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.

Co-Creating with a Conscience: Or, Why Study Leadership at an Art & Design College?

A Walk-n-Talk through N. Commons Park in Minneapolis, led by Paul Bauknight (Center for Transformative Urban Design) and Brett Buckner (Coalition Convener at Seeds to Harvest), with faculty and students of the MA in Creative Leadership 8/1/2022. Photo credit: Nick Lents.

Seven years ago I was in the process of completing an essay in which I brought forward an argument for teaching beauty in a business school—a document that would form the basis for a 12-week course for business students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison, where I was to be a visiting guest artist/lecturer. At the outset, my goal with the “beauty course” (as I and the students came to call it) was to create an alternative approach to business ethics. I was deeply curious about how aesthetic experiences and examination of beauty might foster wiser, more responsible decision-making—essentially, moral imagination.

Among other outcomes, students reported that through the course they learned how to slow down, attend to process (and not just product), see different perspectives from their own, think about relationships differently, notice things previously overlooked, do things they wouldn’t do (i.e. take risks), approach challenges with creativity rather than dread, and care for others.

Hearing such responses, I began to refer to it as a course in human development—and began seeing the value of such a course not only for those studying business, but arguably any field of study. Let’s face it—you don’t need to go to business school to see the world and all of your relationships through an economic lens. As Harvard University professor of political philosophy Michael Sandel argues in his book What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets, market values and market thinking have now come to dominate nearly every area of social life. 

The beauty course was experimental and successful; however, it was a one-off by design. While many business schools are attuned to creativity and ethics these courses are mostly icing on the cake; at their core they are oriented around such courses as accounting, finance, statistics, strategy, economics, marketing, business analytics, operations management, and the global macroenvironment. And, yes, at the core one will often find a course in leading organizations / people / teams; however, such a course often reinforces the overall capitalist logic of business school. Leadership is quite often conceptualized as achieving the company’s (i.e. owners’ or shareholders’) goals, taking action quickly and efficiently, besting the competition, getting employees onboard with change strategies developed by senior leaders aided by a consultant, and motivating high performance.

As 2022 comes to a close, I am six months into the launch of a new MA in Creative Leadership at the Minneapolis College of Art and Design (MCAD)–a program for folx in any industry or sector (the more diverse, the better), working at any scale. For instance, at the moment we have a student working in food justice as a volunteer, a student working in an educational nonprofit with a budget in the tens of millions, and a student working for a dental-care related corporation with a budget in excess of $750 million.

The MCAD program is, in a sense, an inversion of this business school cake; and that inversion is the topic of this post. More specifically, this essay attempts to address a question that I am asked quite frequently: What would you say to someone trying to choose between this program and an MBA program? I’ll aim to do this in three parts:

  • “What is creative leadership? 
  • “Why study leadership at an art and design college?” 
  • “Why pursue an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA?”

Much of what I am writing here has benefitted from and also reflects to a great extent almost two years of conversations with leaders at MCAD, administrative colleagues, co-faculty, field colleagues, and students in the program. I am particularly indebted to my research partner of the past three years, Shannon Litzenberger and to MCAD’s VP of Academic Affairs, Robert Ransick, who has held a goal to create a program like this ever since he pursued and achieved an MBA, all the while imagining a different kind of curriculum and experience. Having said this, any shortcomings or deficiencies in the thinking in this essay are mine alone. Additionally, counter perspectives are welcome!

Part I: What is Creative Leadership?

I have encountered myriad definitions of creative leadership; and they all seem to boil down to some version of envisioning and realizing change and innovation while attending to shared values, mission, and social impact. A central tenet of the program at MCAD is that leadership is a collective capacity, functioning akin to an artist ensemble, and that all players, so to speak, need to be able to step-up and step-back as the moment requires. More specifically, we conceptualize creative leadership as a capacity to collaborate across differences with the goal of imagining and enacting necessary transformational change. Our particular program in creative leadership is built on four pillars:

  • Creativity, or the capacity to move towards uncertainty, as well as imagine and make beyond existing narrative frames, systems, and seemingly intractable problems.
  • Culture, or an understanding that the work of transformational change requires that we work at the level of values, beliefs, and ways of being, doing, and knowing; and that therefore, we must create conditions and structures, as well as develop individual and collective capacities, to converse and collaborate across differences in worldview.
  • Equity, or attention to and repairing of imbalanced social systems and the commitment to build new systems and cultures that are not structured to oppress, discriminate, disempower, or otherwise harm.
  • Sustainability, or attention to working within planetary limits in a way that is regenerative: that goes beyond reuse, reduce, recycle to improve projects, organizations, or systems in such a way that they become healthier, thriving, and capable of sustaining life. 

Much of this is relational work done at the level of embodied self with others—the work of dismantling, unlearning, exploring, and stretching to accommodate alternative worldviews. To begin, this work requires that “we intentionally change in ways that grow our capacity to embody the just and liberated worlds we long for,” as writer, activist, and facilitator adrienne maree brown writes, describing her take on the concept of Emergent Strategy.[1]  Much of the work takes place within and across the intersecting layers of transformational change at the level of self, organization, and system.

Part II: Why Study Leadership at an Art & Design College?

Creativity is consistently ranked as one of the most important skills for navigating the complexities of the 21st century. When I was teaching the beauty course at UW-Madison, the administration really wanted to get the word creativity into the title of the course; but I refused to use the word creativity. Creativity was equated in business schools with the scaling of innovations towards the ultimate goal of stimulating economic growth. I didn’t want to hook beauty onto that value chain. I would sometimes quip: This beauty course is not aimed at putting beauty in service of business. My aim is the opposite. I want leaders to put business in service of beauty. 

Likewise, creativity in the context a leadership program embedded in an art and design college has a conscience and is motivated by widespread recognition of the inequities and harms designed into the present “petro-capitalist”[2] and “modern-colonial”[3] world; the need to understand how we got here; and then, importantly, the desire and ability to work with others to collectively disrupt, transgress, imagine, iterate, and make radically new institutions, systems, logics, or worlds. 

The creation in creative leadership as we are interpreting it at MCAD is based in a foundational premise that there are ways of being, doing, and knowing that are inherent to artmaking and design that are both undervalued by society-at-large and incredibly valuable at a moment in which we are looking at the “end of the world as we have known it”[4] and the need to make a new one. Artists and designers know a thing or two about imagining and making new worlds. 

Among others, here are some creative leadership capacities that are inherent to training as an artist or designer that are central to worldmaking:

  • Imagination: The ability to disrupt patterns and make the new; or to engage in what Otto Scharmer calls, “presencing”—a combination of presence and sensing that involves listening or perceiving from the future.     
  • Discipline: Resourcefulness, attentional capacity, and the ability to shape future possibilities and scenarios within constraints.
  • Agility: A sense of play and the capacity for collective improvisation in response to volatility, uncertainty, complexity, ambiguity, and seemingly insuperable barriers and challenges.
  • Emergent Strategy: Comfort with moving in the direction of uncertainty, with making without a goal much less a plan, and with zig-zagging (or failing) towards the creation of something with structural integrity.
  • Care: Skilled at empathy and moral imagination, or the ability to imagine from the perspective of others and to take decisions with those perspectives in mind.
  • Comfort with Discomfort: Capacity to ask and sit with catalytic questions, give/receive critique, to facilitate difficult conversations, and to be receptive to opposing views or ambivalence.
  • (Eco)-Systems Thinking: Contextual intelligence, the ability to sense and analyze parts in relationship to each other and the whole, to recognize beauty and its opposite (injury), and to give sustained attention to that which tends to be neglected or invisible to others (e.g. the broken, harmed, orphaned, disempowered, colonized, extracted, injured, destroyed, etc.).
  • Disinterest: The ability to distinguish excellence from its potential byproducts: money, power, or fame. (H/T to CalPoly Finance Professor John Dobson for the germ of this idea.)[5]
  • Influence: Storytelling ability, the capacity to reframe, imagine alternatives, craft engaging narrative, and thereby shift perspectives.
  • Ensemble: The desire and ability to build trust, foster generalized reciprocity, engage with diverse aesthetic values, and balance individualism and collectivism in the process of co-creation.

Part III: Why an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA?

Which brings me to the question I am most often asked: Why should I pursue an MA in Creative Leadership rather than an MBA? 

My assertion, in brief: because the cake of creative leadership contains the essential ingredients for 21st century living and working. Put another way, we do not need even more MBAs for the challenges facing the world at the moment; we need more creative leaders. Leaders and managers need to rethink everything (starting with shareholder primacy). They need to strengthen their capacities to adapt to the non-hierarchical, non-extractive, non-discriminatory, non-oppressive, cultures, structures, and practices that are increasingly demanded by both employees and customers. 

Is there also an argument for studying finance, accounting, strategy, macroenvironmental forces, business analytics, operations, and marketing (the business school cake, so to speak)? I would argue only insofar as such offerings are oriented to this dramatic shift in the wider cultural context; and anchored as they are in 20th century management practices, most business schools are not able to hold, much less realize, such an orientation with integrity.

The core elements of the creative leadership program at MCAD (an MBA alternative or complement, if you will), which arise from the values and capacities listed in parts I and II include:

  • Progressive organizations & management, meaning such things as flat structures, decentralized decision making, collective budgeting, cooperatives, community-driven change, DAOs, and hybrid workplaces.
  • Cultural competence and inclusive workplaces, including anti-racism and anti-oppression work, decolonization, conversational receptiveness, collaboration across differences, and a culture of care.
  • Centering methods and practices of artists and designers, because we need to collectively sense, imagine, and make new worlds (systems, organizations, selves) that do not reproduce the harms of the present systems—and this work is inherent to the practices of artmaking and design.
  • Attention to and care for the natural world, most notably the wisdom of regenerative models coupled with an abiding belief that the climate crisis is something with which all leaders need to concern themselves and their organizations.

***

I want to end by mentioning one other aspect of this work.

We are intent on helping to mobilize and animate a much larger conversation on creative leadership; and one way we are working to do this is through the creation of a Creative Leadership Community of Inquiry, Practice, and Care. This community space is being initially built with our students, alumni, faculty, guest artists, and partners; however, we are already planning for it to grow over time to bring many others into the conversation, so to speak.

We want to locate and connect with others who share our goals, with whom we can ask questions, learn new practices, and offer encouragement and solidarity as we collectively build the next, more beautiful world. We know you are out there in your own organizations and networks, doing great work. We want to know about it and engage with you. 

Leave a comment, DM me me on FB or LinkedIn, or contact me through the contact form in Jumper if you’d like to connect and continue the conversation.

  1. adrienne maree brown, Emergent Strategy, p. 3.
  2. Natalie Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World: A Manifesto for Research Creation, p. 101.
  3. Vanessa Machado de Oliveira, Hospicing Modernity: Facing Humanity’s Wrongs and the Implications for Social Activism. The author writes, “I have often referred to modernity as modernity/coloniality, Thesis term functions as a reminder that the benefits we associate with modernity are created and maintained by historical, systemic, and ongoing processes that are inherently violent and unsustainable. In other words, this term underscores the fact that modernity cannot exist without expropriation, extraction, exploitation, militarization, dispossession, destitution, genocides, and ecocides,” p. 18.
  4.  Loveless, How to Make Art at the End of the World, p. 101.
  5. John Dobson, Aesthetics as a Foundation for Business Activity

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 Entrepreneurialism and Publicness (or Whose Theatre is it, Really?)

This essay was originally published in Artivate: A Journal of Entrepreneurship in the Arts by the Pave Program in Arts Entrepreneurship at Arizona State University. Many thanks to Linda Essig for permission to syndicate it on Jumper.

On Entrepreneurialism and Publicness (or Whose Theater Is It, Really?) by Diane Ragsdale

But democratic society — in it, the highest duty of the writer, the composer, the artist is to remain true to himself and to let the chips fall where they may. In serving his vision of the truth, the artist best serves his nation. 

President John F. Kennedy (Remarks at Amherst College, 1963)

In his paper on the creative industries and cultural entrepreneurship Richard Swedberg examines “the parallels between the entrepreneur and the artist, according to the young [Joseph] Schumpeter” (Swedberg, 2006, p. 250). Swedberg conveys that, among other characteristics, the artist/entrepreneur (as contrasted with the static majority) “puts together new combinations,” “battles resistance to his actions,” and is “motivated by power and joy in creation.” I was disquieted when I encountered this discussion of cultural entrepreneurship a few years ago; however, it took completing a case study on the Margo Jones Theatre last year for me to identify the source of my unease.

Margo Jones is generally credited by theater historians with having founded the prototypical nonprofit-but-professional resident theater in Dallas, Texas in 1947. Among a handful of “pattern-setting elements” attributed to Jones’s theater, her adoption of the nonprofit form is said to have had “the most far-reaching effects” on regional theater in America (Berkowitz, 1982, p. 58). It is difficult to refute the statement if one considers that before 1950 there were almost no examples of professional (read: unionized) theaters organized as nonprofit corporations and that today there are hundreds. Nevertheless, it is ironic that one of the few enduring dimensions of Jones’s unique theater model—which combined elements of the community, academic, art, and commercial theater—was its nonprofit status.

While Jones founded her theater as a nonprofit “civic venture” (Jones, 1951, p. 67) there is considerable evidence that she didn’t actually run it like one. Jones is said to have “believed firmly that the head of a theatre must of necessity be an autocrat—which [she] unquestionably was” (Larsen, 1982, p. 123). Likewise, her biographer relays that when the business chairman of the board “expressed a desire to have more authority over how money was spent and accounted for,” Jones declared, “I will not be confined!” and “demanded 100 percent artistic and financial control” (Sheehy, 1989, p. 236). In return, the board of directors gave Jones a “free hand” and “unquestioning support” (Wilmeth, 1989, p. 365). Evidently, it “was not disposed to refusing her whatever she wanted” (Larsen, 1982, p. 183). Jones was able to dominate the theater in part because the economics of the arena-style venue she created enabled “the organization to depend solely on ticket sales for operating expenses” (Wilmeth, 1965, p. 269). Moreover, Jones actively avoided soliciting donations from the community, beyond the $40,000 (in 1946 dollars) she raised to convert a found space into a theater and produce her first season.

In her manifesto-handbook, Theatre-in-the-Round, Jones suggests three business forms that a resident theater might take: nonprofit, sole proprietorship, or stock company funded with investments from shareholders (Jones, 1951, p. 66-67). One of Jones’s so-called followers—though a maverick in her own right—was Zelda Fichandler, who co-founded the Arena Stage in Washington, DC in 1950 as a stock company utilizing shareholder investments. It sustained itself on box office income and converted to the nonprofit form only when doing so became a condition of a significant grant from the Ford Foundation. For years after the conversion, Fichandler expressed concerns about the potential influence of the public on the institution—a worry captured and explained in this poetic passage (Fichandler, 1970, p. 110):

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.

The Milwaukee Repertory Theater—another organization that consulted with Jones before opening—was founded in 1954 as a hybrid nonprofit-stock company. It solicited donations from the community, which it combined with investments by its founder, Mary Widrig John, who held a majority of shares in the stock corporation. This unorthodox pairing reflected John’s desire (akin to that of Margo Jones) to involve the community financially in raising a theater from the ground, but to exercise control over its direction once raised. According to one chronicler, there was “growing dissension among the staff and board of directors regarding John’s authority. The crucial question to be answered was whether the theatre belonged to John or to the public” (Pinkston, 1989, p. 377). The matter eventually went to court and a judge ruled that the theater could not be nonprofit and have shareholders. It became a non-stock nonprofit corporation and John departed.

One imagines that if Certified B Corporations or Low-Profit Limited Liability Corporations had been in existence at the time either one would have been a preferable legal structure for these theaters, given the goals of their entrepreneurial leaders. It is no coincidence that we are witnessing the creation and adoption of hybrid forms of organization alongside the emergence of social, cultural, creative, and arts entrepreneurs. Such forms are ideally suited to those who want to do work that benefits society but don’t want to relinquish ownership or control over their enterprises to do so.

And this brings me to the source of my unease. For all intents and purposes, the Margo Jones Theatre (née Theatre ’47) was operated by Jones as if it were a sole proprietorship (i.e. a private enterprise). Put another way, in terms of funding and control, Jones’s theater was, to a great extent, lacking in publicness (see e.g. Andrews, R., Boyne, G. A. & Walker, R. M., 2011). Moreover, the characteristics that made Jones a highly successful artist/entrepreneur made it nearly impossible for the board of the nonprofit theater (owned by no one and therefore everyone) to exercise what is now generally taken to be good governance, including: oversight of the theater’s financial health, determination of the theater’s goals, and representation of the public’s interest in the theater. Tellingly, following Jones’s untimely death in 1955, the board of directors seized the power that had been denied them for years, dismantled many of Jones’s policies, and took the theater in a different (and ultimately fatal) direction.

As I ponder the motives, opportunities, and means of the three pioneering leaders highlighted in this essay, the parallel characteristics of the artist and entrepreneur as theorized by Schumpeter, and the emergence of new hybrid private/public organizational forms, a philosophical question emerges—in large part because I hear calls these days for nonprofit arts organizations to become both more entrepreneurial (i.e. innovative and self-sustaining) and more communal (i.e. responsive to, or representative of, the communities they ostensibly exist to serve).

Is there an inherent, underexamined, and perhaps necessarily unresolvable conflict between the autonomy or authority needed by the artist/entrepreneur and the publicness required of the 501c3 charitable nonprofit, in order for them effectively to fulfill their respective roles vis-à-vis society?

REFERENCES

Andrews, R., Boyne, G. A. & Walker, R. M. (2011). Dimensions of publicness and organizational performance: A review of the evidence. Journal of Public Administration Research and Theory, Volume 21(Issue Supplement 3), i301-i319.

Berkowitz, G. M. (1982). New Broadways: Theatre across America 1950-1980. Totowa, NJ: Rowan and Littlefield.

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.

Jones, M. (1951). Theatre-in-the-Round. Westport, CT: Greenwood Press.

Kennedy, J. F. (1963). Remarks at Amherst College, October 26, 1963. Retrieved at: https://www.arts.gov/about/kennedy-transcript

Larsen, J. B. (1982). Margo Jones: A Life in the Theatre (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. (Accession Order No. 8222956)

Pinkston, A. (1989). Milwaukee Repertory Theatre. In W. B. Durham (Ed.) American Theatre Companies, 1931-1986 (376-386). New York: Greenwood Press.

Sheehy, H. (1989/2005). Margo: The Life and Theatre of Margo Jones (1st paperback ed.) Dallas: Southern Methodist University Press.

Swedberg, R. (2006). The cultural entrepreneur and the creative industries: Beginning in Vienna. Journal of Cultural Economics, Volume 30(4), 243-261.

Wilmeth, D. B. (1965). A History of the Margo Jones Theatre (Doctoral dissertation). Retrieved from ProQuest Dissertations and Theses. (Accession Order No. 6503696)

Wilmeth, D. B. (1989). Margo Jones Theatre. In W. B. Durham (Ed.) American Theatre Companies, 1931-1986 (362-369). New York: Greenwood Press.

 

 

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.

Approaching Beauty in a Business School

museumIn a week I will be heading to Madison, Wisconsin to teach a 12-week course in beauty for undergraduate business majors.  The course is aimed at helping students cultivate an aesthetic sensibility. It will combine a bit of philosophizing on the nature and function of beauty in today’s society; arts and other aesthetic experiences; and the documentation of these experiences in a portfolio. Over the next four months I will use Jumper as a platform from which to open up the class. I want to share what we’re doing and learn from others who may be walking down similar or parallel paths. In this first post I thought I’d discuss where the concept for the class came from and how it has evolved, and share a couple sections of the course guide to give a sense of its thrust.

From a course for Arts MBA Students to a course for Undergraduate Business Majors

 In 2013, Sherry Wagner-Henry, Director of the Bolz Center for Arts Administration at the University of Wisconsin-Madison (UW-Madison) asked if I would be interested to come to the Center for a semester as a visiting guest artist/lecturer. For those who don’t know, the Bolz Center offers one of the few Arts MBA degrees in the US, alongside its MBA degree. Students in the program take the required courses for an MBA, plus a range of arts-related courses. I was thrilled by the invitation and we agreed to put together a proposal. In support of that proposal Sherry asked me to think about a course I would like to teach.

At the time, I imagined I would be teaching the Arts MBA students. We set up a time to talk by phone so that I could bounce my ideas off her. I started by explaining that I have always been a bit critical of arts administration programs because they seem to be almost exclusively focused on developing the business skills of their students and rarely, if ever, focused on simultaneously developing their students’ aesthetic sensibilities. Skills in the latter seem to be taken for granted in many arts admin programs (though I would argue that they shouldn’t be).  I remarked that if I ever ran such a program I would probably encourage the students to attend performances and exhibitions on a weekly basis and ask them to write a 3,000-word essay on their tastes in art as one of their graduation requirements.

I then rambled on about three other points of inspiration. (1) One of the questions I have been circling around for the past 5-6 years is How can the arts matter to more people and matter more to people? I am curious about how people develop their aesthetics and tastes and what arts organizations can do to encourage this growth. (2) Like many others, I see time at university as a prime (and in many cases last) opportunity for exploring a variety of arts and cultural experiences and, thereby, learning about oneself, one’s aesthetic, various art forms, and the culture generally. (3) I mentioned that I had seen Howard Gardner speak at MOMA a few years back on his True, Beautiful, and Good series and how compelled I was by the talk I had heard on The Good and, in particular, his concept of Good Work (i.e., work that is Excellent, Ethical, and Engaging).

I ended by saying that I somehow wanted to combine these various ideas into a course.

It turns out Gardner’s 2011 book (Truth, Goodness, and Beauty Reframed) was on Sherry’s bookshelf and that she and a couple colleagues in the business school had been thinking on and off (at the encouragement of the Dean of the Business School) about the virtue of beauty and how it might be incorporated into the curriculum. We started talking about Gardner’s concept of the beauty portfolio.*

Gardner re-defines beauty (for the 21st century) as the property of experiences and asserts that “to be deemed beautiful an experience must exhibit three characteristics. It must be interesting enough to behold, it must have a form that is memorable, and it must invite revisiting.”[1]  Gardner suggests that two educational implications follow from this assertion: (1) students should be encouraged to keep a portfolio of their experiences of beauty, aimed at tracing how those experiences have evolved over time; and (2) students should be encouraged to reflect upon the palpable reasons, or factors, that have lead them to consider one experience to be beautiful and another not.[2]

The more we talked the more I realized that the very course I was imagining could be anchored in Gardner’s idea of a Beauty Portfolio and I blurted out, “I want to create that course—a course on beauty!” And as we continued talking, it became clear that the beauty course we were envisioning should be aimed at a broader population of business school students (rather than at the narrow cohort of Arts MBA students).

I hung up the phone and knew immediately who I needed as my co-conspirator—Polly Carl, who has been thinking and writing about beauty for years. See, for example, here  and also here. We had lunch in NYC and I shared what I was thinking and she jumped in and immediately rattled off a few texts for me to read and we created a napkin sketch of the bones of a course. (I’m incredibly enthused that Polly will be coming out to Madison to give three critical lectures over the course of the term.)

As soon as it was clear that this course was to be a reality I began wading into academic literature examining the links between beauty/aesthetics and leadership/business management, as well as artistic and philosophical reflections on beauty. I needed to be able to answer one question for myself, and others.

Why teach beauty in a business school?

In an effort to articulate the worth of the course I began writing a literature review/essay aimed at answering this exact question, which I’ll share in my next post.

In the meantime, I leave you with an excerpt from the syllabus. I hope if you are at all interested in this experiment you will share your ideas, questions, or criticisms—or reach out if you’d like to think about ways to partner or collaborate.

 Approaching Beauty – Course Overview (excerpt)

 Approaching Beauty (a/k/a aesthetics and business) aims to give business students the tools and encouragement to cultivate an aesthetic sensibility. This is neither an arts appreciation course nor a philosophy course. This is a practical course that takes as a foundational precept that art is integrally linked to the experience of things and of life itself.[3] It will combine discussions on the nature and function of beauty in today’s society (led by a range of scholars and artists); curated and self-directed aesthetic experiences; and the documentation of these experiences in a portfolio. Though Gardner is not specific about the form of such a portfolio, for the purposes of this class we are conceptualizing it as a multimedia (visual, auditory, and written) catalogue. Students will ask and answer (in their portfolios) in relationship to a variety of provocations and experiences a range of questions, including: Is it beautiful? Is it not beautiful? Why? On what basis am I forming this judgment? Students will also share their portfolio entries with each other and reflect upon where their ideas about beauty converge and diverge, and why.

Portfolio assignments will be aimed at giving students “bigger-than-me experiences”—to use the phrase coined by Sociologist Steven J. Tepper in a recent essay in the Chronicle of Higher Education. Tepper (2014) asserts that we are living in a period in which institutions of learning need to provide courses that help students “realize that authentic growth comes as much from escaping as from discovering the self.”[4] Tepper makes a link between the rise in cultural activity focused on personal expression (what he calls me experiences) and several studies that indicate that empathy, compassion, moral reasoning and tolerance may be declining; ultimately, he makes a case that what is needed (both in the culture-at-large and at universities) is fewer me experiences and more bigger-than-me experiences. He distinguishes the two, writing:

“Me experiences” are different from “bigger-than-me experiences.” Me experiences are about voice; they help students express themselves. The underlying question they begin with is, “What do I have to say?” BTM experiences are about insight; they start with, “What don’t I know?” Voice comes after reflection. Me experiences are about jumping into a project and making something—an idea, an artifact, a piece of media. BTM focuses on John Dewey’s notion of “undergoing”—making something happen in the world, which requires, first, a shift in our own subjectivity. We must anticipate problems, struggle with ideas, seek some resolution. It’s a process.

Fundamental assumptions of this class are that art teaches us to see what me might otherwise (choose to) not see; art confronts or holds together things that are inherently in tension, it embodies paradox and ambivalence, and it resists easy resolution; and the beautiful (in art and life) arises out of struggle.

Because it is being offered through a business school, this iteration of the course is designed to bridge the inspirational/aesthetic and economic/business worldviews. It starts from a first principle that there is great value (for future business managers/leaders, in particular) in having the capacity to approach the world, or respond to it, aesthetically.

Scholar of corporate finance, business economics, and economic philosophy John Dobson (2007) argues that we are living in an aesthetics business era in which corporations increasingly need to recognize the importance of such things as “harmony, balance, sustainability, aesthetic excellence, judgment, context, compassion, community, beauty, and art.”[5] Dobson suggests that aesthetic judgment is needed in business leaders, in particular, because they face the continual challenge of distinguishing between excellence and its material by-product, material wealth.[6]

Likewise, scholar of management and corporate responsibility, Sandra Waddock (2010) asserts that there are four leadership capacities that can be developed through the cultivation of an aesthetic sensibility (what she also characterizes as “better seeing”):

  • An intuitive grasp of the non-rational or observable elements of situations and decisions;
  • Creativity in imagining solutions or future action;
  • Understanding of relationships among elements in a system in a ‘design’ sense; and
  • The capacity for balancing conflicting elements with the greater good in mind.[7]

And in a similar vein, organizational behavior scholar Nancy Adler (2011) proposes that both “great leaders and great artists” demonstrate courage in three ways: (1) the fortitude and capacity to “see reality as it is”; (2) the daring to imagine new (beautiful) possibilities; and (3) the conviction to inspire others to shift their sights from current reality to imagining what’s possible.[8]

While there is a wide range of literature that has informed the development of this course (laid out in the aforementioned literature review/essay that will be shared in a future post), it builds in particular on Gardner’s construct of the Beauty Portfolio; Tepper’s concept of “bigger-than-me experiences,” Waddock’s premise that aesthetic experiences can help leaders cultivate a different way of “seeing,” and Adler’s vision of “a leadership based more on hope, aspiration, innovation and beauty than on replication of historical patterns of constrained pragmatism.”[9] It also takes as premise (following Dobson 2007) that aesthetic judgment is a critical skill for 21st century business managers and that there is a link between aesthetics, ethics, economics, and quality of life.

***

What do you think about approaching beauty in a business school?

 

* I’m quite pleased that Howard Gardner knows about our course and is enthused we are developing it.

[1] Gardner 2011, p. xi.

[2] Ibid, p. xii.

[3] Dewey, J. (1934). Art as Experience. New York: Penguin Group/Berkeley Publishing

[4] Tepper, S. (2014). Thinking ‘Bigger Than Me’ in the Liberal Arts. The Chronicle of Higher Education, 9/15/2014. Available at http://chronicle.com/article/Thinking-Bigger-Than-Me-in/148739/.

[5] Dobson 2007, p. 46.

[6] Ibid, p. 45.

[7] Waddock 2014, p. 140.

[8] Adler 2011, p. 210

[9] Ibid, p. 208

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.

On tipping the dominoes then walking away …

shutterstock_77378713A couple months back I was one of a number of people interviewed for a research project of Grantmakers in the Arts. The interview was aimed at understanding my influences as a funder (when I worked at the Mellon Foundation) and drawng out some lessons learned. At one point in the discussion I found myself saying that I had probably left grantmaking just in time because I was not sure I understood how to be an effective arts grantmaker over the long haul.

While at Mellon I found myself continually questioning whether it was better to provide stable support to a few over a very long period of time (forsaking all others) or to “cycle out” grantees after a reasonable period of time in order to make room for new entrants.

No matter the choice, the questions that ensued were maddening: If “fewer but larger” which few given that so many worthy organizations needed support? If “spreading the wealth” then what was a “reasonable” timeline for ending support given that organizations and their projects were chronically underfunded?

Without a doubt, a common funder’s dilemma.

And there were other aspects that troubled me.

For one, since no single funder is generally a “majority stakeholder” in most arts organization, the fate of any organization is a factor of actions by quite a number of private and public donors, who can have competing values, rationales, measures of success, and goals.

And perhaps most disconcerting, as time went on it felt increasingly difficult to see the sector with clear eyes. As in any organization, attention in a foundation is focused on some problems but not others. The lens is narrowed and the field is seen through the logic of the current “regime” and through the eyes of current grantees. Problems are problems only insofar as they can be addressed by and classified within existing program areas and can be grasped and articulated using the house rhetoric. Whole swaths of the sector and their issues, by necessity, become invisible in order for the funder to maintain any sense of purpose and potency; to think about everything one can’t fund is to invite a nervous breakdown on an organizational level.

***

About a month ago, I was reading an oft-cited essay from 1970 by Zelda Fichandler, co-founder of Arena Stage in Washington DC and pioneer of the resident theater movement. The essay is called Theatres or Institutions?* Perhaps because this GIA interview had been on my mind I found myself circling back to a couple of paragraphs in which Fichandler questions and reflects upon the impact of first receiving funding (when the Ford Foundation, NEA, and others first began to support theaters) and then losing it a little over a decade later. (Emphases added by me.)

She writes:

What happens when the money comes in a little? When you get enough from the Ford Foundation or the National Endowment to move ten squares and buy the Atlantic City Boardwalk? Is it migraine headache time? What time is it when you are suddenly endowed with all the blessings of institutionalization? (Mind you, the blessings aren’t something that are forced on you. They’re something you asked for without quite knowing what you’re getting.) Time for the Table of Organization? Time for the specialization of labor? Time to begin to consider the internal distribution of wealth now that you’ve got some? The promoting, marketing and distribution of the product? Ways to increase efficiency, ways to rationalize use of time and manpower, ways to diversify so as to appeal to a broader base, ways to close the gap between income and spending? It’s headache time and Surprise! Surprise! Time. One has become a private enterprise in a capitalistic society. The “not for profit” in your papers really says No Parking. Shades of Adam Smith and the Ford Motor Company of American and Pan, where hast thou fled? (p. 109)

[…]

We’ll need more money than we are getting and we must get it in a different way. Arena Stage has just received a terminal grant from the Ford Foundation which, partially matched by a grant from the National Endowment for the Arts will just about cover our deficit for the last season and for this one and the next. We have also received other grants from these and from other foundations, among them a three-year grant for a workshop program for our acting company, a three-year grant for the training at minimal salaries of young craftsmen under a production intern scheme, a three-year grant to increase the salaries of a ten-person nucleus of an acting company. This was very early on, around 1958 or 59—to entice actors from the magnetic field of New York. …

I mention these in particular to make the point that while it may be better to have loved and lost than never to have loved at all, these grants had such a seminal meaning for our organization that when they were withdrawn, or, more accurately not renewed, the trauma was so intense that one wondered whether it would have been better not to have had them than to have had them and lost them.

Not knowing from one year to the next whether there will be a spring, or only summer, winter and fall, one simply does not know how to organize one’s closet. I suggest an end to this tithing tease. I suggest a recognition that subsidy is here to stay or we cannot possibly. (p. 110)

Reading this last line, in particular, brings to mind some of Scott Walters’ recent posts on the need for artists to create new business models that are not dependent on contributions in order to maintain their independence (summarized here by Laura Axelrod).

I am compelled by the dead-in-your-tracks ending of the last sentence of Fichandler … or we cannot possibly. Cannot what? Cannot conceive of any way, perhaps, to continue the revolution that the resident theater movement was intended to be if our comrades in the large private foundations and federal arts agency abandon the cause.

Less than a decade after she spoke these words major funding from Ford would be evaporating and funds from the NEA would begin to flatten before beginning their descent. And by 1978 there would be a palpable sense that the resident theater movement had taken a wrong turn at some point along the way.

I keep returning to these paragraphs from Fichandler’s essay because they illustrate poetically and potently what happens in the psyche of a grantee when a little bit of money comes in and when it, inevitably, goes away. In response to the question, Would it have been better not to have received these grants than to have received them and lost them? I finding myself wanting to shout back at the page, “Yes! You would have been better off never having received the money!”

No matter how good the intentions of most foundations over the past several decades it seems the “tithing tease” has debilitated rather than strengthened the sector. And by debilitated I mean weakened the ability of organizations to enact their missions.

So what is the problem? I find myself wanting to push past questions like whether or not the field would benefit from more GOS and less project-based support, or from longer-term rather than shorter-term grants and ask a more  philosophical question … Something like …

Is it ethical for funders to start what they cannot finish?

Cannot because they do not have the resources … Or cannot because they are unwilling to commit to full funding or long-term support because it is believed that these create an unhealthy resource dependency …  Or because there is a desire to keep options open in order to be able to pursue new initiatives or respond to new grantees at will.

The assumption embedded in the term “start” is that I’m not talking here about the kind of helping hand that simply wants to support ongoing programs or operations. I’m talking about the kind of hand that seems to want to push, pull,  prod, coax, launch, build, expand, change, or otherwise disrupt the status quo.

Some follow-on questions …

  • Is it ethical to de-fund organizations that are achieving agreed upon goals, if you know that removing support will destabilize the organization or the funded program?
  • Is it ethical to provide “seed funding” if the organization is unlikely to be able to raise the remaining funds needed to finance the initiative (in the start up phase and over time).
  • Is it ethical to start relationships with new organizations (i.e., cut the pie into smaller pieces) when those that are currently funded are already receiving inadequate support?

Fichandler says it all in those paragraphs: (1) Even small amounts of money can have undue influence. She isn’t just talking about new programs being started, she’s talking about a shift in the logic, the goals, and the processes of her theater. (2) When money goes away it can be traumatic–not simply because it’s hard to replace the cash but because it feels like, and signals to others, a withdrawal of support for the cause.

As far as I can tell not much has changed with funders since 1970. We continue (at times) to give organizations just enough money to encourage them toward one path rather than another (a choice that we know will consequently enable certain future paths and disable others) and then we walk away when they are just far enough down the path that they can’t really turn back.

We still call it philanthropy but perhaps we need another name for an action that essentially amounts to tipping the dominoes and then walking away.

***

PS – I am delighted (!) to have been asked to attend and blog about the 2013 Grantmakers in the Arts conference in Philadelphia in early October. I will be posting on the GIA website and also on Jumper.

*Essay published by the International Theatre Institute (US) in a journal called Theatre 3 (one of five such journals).

Can we change our definition & measures of success? Do we really want to?

preacher-pulpit2Happy New Year a week late. I picked up a book at the university library a few days ago called Morals and Markets and have read a few chapters, which have been tumbling around in my mind with an excellent New Year’s essay by Polly Carl on the measures of an individual playwright’s success, a New York Times op-ed on trying to measure the impact of social media using “yardsticks” of traditional marketing, and a much cited New Year’s prediction for the arts by Rick Lester at Target Resource Group that appeared on Thomas Cott’s Year End Predictions issue. These provocative texts have me thinking about the process of changing measures of success.

Part I: A short story about life insurance:

Morals and Markets is an academic text written in 1979 by sociologist Viviana Zelizer about “the development of life insurance in the US.”  Zelizer recounts that while the first life insurance company was established in the US in 1759 it was not until the 1840s that sales of life insurance began to take off. Then, within a relatively short period of time, life insurance policy sales grew at an astonishing rate. Why had life insurance failed to get off the ground in the late 18th and early 19th centuries? And why, in the mid-19th century did it eventually become adopted with such fervor? While most historical accounts, written by economists, laid the sudden success at more aggressive advertising and sales techniques (most notably the introduction of the charismatic life insurance missionary/salesman), Zelizer felt something else was going on. She ultimately argues that it was cultural factors at play, among them religious beliefs. She writes on pages 150-151:

In the first place, the development of the insurance industry reflected the struggle between fundamentalist and modernist religious outlooks that worked itself out in the nineteenth century. … The cultural incompatibility of life insurance with literalist and fundamentalist beliefs hindered its development during the first part of the century. In opposition, the emerging liberal theology tended to make the enterprise legitimate. … The history of life insurance helps us understand the problem of establishing monetary equivalents for relations or processes which are defined as being beyond material concerns … With life insurance, money and man, the sacred and the profane, were thrown together; the value of man became measurable by money. …  Life insurance threatened the sanctity of life by pricing it. … By the latter part of the nineteenth century, the economic  definition of the value of death finally became more acceptable, legitimating the life insurance enterprise. However, the monetary evaluation of death did not de-sacralize it; far from ‘profaning’ life and death, money became sacralized by its association with them. Life insurance took on symbolic values quite distinct from its utilitarian function, emerging as a new form of ritual with which to face death and a process of the dead by those kin left behind.

Another cultural factor explored in the book is initial resistance that stemmed from perceptions of life insurance as a form of “betting on lives.” That resistance waned after the 1870s, however, when certain financial practices which had theretofore been perceived by a “traditional economic morality” to be “deviant speculative ventures” became legitimized by a new entrepreneurial ethos. Changing views on life insurance reflected this general shift in attitudes about economic risk taking.

In the last paragraph of the book Zelizer writes (p. 153):

America was, and remains, a land of economic magic. In the case of life insurance the trick was to sell futures—pessimistic futures. The task of selling a commodity to a materialist civilization is relatively simple. The task of converting human life and death into commodities, however, was highly complex. The universe of believers and theologians became involved with another universe of hard-headed businessmen. Out of this interaction emerged a compromise credo which was a far cry from the vulgar marketplace linkages and at the same time a giant step beyond simplified heavenly rewards. Theology yielded to the capitalist ethos–but not without compelling the latter to disguise its materialist mission in spiritual garb.

Part II: Redefining Success

In a post on the measures of success in her own life and the lives of artists, Polly Carl describes what has become the “tired trajectory of success for playwrights”:

Theater artist gets trained >Theater artist emerges >Theater artist gets small gigs in small theaters >Theater artist gets big gigs in small theaters >Theater artist gets small gigs in big theaters >Theater artist gets big gigs in big theaters.

She then observes that this journey is problematic because it suggests that success is linear, that we can and should define what success looks like ahead of time, and that success can be measured in terms of economic growth (bigger house, bigger paycheck, etc.). Within hours of reading her post I was sent a link to the NY Times op-ed mentioned above, Can Social Media Sell Soap? on the problem of attempting to calculate the ROI of social media using traditional marketing media measures. The two pieces got me thinking about the yardsticks of success that we now use in the nonprofit arts.

Notwithstanding the past four years where the definition of success seemed to have been temporarily replaced by the more essential goal of simply finishing the year without a life-threatening deficit, it seems that, by-and-large, the sector is and has been for some time now measuring its success primarily in economic terms: butts in seats, increased revenues, budgetary growth, inches of press, and (how could we ever forget) economic impact.

I would extend Polly’s observation of a success-definition-rut among artists, to arts organizations. Lately I keep hearing admonitions to arts groups to shift their focus from “surviving” to “thriving” but how, as a sector, are we defining this thriving?

Has the recession helped us to interpret “thriving” to mean something deeper or outside of the realm of economic measures? Or (despite all the buzz about intrinsic impacts) are we really only comfortable in our skin if we can flash our numbers (and not just any numbers … butts in seats, budgetary growth, inches of press, economic impact).

I get it.

Believe me, after walking away from a great job that I loved (actually two decades of jobs in the arts that I loved and that defined my success pretty handily) I have spent many sleepless nights these past 2 1/2 years wondering how the heck to define success or, put another way, assess my value. Candidly, most days I feel like an under-performing and illegitimate scholar (as all practitioner-turned-academics will understand); a frustratingly sporadic blogger (sorry!);  a hapless stepparent and homemaker; a too-distant and out-of-touch friend, daughter and sister; and a headstrong and difficult spouse.  What I would give for a job that I “was born to do” and through which my value in this life would be immediately recognizable.

But wouldn’t it be even better if I could redefine success so that my life has value even if I don’t have a great job?

Of course it would.

But still. Would anyone in the world buy into my definition, I wonder? I mean, my mom would probably be proud of me no matter what. But it takes a lot of courage to do what Polly is proposing. To live by your own definition of success—a definition that may be illegitimate in the world we live in.

Part III: Big Data

So we are in this pickle. The value of the arts and culture sector in the US has been declining in recent decades (at least by our cornerstone measure of success: butts in seats). It would seem that we either need to get more people to show up or we need some new measures that can tell people that we’re valuable even if the old metrics don’t look so great. I suspect that Rick Lester at TRG would probably comfort us with the knowledge that we are now in the era of “big data”— which shall enable us to embrace a customer orientation and, “armed with facts,” make better decisions about what to program, who to target, with what product, at what price, on what day, etc.  And others (Alan Brown and Clay Lord, most notably) might suggest that big data could also help us make the case for our value beyond butts in seats—that is, for our intrinsic impacts.

It strikes me that these two uses pull us in different directions. (More on that a bit further on.)

I love data more with every passing day, but I can’t help but think that if we make an analogy with Zelizer’s story of life insurance (and the role of cultural factors in legitimizing it as a key determinant of its adoption), that big data (while an important factor) is probably not going to solve our success/valuation problems. Increasing arts participation and redefining success are less dependent on data than on the values and ideologies that underpin our sector and society-at-large.

We may be able to use data to do better marketing but if kids heading off to college in 2030 still have little-to-no exposure to the arts by their parents or at schools is there anything we could target them with in 2040 that would get them to walk in the door of an opera house producing Don Giovanni or a traditional regional theater doing a production of the Death of a Salesman? And if the data tell us we probably could get them in the door if we radically changed programming, would it matter if those leading and funding arts organizations the next twenty years are unwilling to consider such shifts because they consider them to be immoral?

We may be able to use Twitter to, for instance, understand the social impact of a professional theater piece on a given neighborhood; but will it matter if most boards, government agencies, and funders do not consider the impact of a conversation on Twitter to be as or more important than how many people bought tickets and whether income targets were achieved? We may be able to collect data on the social and cultural impact of amateur groups but does it matter if the training programs and the professional arts sector continues to dismiss such contributions as illegitimate?

We may have the possibility of new data, but we seem to be stuck with the same old values and yardsticks.

Part IV: Time to look in the mirror:

Like Polly, I think it’s time to dig deeper. We can start trying to solve our problems with data, but like a prescription of Paxil, it’s not going to be nearly as effective if we’re not willing to acknowledge the disconnect between some of our fundamental values and ideologies and those of society. Moreover, once acknowledged, we are unlikely to make progress by simply bemoaning our circumstances and calling ourselves victims of a philistine society or simply abandoning the social purposes we were formed to uphold and taking the for-profit route because it’s just too damned hard to fight the good fight anymore.

We are, without a doubt, a sector with conflicting values: excellence versus equity (among others). And as the lines have blurred with the commercial and amateur worlds our identity and the values we stand for (conflicting though they may be) seem to be eroding to the point where it feels like we stand for everything (which is arguably the same as standing for nothing).

No doubt society has changed. The alternative ideals that supported the massive growth of the nonprofit arts sector in the mid-twentieth century were out of favor by the 80s and with it, so were we. But we’ve changed too. Perhaps we have been unsuccessful with getting American society to value what we do not simply because their values changed but because ours have. Is it clear what we stand for? It might be clear to the 70-year-old who takes-for-granted that we stand for something important and good because we once did; but is it clear to the 20-year-old? And if we shout, ‘We stand for something important and good!” does that 20-year-old believe us? Based on what evidence?

I’m not advocating a monolithic conception of the sector, but I am (like Polly, I think, if I interpret her essay correctly) advocating for some honesty and transparency about the core, enduring, distinctive identity and values that we do stand for and, with them, our definition of success.

But as we see in Zelizer’s accout, from there begins the hard work of advancing these ideals and values and measures of success.  What changed the religious fundamentalists that initially rejected life insurance? Among other factors, other more entrepreneurial clergymen, who saw the value of life insurance and began to preach about it from the pulpit.

What caused nonprofit arts organizations to adopt marketing practices? Among other influences, corporate boards and trade associations that encouraged and expected them. Marketing, like life insurance, was an idea that was initially downright distasteful to people working in the arts.

Part V: Can we change the measures of success? Do we really want to?

The arts (like life insurance) long ago became a commodity (having previously operated in the realm of the gift economy), though (also like life insurance) one with values (social, cultural, and symbolic) beyond utility. We came up with our own “compromise credo.” As I observe the heated debates on cultural blogs (including, for instance, the dueling that happened in the comments section of my recent post on the arts cliff), I wonder if this compromise position is becoming untenable and, moreover, as a sector we are deeply divided on how to resolve the tension.

It feels to me like we’ve got big data in our corner and we don’t know whether to stand at the bully pulpit and (A) use the data to get really good at selling our commodity and to make the case that we count in this extended era of economic rationalization (a glance at AFTA’s National Arts Index is but one indication that we’ve actually gotten pretty darned good at that); or (B) use the data to make the case that the measure of success in this world should not be limited to growth in the economy and to identify and measure the something else that matters as much or more.

As I wrote in the executive summary of In the Intersection (a report on partnerships between commercial producers and nonprofit theaters), “Recognizing that the metrics of success and the values of nonprofits have changed is one thing. Changing them back is quite another.”

It wouldn’t be easy to pursue path B. We would have to organize and work together and invest resources in creating and living by such alternative definitions and measures of success. We would have to argue against many of the moves we’ve made the past 30 years.

We would have to use our pulpits.

We would have to believe these other things matter.

As I look across the nonprofit arts and culture sector landscape I see some who believe but I perceive that way too many of us have lost faith.

My wish for us in 2013 … that we can find, keep, and spread the faith.

PS I resolved at the end of the year that I would start posting on Jumper more frequently (weekly at least) and failed in the first week. It’s still a goal. Although after reading this, my longest post-to-date, you may be grateful that I’m not posting with much regularity. Congratulations and thanks to any who manage to stick with it to the end. 🙂

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?

 

 

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.

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

On artists making a living and artistic directors that could make a difference but don’t

Ethan Lipton

Saturday night I went to Joe’s Pub to see playwright-lounge lizard Ethan Lipton & His Orchestra perform  his new work, No Place To Go, about a playwright-lounge lizard that must decide whether to relocate or stay in the ‘the city’ when the company that has provided him with a steady ‘day-job’ (part-time no-benefits employment) for a decade decides to relocate to Mars.  It’s funny, satirical, and poignant. As you might have inferred, the piece is inspired by events in Lipton’s life.

Some of my friends who are actors, playwrights, composers, or directors are able to make something close to a living alternating between paying gigs and unemployment (if you can call having a gross income just above poverty level and no health insurance ‘making a living’); but many of them have (like Lipton) been able to pursue their careers as artists only by working day jobs (many of which have become harder to obtain or hold onto during the rather brutal current economic climate).

There was a time when one of the first principles of resident theaters in this country was that they would hire a company of actors and then cast them in multiple productions throughout the season in a combination of large and small roles. I recently re-read a speech given by W. McNeil Lowry at the Ford Foundation in which he mentions that Ford started investing in theaters in the 1960’s in part to improve circumstances for actors. While ‘acting ensembles’ still exist they are mostly in the form of ‘artist-driven collectives’ that produce shows but operate with a bare bones administrative budget. There are exceptions, but by-and-large, and for a variety of reasons, resident theaters lost their resident acting companies decades ago.

Over the same period of time, however, the administrative staffs of these same theaters became quite substantial to the point where  NEA Chairman Rocco Landesman has recently questioned whether we need “three administrators for every artist” in America. I’m not familiar with the research that underpins that question/statistic, but it certainly seems that artists with salaries are generally artists that have become arts administrators.

The past year or two I’ve begun to hear artistic directors express dismay at the fact that we give administrators salaries but we hire actors, directors, designers, and writers on a ‘contract’ basis. Unfortunately, these conversations never seem to go anywhere. I don’t hear anyone going so far as to suggest that theaters try to ‘get the acting company back together again’ or even that theaters should be paying higher wages to artists to compensate for the fact that they no longer provide stable employment.  They all seem to shrug their shoulders and shake their heads as if to say, “I wish I could do something about this”. It’s like they’ve forgotten that they are the leaders of these organizations and responsible for setting the priorities and values.

I’m no artistic director, but I can think of a few things larger theaters in the US might do for actors short of reconstituting their acting companies and their repertory models:

  • What if theaters maintained a minimum ratio between ‘wages or fees paid to artists’ and the total operating budget?
  • What if investments in the buildings, administrative budgets, and salaries of full-time staff of theaters were matched with a relative increase in artistic budgets and, specifically, wages or fees paid to artists?
  • What if LORT A theaters paid wages to artists comparable to a Broadway production contract?
  • What if, in consideration of the fact that an actor must begin working on a role before rehearsal begins and often needs time to find employment after a show ends, actors were paid a minimum of 12 weeks of salary at any LORT theater (even though they were working at the theater for only 8 of those weeks)?
  • What if theaters opting to do a play with 5 or fewer characters doubled the weekly wages of the actors?

I know …these ideas are preposterous.

I remember hearing Michael Halberstam at Writers’ Theater in Chicago speak at a TCG conference (at a brilliant session with Mike Daisey discussing his insightful and rather incendiary work How Theater Failed America) and learning that Writers’ Theater had long ago made a commitment to invest in actors (and local ones at that) and pay wages comparable to the wages paid by larger theaters. It sounded so right when I heard it, and it was clear that in this room filled with artistic and managing directors from around the country that Michael Halberstam was considered a radical for doing this.

Why is it an outlandish idea to pay as much as you can to the artists and to keep administrative or other production costs as low as possible in order to do so?

And why do we accept this strange idea that doing a play with more than 5 characters is going to bankrupt a theater with a $5- or $10- or $15 million operating budget?

Pffff.

Ethan Lipton is clearly a talented artist. As much as I’d like to hope that he will suddenly be able to make his living fulltime as an artist in this country, realistically I know that I should probably hope that he gets another part-time day job that will let him continue working as an artist.

This makes me sad. I bet it makes many artistic directors sad, as well. But we need to do more than shake our heads when we discuss that arts administrators can make a living wage in this country and that even really talented actors (and musicians and dancers) too often cannot.

We want to tell ourselves that it is not possible to do more for artists but this is simply not true.

At large institutions across this country, of course more can be done.

I welcome other outlandish suggestions …

 

But What Does Barry’s List Mean?

So Barry’s Blog posted its annual Top 25 Most Powerful and Influential Leaders in the Nonprofit Arts list last week. In years’ past I would see this list and bemoan the fact that it seemed to be dominated by funders. I never said anything because I thought it would probably come across as sour grapes since I was, at the time, a funder (but not one that made the list).  As it turns out, this year I squeaked onto the list … barely. And so (with this new found and, no doubt, short-lived position of influence) I have decided to raise the question:

What are we to make of this list and who is on it?

One point of clarification: my aim is not to debate the merits of individuals on the list. My concern is with the overall makeup of the list. I attempted to raise this issue by commenting on Barry’s post last week. Here’s an edited version of what I wrote, building on a comment by Rachel who noted the absence of arts organization leaders beyond Michael Kaiser:

Where are the amazing managing and executive directors of arts organizations on this list? For that matter, where are the artists and artistic directors? I find myself troubled by the fact that this list is so dominated by funders, bloggers (like me), policy wonks, and people running intermediary organizations – despite the fact that some of these people are friends and many are people I deeply respect. Even when I worked at a foundation I thought that it was not such a great thing that so many funders show up on this list each year.

Barry gave a thoughtful response in which he clarified (rightly so) that his list was about arts administration and organizational leadership, and that artists did not appear on the list because nominators were asked not to recommend artists. He also noted that while there were countless things about the sector that troubled him the fact that the list was dominated by funders and policy types was not one of them. Another commenter (following mine) asserted that we need the ‘wonks’ and encouraged them to ‘wonk on’.

These are all valid points. I deny neither the need for policymakers, or funders, or service organizations nor their importance as entities that (often, at least ideally) have both the benefit of a systems perspective on the field and the ability to intervene and have positive impact. They are powerful and influential; and some of them should be on the list.

But I would argue that we should not be content that among the 44-ish people that appear to represent the top 25 and those ‘bubbling under’ only one (Michael Kaiser) actually runs or works in a nonprofit arts institution (that is not related primarily to arts education). Notably, Barry agreed (with Rachel’s point) and said he thought there were “any number of exemplary leaders of performing arts organizations that not only could be, but really ought to be on this list.”

Believe me, I fully understand why the list is constituted as it is. But it suggests a power/influence imbalance in our sector that one-third or one-half of the list is not made up of leaders within arts organizations (and by ‘leaders’ I do not mean to imply ‘directors’) and particularly artistic leaders (yes, being influential and powerful in such areas as arts administration, funding, advocacy, and organizational leadership). As I also wrote in my comment on Barry’s Blog:

If this were the 1960s or 70s W. McNeil (Mac) Lowry at the Ford Foundation would no doubt have been on the list, but so would have been Zelda Fichandler (founding artistic director of Arena Stage), Joe Papp (at the Public) and several other artistic/producing directors (and that’s just the theater).

Robert (Bob) Brustein, founder of Yale Repertory Theatre and American Repertory Theatre (ART) at Harvard University has written (I believe) 16 books on theatre and society over the past three decades or so—the majority of those while he was serving as a director at ART. Regardless of whether one embraces his viewpoints, one cannot deny that the theater world is better off because he was actively contributing to the conversation on such topics as the role of theater in society and what systems (including management, financial, political) support or hinder the making of art. He was not at all hesitant to challenge the decisions of policymakers, funders, and others. In 2000 he contributed an essay to a great book, The Politics of Culture, (G. Bradford, M. Gary, and G. Wallach eds.) entitled “Coercive Philanthropy.” The title (rather wonderfully) speaks for itself.

We are not having an enlightened dialogue about the current state or imagined future of the arts if among the 25 (or 44?) most powerful people thinking about the systems for funding, managing, and administrating arts institutions (again, excluding the arts education subset of the list, which seems to have achieved a better ‘balance’) none are artistic directors, or artistic staff, or artists.

Cynically, I wonder whether artists (etc.) would end up on the list even if Barry removed the rule that excludes them from being nominated. I say this not because we don’t have another generation or two of Roberts, Zeldas, and Joes working in the arts and culture sector (please forgive the theater bias; it’s the history I know best), but because I don’t trust they’d get nominated.

Barry writes in the introduction to the list:

Like every other field or profession, there are those in the nonprofit arts who are powerful and influential. To pretend that any world (ours included) is not stratified, tiered, territorial and subject to politics and disproportionately controlled by an oligarchy at the top is naïve. I believe the people who work in our field are passionate and motivated and seek the higher good, but I also recognize that they are human beings, and that our field isn’t some separate and perfect world – and that power and influence are tangible currency – sometimes spent wisely, other times needlessly squandered.

What I take from this passage is that the field should be engaged with which names are on this list and which are not. Thus, I’d be curious what people think of the list. Again, I’m not asking for opinions on individuals who are either on or off the list (as Barry notes, people are bound to have diverse points of view on the merits of individuals on the list). Rather, I’m interested to hear reflections on the overall makeup of the list—the types of people on it—and what this might say about the sector. In other words, what (if anything) does this list mean? Do you give the list much thought? If so, what do you think about it? And if it means nothing to you, why is that?

I wonder whether the shape of this list reflects the fact that arts organizations (and by that I mean the individuals working within and for them) have, over the past three decades, ceded too much of the power and influence over the arts and culture sector to funders, government agencies, and service organizations? Am I wrong about this?

Despite having concerns about the lack of people working in arts organizations on the list and some questions about the methodology used to generate the list (I wonder how representative it is), I would be disingenuous if I said that getting on the list meant nothing to me. I sincerely enjoy writing my blog and am deeply gratified when people read it much less take the time to Tweet about it, or post comments, or otherwise engage with the ideas. But I would also be remiss if I did not say that (with very few exceptions) I am largely influenced (and inspired) by those working in the trenches, in arts organizations. This is because I spent the majority of my career working in arts organizations and I know that the picture on the inside is much different than the one often envisioned or theorized by researchers, consultants, funders, and policy makers.

Which nonprofit arts orgs deserve these pennies?

In response to last week’s post, Leonard Jacobs posted a thoughtful essay at The Clyde Fitch Report in which he made many excellent points–many of them fair criticisms of my post. I cannot adequately address all of Jacobs’ points in this post, but I hope to address a few while expounding upon some of my previous comments.

In my first post, I was endeavoring to both (1) discuss perceptions of the current threats to funding (which Jacobs rightly says are not ‘attacks’ in the sense of the culture wars) and (2) make the assertion that the current case for cutting support for the arts seems to rest on behaviors of organizations that are often held up as leaders but that, to my mind, do not exemplify the highest principles or the best (or even most common) practices of our field. Here’s are some further thoughts, specifically on responses to the proposed cuts:

(1)   I believe the percentage of the population that is actually hostile to the arts (philistines, if you will) is relatively small (at least I hope so; perhaps I am naive on this matter?). Furthermore, because I’m not persuaded that rhetoric will change their minds, I think advocacy efforts are better focused elsewhere. I’m not proposing to do away with advocacy as Jacob’s construed from my previous comments. There’s no danger in continuing to hone and strengthen the case for the merits of the arts. However, as I’ve said before, if the arts actually mattered more, to more people, then perhaps their value would be self evident and advocates wouldn’t need to work so hard to defend funding for them.

(2) Jacobs and others seem to take the view that the threats are largely political and symbolic. I tend to agree. Some that would cut arts funding believe big government is bad and it should be reduced or eliminated across many areas; others that government support and intervention in some areas is justifiable but the ‘arts’ do not merit such subsidies because they largely benefit those that could pay anyway (the very wealthy and the upper middle class). In either case, since ‘the arts’ matter to a small percentage of their constituencies anyway, the recession offers a good opportunity for politicians to put forward cuts to the arts (which, conveniently, most people seem to equate with ‘the fine arts’ and ‘snooty organiations with expensive tickets’).

So what about that new report from the NEA (to be posted on Feb 28th) that Jacobs mentioned, which indicates much higher participation levels than previously reported? Importantly, these expanded participation rates are due to an expanded definition of participation from one limited to ‘attendance’ to one including (as I recall from the Webinar last week) media related participation and amateur/hands-on participation. In other words, it appears that a lot of the ‘participation’ unearthed by this new report may be happening outside of the nonprofit arts ‘establishment’.

(3)  The final point I was endeavoring to make in my last post is that perhaps there would not be a general perception that the arts primarily serve those who could pay for them anyway if the sector itself did not hold up as ‘exemplars’ those organizations that are elitist, exclusive, wealthy, and extravagant.   

I get that many such organizations exhibit qualities that are often associated with ‘leadership’: they are the largest firms; they have been around the longest and have staying power; they have high profiles and clear brands; they often do very high quality work; they are powerful and able to attract talent; they bring prestige to their cities and people often feel civic pride about their presence; and they are highly professionalized and institutionalized operations (no artsy flakiness in these shops). In other words, they exude qualities that one associates with being at the top of the corporate heap.

These may be qualities of leadership by corporate or commercial standards, but are these the right metrics for leadership in a nonprofit context?  Where and how do we account for leadership in the sense of being the best at pursuing and achieving charitable and educational ends?

I observe many organizations that are doing work that lives up to (what I would consider to be)  ‘nonprofit’ ideals. Generally, they seem to be undervalued and underfunded. I am, thus, troubled that a significant portion of the contributed resources going into the nonprofit arts and culture sector is (and has been for years) directed to organizations that seem to want (in principle) to behave like either country clubs or commericial entities.

Which leads to my question: Does it (should it) mean something different to be a ‘leading arts institution’ vs. a ‘leading nonprofit arts institution’? Is it time to question a  hierarchy that puts (in perpetuity), for example, the Lyric Opera of Chicago above Chicago Opera Theater; or Roundabout Theatre Company above the Foundry Theater? As I said last week, perhaps we need to re-think what constitutes leadership in the nonprofit arts sector. If we’re not sure anymore, perhaps it’s time to figure this out.

Switching gears a bit: I understand from Scott Walters’ post on his recent visit to the NEA, that we in blog- and tweet-land have ruffled feathers by daring to question the establishment. I want to express my respect and thanks to Scott for having the courage to speak candidly both at the meeting and in his follow-up post. I’m glad he was in the room. I also LOVE his most recent post on ‘excellence‘.

PS: Thanks for the essay, Mr. Jacobs. I appreciate your consideration of my post and the thoughtful feedback. I may  pick up on the pricing thread next week … Yrs, DER

Image of Please Help Penny Jar by Aron Hsiao, licensed from Shutterstock.com.

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