”

But let’s be honest: The old civic world worked pretty well for the fine arts.

We (meaning established arts organizations and their patrons) were among those with authority to dictate what counts as art and culture. Leading in the new civic world is not about dictating what counts as art. Instead, it would seem to require a willingness to relinquish authority; to open up our institutions for citizen engagement, not just in artistic experiences but in governance; to look beyond the preservation, advancement, and interests of our individual organizations; and to use our many assets to serve the larger needs of society.[3]

Indeed, this seems to be one of the grand narratives in the arts these days.

It’s the narrative that tells us that we need to rethink our relationship to the world, come down out of the ivory tower, and work side-by-side with our communities to improve quality of life for all citizens in the places where we live. But there is another narrative that has been exerting a powerful gravitational pull in the opposite direction. It’s the narrative that tells us that the path to salvation is a whole body embrace of the power, wealth, and financial growth at all costs. And in this civic world turned upside down, it seems it is becoming increasingly difficult to manage the tension between these competing narratives. As an example, Mark Ravenhill’s speech at the Edinburgh festival last year highlighted, in particular, the way that the means of some subsidized arts organizations may be in conflict with their supposed ends.

He said:

I think the message in the last couple of decades has been very mixed, in many ways downright confusing: we are a place that offers luxury, go-on-spoil-yourself evenings where in new buildings paid for by a national lottery (a voluntary regressive tax) you can mingle with our wealthy donors and sponsors from the corporate sector and treat yourself to that extra glass of champagne but we are also a place that cares deeply about social justice and exclusion as the wonderful work of our outreach and education teams show. So we’re the best friends of the super-rich and the most disadvantaged at the same time? That’s a confusing message and the public has been smelling a rat. If the arts are for something, who are they for? And what are they doing for them?[4]

The question is being called. What’s the answer if we dig down deep and answer truthfully?

Do we want to be country clubs? Or do we want to be civic institutions?

Ronald Heifitz, the Harvard professor who has led the research agenda around adaptive leadership in the US tells us that the complexity of the ever-evolving challenges in the new world require different, even “unorthodox” responses to make progress. Our status quo has to be disrupted. This means that we need to confront the things we take for granted, including all the attachments we have to our world view. This inevitably entails the loss of our sense of identity, status, and values.[5]

And, as Clay Shirky tells us in his TED Talk, Institutions vs Collaboration, institutions are no different from humans in that if they feel threatened they seek to self-preserve.

Have you noticed that there has been a recurring theme to arts conferences the past five years: How do we survive? How do we thrive? How do we build resilience so we can bounce back? How do we find innovative ways to, essentially, sustain the infrastructure and institutions that we’ve created over the past 100 years?

I’ve asked many of these questions myself.

But what are we trying to sustain, to preserve? Ourselves and our once privileged position in an elite-dominated civic world? Or something that transcends ourselves and our organizations? As the person who wrote a talk a few years back called Surviving the Culture Change, I am here to say I think we need to move on from the narrative in which we are primarily concerned with the surviving and thriving of our individual organizations.

On Civic Leadership

And this, really, brings us to the notion of civic leadership. How shall we conceptualize civic leadership? How is it different from other types of leadership?

Here’s the vision from Chrislip & O’Malley:

Rather than a ruggedly individualistic pursuit of our own ends, we might demonstrate care and responsibility for the communities and regions in which we live. Instead of limiting our conception of what civic responsibility means to that of a passive law-abiding “good” citizen activated only when our backyards are threatened, our first impulse would be to engage others to work across factions in the service of the broader good.[6]

In a similar vein, Mary Parker Follet writes on the topic of power and defines it as “the ability to make things happen, to be a causal agent, to initiate change.” However, Follet distinguishes between power over (power that is coercive) and power with (synergistic joint action that suggests we facilitate and energize others to be effective). The old civic world was power over. The new civic world is power with.[7]

And John W. Gardner writes that we need a network of leaders who take responsibility for society’s shared concerns and that the default civic culture needs to shift from a war of the parts against the “whole” to an inclusive engaging and collaborative one that could make communities better for all.[8]

You can hear the common threads in these elaborations.

To achieve these ends two other scholars, leadership studies scholars Peter Sun & Marc Anderson, suggest that leaders need to add on to their existing skills in transformational and transactional leadership and develop what they call Civic Capacity.[9]

Civic Capacity is made up of three components:

  1. Civic Drive: Do you have the desire and motivation to be involved with social issues and to see new social opportunities?
  2. Civic Connections: Do you have the social capital (i.e., networks) to enable you to engage in successful collaborations with other organizations and institutions in your community?
  3. Civic Pragmatism: Do you have the ability to translate social opportunities into practical reality (i.e., what structures and resources can you leverage to make things happen)?

This is big, demanding work. Our first impulse may be to keep our heads down, to pursue the path of least resistance. While doing so may ensure that our grants continued to be renewed for the time being, it won’t ensure our future relevance or contribute to a better world.

Awhile back I read philosopher Martha Nussbaum’s book Not for Profit, Why Democracy Needs the Humanities, in which she makes the case for liberal arts education, and in particular the importance of the arts and humanities. In it she asks what abilities a nation would need to produce in its citizens if it wanted to advance a “people-centered democracy dedicated to promoting opportunities for “life, liberty and the pursuit of happiness” to each and every person.[10] She answers with such things as:

  • The ability to think about, examine, reflect, argue and debate about the political issues of the nation.
  • The ability to recognize and respect fellow citizens as people with equal rights, regardless of race, gender, religion or sexuality.
  • The ability to have concern for the lives of others.
  • The ability to imagine and understand the complex issues affecting human life by having an understanding of a wider range of human stories (rather than just data).
  • The ability to think about the good of the nation, not just one’s own group.

The arts have so much to offer to the advancement of such goals; but only if we step up to the work.

Change is needed.

Conclusion

Back in June, I went on a residential training with the organization Common Cause, which seeks to encourage NGOs and others working in the social sectors to join up to advance common values in society—values like A World of Beauty, Social Justice, Equality, A Meaningful Life.[11]

At the first gathering when we went around the circle and talked about why we had chosen to come on the training and I said something to the effect of:

I’m here because I’m trying to figure out what I’m laboring for that transcends arts and culture. I’m here because I feel like I’ve been talking in a closed circuit and I want to join up the conversation we’re having in the arts with the conversation others are having about the environment, or human rights, or education. I’m here because I don’t know if I can continue to work on behalf of the arts if the arts are only interested in advancing themselves.

I’m here because I’m worried about things like growing income inequality and suspect that growing income inequality may actually benefit the arts. And what are we going to do about that? I’m here because I’m worried about cultural divides and that the arts perpetuate them more than they help to bridge them.

I believe the arts could be a force for good, but I believe we will need to change as leaders, and as organizations, in relationship to our communities, for them to be so.

There is a challenge/opportunity before all of us.

I leave you with two final questions:

  1. What are you laboring for that transcends your organization and your position within it? What values, goals, or progress in the world?
  2. And what are you going to do about it?

***

[1] Chrislip & O’Malley 2013, p. 3

[2] Chrislip & O’Malley, p. 5.

[3] The theory of basic human values was developed by Shalom H. Schwartz and is the basis for a framework developed by the advocacy organization Common Cause. More information may be found in the Common Cause Handbook, published in 2011 by the Public Interest Research Center (Wales).

[4] Ravenhill, M. (2013). “We Need to Have a ‘Plan B’”. Published in The Guardian 3 August 2013 and available at: http://www.theguardian.com/culture/2013/aug/03/mark-ravenhill-edinburgh-festival-speech-full-text.

[5] Chrislip & O’Malley, p. 7

[6] Chrislip and O’Malley, p. 11

[7] Chrislip and O’Malley, p. 7

[8][8] Chrislip and O’Malley, p. 7

[9] Sun, P.Y.T. & Anderson, M.H. (2012). Civic capacity: Building on transformational leadership to explain successful integrative public leadership. The Leadership Quarterly 23 (2012), 309-323.

[10] Nussbaum, M. C. (2010). Not For Profit: Why Democracy Needs the Humanities. Princeton: Princeton University Press. (See pages 225-26).

[11] Public Interest Research Centre (2011). The Common Cause Handbook. London: PIRC.

Beyond repair? On the loss of structural integrity …

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geodesic dome and fullerThere is an arts story that has been nagging at me the past couple months. It’s the recent announcement of the revised plans for the NYC Performing Arts Center planned for the former World Trade Center site.

The plan for an arts center at Ground Zero began more than ten years ago. At first the center was to house four arts organizations but three of the four were tapped out several years ago. Only one (the Joyce Theater) still remained as of last year. The project has never really gotten off the ground and plans have changed so many times I couldn’t begin to recount them all. The February announcement basically conveyed that things are changing again: a temporary artistic director (David Lan from the Young Vic in England) has been hired; rather than creating a dance center the new plan is to create a music, theater, and dance center on the model of the Young Vic, but more ambitious; the estimated costs of the project are unknown (though previously were projected between $300 and $700 million); it seems the lack of clarity about the budget may be related to the fact that the architectural design by Frank Gehry may need to be ditched because it was created when the plans for the project were still hazy (hmmm, that’s an expensive mistake); Gehry himself didn’t seem to be aware of this, though, since no one involved with the project had spoken to him in months; and the Joyce Theater may or may not have a future programming role, depending on who you ask.

The situation at the WTC PAC is frustrating and disheartening on multiple levels. I respect many of the people involved, so this is not a concern about individuals or their capacities as directors. Specifically, it’s not about a British director rather than an American being hired for the project (although given the symbolic significance of this project, I am surprised they did not hire someone from New York). And it’s not about whether or not a multi-disciplinary space with three small theaters and a cafe is better than a dance space with 1,000 seats and classrooms, or any of the other plans for the PAC site that have been presented over the years.

It’s about the time for this project having come and gone.

It’s about organizers having, long ago, lost the plot.

More than anything, it’s about having used up all of the do-overs a single entity can reasonably ask of its community.

Not that the community was ever consulted.

Here are my questions:

  1. Who still wants this space? Whose interests does it/will it serve? And given the numerous changes should the citizens of NYC have the opportunity to voice their thoughts on whether this project should still go forward?
  2. What role will it fill in the cultural landscape that is not already being more than adequately filled by other (potentially under-capitalized) organizations? As the article rightly points out the landscape has changed dramatically in the past ten years and there are spaces now available–Park Avenue Armory, the new TFANA space in Brooklyn, the Lincoln Center theater that was previously housing NYCO–that were not available when the PAC was first being planned.
  3. How much has been spent on this project over the past ten years? And on what? Should the public be given an accounting of all the private, tax deductible contributions and government funds that have been received and expended to date?
  4. Is the center the best use of half a billion dollars, or however much it will cost, given other options? And after raising the money to build it, how will it be sustained–particularly if it has a programming strategy modeled on the Young Vic (which seems to be suggested in the article). +
  5. Finally, why has this project had such an extraordinarily difficult time getting off the ground? Shouldn’t this be understood and addressed before additional resources are invested?

On Buckminster Fuller and Structural Integrity

About a month ago, I was reading about Buckminster Fuller and came across a concept that he applied in both his work as an engineer (designing the geodesic dome) and also in his quest as an “ordinary human being” trying to have positive influence in the world. It is the performance characteristic called structural integrity. From an engineer’s perspective structural integrity refers to the ability of a given structure to withstand a designed load under anticipated conditions. In a more metaphorical sense, Fuller used the term structural integrity to refer to a person’s accountability (to the ability to be counted on to do what one has said one will do).

Further describing Fuller’s take on integrity in his 2011 book, A Fuller View, L. Steven Sieden writes:

Bucky’s definition of integrity is structural. Anything that has integrity holds its shape regardless of external circumstances.

In the same book, Jim Reger and David Irvine also reflect on Fuller’s concept of structural integrity, and how it relates to leadership:

Integrity comes from the word “integer,” which means wholeness, integration, and completeness. Being integrated is a necessary condition for self-respect, and self-respect is the basis for creating a respectful environment. Integrity means having clear, explicit principles and doing what you say you’re going to do. It’s about being honest with yourself and others.

After reading these essays on Fuller I began thinking about two things.

The first was about accountability and how this manifests in organizations with no owners. Do nonprofit arts organizations feel accountable to the public? I’m not sure they do. When civic leaders and other community members pleaded for an end to the Minnesota Orchestra lockout, which was harming the local culture, did MSO, Inc. (i.e., the board and leadership) feel accountable to end the lockout and make good on its mission to “enrich, inspire and serve its community” by producing the concerts it had promised (and accepted tax-deductible funds to produce)?  It certainly didn’t look like it from the outside. The musicians did play concerts, however–and the community, unsurprisingly, largely stood behind them. More recently, San Diego Opera didn’t seem to feel the need to keep its community informed about its apparently rapidly deteriorating finances. A couple weeks ago it sent out a puzzling announcement about plans to shut down–a decision that seems to have taken its community by surprise and to have raised hackles, particularly given that everyone had been led to believe that the opera company was doing quite well. Arts organizations talk about accountability to the public; but do they feel it?

The second thing I began to think about after reading a bit on Fuller’s concept of structural integrity centered around the causes of structural failure in nonprofit cultural organizations. When organizations or projects collapse there is a tendency to scrutinize the actions of the current cast of characters and the financial and programming decisions made in recent years; but perhaps in nonprofits–perhaps in cultural nonprofits in particular–the fatal mistakes are the ones we don’t tend to flag … because they don’t hit the P&L statement and the box office totals in the short term.

Perhaps they’re the ones that destroy something more essential to a cultural organization.

Its soul.

Its relationship to its artists and its community.

Its integrity.

The quiet harms that are done to those nonprofits exist to support and serve–the neglect, the taking for granted, the opportunism–may take time to fully register. But when they do, perhaps there is no going back and fixing the damage that has been done.

***

I don’t know when it happened, or how, but (from where I sit) the PAC at the World Trade Center site long ago lost its structural integrity. Or perhaps it never had any? I don’t know. The question now is, can this ever-collapsing structure be turned into something beautiful for the city of New York and the rest of the world, or would it be best to let this cursed project go and allow for the possibility of something entirely new to be created from the ground up.

 

+According to an annual report from 2006 that I located, the Young Vic cost 12.5 million (gbp) to build and its annual turnover was around 3.6 million in 2006, about half of which was funded from the government. It still receives about 1.75 million per year.

 

 

 

On the distinction between giving people what they want versus what they need.

want needRecently, Nina Simon has written a smart post taking aim at the “Need versus Want” distinction often used to describe the role of (nonprofit) arts organizations—as in, “Our job is not to give people what they want but what they need.” As someone that has, at times, used this distinction to make points in various talks I was eager to read Simon’s post, Let’s Stop Talking About What People Want and Need As If They are Different (and We Can Tell How).

Simon makes three arguments: (1) it’s presumptuous for arts organizations to think they know what people need; (2) sometimes those running arts organizations (rather disingenuously) wrap up what they want to do in something called “serving people’s needs”; and (3) it’s depressing to think that art is not something that people might want. Reading Simon’s post inspired me to think a bit more about why the distinction between Need versus Want is one that has appealed to me in the past and whether I agree that it may be a false and unhelpful comparison for the arts to continue to make.

Taylor Mac on Need and Want:

At the 2013 Under the Radar Festial artist Taylor Mac performed a Manifesto in which he elaborated on “a good number” of his beliefs about the theater. When I read the talk I was immediately taken with a section in which he distinguishes Need from Want in the relationship between artist and audience.

I believe theater is a service industry.  It’s like being a plumber and theater artists are blue-collar workers who wear better clothes, for the most part.

I believe theater artists should be students of humanity

I believe, to learn what your audience needs, is the job

But caution that sometimes we confuse need with want.

Giving our audiences what they want is not the job

Sometimes giving them what they want is a fringe benefit or happy accident but it is not the job

I believe you may be saying to yourself, “That’s very presumptuous of him to think he knows what the audience needs”.  But I believe if I were a plumber you wouldn’t think it was presumptuous of me to say my job is to learn what your plumbing needs. You would say I was a good plumber.

I believe sometimes we confuse what the audience needs with what the artist wants.  That makes crappy art.  But I believe there is room for it all.  Including crappy art.

I am drawn to Mac’s conceptualization for many reasons—not least of which he suggests that the job of the artist is not to presume the needs of the audience as much as learn or discern them. Mac seems to submit that the artist’s ability to comprehend and respond to the world is a skill. Whereas the plumber has the ability to diagnose the needs of a plumbing system, the artist has both the ability and responsibility to do the same with other (social) systems.

Alain de Botton makes a similar argument in his TED talk Atheism 2.0. De Botton rejects the idea of Art for Art’s Sake and asserts, instead, that Art must “do something for this troubled world.” By assigning to Art the responsibility to do more than exist and by characterizing the world as in need de Botton proposes that the ‘job’ (to use Mac’s characterization) of artists and arts organizations is to bring something of value to bear in a ‘system’ (so to speak) in need of repair, maintenance, or perhaps complete overhaul. When I have held up the importance of responding to Need versus Want it has quite often been in this vein.

Moreover, I have often taken the line that effective arts organizations essentially broker an opportunity for people to engage with (and with each other through) the arts experience; and in curating a season arts organizations (ideally) pay attention to their communities and program work that they believe has social or intellectual relevance–that will matter–which can be different from saying that they program work that they believe will sell well.

This alludes to what I would argue is a reason to hold onto the distinction: Need versus Want is quite often shorthand for what it means to choose to work in the part of the sector that is endeavoring to operate outside a market logic. Giving people what they want is often shorthand for being market-oriented and giving them what they need is often shorthand for being artist- and/or community-oriented. This is a potentially critical distinction. Everywhere we look arts organizations (like the rest of society) are encouraged (or permitted, perhaps) to measure their worth (the value of their contributions to society) almost exclusively in short-term, market-driven metrics (positive press garnered, strong box office generated, jobs created, budgets balanced, hotel beds filled).

There can be a tension between serving markets and serving communities and serving the artform and artistic processes—particularly for disciplines like theater which exist in a mixed-market (meaning the markets for theater are occupied by commercial, nonprofit professional, and amateur organizations). I perceive that the Need versus Want language is, at times, useful in helping to parse our relationship to these peculiar masters.

A Caution: Philanthropic Paternalism

Both Simon and Mac rightly allude to the possibility of conflating audience needs with artistic wants. At the organizational level I would characterize this as a caution against what is sometimes referred to as philanthropic paternalism. Philanthropic paternalism is a term I’ve encountered in academic literature primarily drawn from nonprofit studies; it refers to a tendency of those in the private nonprofit sector to identify and address problems as they see them rather than as those they serve see them. Philanthropic paternalism stems from developing programs and services with very little input from those they are intended to benefit. This is a construct that is, arguably, more easily grasped in relation to the health and human services arm of the nonprofit sector, but it still holds in the arts (for both arts organizations and those that fund them).

How might we ‘gather input’ in the arts? Well, what are the processes for identifying where the community’s needs (read: hopes, fears, controversies, voices, stories, history, important events, values, etc.) and the organization’s purpose and goals intersect? We may do market research but are we diligent about thoughtfully accounting for, or engaging the community in, the process of developing missions, vision statements, and strategies? Perhaps tendencies toward philanthropic paternalism are mitigated by inviting a more representative group of individuals from the community to participate in those processes. Even better, why wait for the annual retreat or future-planning summit? Why not change governance and staffing structures and administrative and artistic processes to ensure that the organization (or perhaps a community of organizations working together) will regularly encounter, absorb, and reflect upon knowledge about who lives in the community, what they value, how they live and how they are impacted (or not) by existing cultural institutions in the community?

Need versus Want: Where the distinction makes little sense

While it may be useful for artists and arts nonprofits to distinguish between Need and Want in conceiving of their “jobs” it’s not a distinction we should expect the audience itself to make. Do I need to see Fun Home and Good Person of Szechwan at the Public Theater in New York City when I’m in town next week, or do I want to? It seems a strange question. On the receiving end the distinction begins to evaporate.  Is art necessary and life-saving? Do we sometimes go out of duty or obligation only to find that the experience is (or becomes with time) an enjoyable one? Do we delight in it like a kid in Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory? Sure. Maybe yes to all of the above, or some, or none.

What matters to me is not whether I need or want to see a couple shows at the Public. I value the chance to see these two particular shows sufficiently to pay just over $180 (which is steep on my PhD salary) to see them. What would seem meaningful to me is if I were to browse the offerings of the Public theater, shrug, and come to the conclusion that there’s nothing there I need or want to see.

And that, really, should be our larger concern: Are we losing people? If so, why? Due to what action or inaction on our part in response to ever changing communities, markets, and artworlds? We are perhaps on thin ice if framing our job as giving people what they need (rather than what they want) has become a form of cognitive dissonance reduction–a way of rationalizing declining relevance as a problem outside of our control. Cultural organizations arguably exist to influence the values of the culture as much as reflect or manifest them.

Renegotiating the value of a museum

Over the past couple of weeks quite a few people have weighed in on the Detroit Institute of Art’s successful appeal to three counties in Michigan to pass a “millage” (a property tax) which would provide $23 million per year for the museum (91% of its budget) over ten years, while it raises $400 million for its endowment to replace the tax revenues when they run out. One of the most interesting aspects of this strategy is that the DIA offered free admission to the museum only to people living in the counties that passed the levy (which equates to approximately $20 per year tax on a home with a market value of $200,000 and a taxable value of $100,000) and threatened to shut down galleries and close the museum on weekdays if the levy did not pass. If you have not been following the story, on August 7th the levy was passed in all three counties. Despite my instinct to be cautiously optimistic, I find myself mulling over this case and wondering whether it is the hands-down financial and moral victory that it seems to be on the surface.

For background and more details about the plan read an excellent overview by Judity Dobrzynski and also one by Mark Stryker. Additionally, Lee Rosenbaum (Culturegrrrl) has written a thoughtful post reflecting on the circumstances at the DIA and her perspective that it was (perhaps uniquely) well positioned to pull of such a feat and deserving of the public support. Terry Teachout astutely assessed the keys to DIA’s success, framing them as good lessons for other arts organizations in trouble. Likewise, Benjamin Genocchio examined the financial crises at DIA and LA MOCA to exhume strategies for other art museums on the brink. And one blogger asked (without much elaboration) whether DIA’s rescue can serve as a model for others.

From everything I have read about the executive director of the DIA, Graham W.J. Beal, he appears to be a very smart and capable leader. The word heroic came to mind several times as I was perusing articles about his tenure at the DIA and what he has accomplished. And I am sincerely impressed by the successful passing of the millage—it was a bold solution to a long-term structural deficit, it was executed responsibly and well, and the favorable response from the community (I presume, though I could be wrong) would seem to represent sizeable goodwill towards the institution, respect for its collection and trust in its management, or value for the arts in general.

Having said this, I have some questions:

First, I wonder what the annual net gain of this millage is estimated to be once possible reductions in contibutions, memberships and admissions are considered? I notice that the membership fees (for individuals and families) on the DIA’s Website are pretty steep relative to the $20 per year per household tax assessment: $60 for Senior Citizens; $65 Individual; $80 Companion; and $110 Family Plus. In 2009, DIA had membership revenues of nearly $4 million. Is there a risk that some (many?) of its current members will now feel that they have “already paid” and will not renew their memberships, or that the tax will crowd out future membership growth? Additionally, the DIA shows another $2 million in admission fees on its 990, some percentage of which one estimates could be lost because of the tax. Finally, it’s not unreasonable to think that some donors may now consider the DIA to be safely harbored with its millage and may reduce their contributions or choose to redirect to other organizations that do not have the heft to win such a tax.

Second, I am more familiar with such taxes being passed to support a range of nonprofit institutions, sometimes in the arts or sometimes across sectors. While I understand that a proposed tax to support 17 institutions in Detroit failed some years earlier (some suspect because it was too high), I wonder whether a tax to support a range of institutions in Detroit might have been a smarter and more ethical solution in the long run? For one, I have begun to worry that large investments in large institutions can come at the expense of the health and vitality of (arts) communities as a whole. For another, I am skeptical that many individual organizations could actually pull off this sort of feat. I agree with Lee Rosenbaum that when you read DIA’s history and track record in recent years it seems to be both deserving and well positioned for this reprieve. Could any other arts organization in Detroit successfully undertake anytime soon a similar effort now that DIA has gone this route? Is this a strategy that favors first movers only? Is it really the model that some seem to think it is?

Third, is the DIA setting itself up for an awkward renegotiation of its relationship to its community when the levy ends? Imagine a scenario ten years from now in which DIA has been unable to raise the $400 million in its endowment—a scenario that seems quite possible given the extraordinary ambition of the goal, the poor financial condition of the city, and the tremendous competition for contributions since many public services have been cutback and many nonprofits are struggling to stay afloat. DIA has already said it will not try to get the tax renewed. If it is not as flush as it hopes to be in ten years will it be forced to cut services and institute admission fees again? And will community members that have been going for free be willing to pay?

Fourth, what motivated people to pass the tax? As I understand it, the millage was not expected to be a slam dunk in all three counties. Was it civic pride and sincere appreciation for the institution/art? Competition among the counties? A logical reasoning that $20 per year to gain free admission for one’s entire household to a public museum that normally charges $4-$8 per ticket is a good deal? I wonder whether there is something we can learn from better understanding what motivated people to vote “yes” – and also how those who may have voted “no” are now feeling about the museum? Resentful because they feel that education, pubic safety and health and human services should be prioritized over art (as more than a few comments by readers of the Detroit Free Press seemed to suggest)? Or perhaps more inclined to attend and take advantage of the resource?

Fifth, what are we to make of the tripling of attendance in the week after the millage was passed? Is this a sign that even a $4 to $8 admission fee (the range of prices listed on the DIA Website) is a barrier for many, many people? That people wanted to “get their due”, or perhaps felt a newfound sense of “ownership”? That people wanted to “celebrate” the millage? I wonder if the DIA or anyone else has polled these visitors to try to determine how the millage may already be affecting people’s perceptions of the museum and their relationship to it.

Finally, and perhaps most of all, I am intrigued by DIA’s quid pro quo deal with its community. I wonder whether DIA has set a precedent that may begin to recalibrate the perceived relationship between nonprofit arts organizations and their communities and the expected ROI from future investments in the arts. This seemed to be the argument underpinning the DIA strategy: Those arts institutions that want their communities to step up and support them will need to put more than the importance of art, quality of life, and general econmic impact on the table – the people expect and deserve a tangible private benefit in return for sharing some of their hard-earned wages. And, likewise, communities that do not demonstrate support for the arts can no longer expect to receive the same levels of service or access as those that do.

Was this simply the new deal between the DIA and its community? Or does this represent a new line in the sand … a raising of the bar for all of us in the arts?

I admit to knowing only what I’ve been able to glean from newspaper accounts and blogs. I heartily welcome information and perspectives from others on these issues. in the meantime, I offer congratulations to the DIA and the greater Detroit metropolitan area for the win. It is a vote of confidence in the arts, which has clearly been heartening to many.

PS – Many thanks to all who have continued to post comments on my last three posts. I am heartened by the terrific conversation/debate. I do expect to return to some of these issues in the future.

Nonprofit Arts Orgs and the Boards That Love Them

Last week I read an article by Pablo Eisenberg in the Chronicle of Philanthropy in which he argues that greater oversight of nonprofits is needed because nonprofit boards can no longer be trusted to make sure the institutions they govern are serving the public interest, which they are legally obliged to serve. Eisenberg mentions hospitals and universities in particular, citing the recent debacles at University of Virginia and Penn State as evidence for why we can no longer put our faith in boards. However, I think it’s fair to say that the arts sector is not immune to “poor performance, corruption, and a lack of public accountability.”

Let me ask you: Do these seem to be reasonable questions to be asked of a nonprofit arts organization?

Why was the board unaware that the organization had been, for years, overspending? Who made the decision to spend funds that were restricted and on what were they spent? What is motivating what appears to be a radical shift in the programmatic strategy for the theater? How do you reconcile your mandate to be accessible with the fact that you are charging over $100 per ticket for this show? Why did you cancel the new play scheduled for this season and replace  it with a revival? Can you explain why, over the past five years, administrative salaries and costs have grown at a faster rate than artistic salaries and costs? Do you think audiences may be declining because the quality of the programming has declined? Why did the board approve significant raises for the executive and artistic director even though the last three seasons have ended with deficits? Why are no female writers, or writers of color, featured in the upcoming season? Is it true that the work of a political artist was censored by your chief curator?

I think these are reasonable questions–difficult and complex to answer as they may be.

And yet, nonprofits often seem unable or unwilling to answer such questions directly, or they bristle at the idea that someone (a funder, a journalist, a new board member) would ask them in the first place. But one could argue that nonprofits shouldn’t need to be asked such questions at all–that they should be more transparent in the first place about the decisions they take, presumably in the public interest.

Which raises more questions: How seriously do nonprofit arts groups take their ‘public interest’ mandate? Do board members actually see themselves as representatives of the community’s interests (which they are)? Or rather do they consider themselves to be primarily advocates for the needs and goals of the institution?

Here’s Eisenberg on why boards cannot be trusted to look out for the public interest:

The reasons we can’t trust boards are most obvious at colleges and hospitals, which account for a large share of the assets of nonprofit institutions.

Most trustees at public universities and nonprofit hospitals are essentially political appointees, named by governors and state officials because of their political connections, as financial supporters, party members, or close allies to universities and the medical profession. The large majority are not experts in either health or education. Nor are they a cross section of their communities. They are among the wealthiest people in America, and they largely serve as lobbyists to attract more government aid to their institutions.

And at most colleges, public or private, it’s rare for boards to include students, professors, or members of the public in their boards, although some hospital boards include patients, nurses, and people who represent the community.

Also missing from the boards of most national and regional, and even community, groups are the blue-collar workers, teachers, small-business owners or grass-roots community leaders. It may be a cliché to say that we have become much more of a class society, but increasingly the nonprofit boards reflect that truth, and with it the problems of democratic representation and public accountability.

Instead, most trustees of large nonprofits mirror corporate America.

With the exception of the phrase about “political appointees” much of the same could be said of the boards of the largest arts organizations in the US.

Reflecting on Eisenberg’s article, I wonder:

  • Is  this failure of nonprofits to look out for the public interest a new phenomenon? Or is it possible that boards and executives have always used nonprofits to achieve institutional rather than public aims? Put another way, is the problem with the nonprofit form itself (and the fact that it lends itself to manipulation) or with board members who have become, perhaps, more likely (for whatever reason) to use it to misguided ends? Or both, perhaps?
  • If a nonprofit fails to act in the public interest, what can the public reasonably do in response? If a community decided that a nonprofit was not well run what would its options be? A leveraged buy-out would clearly not be possible but is there an equivalent for nonprofits? And if not, why not, and do we need such a process?

Eisenberg’s suggestions for improving nonprofit oversight include: requiring all nonprofits with budgets over $5 million to appoint an inspector general or hire an ethics or compliance officer; appoint an independent ombudsman to investigate complaints by whistle-blowers; or appoint an oversight committee of citizens to communicate with boards about possible infractions.

The arc of the first five comments (each made by a different person) posted by readers in response to Eisenberg’s article made me chuckle:

“I’d like to be one of those new Ethics Officers. I would imagine that to be a $2m/year job, with the primary role being to not object to the Board’s or my own salaries.”

“No more regulators or regulations or layers of accountability.”

“Regulation on top of regulation is useless. As soon as one of Eisenberg’s ethics officers cheats or steals, we’ll need ethics officer overseers. Yes, some boards will be inept — so are some professors, and writers, and editors. Over-regulation solves nothing.”

“Sure…let’s pile bureaucracy on top of regulation on top of oversight on top of more bureaucracy. And while we’re at it, make sure we never, ever trust the private sector to govern itself. Typical academic clap-trap! I guess Eisenberg proves that when your only tool is a hammer (bureaucracy), then every problem looks like a nail. We already have more-than-sufficient regulation. Let’s start by simply enforcing the existing rules. The last thing we need is more government inserting itself into the situation.”

“I can’t help but think that the previous comments are not coming from people who provide the funds for the charities.”

Reading through the comments posted in response to his article, I noted that many people were skeptical of Eisenberg’s suggestions. Nonprofits are often offended or annoyed by the suggestion that greater oversight is needed, and assert that they are capable of self monitoring. But Eisenberg asserts that boards have proven over and over again that they are not.

In last week’s post I shared the Marshall W. Meyer and Lynne G. Zucker theory of permanently failing organizations: organizations that persist despite the fact that they are not achieving their goals. Arguably, permanently failing nonprofit organizations do not serve the public interest. But as the responses to Rocco Landesman’s 2011 supply/demand salvo showed, arts organizations seem to find it unacceptable that the NEA or the IRS or state arts agencies or any outside entity, really, would weigh in and mandate the closure of some organizations.

Thus, it seems that if permanently failing organizations are going to be encouraged to either take the necessary risks to become high performing, or acknowledge defeat and close their doors, board members are the ones that need to make that demand–on behalf of the public interest. Board members are in the driver’s seat when it comes to approving organizational plans, budgets, and (often) finding resources that allow an organization to persist.

Of course, if you were appointed to a board exclusively because of your ability to give or get money, or if you mistakenly believe your job is to keep the institution alive rather than on mission, or if you are reluctant to admit defeat “on your watch” … well, it’s easy to see why nonprofit board members may be prone to tolerate a permanently failing existence.

I’m not sure how to address the failure of nonprofit boards to, at times, do their jobs (and for the record I do not think all boards are failing in their responsibilities to the public); but it would seem that if the public is, indeed, losing trust in the ability of boards to act in their interest then we might very well expect increased calls for greater oversight to be imposed–for the ultimate good of the nonprofit and the public it serves.

Nonprofits and those who love them, eh?

 

 

Are feasibility studies a racket? If not, then why do so many capital campaigns derail?

Last Friday, I read a story posted on AJ about Michigan Opera getting a one month reprieve on the $11 million it must pay to Chase Bank if it is going to avoid a possible bankruptcy related to delinquency on a bond obtained for a capital expansion in 2004. How did this arts organization get here? I’m assuming there was a feasibility study at the outset and that the feasibility study gave the arts organization a green light, right?

So how did it end up several million dollars “short” on its campaign? How did we end up hearing yet another story about another arts organization struggling under the debt service associated with a new building, or struggling to maintain higher than expected operating costs following the opening of a new building, or struggling to maintain the minimum amount of cash on hand required for a bond agreement? The recession, I’m guessing, is the party line. But as we all know, there’s always more to it than the recession. Besides, don’t feasibility studies account for the possibility of economic decline when they are giving their assessments? If not, perhaps they should.

Is it possible that either feasibility studies cannot be trusted or arts organizations cannot be trusted to heed the findings from them?

I have never led a massive capital campaign for a building or endowment. I have, however, worked at an organization struggling to operate after such a campaign related to a building expansion. And I have worked at a foundation that was continually approached by organizations seeking increased support for ongoing operating costs after their new buildings were opened. Here is my slightly tongue in cheek characterization of a typical conversation with a feasibility study consultant when I was working at a foundation:

Consultant: As I believe you are aware, Leading Arts Organization has the phenomenal opportunity to build a new facility, which will blah, blah, blah.

Me: Yes, I do know this.

Consultant: Have you seen the plans?

Me: Yes, I’ve seen the plans.

Consultant: It’s going to be a phenomenal venue, don’t you think?

Me: The architecture is pretty stunning.

Consultant: I’m sure you know why we’re calling you. You have long been a supporter of Leading Arts Organization. May we assume that this means you see value in what they do?

Me: Yes, we tend to make grants to organizations that we perceive to be doing great work and that fit within the limited priorities of the foundation.

Consultant: Would you say that your grants are competitive?

Me: Yes, in the sense that we have limited means so we cannot fund everyone doing great work.

Consultant: Of course, so it’s all the more meaningful that you provide support to Leading Arts Organization.

Me: I suppose.

Consultant: Over the next X years, Leading Arts Organization will be seeking to raise an Ungodly Amount of Money Given the Size of Its Operating Budget. This amount will support both the new facility and an operating endowment. This expansion will make it possible for blah, blah, blah. I know you currently provide programmatic support to Leading Arts Organization. Would you also consider a meaningfully sized gift to the campaign within the next two years?

Me: No that is not something we are able to consider.

Consultant: I understand, and had been told that, but just wanted to confirm that information. In that case, as you can imagine, Leading Arts Organization’s operating budget will significantly increase with the move to its new building. To sustain all of the great new educational programs and ambitious, large-scale works that will be made possible once the facility is completed, it will be counting on increased support from its most loyal donors. Would you consider increasing your annual programmatic support to Leading Arts Organization?

Me: We do not promise funds in perpetuity to organizations nor can we commit to increasing the level of support that we provide in the future because an organization’s operating budget is increasing due to a facility expansion.

Consultant: I see. I notice that you made a grant to An Organization Like Ours in the past to support new programming after its new building was opened.

Me: Yes, we did. But, again, we cannot promise today that we can do such a thing in the future for another organization.

Consultant: But it is not impossible to think that, four years from now, when the building is completed, that Leading Arts Organization could apply for similar support for some of the new programs that it is planning and that you would respond favorably to that request?

Me: No that is not impossible; but I would stress that the organization should not count on such support when doing its planning.

Consultant: I see.

Then generally a bit of chit chat as the consultant reiterates the need for the facility, all of the benefits to the community, and perhaps asks a couple more questions. Then, inevitably, the call would end like this:

Consultant: So, I understand that the foundation cannot support the current capital campaign; however, it is fair to say that you think highly of Leading Arts Organization, that you understand the need for the expansion, that you are committed to continuing programmatic supporting for Leading Arts Organization through the campaign, and that you would consider increased support for new programs when the campaign is completed.

Me: No. I’m sorry if I was not clear. Leading Arts Organization should not plan on increased support from the foundation in the future. That’s what should be conveyed.

Consultant: Mmhm.

My hunch is that the large majority of feasibility studies conducted are irrationally exuberant and portray campaigns and the expansions that they support as being sustainable when, in fact, the large majority of them are not. Why would they do this? Well, the cynical side of me assumes it is because (a) consultants are not generally hired to deliver the truth; rather, they are hired to legitimize the choices that arts organizations and funders have already determined to undertake and/or (b) feasibility consultants often stand to gain from campaigns that go forward as many of them offer ongoing fundraising or building consulting services.

One thing I do know from doing a number of these interviews is that these plans are always notoriously vague. No one will ever say to a potential donor:

Here’s the deal, if we go forward, we will need you to give support from now until you die and we will need for your annual commitment to us to increase by 300% over the next three years and then by 15% every year thereafter. And if you and many other people do not do this then we will be on the verge of bankruptcy within 5 years and will need to do a special emergency campaign. At which point we will go back to everyone that gave to this campaign in the first place and make them feel obliged to throw good money after bad and keep us in this building that we cannot afford for another year or two by making what we will call a “one-time stretch gift”. Of course this is a somewhat deceptive term as we will keep coming back to you and doing this as often as is necessary to keep us in this building, for as long as we both shall live. (PS: We are, of course, counting on the fact that you will consider a bequest, as well).

So what’s the solution?

I’ve been thinking for a few years that perhaps we need feasibility studies undertaken on behalf of “the people” of the community—paid for with local government funds but hired and supervised by an independent committee. Think of it as spending a little to save a lot. Not only are many facility campaigns kicked off with massive grants from local governments but many local and state arts councils award grants on a formula basis (meaning the larger your budget the larger your grant, relatively speaking). Thus, once the facility is completed the people might expect that even more dollars will be flowing to the arts organization on an annual basis.

This audit (which could be in addition to the audit commissioned by the arts organization) would be aimed at:

  • Accurately projecting the capital campaign costs (assuming the delays and inflation that are inevitable), the size of operating endowment that would be needed to cover costs related to the facility, and realistic income and expense projections the first 15 years in the building.
  • Determining to what degree there is sufficient commitment in the community to support both the costs associated with creating or renovating the facility and the ongoing operating costs.
  • To calculate the anticipated increased amounts that would likely need to be given by the local government, major arts foundations, and key major arts donors over time (i.e., the ususal suspects that often end up holding the tab on these projects, especially when they go south).
  • To assess the feelings of the local community about a potentially significant amount of government dollars being invested in the organization if the building were to go forward (and the opportunity costs associated with that commitment). For instance, there could be a question such as: “The city is trying to decide between investing funds in a new opera venue or a new aquarium. Which of these would be more valuable to you and your family?”
  • Finally, such an assessment could assess not only the feelings of those living in the area that would be on the receiving end of any building planned for the future, but the people on the losing end, so to speak (that is, those living in the neighborhood that will lose the arts organization when it moves).

[A brief tangent related to this last bullet point: In response to my post last week on the new Barnes one of my favorite bloggers, Scott Walters, posted the comment, “While Montgomery County is certainly not rural, Merion is an unincorporated town. The move to Philadelphia continues the urban centralization of the arts.” I wonder: How did the people in Merion feel about their museum being taken away? How will the loss of the collection impact their local community? Were their voices heard in this process?]

Are capital expansion feasibility studies a racket—a deception between organizations and consultants that stand to benefit from positive assessments? If so can we fix this? Would feasibility studies commissioned by local governments help, or would those be just as corrupt? Why do so many campaigns derail and run out of steam? Why are the expansions so impossible to sustain over time? How do we get a better picture of the total costs of ownership of these buildings? How do we recognize a potential disaster in the making before loans are issued, grants are awarded, and architects are hired? And if the problem is not with the way these feasibility studies are executed and interpreted then are we to assume that donors lie when asked about whether they’ll support an organization’s expansion plans—that they promise generous support but then change their minds?

Or what else could it be? And, equally as important, who should be held accountable when these projects end up millions of dollars in debt?

I would love to be proven wrong about my suspicions in this realm and hope that those that undertake such studies, arts leaders, consultants, and donors to these campaigns will weigh in and share their thoughts.

Time to start pulling off the duct tape …

In his article, Occupy the Arts, a seat at a time, NY Times critic Anthony Tomasini (like others) pounced on recent allegations of ‘elitism’ in the arts (growing out of the Occupy movement), decrying that there are loads of free and affordable arts events and that even those organizations that charge $400 per ticket also have cheap seats (and the experience is just as great from the nosebleeds, thank you very much!). Not only do Tomasini and others seem a tad defensive when they fly their Free Tickets Flag in the face of those seeking to raise a conversation about social inequalities in the arts, it seems they rather miss the point.

Tomasini writes:

But as we try to grasp what the committed Occupy Wall Street activists are saying to the performing arts, can we all agree to put aside at last the charge of elitism? Especially, I would say from my partisan perspective, regarding classical music? At least in New York and in many other American cities, as well as most college towns, there are abundant opportunities to attend free or very affordable concerts and operas.

What arouses allegations that fine arts organizations are elitist is not (primarily) that their ticket prices are sometimes high, but rather that they are (more often than not) governed by a select group of (generally wealthy, well-educated, and often white) people whose beliefs and tastes are presumed to be ‘the best’ and, therefore, good for society as a whole. Many fine arts organizations are perceived as elitist because they seem to cater to the needs, capacities, and desires of this select group of people rather than serving their communities-at-large.

Communities in which, evidently, a lot of people are quite poor. Russell Willis Taylor of National Arts Strategies and I were chatting the other day and she mentioned that the most recent US census shows that 1 in 2 people in the US are living at the poverty level (Census: 1 in 2 Americans is Poor or Low Income).

And yet, attending a fine arts event in the US one steps into a world that seems to be (and often is) completely out of touch with the reality of that census statistic …

Arts organizations could do something in response to that statistic. Several years ago now, Appalshop (an arts and education center located in the Appalachian mountain region) realized there was a tremendous (and rather sobering) ‘growth market’ in its community (and the US generally) that was not being served by the arts: people who have been or are currently in prison, or those who know people who have been or are currently in prison. A staggering number of people fall into this category—enough that the good people at Appalshop felt that their perspectives and needs were worth taking seriously and that it was important to develop programming with them and for them. To read about this extraordinary program go to the Thousand Kites homepage.

Oh, but wait just a darned minute! Isn’t Appalshop one of those ‘community-based’ organizations? So that’s different. They’re supposed to serve the needs the community-at-large. That’s their mission. As opposed to ‘Arts’ organizations which are supposed to serve … ummmm … oh, never mind.

Pffffffff.

There is a growing financial, artistic, and psychic gap between the ‘nonprofit fine arts world’ in the US and the ‘rest of the US’.

And we’ve been trying to bridge this gap with duct tape (aka, friends with money) for at least 30 years.

It’s a new year.

What better time to tear off the duct tape, see what holds, and start building something better?

Arts Orgs: Places 2Meet or Not2Meet?

I’m getting married in a couple weeks and then headed on my honeymoon so this will be my last post until mid-August. Enjoy these summer days!

Seats2Meet - Utrecht

So, I recently learned about an innovation in meeting spaces that was founded in the Netherlands and has begun to spread across Europe. It’s called Seats2Meet. The concept is a communal space where independent contractors or those simply in need of a temporary workspace can come to plug-in, meet-up, and network. I visited a new location at Utrecht Central Station, near my home.

The day I visited the place was buzzing but still conducive to taking care of business. The vibe was relaxed and social, but definitely work-focused. The users of the space, each invariably armed with a laptop or tablet, worked solo or clustered in 2s and 3s at round and rectangular tables throughout an open space. Additionally, I spied a private ‘board room’ and a ‘quiet room’. There was also a coffee station in the middle of the room.

Talking with the staff, I learned that work tables/seats are free to use, however, Seats2Meet requests that anyone interested to use the space sign up at least one day prior. This allows them to alert potential users if the space appears to be maxed out at certain times of the day and, if so, to encourage users to come at a different time or go to a different location. All users have access to free coffee and tea throughout the day, and (in some locations) a free lunch (that’s right, a free lunch). Seats2Meet also stresses in its materials that it is both an online and live space to network and share knowledge.

How is this paid for, you ask? Well, according to the person that gave me the scoop, the free seats are subsidized by the those who pay to use private meeting spaces and spots in the quiet work rooms, which are rented in blocks of time for an hourly fee; (so, at least in part, it operates with a Freemium business model). I gather that the company also has a partnership program whereby entrepreneurs can license the Seats2Meet name and start franchises in their communities.

If I were (re)designing an arts venue these days, I think I would look into the feasibility of a Seats2Meet franchise being located in the space. Arts venues would seem to have at least a few advantages as locales for these work/meeting spaces: they often have space that goes unused during the day; they are associated with ‘creativity’ (and Seats2Meet is particularly interested in appealing to creative freelance types); and arts organizations could go one better than a ‘free lunch’ — they could potentially host happy hour performances or exhibitions at the end of the workday or week. For those organizations with excess real estate, or striving to be a ‘community hub’, or endeavoring to get more people to use their spaces during the day, perhaps a Seats2Meet franchise (or something similar) is worth exploring? Here’s a link to information on the partnership program.

But beyond the potential incorporation of the Seats2Meet concept into the planning of an arts facility, I keep thinking about the expectation (actually one of the stated rules on a sign when you visit) that Seats2Meet members (unless they are in the ‘quiet room’, presumably) should be open to sharing their knowledge and talking with others. Seats2Meet is striving to create an online network and to be a community, not simply a work space for the knowmadic.

Ostensibly nonprofit arts organizations are in the community-building business; but you sure wouldn’t know it when you visit many of them. I wonder how many arts groups would hang a sign in the lobby saying, “By coming here today you are not simply viewing a performance, you are participating in a community event. We ask you to introduce yourself to those standing and seated around you and to be open to conversation from others. After the performance, we’ll keep the bar open and continue to serve drinks and desserts for a couple hours; we encourage you to stay awhile and talk with others who came to see this performance tonight.”

Of course, it’s much easier to get people to stay if you have a cozy space where they can sit and talk. Hmmmm …. perhaps an evening use for that Seats2Meet location? … Workspace by day, lounge by night?

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