Jumper

Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

On a Strategy of Indeterminacy: Or, the Value of Creating Pathways to the Unforeseen

Inspired by work and writings of John Cage and Rebecca Solnit

How do you calculate upon the unforeseen? It seems to be an art of recognizing the role of the unforeseen, of keeping your balance amid surprises, of collaborating with chance, of recognizing that there are some essential mysteries in the world and thereby a limit to calculation, to plan, to control. To calculate on the unforeseen is perhaps exactly the paradoxical operation that life most requires of us.

This passage is from one of my favorite writers and favorite books on the creative process, Rebecca Solnit’s A Field Guide to Getting Lost (5). In a series of beautiful essays Solnit evokes, meditates upon, and illustrates the experience of being lost and its relationship to creation, transformation, shapeshifting, or simply making one’s way forward each day.

This question of Solnit’s ”How do you calculate upon the unforeseen?” is one I love chewing on and I have returned to time-and-again since I first read Solnit’s book in 2014. It is a question inspired, Solnit writes, by a declaration of Edgar Allen Poe that “all experience, in matters of philosophical discovery, teaches us that, in such discovery, it is the unforeseen upon which we must calculate most largely” (5).

In this #creativeleadership post I want to reflect a bit on the inevitability, the purpose, the lessons, the possibilities, and the power of the unforeseen. While the unforeseen is something that many of us might like to avoid (I’m now thinking of any number of cataclysms of the past 5 years), artists (in the main) seem to dance with the unforeseen, draw it out, seek it out, and sense it long before others. Across a range of disciplines, one might even conceptualize the creation process that many artists engage as they make new works as a pathway to the unforeseen.

One of the forebears and exemplars of “collaborating with chance,” as Solnit puts it, was the composer and music theorist John Cage. Over winter break I re-read Kay Larson’s fantastic biography Where the Heart Beats: John Cage, Zen Buddhism and the Inner Life of Artists as a handful of students in the MA Creative Leadership at MCAD were keen to engage with it. The book is largely an exploration of the influence of Zen Buddhism, including the writings and talks of seminal first carriers of Buddhism to the United States (such as D.T. Suzuki), on Cage’s life and work.

In this second reading I made the connection between Solnit’s “pathways to the unforeseen” and Cage’s principle of indeterminacy. Larson describes indeterminacy and encapsulates Cage’s use of it, writing:

Indeterminacy means, literally: not fixed, not settled, uncertain, indefinite. It means that you don’t know where you are. How can it be otherwise, say the Buddhist teachings, since you have no fixed or inherent identity and are ceaselessly in process?

Inspired by Suzuki’s class, Cage had been exploring ways to write music that was indeterminate both in original intention and in outcome. By using methods of divination (his favorite was the I Ching, the Chinese Book of Changes) Cage could write music with the help of chance. In that way, he could begin with an intention and open it up to the unpredictable. The next step was to write music that obliged the performers to make some of their own choices.

Larson, Where the Hear Beats, 19-20

Cage characterized his work as an experience “the outcome of which is not foreseen” identified with “no matter what eventuality” (Larson, 348). He adopted the use of the I Ching as a method in large part to remove himself (his ego) from the decision-making process with new works. While he quite often set up elaborate constraints or rules in advance of rolling the I Ching, ultimately the work that emerged was the outcome of chance.

While I wouldn’t go so far as to say that all artists work by a principle or process of indeterminacy, the capacity to work in such a way (moving towards the unknown, allowing chance events to influence the work, beginning without a plan or articulated end in sight) does seem to be common among many artists.

Within the frame of organizational processes, I would argue that the opposite of indeterminacy is strategy. What do I mean by strategy? Michael Porter describes it as the big picture of how the organization is going to win in its environment, whatever that is. Put another way, how will you achieve competitive advantage (deliver a distinctive value proposition) given known and unanticipated threats and opportunities?

Since Porter’s initial formulation, and in response to uncertainty and continual disruptions and therefore the difficulty of engaging in long-term strategic planning we have witnessed the turn towards adaptive strategy. While applied to business it grew out of software development and, akin to the scientific process, involves hypothesizing, experimenting, and adjusting as necessary. In other words, try-out short-term strategies and adapt as you need to in pursuit of your longer-term goals.

Lately, the concept of emergent strategy (first coined by Henry Mintzberg but of late most associated with adrienne maree brown) has been gaining ground. Emergent strategy (as it sounds) is not deliberate and does not involve planning. It is developed in response to fluid or unforeseen circumstances (like, say, a pandemic). I am a big fan of brown’s book.

What I have been wondering since re-reading Larson’s book on Cage is whether, to prepare ourselves for a future that we anticipate will be radically different, humans and businesses alike would benefit, at times, from adopting a strategy of indeterminacy. By that I mean an embrace of processes that will by necessity and with intention ensure that we arrive at destinations we cannot imagine, much less describe. 

What might a strategy of indeterminacy — a process for putting our organizations on a pathway to the unforeseen–look like? I work at a college running a master’s program. I spent a bit of time lightly pondering this possibility within that general context and came up with a few ideas:

Idea #1 – Wild Card Courses

What if my program annually scheduled a wild card course – a course that would never be logically included in the program. Moreover, what if that course was determined in part by chance? Each year someone would roll the dice to select one of X possible courses. Here are 10 courses that I would never strategically build into the program I currently direct (all but #10 inspired by headlines I’ve noticed recently):

  1. Tomorrows Deities, Doctrines, & Denominations: What is the Future of Religions?
  2. Whither Water and Wastewater?
  3. The New Canary in the Coalmine? Autonomous Mobile Robots & Workplace Hazards
  4. Building and Using a Vertical Hydroponic System to Grow Vegetation
  5. Gene Therapy: Risks, Rewards & Quandaries
  6. Gun Control Policies in China and the US
  7. GIS Data: Applications in Business, Social Change, and Everyday Life
  8. Climate-friendly Eating
  9. Frontiers in Animal Science: Ethics, Economics, and Environmental Sustainability
  10. Woodcarving

Another idea could be to create a campus-wide course whose content is determined by whomever shows up for it and their interests. No syllabus. No plan. No clear outcomes. It simply emerges in response to the questions, curiosities, and goals of the individuals that come to form the course ensemble.

Idea #2: An admission lottery system

This is not a new idea as admission lotteries already exist; but they are a great example of an indeterminate strategy. Lotteries are already used in Charter schools and some public high schools (in NYC, e.g.). Some institutions of higher learning also use them for incredibly competitive programs. But what if they were adopted at most colleges and universities?

Idea #3: Where’s the College President?

What if every day the president of the college used a random outcome generator to select a spot on campus where he/she/they would set up a laptop and work for two hours?

What would be the outcome of these actions? No one knows; and that is the beauty of them.

I’m by no means suggesting we toss aside strategy in favor of indeterminacy; but I believe there are lessons in the ways that John Cage approached the creation of work and, in particular, engaged processes that enabled him to extend real and imagined boundaries, encounter the unknown, and make what could not have been imagined in advance of the making.  

Given widespread recognition of the need to find radically new and beautiful alternatives to many of the ways of being, doing, and knowing that we embraced throughout the 20th century—new ways of relating to the natural world, to ourselves, to each other, to work, to learning, to organizing, to healing, to sustaining ourselves, etc.—it is perhaps worth asking whether we could benefit from engaging creative processes and practices that are, essentially, pathways to the unforeseen.

I’ll leave you with a quote from a talk with Brian Eno and Donna Gratis on the arts’ role in tackling climate change that I attended today.

Surrender is a valuable thing to do. … A lot of our problems come from an excess of control and an absence of surrender.

Brian Eno

What do you think? And have you seen examples of strategic indeterminacy? Or do you have thoughts on how to apply the idea? I’d love to hear from you.

Innovation to what end?

map guy 2Happy New Year! This is a condensed and slightly adapted version of a short talk I gave in October at an event called Blowup: Innovation in Extreme Scenarios, hosted by a hub organization called V2, located in Rotterdam.

INNOVATION TO WHAT END?

I predicted in an article I wrote in 2005 that “innovation” would become the next buzz word to emerge in US funding applications and I was right. Predicting the rise of innovation hardly required super human insight.  The whole world was striving to innovate—even before the great recession. And over the past few years the hunt for the next great product for the as yet untapped market has become ever-more-desperate.

Speaking of the recession, in 2008, Paul Light, a professor of public service at NYU wrote an article in which he speculated four possible futures for the subsidized sector in the US arising out of the recession:

four scenarios

  1. Rescue Fantasy: nonprofits are saved by significant increases in contributions;
  2. Withering Winterland: organizations starve themselves into a weakened organizational state;
  3. Arbritrary Winnowing: survival of the largest, oldest, and best connected organizations; and
  4. Transformation: a redesign of the sector that leaves it stronger, more vibrant, more sustainable, and more impactful.

At the end of the article, Light predicted that if we let the future take its course it would result in a Withering Winterland or Arbritrary Winnowing and noted that the benefits of transformation could only by reaped deliberate choice. The same prediction could have been made about the future state of the Dutch cultural sector following the government cuts in 2010.

And what picture is emerging in the arts and culture sectors (in both countries)?

bad scenarios

From what I can tell it appears Light’s predictions are panning out.

I have been a critic of the broken-record calls for innovation in the arts sector from governments and private funders; however, I propose to forget about the motivations, expectations, and rhetoric of those holding the money bags for a moment. Instead let’s ask ourselves whether Withering Winterland and Arbitrary Winnowing are the future scenarios that we want for the arts and culture sector. If not, then transformation may be our only choice. And yes, transformation, requires new ideas, new ways of thinking, creating, and distributing, new conceptions of our very purposes, and new value propositions.

Dare I say it? Sector-wide transformation may require innovation.

But we know this, right?

We know that the world has changed and that we need to adapt or otherwise respond to it.

We know this.

So why haven’t we seen massive transformation in the arts and culture sector in response to this changing world?

A couple decades ago two researchers, Pralahad and Bettis, asked just this question. They wondered why it is so difficult for organizations to change and why, even when organizations see change in their environment, they are unable to act.

Pralahad and Bettis conceptualize organizations as having, in essence, a dominant logic – an information filter that focuses the attention of managers on some issues but not others.  The dominant logic also underpins the beliefs about causality that are inherent to an organization’s business model. For instance, we do X, which is of value to society and, in return, Y revenues are paid to us by the government, citizens, sponsors.

We are living in an era in which the logic underpinning our institutions appears to be unsound. It is no longer clear that what we’re doing is of great value to sufficient numbers of people. It is no longer clear that enough people are going to step up and pay for us to continue pursue our missions. How many people stormed the ministry to demand subsidies for the arts in the Netherlands a few years back?

Not enough.

We need a new logic … a new relationship to society … a new way of seeing our place in the world.

Pralahad and Bettis would argue that we cannot find this new logic without first unlearning the old one.

That’s what this model is showing.

pralahad and bennis 2

This graph suggests that instability assists in unlearning an old logic: If your organization becomes sufficiently destabilized, you may abandon your old filter, thus enabling you to see the world in a different way. To see partners where previously you saw competitors. To see venues where previously you saw useless space. To see co-creators where previously you saw ticket buyers. To see clients where previously you saw “non-arts people”. To see 50 ways to deploy existing assets where previously you saw one. To see multiple businesses within your organization where previously you saw one. To see numerous markets for your services where previously you saw a single, rather niche market, of upper middle class, educated people.

Of course, unlearning is not inevitable. Finding a new dominant logic is not an automatic outcome of instability. Some organizations will simply fail. Others will hunker down, wait out the storm, and return to the status quo (the old equilibrium and dominant logic). I wrote about the latter possibility in a post last year when I picked up on a provocation by a field colleague who wondered whether the arts sector in the US had squandered the recession–whether it had, in essence, wasted its opportunity for transformation.

So if we have failed to see transformation (at the organizational or field level) perhaps one reason is that we have not yet been (or allowed ourselves to be) sufficiently destabilized, in a sense, to abandon old models and the long-held beliefs underpinning them.

But I suspect that’s not the only, or even primary, reason.

I suspect the primary reason is that we do not yet have a vision (or buy-in) for what sector-wide transformation would look like or what purpose/whose interests it would serve. And I would say the same is often true of our pursuit of innovation at the individual organization level.

My friend Todd London gave a talk at an innovation summit recently. In it he said, “I come to bury innovation, not to praise it.” I thought very much of doing the same thing today because I, too, am so weary of this discourse. I once ran an organization that had a solid reputation for being innovative; however we never attended an innovation lab or even thought about needing to innovate, per se.

Instead, I would say we had three goals: to do work that no one else in our city would dare to do; to increase the fan base for the art and artists on our stages; and to do everything possible to make sure that the experience was always social, intimate, and meaningful for both the artists and the audiences. Very simple goals and we were willing to question just about everything about the development, production and distribution of our work in order to reach them. And we were willing and able to experiment continually (1) because it was inherent to the mission of the organization and (2) because we were in a state of crisis at the time and it was clear that some things had to be blown up in order for us to move forward.

From my experience innovation is a side product of:

  • actively throwing away existing maps and having one’s organizational eyes wide open to a changing environment (i.e., having vision);
  • having strong values but flexible forms and practices;
  • encouraging creativity throughout the organization;
  • having the courage to see the truth about organizational performance and act upon it;
  • rejecting the status quo as a goal; and instead
  • continually seeking to create greater value in the world.

But how to innovate seems to me the less interesting and powerful question. Beyond “staying alive”or “replacing lost government funds” how will innovating allow you to advance your mission: increase your capacity to bring people together on equal terms, create and share knowledge, provide greater support for artists, develop and produce higher quality work, take risks, or make relevant and meaningful that which has become tired, is unfamiliar or misunderstood, or has been forgotten?

Or to do something else?

More importantly, could innovation serve the goal of sector-wide transformation? If so, how?

What would sector-wide transformation look like?

Until we can answer this question I don’t think we will successfully undertake the overhaul that is needed.

Innovation is a process, not a destination.

It’s a means to an end … The bigger question is, to what end does your organization, or the arts and culture sector as a whole, need or desire to innovate?

What is the changed state you/we want to see in the world? And why?

 

On organizations evolving: when short-term coping mechanisms become the new way of doing business

icebergsA couple weeks ago, one of my favorite arts bloggers, Andrew Taylor (a/k/a The Artful Manager) wrote a post whose title conveys a pretty strong thesis: Organizations don’t evolve; they cope.  While I share Andrew’s skepticism of the field’s use of natural world metaphors (ecosystem, ecology, evolve, adapt, sustainability, etc.) it’s not because I think the metaphors don’t apply (within limits); it’s because I think we sometimes misapply them.

Andrew begins his analysis with a comparison between individual organizations and individual organisms, writing:

We’re calling on existing organizations to evolve to the new environment, as living organisms evolve to theirs. Only, individual organisms don’t evolve. They only cope. So, we can tell a nonprofit corporate organization to evolve just as effectively as we can tell a fish to grow opposable thumbs. Its traits and tendencies were inherited at birth. It can adjust its tendencies, it can retrain its reflexes, but it’s still a nonprofit corporate organization, even if it can do new tricks.

He then rightly points out a couple paragraphs later that there are differences between an organization and a fish:

An organization is a bundle of people, things, processes, and traditions, bound by contracts and covenants, and restricted in its operation by laws, codes, and norms. A fish is, well, a fish.

The distinctions that Andrew makes between an organization and a fish are critical; indeed, it is these very distinctions that would seem to make it possible for an organization to evolve and impossible for a fish to do so.

Moreover, I would argue that (legally constraining, in principle, as the form may be) the nonprofit corporation has demonstrated that it can be rather easily manipulated to ends (goals) other than the (educational or charitable) ones which any given 501c3 organization is presumably formed to pursue. In other words, where there’s a will to evolve, there seems to be a way.

***

Organizations are socially-constructed systems with goals, presumed to be shaped by the contexts in which they are established. Typically, variations in organizations have been perceived to come about primarily through the deaths of old forms and the births of new ones. With the birth of new organizations, variations may be introduced, some of which will be retained in the population.

The introduction of the nonprofit form in theater is a nice example. In the first half of the twentieth century it was relatively rare to find a professional, nonprofit theater company in the US. With the emergence of funding from the Ford Foundation, and later the NEA, the nonprofit form became (in the words of Arena Stage founder, Zelda Fichandler) the apava for resident theaters across the US. In a 2011 talk, she remarked:

There’s an expressive word, I believe it’s Sanskrit – and the word is apava – that translates as “the effective means to make a vision concrete” or workable or real. Our apava, strangely enough, turned out to be the nonprofit corporation. Some of us might take that fact for granted, but we shouldn’t. It’s the basic reality of our existence. Before nineteen hundred and fifty something, theatre was excluded from the benefits given to science, universities, charities, the church, opera, and maybe dance – but not theatre, because it made a profit. We knew that without the nonprofit blanket we could not exist, for it allows us to receive gifts and grants and to be free of taxes on tickets.

Beginning in the 1960s there was an exponential growth in the number of nonprofit theaters. Organizational ecologists would suggest this was a reflection of the legitimacy of the form over other forms and that this growth would continue until the population had reached its carrying capacity, and then it would begin to decline. The carrying capacity is the maximum population size that an environment can sustain indefinitely given available resources.

As an example of the growth and decline in a population, as part of HowlRound’s recent weekly series on Black Theater in the US, Sade Lythcott noted in her essay that “in the roughly ten-year span of the Black Arts Movement in New York alone (1965-1975), over two hundred black theaters emerged; today there are less than ten.” The decline in that population (not only in NYC but across the US) has been considered by some in the theater field to represent the struggle of black theaters to attain legitimacy, resources, support, meaning, etc: they were birthed in a certain context and as the environment around them shifted they were unable to compete and survive.

Likewise, it is rare these days to see a young contemporary choreographer form a permanent company in NYC with a large number of dancers on the payroll, or a resident theater company (in any city) formed with a permanent acting company.

And it’s not just certain forms of arts organization that are now harder to sustain; reading the “bracing” conclusion of the executive summary of the 2010 National Arts Index (as reported by Ben Davis), one wonders if we have reached the carrying capacity for the nonprofit form in the arts generally:

Given the profusion of underfunded organizations, the nonprofit model may have to be abandoned in favor of more experimental or market-oriented business models for the arts.

This is frequently how evolution in an organizational population is seen to occur: through the death, birth, and (importantly) growth of some organizations (and not others) in response to a shifting environment.

But as we have seen now and then, and as more recent research has theorized, it’s not only populations that can evolve. Individual organizations themselves can transform (sometimes dramatically, sometimes incrementally) and do. While a fish may not be able to grow a new central nervous system, an organization, in essence, can.

An organization can “unlearn” practices and beliefs and norms and strategies, and learn new ones. It can shift its “dominant logic.” One paper on this topic (Bettis & Prahalad, 1995 – The Dominant Logic: Retrospective and Perspective) asserts that this “unlearning” and “shift in logics” may be more likely to occur out of a period in which an organization experiences a high degree of instability. (Of course, this is not always the case: other possibilities arising from instability are that the organization will survive and revert back to the status quo, or simply fail entirely).

It’s not hard to identify arts organizations that have been transformed out of periods of duress. The Louisiana Philharmonic Orchestras is a musician-owned and –led orchestra that formed after the demise of the New Orleans Symphony. The fact that the name has changed is less important than the fact that many of the same people re-organized and re-formed with new goals and a different structure and relationship between management and musicians.

Or consider the new strategies introduced in the opera world when Peter Gelb traveled from Sony to the Metropolitan Opera (which was, at the time, struggling with declining audiences and financial challenges). Consider the way the HD broadcast adaptation, specifically, has begun to influence the creation, production, and distribution processes not only at the Met but in other organizations, as well, and has begun to change the relationship of audiences to the art form of opera.

Or look at how Diane Paulus has radically re-interpreted the mission of the American Repertory Theatre. She has changed the goals, relationships, identity, structure, and strategies of the organization in response to not only a changed “world” (i.e. larger societal context) but also changed expectations from ART’s “host,” Harvard University.

Of course, organizational evolution is rarely this dramatic. More often, it happens so slowly we don’t recognize it. Paulus did in one season what other theaters took two decades to enact.

We tend to talk about the arts and culture sector these days as though it is “stuck” – unable or unwilling to change – but it might also be useful to consider how the present state is a function of small adaptations (in structure, people, processes, culture) in response to a shifting environment and the persistence of some of those changes over time (i.e., those that were perceived to increase the chances of survival).

Evolution occurs both through adaptation and through the perpetuation of whatever is working well. In The Resilient Sector, Lester Salamon has suggested that we have been witnessing a long creep towards commercialism in the nonprofit sector in the US generally (not only in the arts), because this is, essentially, what the slings and arrows of the US system encourages.

With the lack of subsidies and increased competition for funding, what options exist for staying alive? Do an enhancement deal and produce a new musical; reduce production expenses and beef up the development and marketing staff; find a corporate sponsor and produce a sensational exhibition of some kind; hire a celebrity and charge $300 for tickets; avoid producing works that require a large number of actors or musicians or dancers and more than the standard amount of rehearsal time; replace an unknown work by an emerging playwright with last year’s Tony Award-winning work; or better yet, a revival of a well-known title by a household name.

These strike me as coping mechanisms. Tactics to enable short-term survival.

In this sense, I agree with Andrew. Organizations often adopt coping mechanisms in response to changes in the environment and uncertainty. However, sometimes a coping mechanism, perhaps because it’s working in the short-term, becomes a longer-term strategy. It gets re-framed as a process innovation and becomes a new way of doing business — a model for existing organizations, or new ones being formed, to replicate. Eventually, one adaptation can begin to have repercussions on the audience, the art, and the identity of not just one organization, but on an entire organizational field.

Some of these changes may strengthen nonprofits and their ability to realize their missions and goals. Some may not.

Therefore, from my perspective, the question is not whether or not organizations can (and thus should be expected to) evolve; they do evolve. The question is how, and in response to what?

***

BTW, closely related to this blog, I’ve endeavored to tackle the concept of sustainability in the arts in a recent talk that I’ve given in Minneapolis, Lyon, Salzburg, and Belfast. It’s called, “Holding Up the Arts. Can We Sustain What We’ve Created? Should We?” There is a permanent link in the sidebar “Stuff I’ve written”.

Are we a sector defined by our permanently failing organizations?

A few weeks back I wrote a post responding to a session at the Theatre Communications Group conference in which an esteemed leader of a resident theater (Michael Maso) called “bullshit” on some criticisms being lobbed at large theater institutions. I am incredibly grateful to all who took the time to read or respond to the post. The comments, including a link to Mr. Maso’s response, are well worth reading if you have not done so. I want to pick up on some of the ideas raised by Maso and others in a future post, but today I want to draw attention to comments posted by Corey Fischer at the recently closed Traveling Jewish Theater. In talking about the struggles the organization faced in trying to maintain its commitment to its mission and goals, Corey writes:

The sad part is that in the years leading up to our decision to finally close down, it seemed as if we were being punished for our commitment to be a home for artists. Some foundations and consultants implied and sometimes said straight out that to attempt to have artists at the center of the company and pay them a living wage was frivolous, unrealistic and irresponsible. Perhaps. But as economic conditions forced us to change that basic aspect of our identity, it became harder and harder for us to accomplish our mission of creating and presenting original work. When we recognized that the only way to even have a chance of surviving was to become one more theater producing plays that could just as easily be done by a host of other companies, we saw no reason to continue.

When I read Corey’s posts I was reminded of the 1989 book “Permanently Failing Organizations” by Marshall W. Meyer and Lynne G. Zucker, which I recently read on someone’s recommendation. The authors define permanently failing organizations as those that persist even though they are no longer achieving their goals. While economists and others have long theorized that higher performing organizations persist and those that are not high performing are driven out of business, Meyer & Zucker found that persistence and performance can become decoupled and companies that are no longer achieving their performance goals (e.g., profits to owners/shareholders in the case of for-profits; and artistic and social mission goals in the case of not-for-profits) can continue to exist for quite a long time.

Without going too deeply into the theory in this post, the researchers postulate that organizations reach a so-called ‘permanently failing’ state when those who are ‘dependent’ on the institution (primarily but not exclusively, managers who depend on the institution for a paycheck and who, therefore, often value maintenance of the organization over other performance goals) begin to amass power, which they then use to keep the organization alive, but in a low performance state. Why do these managers fail to pursue strategies that might lead to higher performance (e.g., higher profits or higher quality)? Because such strategies often entail taking risks that might lead to “outright failure”–something those running permanently failing organizations want to avoid at all costs.

It strikes me that in nonprofit arts organizations–in which there are no owners (or shareholders) in the legal sense, in which permanence is often a goal of the institution, in which mission and goals are notoriously difficult to define and measure, and in which it is actually quite difficult for up-and-coming innovators to access the resources and power necessary to give the most established institutions a run for their money–it would be particularly easy for organizations to drift towards a permanently failing state (or to become ‘nonprofit arts zombies’, to use the phrase coined by Brian Newman in his chapter in the book 20 under 40).

Interestingly, Traveling Jewish Theater clearly felt it had the option (and encouragement by funders and others, even) to pursue persistence at the expense of its mission and goals by becoming “just another theater company doing work any other theater company could do.” However, TJT chose the road less travled in the nonprofit arts sector. Laudably, TJT felt it was “more important to accomplish the mission, than to survive” (a phrase used by Woolly Mammoth board member, Pete Miller, at the Scarcity to Abundance conference at Arena Stage in January 2011).

In the nonprofit sector we have come to associate age and size with performance; and yet we have also become a sector in which there is an almost constant call for innovation and new models. Perhaps the two are not unrelated? Perhaps we perceive the arts sector itself as being in the doldrums not because there are no innovators in our midst (there are plenty), but because we have, for too long, held up our permanently failing organizations as leaders and, by doing so, have permitted them to define our sector’s goals and its performance.

Theatre Bay Area’s “Counting New Beans”

Clay Lord and the fine folks at Theatre Bay Area have a new publication out: Counting New Beans: Intrinsic Impact and the Value of Art, which includes interviews with 20 prominent artistic directors and essays by Alan Brown, Rebecca Ratzkin, Arlene Goldbard, Rebecca Novick, and Clayton Lord. It also includes an interview with yours truly.

Here’s an excerpt from my long and winding conversation with Clay Lord. I’ve edited together excerpts (elipses mark missing sections) from two different parts of the interview.

Clay Lord: You’ve written about “creative destruction,” this idea that we either need to take control of our growth and make decisions about what survives, or natural forces will do it for us.  But what is the rubric for understanding where the culling of the herd needs to happen, and who does the culling?  Foundations? Market forces? Attendance figures? What are the evaluative terms? If the art isn’t going to stop, then how do the organizational structures decrease? Who decides?  Who are the arbiters of which organizations are “valuable,” and what are the terms? 

DER: Artists and communities make up a constantly evolving and changing environment. It’s the institutions that are stuck, holding onto beliefs and practices about what is or is not [a] “legitimate” [artistic experience] and denying the changing tastes, habits and demographics of their communities. […] When we say we need to try to find a way to make things “more sustainable,” what are we talking about? Sustaining middle class livings for those salaried professional administrators that have them? Sustaining the capacity for artistic risk-taking? Sustaining broad and deep community engagement with the theatre? The “what” is really important. And if we’re talking about nonprofit, mission-driven organizations, then we need to be able to answer the “what” with regard to the social value we are trying to sustain or create.

We keep saying we want to see the next thing arrive, but at the same time desperately try to preserve what we’ve already created. It’s very difficult to do both; most often, you need to destroy the old in order to allow for the emergence of the new. This is the idea behind “creative destruction.” […]

I think the “impact” question makes the field a little nervous—and so does the supply/demand conversation—because we sense that we’ve arrived at a day of reckoning. The money is tight and the environment is hyper-competitive. The conversation has been controlled for a long time by a small group of people. For years we’ve had a field-wide understanding of who were the field leaders, and there was no displacing them.

To some degree we’ve gamed and worked the system to maximum output of whatever could be derived from it, and now we have come to the end of the line. It’s time to start asking ourselves the disruptive questions. Does it make sense to subsidize large resident theatres and not commercial theatres? Does it make sense to subsidize professional theatres and not amateur theatres performing in churches or high school gymnasiums? Does it make sense to subsidize those that are most able to garner patronage from wealthy, culturally elite audiences? […]

We’re rather protectionist in the U.S. nonprofit arts sector because we know, or at least suspect in our gut, that if we start measuring intrinsic impact—testing our assumptions about the impact of the art we make— we might find out that there is greater intrinsic impact from watching an episode of The Wire than going to any kind of live theatre. Or we may find that small-scale productions in churches or coffee shops are just as impactful (or more so) than large-scale professional productions in traditional theatre spaces. Are we prepared, if we find this sort of evidence, to change the way we behave in light of it? […]

Because right now it appears we have a winner-take-all system in the arts. The few at the top continue to grow while the rest of the sector is forced to divide a shrinking pie among an increasing number of organizations. Assuming we’re not going to have significantly more resources coming into the sector, […] can we allow for a different idea to emerge about which are the most important organizations to fund? Who’s at the top? Who’s at the bottom? Who’s considered leading? These are rankings that were established decades ago and it’s nearly impossible for even an incredibly worthy and high-performing entrant to displace one of the ‘pioneering’ incumbent organizations at the top of the pyramid. […]

We need data that can help us see the field differently. Sure, if you rank theatres by budget, if you rank them by how many thousands of people they perform to in a year, then you will continue to rank them 1, 2, 3, as they are currently ranked. […] We need new ways of ordering the sector, and understanding what contributes to a healthy arts ecosystem. A lot of money has come into the sector, but it hasn’t been distributed very well. The ecology is out of balance. […]

Who gets to decide which theatres stay and which go? Well, we have a decentralized, indirect subsidy system, meaning, in theory, “everybody” could get to decide. But in reality don’t we see that those with money get to decide? And by extension, then, friends of those with money are the winners and everyone else loses. And then some say, “No one should decide; we should let nature take its course.” But what do we mean by “nature?” Do we mean that we should let “the market” decide?

That’s not valid. You can’t, on the one hand, say “We have to subsidize this particular form of art  in order to compensate for market failure,” and then on the other hand say you’re going to let “the market” decide. Many organizations exist today because someone saw them as meriting support 40 or 50 years ago. Why do we resist the idea that some entity or entities should be able to intervene now and discontinue funding for certain organizations (that seem less worthy or relevant now) and encourage or enable funding for others?

The system does not seem to deal with underperforming organizations proficiently or effectively. And if you can’t eliminate underperforming organizations, over time, they compete with other, more worthy organizations for resources. Of course somebody has to decide. A bunch of ‘somebodies’ has to decide. But how do you coordinate that? This is the challenge with our decentralized, indirect subsidy system.

I’m a big believer in Alan Brown’s work, and what you are doing, and I’m hopeful that it can help reframe the conversation about social value and about what it means to be a “leading organization.” Right now, though, what we know is that major foundations provide an imprimatur; they are able to change the perceptions of organizations as they give money and take it away. The press matters. Service organizations matter. And there are others. Any of these can stand on a bully pulpit and say, “Here are the organizations that we perceive to be leaders.” And if it’s a very different list from the list that we’ve had in our minds for a long time, if the names are not simply those that we’ve historically perceived to be leading, it will begin to shift our understanding of what we mean when we say “leading” (i.e., not just oldest and largest). It also provides leverage to the new leaders, increases their ability to fundraise, and changes the way others perceive them. […]

The formation of the nonprofit arts sector was essentially an effort to create exclusive organizations to serve wealthy people – that was the goal. That was the idea at the outset. We have reached a logical result of having created such a system. Arts organizations are sleeping in beds they made. […] And the idea that we need to keep sustaining it—well, I’m not convinced that this particular thing we’ve created, this current model, needs to be sustained. It is proving to be unsustainable perhaps because it caters to a few rather than serving the many. […] Maybe it’s time to blow things up, rather than sustain the status quo.

Counting New Beans is an impressive 464 pages long, including the full final research report, four original essays commissioned for this report, and full transcripts of the interviews with artistic leaders and patrons. It is $24.95, and will only be available here, on the Theatre Bay Area website.

On my Soapbox: Digitization of Live Performance

The Wooster Group

Clay Lord has written a provocative and rather erudite post, The Work of Presentational Art in the Age of On-Demand Technological Empowerment, in which he cautions that as arts organizations embrace or respond to pressure to record and disseminate their live work that they not lose their identity and the core of what live performance (and theater in particular, perhaps) is all about.

Clay mentions my post from last week in which I wrote: “If our goal for the next century is to hold onto our marginalized position and maintain our minuscule reach—rather than being part of the cultural zeitgeist, actively addressing the social inequities in our country, and reaching exponentially greater numbers of people— then our goal is not only too small, I would suggest that it may not merit the vast amounts of time, money, or enthusiasm we would require from talented staffers and artists, governments, foundations, corporations, and private individuals to achieve it.” In response, Clay comments, “I’m not sure I can simply agree, much as I might want to. This, more than anything, reminds me of Veruca Salt, forever simply wanting more without pausing to ask whether that was going to truly get her someplace she wanted to be at the end.”

My encouragement towards reaching greater numbers of people through other channels (generally and in the post quoted) is not meant to be a rejection of the importance and distinctive joy of an intimate, high quality, live arts experience. Those opportunities exist in great numbers in many cities in the US, for those interested and able to attend. But perhaps a personal anecdote will help to illustrate my excitement over the possibilities of recording and streaming live performances.

Despite being a ‘theater person’ I did not encounter the Wooster Group until I was in my 30s when I was working at On the Boards. Why? Because the Wooster Group didn’t travel to Kansas City when I was in graduate school. Or Idaho, when I moved there in my 20s to work in theater and run a music festival.The Woosters have never traveled to more than a select number of cities in the US (for perhaps obvious reasons). I had read about the Woosters in my edition of Brockett back in the late 80s/early 90s (a few paragraphs, as I recall) but never experienced ‘that kind of theater’. When I finally saw the Woosters, live, in my 30s, it was a seminal experience.

The same with Anne Bogart, Miranda July, Felix Ruckert, John Moran, Deja Donne, Richard Maxwell and many other artists that I was fortunate to encounter only because I had the good fortune to live in Seattle and work at On the Boards and, in particular, with Lane Czaplinski. Eventually, I moved to NY and saw 150 performances per year and it was a pretty heady period of my life. And now I’m living in a small village in the Netherlands and for many reasons (financial limitations because I’m a student, transportation issues, family obligations, etc.) it is quite difficult for me to see even the great work that is happening here in the Netherlands, much less venture to various festivals around Europe. No more Wooster Group for me.

Thus, I am (now more than ever) incredibly enthused that (for example) the the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts and OtB TV now exist. I wish to God OtB TV existed in 1990 when I was trying to find a place for myself in the arts world and develop an aesthetic. If I were running an arts aministration or MFA program of any kind I would make such broadcasts/channels mandatory viewing. When I was in graduate school one of my professors screened a film of Laurie Anderson’s UNITED STATES LIVE. I had not yet seen Laurie Anderson live. It prompted me to buy a ticket to her next concert, in Lawrence, Kansas. That, too, was a seminal experience for me.

Enough with the nostalgia … Yes, hold onto the core. But, to be honest, I think the ‘core’ of theater is far more threatened by the preponderance of rather deadly small-scale teledramas that pass as ‘dynamic live theater’ in many of the regional theaters in the US than by, for instance, a broadcast of the fabulous Young Jean Lee’s SHIPMENT on OtB TV.

If the ‘live’ experience is still mattering to people I believe it will compel people to go to the theater, buy a ticket (or stand in line for free tickets) and attend in person. But I would implore you not to dismiss these mediated experiences by assuming that they still generally ‘look like shit’ (as Clay suggests in his post and as they mostly did in the 20th century). Have you seen one of the Met HD Broadcasts? Personally, I think they are amazing and, as a ‘theater person’, I prefer them to the live experience as I can see the faces of the performers. Furthermore, having seen the broadcasts I now find the live experience all the richer. Not only is the technology improving but so are our skills at capturing the ‘liveness’ in a digital medium. And OtB TV is showing us that it can be done well without the price tag of the Metropolitan Opera broadcasts.

The major institutions in this country are now quite large and hungry beasts, demanding incredible resources to be sustained. It is quite hard for me to imagine how we can continue to justify such expenditures in the face of the declining live audience trend (that seems to have begun in the 80s according to the various studies). But if we could begin to talk about a rising ‘online’ or ‘cinema’ or ‘DVD’ audience (which the Metropolitan Opera and others have been able to do) then I begin to see the logic of ongoing large investments in these institutions. And these recordings are not just about reaching audiences that can’t access the live work. Arguably, they could play a crucial role in helping artists (more easily or quickly) build a larger global audience, be ‘in dialogue with’ other artists, and have greater impact.

We can also avoid that path, preserve the current experience, and hunker down with the goal of serving the people that (again) have the interest and ability to join us at our venues. But if that’s the case then we probably need to be prepared to downsize our infrastructure over time if the audience for what we do continues to diminish over time.

I would argue that if organizations with the potential for wider reach (that is, they are producing work for which there is demand beyond their local community) can do it well, and affordably, and strategically, and ethically (paying artists their fare share), then they should embrace the possibility of mediated experiences, trusting that they can live side-by-side with the live performance (and decades of recordings by musicians that primarily make their money doing live concerts should give us some hope here). Or even better, that new, exciting art forms may emerge (think Dance on Film) geared especially to the medium.

While the recording may be a substitute for some, I also believe it will be a complementary good for others. Do I think that if mediated experiences grow in number and reach that we will necessarily maintain our current (some would say ‘overbuilt’) infrastructure in the US? I don’t. But like others, I think that some of that infrastructure needed to be dismantled anyway – long before the Met broadcasts disrupted our sector.

If I had seen a recording of the Wooster Group in my 20s I would have beaten a path to NYC or the next nearest city where they were performing to see them live. But I couldn’t conceive of what that experience would be before seeing it. (I was trying to place the Woosters within my rather limited LORT theater experiences.) That is, after all, why we call them experience goods. Giving more people an experience (even if it is a mediated experience) is better in my mind than having them sit outside the venues wondering what goes on inside or, even worse, being pretty sure they know and that they wouldn’t find it interesting.

POST SCRIPT: Coincidentally, I just came across an email about an opportunity to experience the Wooster Group on film and video. Anthology Film Archives are hosting a 7-day series that ends on the 23rd. Info here.

If you’re still awake at the end of this post (sorry for the length) grab a cup of coffee and make the time to read Clay’s thoughtful post as well as truly smart comments by Polly Carl and Linda Essig.

A planned ending for Merce Cunningham Dance Co.

Merce Cunningham

In last week’s post on direct subsidies to artists, I expanded upon a premise from artist/economist Hans Abbing–that direct subsidies to artists may provide incentives to more people to become artists, thereby increasing competition, and making it more difficult for any to make a living–and suggested that the same may be true of arts organizations. I wrote, “We have incentivized the exponential growth of the arts and culture sector in the US and, despite significant resources (government and private) flowing into the sector on an annual basis, we now find that both artists and the large majority of organizations are poor. There’s a lesson there.”

What the lesson may be I’m not entirely sure, but the past couple of weeks I’ve been thinking about the problem of chronic undercapitalization and its effects on the sector in the context of the final performances of the Merce Cunningham Dance Company on New Year’s Eve. The planned closure (aka Living Legacy Plan) of this renowned company has been both refreshing and disconcerting to a field that has become accustomed to dance companies struggling to sustain themselves and preserve the legacies of their founders after death. Merce had witnessed the disappointing trajectories of more than a few companies; he understood what could happen to his own company over time if it tried to persevere without the infusion of new works and his presence.

In planning for its closure, Cunningham Dance Foundation raised funds to help support (among other things) a world tour, transitions for members of its company and staff, and filming/digitial recording of Merce and the company in rehearsal and performances. This past year we were badgered with claims that there are too many arts organizations and calls for the sector to ‘make it OK’ for arts organizations to close responsibly and with dignity. The Cunningham Dance Foundation’s decision and successful implementation of that decision could be seen as a model for how to realize a ‘successful’ closure. But the very planning of the closure seemed to be what was most disconcerting for some. Despite the emotional and financial toll they take on artists, administrators, and community members it seems we prefer our endings to be either a long and exhausting battle to the bitter end or a blindside collision we never saw coming.

To plan for them seems to be an acknowledgement that we recognize and accept that it’s the end of an era.

I adore the Merce Cunningham Dance Company. I truly regretted being unable to attend the Park Avenue Armory performances on New Year’s Eve and it makes me genuinely sad that there is no possibility of a performance by the company in my future. I am quite grateful that I lived in NYC at a time when Merce Cunningham was still alive and I saw his company perform many times; I will not soon forget those experiences. But if anything, the closing has made my experiences of him and the company all the more valuable. Of course, the effects of the closure are somewhat mitigated by the existence of an incredible archive (which many organizations do not have, btw, for many reasons). The MCDC archive is also all the more valuable (and may become all the more ‘alive’) now that the company is not performing.

In the end, it seems that Merce Cunningham made a decision that was both principled and pragmatic.

And perhaps that is one of the lessons in our miserably impoverished and wonderfully abundant sector. Perhaps now is the time for both principled action and clear-eyed pragmatism.

Does it seem likely that we can continue to generate interest and support for what we do, how we work, who we are? If not, can we adapt our organizational practices, structures, and purposes to ‘the times’ without crossing a moral line or violating core values (see Phills 2005, pp. 27-28)? If not, is it better to linger on and become a shadow of our former institutions, or is it better to plan for closure, document and celebrate accomplishments, and make room for something new to emerge ahead of us?

It’s a new era.

PS: You can now ‘subscribe’ to Jumper and receive an email alert when a new post has been published. To do so, enter your email address in the form on the right hand side of this page. Thanks for reading!

J. A. Phills, Jr. (2005). Integrating Mission and Strategy for Nonprofit Organizations.

Photo by Floor [CC-BY-SA-2.0], via Wiki­me­dia Commons

Digitisation in the arts: Is there a do-over if we get it wrong?

I’ve recently come across four articles/papers that have me grappling with the promise and the potential threats of digitisation in the arts and culture sector.

At the end of September I read an article in “Inside Higher Ed” discussing some truly exciting advances in the ‘digital humanities’, a branch of the field that uses “technology-heavy approaches” to study and provide new ways of understanding and experiencing history, language, art and culture. The National Endowment for the Humanities recently hosted a conference with the 60 recipients of its Digital Humanities Start-Up Grants. Here’s how one is described in the article:

Heidi Rae Cooley, an assistant professor of new media studies at the University of South Carolina, presented [a]project, called “Desperate Fishwives.” The game “intends to introduce students to the kinds of social and cultural practices that would have been in play in a 17th Century British village,” Cooley explained. Students will be tasked with accumulating resources, completing social rituals, and solving some societal ill “before church or state intervene,” she continued. Afterward, students would render a prose account of their experiences — “and thereby learn of the nature and complexities of historiography.”

On the heels of reading about these innovative projects, which appear to have the potential to not only enrich research but also rejuvinate the humanities and open them up to a wider audience, I received an announcement from the NEA about the winners of the Knight/NEA Community Arts Journalism Challenge, which awards seed funds to projects pursuing innovative models for local arts journalism.

It’s also a terrific list of projects representing a diversity of approaches: a collective of trained journalists publishing across media platforms (Charlotte, N.C.), mobile video booths where audience members can record reviews (Detroit), an online marketplace and mobile app where citizen journalists can pitch stories on the local arts scene, team up with traditional media outlets, and produce the stories (Miami); a partnership between a university (staff, student, faculty, journalists) and a daily newspaper to expand arts coverage (Philadelphia); and a local arts event mapping feature + mobile app which enables people to add comments, reviews, and images (San Jose).

I was sincerely buoyed by the openness and forward-looking enthusiasm by those leading the projects featured in both of these articles, and  by the government agencies and private funders providing a platform for them along with some seed funding.

Then, last week, I came across the article on the Metropolitan Opera’s Fundraising Feat for FY11: it was announced that the Met had successfully raised $182 million for its most recently ended season. [To be honest, I’m not sure that I would characterize this as ‘great news’ …] In any event, the article also highlighted that the Met’s HD broadcasts had made a “profit” of $11 million (though the article does not clarify how this profit is calculated) and that, since 2008, attendance has flattened and even declined modestly for its live performances at Lincoln Center. On this point, the article states:

Mr. Gelb acknowledged for the first time that competition from the HD transmissions may have cannibalized box office sales, particularly from people in nearby cities like Boston, who might have traveled to New York before. But the financial loss was offset, he argued, by donor contributions from across the country that were generated by the excitement surrounding the broadcasts.

***

As I think I may have mentioned in a previous post, I was assigned as the lecturer for a course called “The Creative Economy and Creative Organizations” at Erasmus University in Rotterdam. One of the texts we read and discussed this term is a paper by David Hesmondhalgh, “The digitalisation of music” (a chapter in Pratt & Jeffcutt’s 2009 book Creativity, Innovation, and the Cultural Economy). Hesmondhalgh’s primary argument is that we need to understand the competing interests between those that produce and circulate “goods and services based on acts of symbolic creativity” (think: ‘operas’) and those that create the devices and processes on and by which they are increasingly experienced–many of which change the way we experience culture (think: file sharing, smart phones, etc.). He makes the point that these two sectors of capital have differing goals, notions of  creativity, and abilities to lobby government.

The Hesmondhalgh paper and the articles mentioned above have been circling each other in my mind for the past few days and have raised some questions for me related to the nonprofit arts and culture sector:

  1. Are we conscious of the competing interests of different sectors of capital and how they may be shaping our future?
  2. As we embrace digitalization, is the nonprofit sector, in particular, holding itself accountable for making sure that artists are supported and not further exploited by the progress that digitalisation provides in reaching more people with great art? Put another way, in this ‘knowledge economy’ race to own, control, and exploit the global intellectual property rights in perpetuity to anything and everything, will and should nonprofits hold themselves accountable for fostering diversity and not consolidation, keeping culture accessible, and making sure that artists are able to retain rights to the work they produce or, if not, get their fair share of profits?
  3. As new media technologies enable us to develop new tools and methods for creating, distributing, documenting, and discussing the arts and humanities are we conscious that we are not simply providing additional outlets, we are forever influencing the ways that people experience these forms of culture and that in all likelihood a good number will prefer these new methods to the old ones. I don’t know the statistics on this, but I would imagine that it’s likely that HD broadcasts are a complement for the live performance for some and a substitute for others and that this balance will evolve over time (that is, that for more and more people the broadcasts may become a substitute for the real thing).

This last point, in particular, I do not put forward in an effort to quash enthusiasm for the HD Broadcasts (or Desperate Fishwives, for that matter). I am a fan of the broadcasts and they have clearly expanded the reach of the Metropolitan Opera productions in a way that is pretty mindblowing. But when I read the line in the article noting that Gelb suspects that the broadcasts “may have cannibalized box office sales” for the live performances in NY I thought, “Of course … it’s only natural that they would. And surely you thought about this before you pursued the HD path? Surely, having come from Sony, you understood where this would lead?”

These three projects are not the same and by lumping them into one post I don’t intend to imply that they are easily compared. But I would suggest (following Hesmondhalgh’s point) that they are all changing the ways that people experience the arts and humanities. It’s good we are marching forward with the times … these are exciting developments. One of the best parts of these NEH and NEA programs is the opportunity to experiment with new models and discover what happens as a result.

If there is a point I want to make at the end of this way-too-long post it is perhaps this: Better that we in the nonprofit sector wrestle sooner than later with commerce v. art, principles v. pragmatics, preservation v. advancement of art forms, tradition v. innovation, diversity v. consolidation, local v. global, and the ethics and legalities of it all than simply follow the practices of the commercial herd and hope for the best.

 

What are we incubating and to what end?

A couple weeks back Thomas Cott published an issue of “You’ve Cott Mail” centered loosely on the theme of innovation and business incubators in the arts world, in which he linked to a post by one of my favorite bloggers/researchers/thinkers, Devon Smith. Devon contrasted the concept of ‘incubator’ in the tech world and the arts world. After reading her post I was curious to read up on technology and business incubators and ask myself what, exactly, arts incubators are incubating and to what end?

Devon makes the point that in the tech world it is ‘demo or die’ and that, in contrast, many arts incubators tend to be about process without the expectation of a deliverable on a certain time frame. Devon characterizes it as ‘we’re here to support you in however much you get accomplished for however long you are here’. Beyond the expectation to ‘demo or die’, however, there’s something else I learned in my reading: business incubators, philosophically and practically speaking, perceive themselves to be incubating the entire enterprise. At the end of 33 months (the average amount of time spent in a business incubator) it is expected that the startup can leave the nest with a viable business model and product and fly on its own.

How do these business incubators develop the whole enterprise? Devon talks about this in her post, as well, but I found a couple things particularly interesting. First, while they don’t necessarily provide venture capital, business incubators often serve as brokers and introduce entrepreneurs to venture capitalists, other successful entrepreneurs, or people that have knowledge and skills needed by the startup. Second, a successful tech incubator will provide access to high-end technology, as well as high-level marketing support, comprehensive adminstrative support, and hands-on business planning.

After reading about business incubators it struck me that it seems important to distinguish the purpose of an ‘incubator’ from (1) a one-to-three week ‘workshop’ or ‘residency’, which is meant to give an artist time to further develop a particular project and (2) ‘access to affordable office space, basic equipment, and business classes’ — which seem to be common types of support offered to artists and arts companies. These are not without value; but I would suggest that (particularly when provided by separate hosts) they do not an incubator make, if ‘incubation’ suggests a range of support and services aimed at making a venture viable and launching it into the world with a greater chance at success.

Devon suggests that art incubators seem to be reluctant to hold the groups they are incuabting accountable for success beyond a ‘good process’ and hypothesizes that perhaps arts incubators are ‘too nice, too forgiving’. I wonder whether the laissez faire nature of many arts incubators is a symptom of two things. (1) The rejection for the past 100 plus years of the notion that great art works can be born of a ‘shared vision’ between patron/investor and artist. (2) The widespread belief in the ‘fine arts world’ that ‘being truly artistic, excellent and innovative’ and ‘keeping an eye to the market with the goal of eventually selling the work to a mainstream audience’ are mutually exclusive endeavors.

Yes, it’s important to distinguish between the processes that best support the making or preservation of culture and those that best support its exploitation. But distinguishing between these two processes does not suggest that the two cannot coexist or that we should necessarily reject the latter as a goal if we care about the former.

What is the goal of a successful arts incubator? What should it be? Is it wrong to think that it should be not only about improving the quality of the work but also about discovering avenues by which to exploit it (i.e. derive full value from it) in the marketplace?

 

 

 

 

The lesson in my new tree for arts policy makers

About my tree:

Last month my husband and I hired a small family-owned landscaping business to help us renovate the small gardens in the front and back of our house. They planted three new trees, two of which are young (thin) but already quite tall. They planted the trees with support poles on either side to ensure they grow straight (see pic). As I have never had a garden I asked how many weeks the poles would need to stay. The answer: three years.

About the production houses in the Netherlands:

For years the Netherlands has had a unique system of support for promising performance artists and theater makers who have finished their training: dedicated production houses. As I understand it, these houses are often affiliated with larger theaters, drawing on resources they can provide, but are funded by the government and operate independently. They provide multiyear production support for artists after university (e.g. cash resources so artists can invest time in the research and development of their works and pay other artists, tech support, dramaturgy, promotion, etc.). During these post-grad residencies the emphasis is on strengthening the artist’s work.

I was with a gathering of artistic directors and performing arts curators last week at which we met several artists, including two that had come through this system and who spoke of the importance of the production houses in helping them become better artists and develop successful careers. We asked how long the support lasted. Their initial residencies were three years.

About the funding cuts in the Netherlands:

Among the many orchestras, dance companies, and other arts organizations that are going to be defunded in 2013, the Ministry of Culture has determined to shut down all 23 production houses in the Netherlands. This strikes me as a particularly unenlightened decision. For one, these production houses are relatively inexpensive to operate (they are a big bang for a small investment); second, the production houses play a critical role in the arts ecosystem here; third, they seem to help the Netherlands attract and retain truly talented theater/performance artists.

I am unsettled by what appears to be a strategy in the Netherlands of maintaining investments to the most high profile fine arts organizations while leaving many smaller organizations, artist companies, and intermediary organizations to fend for themselves. The rhetoric that is being perpetuated in the case of the production houses is that they will be taken under the wing of bigger institutions or become more entrepreneurial and find other sources of support. Given the short timeframe (the cuts go into effect in 2013) both scenarios seem highly unrealistic.

In any event, it seems that not many in the arts sector are buying the rhetoric. Quite a number of the artistic directors and artists our group met with spoke of planning to leave the Netherlands by 2013. Of course, as someone said to me a few days ago, this could be considered a positive outcome from the standpoint of the government.

Pfffffff. Cue the flashback reel of the US in the 80s and 90s.

The Netherlands is not alone in wanting to encourage private sector support for the arts. But there are smart ways and not-so-smart ways of doing this.

About ArtSupport Australia:

Several years ago now (after changing the tax laws to make it easier and more beneficial for individuals to set up small trusts and foundations), the Australia Arts Council started an arm’s length organization, run by visionary Louise Walsh, whose role is to broker relationships between small and midsized arts organizations and small private family foundations and trusts. ArtSupport Australia (ASA) meets with donors, talks to them about the importance of supporting the arts, and identifies organizations that might fit with their values; it mentors arts organizations to help them develop realistic funding strategies and prepare effective proposals; and it makes matches between the two. It’s a brilliant system and has had tremendous positive impact over the years.

While Kickstarter and other crowdfunding models seem to be working for some types of individual artists and projects and larger institutions have the capacity to buy fundraising expertise and (as a result of being high profile) tend to be attractive major private donors and foundations, a mechanism for connecting smaller family foundations with smaller and midsized arts organizations and ensembles/companies seems like a missing cog in many arts funding systems (including in the US). Even community foundations and donor advised funds aren’t really set up to fulfill this particular role.

When ArtSupport Australia was founded it received three years of support from the government. Even before the end of the initial funding period it was clear that it was working and the government has funded it consistently ever since. There’s an important tangential point here:  a big part of what makes ASA work (which, not unlike the production houses, is a lean organization that provides big bang for the buck) is that the Australia Arts Council is committed to funding it. It would change ASA (and compromise its mission) if it suddenly had to raise all of its operating expenses by skimming off a percentage of every gift or competing against the organizations it exists to support by competing directly for support from private donors.

Over the past year I’ve been asked rather frequently for my thoughts on how to encourage private support for the arts in the Netherlands, in light of the pending cuts. I’ve directed people to an an essay I wrote about some of the issues we face with the US system and I’ve said the same thing to everyone: the ArtSupport Australia model is brilliant and I think it would work very well in the Netherlands. I could easily imagine such a system, for instance, helping to broker relationships between a number of enlightened families, individuals and small firms and the production houses here.

***

As I’ve written before, cutting off the sprinklers to the grass and small shrubs while continuing to water the old, tall trees is not the path to a vibrant arts and culture sector. Too often, arts policy makers develop policies that demonstrate a fundamental lack of understanding about such things as: the interdependencies between large organizations and small ones, and the commercial arts sector and the subsidized sector; what makes a city attractive to artists; how good artists become great artists; what motivates donors to give; how difficult it is for some very worthy organizations to be competitive in the funding process; and the time and personal connections that it takes for donors and arts organizations to form relationships that are beneficial and that will be sustained through good economic times and bad ones.

My young tree needs supports if it is going to become a healthy, large tree. Young artists need developmental support if they are going to become great artists. Countries without a culture of asking and giving need a support system if effective long term relationships are going to be built between private donors and the arts sector, particularly if there is a hope that more than just the large, historically leading organizations will be supported by private donors. Policy makers need to be smarter about how the arts ecosystem works so that they know where to provide support structures and for how long.

Australia got it right. I’ll be interested to see what the Netherlands does in the coming months and years.

How to avoid a strip-mall future for the arts sector: Lessons from the boutique label, Pi

This past week I came across a New York Times article featured on ArtsJournal examining the remarkable success of the indie Jazz label, Pi. The article demonstrates that Pi is bucking trends in the music industry. It is managing to not just keep its head above water at a time when many music labels are struggling, but it is having tremendous impact despite being a relatively small Jazz label focused on the leading edge of its artform.

Here are a few keys to Pi’s success (which I gleaned from the article):

(1)   Unlike many labels that flood the market with product (often as a hedge against the uncertainty of not knowing which will succeed or not), Pi releases a handful of albums per year and is highly selective in choosing which artists to get behind. Virtually everything it releases meets with critical acclaim. Because it has earned a reputation for consistently putting out great albums and has a very clear niche, it has a devoted (and growing) fan base.

(2)   Given its limited release schedule, and the limited revenue potential of each of its releases (these are not mainstream artists), Pi keeps its overhead low. Its owners are pragmatic and disciplined. By staying small they have been able to maintain artistic integrity.

(3)   Pi has a long courtship with an artist before it makes a commitment. Once in, however, Pi invests deeply in the development of its artists and ensures that each receives sufficient resources, attention, and support from the label. This is a critical factor in the label’s remarkable track record and reputation.

Pi’s strategies are serving both its artists and its customers.

Given an overabundance of product and seats to fill on any given night in many communities (relative to current ‘demand’) and (sorry to say) the not-quite-ready-for-primetime-quality of much the so-called ‘professional’ work that is produced and presented in the US, it’s worth considering the lessons of Pi (which are not new, of course).

It seems that more than a few overleveraged and underperforming professional nonprofit arts organizations need to both better differentiate themselves and hold themselves to higher artistic standards; to right-size their institutions and reduce fixed costs given the amount of income they can reasonably expect for the forseeable future; and to provide more time, attention, and resources to artists and to the development, production, and thoughtful promotion of artistic works.

I’d much rather live in a community with a sustainable number of boutique arts organizations than one with a deluxe mall featuring four high-end department-stores (the ‘flagship’ orchestra, theater, opera, and ballet companies) that suck up the majority of the resources and a bunch of strip malls made up of undercapitalized retail chains and mom-and-pop shops that either saw their best days in 1985 and haven’t been able to make improvements since, or were formed in recent years and (while perhaps promising) are struggling for attention, customers and capital.

I seriously fear that the strip mall nonprofit arts sector is our future. There are arts boutiques out there, but in many cities they are few and far between and seem endangered.

How and why so many arts organizations in the US have grown to unsustainable levels in recent decades is a topic that requires more reflection than I can give in a blog post. However, I will say this: it often seems that capacity building in the arts sector is (1) aimed primarily at securing the administrative futures of arts organizations and (2) resulting in an erosion of quality and distinction in artistic processes and experiences, today. I by no means wish to suggest that the answer to an overbuilt sector is to starve it into a more sustainable state; but it is reasonable to think that we need to seriously rethink how existing resources are distributed (within and among institutions).

We tend to think of a ‘sustainable state’ for the arts and culture sector as being one in which existing arts organizations have achieved equilibrium and can crank along in perpetuity. This is wrongheaded: even if we could achieve a state in which all existing organizations could secure adequate resources to keep running year-after-year, the lack of creative destruction in the sector would eventually lead to its stultification (oh wait, we may be there now). This is one of the consequences of letting some institutions get ‘too big to fail’ (and too big is relative to the size of city you are in and the other arts organizations in your market): the majority of arts sector resources get sucked into the incumbents and rather than creative destruction (reinvention of those firms or their replacement by younger, more innovative ones) we end up with plain old destruction (losing the boutiques and watching the big organizations calcify).

Pi may or may not last for another 50 years (much less beyond the lives of its owners/founders). But while it exists it is having positive cultural and social impact. That’s more than we can say about many professional nonprofit arts organizations in the US.

Generic strip-mall image by Mark Winfrey, licensed at Shutterstock.com.

 

The mad, mad chase for innovation in the arts

A few weeks back, I wrote in a post that I’m beginning to wonder whether the process of adapting to a changing environment has become harder for arts organizations than it needs to be because many arts funders seem to be fixated on the idea that future success will come only through ‘radical innovation’. I suggested that perhaps we could see some pretty great results through good-old-fashioned, common-sense, it’s-about-time, just-do-the-right-thing, ‘improvements’. I’m not suggesting that ‘innovation’ in the arts and culture sector should not be enabled or supported (it should). But I am skeptical of the funder-driven ‘innovation in the arts’ bandwagon. Here’s why:

First, once new ideas are funded within funder-led ‘innovation’ initiatives, they tend to get heralded (by the press, funders, and field experts) as ‘innovative’ before they have demonstrated that they are. As an example, the Dance Theater Workshop and Bill T. Jones/Arnie Zane Dance Company merger has been called ‘innovative’; but the idea to merge a dance company and a presenting organization is not, in and of itself, an ‘innovation’.

In the long run if this new hybrid organization proves to have a stronger and more sustainable business model, and if it is able to create new or greater value (for artists and audiences) than either organization could on its own–and if other organizaitons can learn from and replicate this success–then one might very well call such a development an ‘innovation’ for the arts and culture sector. The other possibility is that it represents the (pragmatic?) acquisition by one organization (that desperately wanted a permanent space) of another organization (that had a space and was desperate to have its debts eliminated).

Second, related to point one, the path to innovation is often paved with many (sometimes boring) small experiments, small successes, and small failures–in other words nothing that sounds very sexy on a grant application. Funding ideas that sound innovative is quite different from sustaining an organization’s ongoing capacity to learn, adapt, and innovate.  The ‘innovation grant’ seems to encourage organizations to dress up, scale up, or amplify otherwise well-conceived and feasible strategies for modest improvements, in order to make them seem more ‘radically innovative.’ 

Receiving the grant can not only destabilize an organization as it attempts to take on more than it can handle, but  can put extraordinary pressure on its new souped-up ‘innovation’ to succeed. More to the point, it can make it difficult to let go of the idea if it is not panning out as expected, particularly if it was heralded out of the gate as a potential ‘model’ for the field.

Third, it seems that funders have made innovation a priority under the misguided belief that ‘funding’ is what makes organizations able or inclined to innovate. Organizations (entrepreneurs) innovate because they are discontent with the status quo and feel compelled to find a new way forward. They innovate because they see something is missing in the world and feel compelled to create that thing. Innovative organizations do not need a two-week retreat at a spa, or a high-paid consultant, or a big carrot or stick from a  national funder, to encourage or enable them to innovate. Providing innovation-inducing ‘seed money’ to risk-averse institutions seems like a waste of precious grant dollars that might be better directed (in the form of multiyear general program support) to ‘naturally innovative’ organizations (if innovation is the end goal).

Finally, it’s perplexing and annoying to others in the arts sector when funders give ‘innovation grants’ to projects and organziations that are not, actually, innovative–particularly when one knows the projects that did NOT get funding. I’m not sure how this happens but I suspect it is in large part because ideas that are truly surprising, that may even defy written rules and conventions, are unlikely to make it all the way through the grantmaking process at most risk-averse foundations (in no small part because they make lawyers nervous).

All of this prompts me to ask:  Does innovation happen because one feels incentivized or mandated to innovate? Can one pursue innovation? Or is it a side-effect of … any number of things: having one’s organziational eyes wide open to a changing environment; having strong values but flexible practices; having vision and creativity; having the courage to see the truth and act; continually seeking to create greater value for your constituencies and develop new sustainable resource streams … for instance?

Eating Ideas image by Scott Maxwell / LuMaxArt, licensed from shutterstock.com.

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