Jumper

Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

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

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

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

Part 1: Can we talk about our aesthetic values? 

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Many thanks for reading and sharing any thoughts!

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On 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.

Taming our inner speculators …

speculators

A few days ago, while doing research, an article caught my attention. It was written in 1936 and it was about the birth of Theatre Arts magazine twenty years earlier (in 1916). Here’s how the founding of the magazine is described in the article:***

For it began in revolt against musty tradition, its first issue proclaiming a credo that still rings in the ear: ‘To help conserve and develop creative impulse in the American theatre; to provide a permanent record of American dramatic art in its formative period; to hasten the day when the speculators will step out of the established playhouse and let the artists in.

(Emphasis added.)

That day seemed to have arrived with the formation of the resident theater movement–the “alternative-to-commercial” theater–30 years later. As I noted last week, Zelda Fichandler recently described the movement’s inspiration and purpose saying:

We looked at what we had – the hit-or-miss; put-it-up, tear-it-down; make-a-buck, lose-a-buck; discontinuous; artist-indifferent; New York-centered ways of Broadway, and they weren’t tolerable anymore, and it made us angry. The fabric of thought that propelled us was that  theatre should stop serving the function of making money, for which it has never been and never will be suited, and start serving the revelation and shaping of the process of living, for which it is uniquely suited, for which it, indeed, exists. The new thought was that theatre should be restored to itself as a form of art.

If only achieving the ideals of the resident theater movement (the revolution, as it was called) had been as simple as kicking the speculators out and giving the artists the keys to the buildings, the business cards, and nonprofit status.

It turns out that as nonprofit theaters became successful, some of them started to look a lot like commercial producers. A 1984 New York Times article– Will Success Spoil Nonprofit Theater?–described the whys and hows and so whats of the process:

With achievement comes heightened expectations, expectations not necessarily consistent with a theater’s role of developing new plays and new writers. … Rare is the artistic director who does not hunger at some level for acclaim in New York; it is the theater capital of the nation, and Broadway, however maligned, is a part of the mythology on which theater people have raised. There are practical advantages, too. The income from a commercial transfer can virtually support a nonprofit theater … And the publicity attendant to a transfer makes it easier for a nonprofit theater to both raise money and to attract leading artists.

The problem is that the gravitational tug of Broadway is strong. There can come a point when a nonprofit theater begins producing plays solely, or subliminally, to export them to New York.

There it is again.

That “long tug of war,” referenced last week, “between art and commerce, spiritual ideals and materialistic forces …”

The resident theater was founded (and propelled forward by the Ford Foundation) at a time when philanthropists believed that the best way to organize the cultural sector was to create clear boundaries between the “commercial entertainment” and “artistic” spheres and to avoid contamination between the two. (Whether this still is, or ever was, a good policy or approach is a topic for another post, perhaps.)

If you go back and read about the formation of the first symphony orchestras (decades earlier), you can observe this same “weed out the entertainment” then “fertilize the art” strategy.

Of course there’s a difference between theater and symphony orchestras (which perhaps foundations and government agencies did not fully account for): one doesn’t see many (any?) examples of “commercial orchestras” in the US.

Not only did a robust commercial theater industry precede the resident theater movement, it continued to exist (and compete with the nonprofit theater) once resident theaters were formed. Theater exists in a mixed market, and one in which the commercial theater has held heavy sway for the past century.

So, even if we had subsidies on par with Sweden or Germany, we probably could not have kept the art and commerce theater worlds separate for many, obvious reasons–not least of which, successful playwrights, actors, directors, designers, and producers rarely work exclusively within one industry (either Hollywood, or Broadway, or Off-Broadway, or regional theater) and successful properties (plays, books, films, etc.) frequently traffic across these boundaries as well.

And while subsidies helped to fortify the lines between the sectors for 20 years or so, as many nonprofit leaders have remarked over the years, after funding fell off from Ford and the NEA, what choice remained but to do more commercial fare (whether shows aimed at Broadway or hits that had already played there)? How could theaters be expected to pursue the ideals of the movement when the beliefs underpinning the economic model were no longer valid?

So, given that nonprofit theaters exist in a mixed market, given that artists and properties cross sector boundaries, given that  funding went away but the big buildings built with the funding had to be supported anyway, co-productions between the two sectors … collaborative R&D … exchange of rights … transfers … alliances … dalliances … deals between the two sectors… were perhaps inevitable.

As Bob Brustein (founder of ART & Yale Rep) remarked in a meeting in 2011 of commercial producers and nonprofit theater leaders to discuss partnerships between the two sectors:

I want to say something about commercial production [ at resident theaters]. I’ve obviously been a big enemy of that. But I’m an enemy of the frequency of it.

I think it’s inevitable from time to time. The question is keeping some sort of a constraint on it […]

Whether you want to or not, one of those shows is gonna go [to Broadway].

But why constrain it? Why tame our inner speculators? Particularly in this era of social and cultural entrepreneurship when, everywhere you look, people are making money while doing good and doing good while making money. By comparison, the legal and cultural/cognitive boundaries between the “art theater” and the “money theater” (to use Todd London’s great tags in this terrific essay) start to feel oppressive–as though they may be holding us back from reaching our full potential, from being the “entrepreneurial” organizations that governments, foundations, boards, and donors now want nonprofits to be.

I think the 1984 article illustrates why. If you start to go back in time (before even the creation of nonprofit resident theaters) over and over again you will observe that commercial success seems to breed external and internal pressure for more commercial success, which seems to be at odds with some of the core values or purposes (e.g., access, diversity, artist development, artistic risk taking, education, community-building, preservation and innovation) that “art theaters” or resident theaters exist to uphold or advance.

The question is, how to keep some sort of constraint … given that intermingling is perhaps inevitable … given the ‘gravitational pull” of Broadway … AND given that it’s great to reach more people with great theater and difficult for a new work to enter the cultural canon and discourse without going to Broadway.

At the same 2011 meeting (mentioned above), Polly Carl, editor at HowlRound, suggested that what was needed is a code of ethics. Ethics in the American theater is a running theme throughout Polly’s writing and talks. In one essay on the subject, she urges nonprofit theater leaders to prioritize the creation of an ethics statement that “answers the hard questions.”

What types of questions?

In her book, Economic Lives, economic sociologist Viviana Zelizer refers to the OED for a definition of ethics: “The science of morals: the department of study concerned with the principles of human duty.” She then expounds on the definition, writing:

In economic activity, then, ethics concerns the proper way of conducting production, consumption, distribution, and transfer of assets. For instance, ethical questions assume such varied forms as, Is it right to pay women for their eggs? Is it wrong for a supervisor to make sexual advances to an employee? May a CEO legitimately issue public reports exaggerating a firm’s economic performance? Is it appropriate for company executives to use company jets for personal trips? More generally, is it feasible to set rules that eliminate conflicts of interest between a person’s corporate responsibility and private interests? …

I could certainly imagine an equivalent list of questions for nonprofit arts organizations. And in this era in which there is increased scrutiny over the ethical practices of corporations, I could certainly see why the time is ripe (if not overripe) for this effort in the nonprofit arts.

And not because of commercial deals, per se. The ethical issues for a nonprofit theater would seem to be much broader than how to do deals or how many deals to do.

But I’m curious what others think.

Do nonprofit theaters (or other arts nonprofits) need ethics statements?

If so, what hard questions should be put on the list?

 

  Speculators is a John Leech sketch from 1846.

***Theatre Arts at the Age of Twenty. New York Times, Feb. 2, 1936.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

Nonprofit Arts Orgs and the Boards That Love Them

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Instead, most trustees of large nonprofits mirror corporate America.

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

Reflecting on Eisenberg’s article, I wonder:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Nonprofits and those who love them, eh?

 

 

Are we a sector defined by our permanently failing organizations?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

As nonprofits do we (or should we) put all art in service of instrumental ends?

This past Thursday and Friday I had the honor of attending a convening on global performance, civic imagination, and cultural diplomacy at Georgetown University, hosted by Derek Goldman and Cynthia Schneider. By bringing “leaders in international theater and performance together with foreign policy leaders from academia, think tanks, and government,” the stated hope of the organizers was to bridge the gap between the fields of politics and culture, to the mutual benefit of both. Over the course of the first two days of the convening some questions began to emerge:

  •  When we talk about cultural exchange and cultural diplomacy what, exactly, are we talking about—and are these acts different from simply doing a performance in another place, or for another people, than one’s own?
  • Before, or as, we discuss these issues at the global level might we acknowledge the necessity for this work on the local level and examine the possible connection between the two?
  • Is the impact of this work measurable? Must we be able to measure the impact of this work in order to make the case for its support? Or can we trust that it makes a difference?
  • Is the best work in this area government sanctioned, organized, and subsidized? Or is it best when furthered through the decentralized, grassroots relationships that are formed when one artist or one presenter or one company sets out with the intention to forge individual connections?
  • Are the goals of art and the goals of cultural diplomacy aligned; or in asking the former to serve the latter are we compromising artists and the aims of art?

I left Friday afternoon (a day early, unfortunately) with these questions on my mind. On my way out the door to grab a cab to Union Station I ran into a playwright (now based in the US but originally from outside the US) and we had a quick chat. In the midst of our conversation she commented on the nonprofit system of organizing and funding the arts in the US, making the point that the system is flawed because it puts all art in service of social or educational goals—and in doing so constrains artists and art. Her point was that all work created in a nonprofit structure must serve the instrumental ends of education and be in service of a mission. Her perspective as a playwright, in particular, was that nonprofit theaters create mission statements, and then programmatic strategies to fulfill those mission statements, and that such strategies inevitably filter or limit the types of plays that can or will be selected. The question she seemed to be asking: What happens to the artists whose works falls between the mission cracks, so to speak?

Cynically I thought, “Oh, well in the US, they simply go open their own nonprofit organizations.”

On the three hour train ride to my next stop I found myself thinking about this issue of art in service to instrumental ends, which came up both at the convening on cultural exchange and in the conversation with this playwright. I began to mull on the following:

  • Are the mandates (educational/social) that come with nonprofit status appropriate for artists that simply want to make work without having to put that work in service of an educational or social mission? In other words, for those that bristle at the idea of “instrumental ends” for the arts, is the nonprofit form a legitimate and beneficial form? If not, what would be a better fit? L3C, perhaps, as I’ve written about before?
  • Have some or many of us set up nonprofit institutions because the nonprofit form is a vehicle for accessing capital for money-losing art, rather than a vehicle for society-serving art?
  • Since the nonprofit form is preferred by so many seeking to produce or present artistic experiences is the underlying belief that all art serves society? If not, how would we discern the difference between “art that serves educational and social ends” and art that serves some other ends?
  • How constraining, really, is nonprofit status? That is, do the majority of artistic leaders even think about the works they are producing or presenting as being in service of educational or social goals? Or do they simply program works they like and believe in, regardless of such instrumental ends?
  • If the nonprofit form is not all that constraining then is it all that meaningful?

Returning to the topic of the Georgetown convening – cultural exchange and diplomacy – I have found myself at many of such meetings over the past several years and at each one I have made the following point: Many US artists rely on performances overseas for income. In other words, what is motivating them to perform in Europe or Asia is often the touring fees (i.e., money)—not “cultural exchange” and certainly not “cultural diplomacy.” While I don’t think that cultural exchange and diplomacy need to be government funded or organized to be legitimate I also don’t think that anytime an artist hops on a plane and performs at a festival that this constitutes “exchange” or “diplomacy”. The difference would seem to be one of intention, at the very least.

I think the same is true of nonprofit status. When we were forming our institutions 5, 10, 20, 30 years ago was our intention to serve society through art? Was our intention to educate through art? Or was there at the outset (among some or many of us) simply the practical consideration that calling oneself nonprofit would (a) provide legitimacy and (b) provide a possible business model for sustaining art (maybe worthy, maybe not-so-worthy) that would not make it on box office alone?

We are nonprofit in name, but are we (by-and-large) nonprofit in spirit? Are we nonprofit in purpose? If losing money were the only or even primary criteria for nonprofit status then plenty of commercial films and Broadway musicals could also be nonprofit. If we have been using this form to achieve ends other than the social and educational ends for which it was created, then perhaps it is time that we created a way to exist that has integrity with what we really are, or want to be in the future?

Apologies for the sporadic postings. I have been (and will be until the end of July) on a multi-week research trip. I am trying to post whenever time and Internet access provide.

Image from the Website Whip: http://www.fightersgeneration.com/characters4/whip.html

 

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.

What are the aims of direct subsidies to artists?

Polly Carl has posted a new piece on HowlRound, A Virtual Theater Movement,  in which she remarks on a recent trend in arts philanthropy: increased direct support for artists. This philanthropic trend prompts me to ask, “What are funders hoping to achieve by providing direct subsidies to individual artists?” and to raise the ideas of a colleague from Erasmus, artist/economist Hans Abbing, who wrote a book in 2002 called Why Are Artists Poor? The Exceptional Economy of the Arts, an excellent summary of the chapters therein you can read here.

Abbing crafts a well structured rationale to which I cannot do justice in this post; however, I will mention a few key points. Abbing suggests that the poverty of artists is structural and relates this to a number of factors, including:

  1. The social construction of ‘art’as something holy, a notion which is contradictory to the notion of commerce and monetary exchange. He writes: “Although the arts earn approximately half of their income in the market, the arts can only maintain their sacred status when people associate the arts with the values of the gift sphere rather than the market sphere.”
  2. While artists do care about money, they tend to care more (than other professionals) about rewards such as personal satisfaction, recognition, and status. He says that most artists have been socialized to this preference and that it is ‘hardly a virtue’. As a manifestation of these preferences, he says that (for example) most artists will work their day jobs only long enough to earn sufficient income to go back to creating artistic work.
  3. Given that artists tend to exchange money for rewards such as personal satisfaction, direct subsidies do not lead to higher incomes for artists. Instead, they may simply provide incentives to more people to become artists, thereby increasing competition, and making it more difficult for any to make a living. As Abbing writes, “Subsidization increases the number of poor artists per hundred thousand inhabitants and thus increases poverty.”

So, what is achieved through subsidies to artists? Here are my own reflections:

Direct grants to artists may make it possible for an artist, at a particular point in his or her career, to make (better or more ambitious) work (by removing the necessity to maintain a day job). Funds may be used to help an artist acquire a critical resource or asset that has longer term returns (a marketable artistic output, knowledge and skills, marketing and promotion, staff, representation, a piece of equipment, a studio, a car, etc.). And often direct grants (particularly if competitve or associated with awards) send a signal to other gatekeepers (funders, donors, producers, press, intermediaries, curators, etc.) that a particular artist is worthy of time and support and may result in more resources and attention flowing to that artist. (It may be worth noting, however, that this ‘signaling’ effect can contribute to the ‘winner-take-all’ phenomenon that sometimes exists in the arts and make it even more difficult for new entrants to emerge and find resources.)

However, it seems to me that direct grants to artists are unlikely to (1) solve the longer-term systemic issue (which Polly also points out in her post) that funding to arts organizations in the US seems to increase flows not to artists but rather to buildings and administrations; and (2) (if we agree with Abbing’s point about subsidies providing incentives more more people to become artists) improve the structural poverty of artists.

It seems that these two issues will require a re-thinking of some of the bedrock ideas of the arts and culture sector in the US, among them: (1) to be legitimate you need grants and to get grants you need nonprofit status and administrators; and (2) aesthetic value and market value are at odds. There are others …

And it perhaps goes without saying (but I’ll say it anyway) subsidies (grants, gifts, or other forms of support) may not only lead to an  increase in the number of people who want to be artists but also the number people who want to form arts organizations. 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.

***

Postscript: I want to close by giving a shout out to David Dower, Polly Carl, Vijay Mathew, Jamie Gahlon and everyone working at the New Play Institute. The move from Arena to Emerson strikes me as inspired and I am excited to see what comes of placing the Institute (now The Commons) in an environment suited to both academic study and practice. David’s vision for the Institute came to life through the talent and hard work of a dedicated crew of interns and staffers at Arena. And it is staggering to consider the impact of HowlRound (the brainchild of Polly Carl) in its first year (not even) of existence. Kudos to all and I look forward to seeing what emerges from The Commons.

 

 

The times may be a-changin’ but (no surprise) arts philanthropy ain’t

The Philanthropy News Digest recently sent me a bulletin with the headline, “Arts Funding Does Not Reflect Nation’s Diversity, Report Finds” which linked me to an AP Newsbreak article with the headline “Report finds arts funding serves wealthy audience, is out of touch with diversity”. My initial thought was, “Seriously? We need a report to tell us this?” The report, Fusing Arts, Culture, and Social Change: High Impact Strategies for Philanthropy, was produced by the National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy and written by Holly Sidford.

Here are a couple paragraphs from the executive summary:

Every year, approximately 11 percent of foundation giving – more than $2.3 billion in 2009 – is awarded to nonprofit arts and culture. At present, the vast majority of that funding supports cultural organizations whose work is based in the elite segment of the Western European cultural tradition – commonly called the canon – and whose audiences are predominantly white and upper income. A much smaller percentage of cultural philanthropy supports the arts and traditions of non-European cultures and the  non-elite expressions of all cultures that comprise an increasing part of American society. An even smaller fraction supports arts activity that explicitly challenges social norms and propels movements for greater justice and equality.

This pronounced imbalance restricts the expressive life of millions of people, thus constraining our creativity as a nation. But it is problematic for many other reasons, as well. It is a problem because it means that – in the arts – philanthropy is using its tax-exempt status primarily to benefit wealthier, more privileged institutions and populations. It is a problem because our artistic and cultural landscape includes an increasingly diverse range of practices, many of which are based in the history and experience of lower-income and nonwhite peoples, and philanthropy is not keeping pace with these developments. And it is a problem because art and cultural expression offer essential tools to help us create fairer, more just and more civic-minded communities, and these tools are currently under-funded.

I am as discouraged as anyone by where many (but certainly not all) private foundations and wealthy individual donors give their support, and where they do not. However, my sense has never been that this behavior persists (and has perhaps become more pronounced as the demographics of the country are shifting dramatically) because the heads of foundations or the wealthiest donors in America were lacking a report explaining that too much of their money was going to arts organizations producing Western European ‘high art’ for white, upper middle class audiences.

The book Patrons Despite Themselves told very much the same story back in 1983 in its analysis of the ‘indirect’ system of funding the arts (that is, via the tax system rather than via direct grants from government). Feld, O’Hare, and Schuster concluded (among other things):

On balance, income to the arts is paid for disproportionately by the very wealthy and is enjoyed more by the moderately wealthy and the well educated. The demographic characteristics of the audience – the beneficiaries of the government aid – do not vary much across art forms. While the system tends to be redistributive, it is only so in a limited sense: from the very wealthy to the moderately wealthy.

Three of the recommendations in PDT regarding philanthropic decisionmaking are: (1) “decisions should reflect expertise in the subject”; (2) “public decisions in allocation of government support for the arts should reflect many varied kinds of tastes”; and (3) “arts decisionmaking must be independent of malign influence, that is, influence represented by narrow partisan politics or self-serving interests.”

We can see how much traction the authors had in the arts and culture sector with this message given the ‘elitism redux’ (and with more urgency) message in the new National Committee for Responsive Philanthropy report.

This is why I find it ironic when funders throw their arms up in the air, discouraged by declining attendance at ‘out-of-touch’ symphony orchestras and other fine art forms. It would seem that the growing gap between these organizations and their communities exists in large part because they continued to find support and legitimacy from high profile foundations even as they were raising ticket prices and failing to update their programming and becoming increasingly ‘non-representative’ of their communities over the past 30 years.

Moreover, if we are wondering why this decades-old message just doesn’t seem to ‘stick’ and change behavior, it may be worth taking a moment to recognize the “alliance between class and culture” that emerged with the very development of our nonprofit arts system in the US: “High art” was meant to serve the needs of urban elites and the hierarchical distinction between “high culture” and “popular culture” was meant to distinguish not simply two forms of culture but the types of people that patronized these forms of culture (DiMaggio 1982).

We have (and have had) a cultural divide in the US and the arts continue to contribute to it – not all arts, but certainly a large part of the sector that is often heralded as ‘leading’, ‘excellent’ and ‘world class’. You don’t end up with the large majority of your audience being white and wealthy by accident. Nor do you end up with the large majority of your funding portfolio going to assist those organizations that are primarily serving those white and wealthy people, by accident.

This is by design, folks.

I by no means want to suggest that it is a waste of time to periodically document the fact that private funding for the arts continues to primarily support upper middle class white people. This is, perhaps, a message that needs to be transmitted continually if the situation is to change. And, as the report accurately suggests, this issue is becoming more acute as arts funding fails to keep pace with dramatic socio-economic changes that are occurring.

Indeed. Taking the message one step further, I don’t think I’m alone in thinking that organizations whose value is reliant upon old institutions, old habits, and old social networks (centered around an old concept of ‘the cultural elite’) may very well find themselves on the wrong side of a cultural change in the years to come.

Arts organizations and their funders would seem to have a choice: be part of the change or fight to the death to uphold the dying system that for decades gave their work meaning. Perhaps their own survival (if not an interest in fairer and more civic-minded communities and a sincere desire to upend social norms and support social change) will ultimately prompt some of these institutions to change their behaviors?

 Poster designed by adbusters for #OccupyWallStreet.

 

 

Why not rid ourselves of the nonprofit burden?

Chad Bauman, Director of Communications at Arena Stage, has suggested in a recent post on his blog that perhaps nonprofit resident theaters should consider casting off their nonprofit status. These are surprising words given the rather generously supported theater where he works. When I suggested in my recent post L3C Cha Cha Cha (referenced by Mr. Bauman) that some nonprofits might have been more appropriately organized at the outset as L3C’s (if such a model had existed at the time) I was not suggesting that current nonprofits give up their 501(c)3 status. Putting aside the ‘charitable and educational’ mission implications for the time being (an important topic for another day, perhaps), there are clearly legal and financial implications of such conversions that would need to be weighed:

  • First, once you add the tax burdens and increased expenses and eliminate the contributed resources to support both capital growth and ongoing operations I would venture to say that the current programming model, buildings, and administrative staff infrastructure for most resident theaters could not be supported. Becoming for-profit doesn’t simply result in the loss of government grants. Among other things, giving up nonprofit status also means losing the ability to accept tax exempt contributions and losing (in some states) property tax exemption. I assume it may also result in the necessity to pay higher wages to actors, stage hands and more competitive wages to administrative staff.
  • Second, donations come with restrictions and the assets of a nonprofit cannot simply be turned over to a for-profit. To use Arena Stage as an example, public and private donors gave money in good faith to support its operations (now and in the future), and to build its impressive buildings believing that funds would be used in perpetuity to support the mission.Would those gifts need to be returned or transferred to another nonprofit? Would the buildings need to be turned over to a qualified 501(c)3 organization? Would Arena need to pay back-taxes on its buildings? (BTW, it’s recently been reported that the Annenberg Foundation may ask for the return of the remainder of its $50 million gift to the Philadelphia Orchestra because the symphony has recently filed for Chapter 11 bankruptcy protection).
  • Third, I think that Mr. Bauman may be overestimating the degree to which additional user fees (higher ticket prices in exchange for VIP amenities, for instance) could compensate for some portion of the loss of contributions, especially when Arena is already charging as much as $110 for tickets (in other words, I’m not sure how much more people would be willing to pay). Furthermore, Arena could lose patron trust and goodwill by converting to a for-profit: to the degree that some of its loyal subscribers actually care about its mission and go to shows at Arena Stage in order to support that mission, it’s not unreasonable to think that some might shift their loyalty to another nonprofit theater (Woolly Mammoth, for instance)?
  • Fourth, Bauman suggests that some of a nonprofit’s donors (its board members, for instance) might become ‘investors’; perhaps, but then one assumes they would be expecting to share in profits. If surpluses are small or nonexistent then it stands to reason that, in time, such investors would find somewhere else to put their funds. Moreover, I don’t recall hearing any commercial producers saying it’s become easier in recent years to find investors for their shows. Bauman also suggests that becoming for-profit could eliminate the volatility inherent in the nonprofit business model; but I’m not sure why he thinks that a market-driven model would be any more stable than one reliant on contributed revenues? Commercial and nonprofit entities alike are in search of new business models these days.

From where I sit (and albeit, that is not and never has been at the head of a theater like Arena) large leading nonprofit arts institutions (like Arena) benefit from the nonprofit model far more than they are burdened by it. The majority of all contributions to the nonprofit arts and culture sector flow to such institutions. If any nonprofits would benefit from considering a new model it is most likely those smaller institutions that have a very slim chance of ever becoming recipients of significant contributions (hence the recommendations in my L3C Cha Cha Cha post). Indeed, given the fact that Arena Stage has a brand new $125 million building, I imagine largely paid for through contributions (one assumes with significant gifts from the Mead and Kogod families), it strikes me as somewhat cheeky to suggest that the nonprofit model is not working for Arena and that such donations are easily replaced with other revenues sources with a few tweaks to the business model.

Sisyphean Toil image by sellingpix, licensed on Shutterstock.com.

Oh, nonprofit model. Where do we go from here?

DER Blogging on AftA's ARTSblog May 16-20

May 16-20 I blogged for Americans for the Arts on ARTSblog. AftA brought together a group of thinkers to ponder the future of the nonprofit model. (Cue dramatic music.) In all seriousness, I’m honored to have been asked to contribute to the discussion.

Here’s the framing post for the discussion, written by Valerie Beaman and my three posts: L3C Cha Cha Cha, Need a new way of working? How about the old way?, and The Blurring/Vanishing/Missing Line Between Commercial and Nonprofit. And if you go to AftA’s Private Sector Blog and scroll to posts during the week of May 16-20 you can read the rest!

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