Jumper

Diane Ragsdale on what the arts do and why

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

Inspired by work and writings of John Cage and Rebecca Solnit

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Larson, Where the Hear Beats, 19-20

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Idea #1 – Wild Card Courses

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

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

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

Idea #2: An admission lottery system

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

Idea #3: Where’s the College President?

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

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

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

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

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

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

Brian Eno

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

On Aesthetics, Ethics, Economics, and Consequential Decisions of Cultural Leaders in the Long Now

El suplicio de Cuauhtémoc, 1892. Óleo sobre tela, 294.5 x 454 cm. Museo Nacional de Arte. Available on Wikimedia Commons.

A little over a year ago I had the great pleasure to be a guest on Erik Gensler’s podcast, CI to EYE (a program of Capacity Interactive, of which Gensler is the founder). We delved into a handful of topics including beauty and ethics, the relationship between the commercial and nonprofit theater, cultural leadership, and the costs of “permanently failing organizations.” (The episode can be accessed here.) Gensler ends his episodes by asking his guests what advice they have for the sector and he asked if I would pose mine in the form of a question. My question: What’s holding your feet to the fire?

I elaborated on this question, with the following reflections:

Missions are squishy; and buildings and bottom lines are not. And judgments about art are subjective. And human beings are often self-interested. And the nonprofit form lends itself to manipulation and to serving the interests of a few rather than the general public. …

I think that arts organizations need to be aware of these dynamics and can’t hang their hats [on], or trust, or lean into mission statements and values statements as enough to keep them moored to their purposes. … [W]e need non-negotiable principles or policies that … hold our feet to the fire so that when these forces are in play we are compelled to constrain ourselves from certain behaviors and actions that might otherwise lead us to … program an entire season that is white, western and womanless, for instance. …

I worry that boards and leaders sometimes stop short of setting those policies and instead want to trust themselves to make the rights decisions … but can then get edged off of doing the right thing when the bills need to be paid.

This blog post is about the relationship between the aesthetics, economics and ethics of cultural institutions and asserts that arts organizations need ethical and aesthetic guardrails that are as clear and firm as their financial ones, particularly in times like the present when truly consequential decisions are being made.

Part 1: On Aesthetic, Economic, & Ethical Judgments, Values, & Limits

Much of my work the past several years has been underpinned by an abiding concern with the relationship between ethics, aesthetics, and economics. My interest in these three forms of value and valuation began when I was working on my dissertation (examining the relationship between the commercial and nonprofit theater) and additionally teaching a class on beauty to business majors. My journey along this path has been greatly aided by discovering the work of scholar of finance, John Dobson, author of the Aesthetic Manager, who participated in an academic symposium I put together back in 2015.***

To begin, I would propose the following as essential questions asked from the perspective of each of these three forms of judgment / valuation.

  • An aesthetic judgment asks: Is it beautiful, excellent, or interesting?
  • An economic judgment asks: Is it profitable, valuable, or useful?
  • An ethical judgment asks: Is it morally right or wrong? Who benefits and who is harmed from this action?

I tend to think of these as setting key boundaries on the dominant logic (the mutually interdependent structures, practices, processes, conventions, rules, and beliefs) of any given cultural institution.

Economic value is often calculated as exchange value and economic limits can come from both internal and external constraints. For arts nonprofits, such constraints may include, among others: net assets and liquidity; costs of inputs (e.g. content, people, and technologies); whether or not there are a significant number of competitors locally or nationally for content, talent, audiences, or contributions; local and federal laws, including tax laws; the strength of the local and national economy, including unemployment; local population size (and whether growing or declining), socio-economic demographics, and values; and whether or not there are foundations, civic leaders, and government agencies interested to invest in having a robust arts and culture sector.

Almost invariably arts organizations in the US are established as 501c3 nonprofits, which are prohibited from distributing their profits to individuals (so they have neither owners nor shareholders). Importantly, cultural nonprofits in the US have historically tended to be praised and rewarded (by foundations, government agencies, boards, and other influential gatekeepers) for economic growth including facility expansion. For much of the twentieth century these were generally assumed to be an unqualified good thing–along with professionalism (in artists and in the realm of administrative capacity building) and permanence. The high value placed on these led to choices made decades ago that are still influencing the economics (and therefore aesthetics and ethics) of arts organizations today.**

Aesthetic values are broad ranging and can include such sensory attributes of excellence as: simplicity/complexity; dark/light; local/global; coherent/chaotic; conventional/disruptive; individual/ensemble; scripted/devised/improvised; aural/visual; fast/slow; formal/informal; passive/participatory; intimate/distant; and resourcefulness/extravagance. Aesthetic limits could be thought of as the constraints that make an entity an art firm rather than a church, hospital, widget factory or any other kind of firm. Arts institutions are, among others, outlets for artists and are key gatekeepers who make judgments about which cultural artifacts and experiences to preserve, protect, produce, curate, and present–and which to disregard. Through that process they advance a set of aesthetic values that are shaped by and shape the world around them. Put another way, they are influenced by and influence collective, taken-for-granted norms and beliefs concerning what is beautiful / excellent / interesting, and what is not.

Many establishment cultural institutions in the US were formed at a time when the democratization of high culture was an assumed social good; and cultural policy therefore often included initiatives aimed at providing opportunities for “everyone” to experience and appreciate the touchstone of white, Western European culture. Organizations trading in such culture were (and still are) often classified as the “benchmark” arts. Because of this, despite appealing to a narrow demographic, the purposes and aesthetics of symphony orchestras, e.g., were not categorized as being culturally specific (that is, of/by/for predominantly white, educated, upper middle class people) in the same manner as those of e.g. Black or LatinX theater companies. (H/T to Jamie Bennett, the first person I heard articulate this.)

One result of this privileging is that predominantly white institutions systematically received exponentially greater financial support and were therefore better able to grow their operations, expand their influence, and increase their power over time relative to organizations that were identified as culturally specific or community-based. One present-day challenge is to increase understanding and appreciation in the sector for a much broader range of aesthetic values than those advanced by the so-called “benchmark” arts. An excellent resource if you want to further engage this premise, is this Animating Democracy framework, Aesthetic Perspectives: Attributes of Excellence in Art for Change.

Ethical values include such things as trustworthiness, fairness, respect, caring, and responsibility. Ethical (or social) limits to a great extent come to the fore when we think about the kinds of behaviors that we imagine could (or should) distinguish cultural nonprofits from commercial entertainment industries. For example:

  • Pricing models: we might assume that in nonprofits something other than what the market will bear will guide this decision;
  • How much to pay artists and whether or not to retain rights to their work: again, we might assume that nonprofits would strive to maximize income to artists, and avoid extractive or exploitative practices;
  • Pay ratios: we expect corporate CEOs to pay themselves handsomely while others in their firms are struggling, however, we might not expect nonprofit executives to do so;
  • Whether and how to distribute decision-making authority: not only might we expect nonprofits to embrace self-organizing or collective organizing over command-and-control hierarchical cultures/structures, we might expect leaders to take the time to listen to external stakeholders before taking key decisions about the institution;
  • Whether and how to reinvest profits: while a for-profit firm might redistribute profits to shareholders or increase pay/bonuses to top executives, we might expect nonprofits to reinvest surpluses into core programs so that they can better serve their missions;
  • Whether to accept contributions from those with opposing values: we might expect nonprofits to be discriminating in whose money they accept if they are serious about advancing values like climate consciousness, freedom of expression, peace, or social justice; and
  • Whether to adopt policies aimed at ensuring an anti-racist, anti-oppressive, non-hostile, climate-conscious, disability friendly working environment: we might expect nonprofits to care about harms against people and earth more than those in the corporate sector.

Part 2: Which of these is in the driver’s seat? Which should be?

Which way do the arrows run in your institution? Which way would you like them to run?

Within the context of an organization’s dominant logic (or business model if you prefer), I conceptualize these three elements as mutually interdependent. That is, a shift in practice/belief made in one area will influence the other two. The 2020 pandemic is an interesting case in this. The exogenous shock of prohibitions on gathering (and therefore live attendance at cultural institutions) forced many organizations to change their conventional practice of producing live performances. In place of live performances, many began to produce or distribute digital performances. In doing so, many also began to articulate beliefs that digital performances are valuable (even if they had historically upheld “liveness” as an aesthetic value and had long eschewed such practices).

Regardless of the motivations for the shift, this is a decision that has now, in many cases, shifted the aesthetics of the firm and with it, we see the other two areas are now effected. For example, economically, this shift has altered such things as: the complexity, scale, and costs of production and distribution; the types of skills and knowledge needed to bring a production to the market; the number of people and geographic locations that can be reached by a work; the prices that can be charged; the shelf life of content; and the nature and number of competitors/substitutes (if markets now shift from local to global and the product shifts from live to online).

Likewise, ethically, this shift has raised such questions as:

  • Do existing artist contracts (including rights & royalties) adequately and fairly deal with the sudden and dramatic shift from the hitherto presumed standard of live performance of concerts, plays, musicals and dance performances to the presumed standard of digital distribution of these through the Internet?
  • When the pandemic is over should we return to international touring practices that consumed scads of jet fuel, or are we beholden to find more climate conscious ways of engaging in cultural exchange?
  • Are digital educational experiences potentially more harmful than beneficial to the goals of learning and meaning-making?
  • Is there a vital role for artists in this moment and should we therefore be investing our resources to support that work, even if it’s not historically part of our mission?
  • Are digital forms crowding out something vital that can only be achieved with human bodies gathered in person?
  • Do nonprofit cultural institutions now have an ongoing obligation to try to provide free or low-cost digital access to experiences that are otherwise inaccessible to those without the means or ability to access them?
  • Do we need to revisit our policies regarding who is allowed to telecommute and who is not? Do we need to compensate employees for their costs of working from home and ensure they have the supplies and resources they need to do their work effectively?

I would assert that, for most cultural nonprofits, economic values have long been crowding out ethical and aesthetic ones–and not only because buildings and bottom lines are firm and many missions are squishy. For one, in the words of one of my musical icons, Cyndi Lauper, money changes everything. More to the point of this post, however, economics is and has been in the driver’s seat primarily because it is and has been what gets the most attention from institutional leaders.

Most boards have finance and audit committees and dedicate time at each meeting to understanding the financial position of the organization. Boards are equipped and comfortable setting limits on, e.g. how far over budget or into debt an arts organization may go. They may set targets for reserves or endowment. They may fail to approve a budget that is not balanced and may ask executive leaders to make cuts if income is falling short. They may implement give or get policies and recruit board members with high capacity to contribute to ensure that the organization is able to reach its income targets each year.

On the other hand, how many cultural nonprofits have explicit, sophisticated, depth conversations at the board level in order to understand or come to agreement on the organization’s aesthetic values or ethical principles? Even more pointedly, how many organizations hold their feet to the fire by establishing measurable policies to operationalize these. The kinds of policies that might enable or compel board members to ask awkward questions when, for example, the season is announced and there are zero writers or composers of color in the lineup? Or when a pandemic hits and the decision is made to lay off all the teaching artists but hold onto the majority of marketing and development staff for the time being?

Arguably, a nonprofit cultural institution should be distinguished from a for-profit entertainment company. And one of the ways we might expect it to be distinguished is in ensuring that economic decisions are made in service of (or within the limits and full consideration of) a clear set of guiding aesthetic and ethical principles or policies. Without such constraints economic exigencies hold sway and loosely defined aesthetic and ethical values are stretched to make economics work.

Part 3: On the necessity of discourse and debate, particularly in these times

As with the 2008 financial crisis, many nonprofit cultural institutions have fixed their attention first and foremost on surviving economically. There are practical reasons for this. Without cash, any business (even one with a great mission) can become dead in the water. But also, quite often the line between solvent and not solvent is much clearer to see than the line between “fulfilling our mission” or not.

Nonprofit goals like “equality” and “excellence” are perceived to be difficult to assess; however, I would argue that this is the case largely to the extent that one has failed to define them for oneself and one’s institution. Vague mission and values statements are common in the sector and seem to be intentionally designed to allow for maximum freedom and flexibility, rather than to provide a crystal clear North Star. Notably, these first arose out of the corporate sector.

Before arts organizations began writing corporate mission statements many were founded with manifestos or their equivalent. One reason manifestos are so valuable is that they often include a clear articulation of the ways in which values will be interpreted or operationalized. (BTW, my friend, UK-based consultant Andrew McIntyre with MHM Consulting has been leading cultural nonprofits through the process of writing manifestos from the ground up for the past several years.)

Even without a manifesto, however, it is possible to do this work if one is willing to engage in a process aimed at clarifying values and setting policies that will constrain interpretations of these values. With a hat tip to Deborah Fisher, longtime executive director of the arts organization A Blade of Grass for the analogy, this process is not dissimilar to the interpretation of the constitution.* While the constitution is grounded in values, much of the law is about making value judgments, a process that requires ongoing discourse and deliberation. Also similar to the constitution, though it tries, a mission statement can’t predict all future events that might necessitate its re-interpretation; therefore, from time-to-time organizations may need to amend their policies. This last point is an important one. As I heard a speaker say at a workshop last week: Don’t lose sight of the philosophy behind the policy or practice!

Here’s a quite straightforward illustration: In 1947 when Margo Jones founded the first recognized nonprofit-professional resident theater in Dallas, Texas she adopted the principle of three weeks of rehearsal for every play. At the time, three weeks was significantly more than the amount of rehearsal (typically one week) customary in summer stock companies. Quality was a core value of Jones and the philosophy behind Jones’s principle was: “Let’s rehearse long enough to make sure we can produce a high-quality show.” Fast forward and the US regional theaters have an international reputation for being among the most efficient in the world. Why? In part because theater leaders following Jones held onto the practice of a pre-determined number of rehearsal weeks, however, they lost sight of the value and philosophy behind it. Much to the frustration of some artists, a standard in many theaters was adopted and maintained, regardless of the scale or complexity of a production, or level of completion of the text. If the value to be upheld was “quality” then arguably the policy should have been revised once it became clear that the number of weeks of rehearsal was inadequate to achieving that goal.

***

Some concluding thoughts.

Cultural nonprofits are being challenged on multiple fronts and are being forced to make some truly consequential decisions. At all times, but particularly under duress, I believe that institutions are at high risk of undermining their distinctive purposes (as ‘Art Firms’ and as ‘Nonprofits’) if they have not engaged in necessary discourse and debate (up-down-and-across the organization, with key external stakeholders, and at the board level) aimed at defining, debating, or shoring up ethical and aesthetic guardrails that are as powerful as present economic urgencies.

This is an extraordinary moment in which to deeply examine the economics, ethics, and aesthetics of cultural institutions; to ask which of these three areas is driving the decisions being made; and to debate and discuss questions like these:

  • Should we keep going?
  • What do we mean by keep going. (Does maintaining a building and a core group of administrators constitute quality of life for a cultural institution?)
  • Is it better to hibernate and preserve cash or continue to pay people and create value even if that means we may run out of cash at some point?
  • Who should be involved in making that decision–or any significant decisions made at this time?
  • What (values, people, practices, processes, structures, beliefs) must be held onto at all costs and what would we be wise to drop?
  • Are we sure we’ve articulated the right problem to be solved at this moment?
  • Who are we if we cannot produce shows/exhibitions in a live venue?
  • How does this moment change our understanding of the nature of certain art forms and their role in society?
  • What does art need to be at this moment and for the foreseeable future?
  • Who stands to be harmed by the outcomes of our decisions and who stands to benefit most from them?

If economics is in the driver’s seat as decisions are taken in the Long Now, and if ethics and aesthetics are therefore merely riding along, arts organizations may emerge on the other side of this pandemic with buildings, leaders, and cash in the bank; but may find they have lost the people, principles, and purposes that were far more essential.

Thanks for reading. Those struggling to keep cultural institutions afloat and those unemployed and struggling to find a way forward outside of institutions equally have my admiration, respect, and gratitude.

NOTES:

* A Blade of Grass is a phenomenal arts organization and they publish some extraordinary articles, films, and other content on their website. The current theme is Artists Organizing for Racial Justice. Check it out.

**If you are interested in the topic of permanence and the question of “when to stop” you might find value in reading my essay, “To What End Permanence?”(which you can read here), penned for the book A Moment on the Clock of the World. Here is also a blog post with further reflections on the essay and its lessons for the moment.

*** John Dobson conceives of three universes (the technical universe, the moral universe, and the aesthetic universe) and asserts that while humans ‘naturally’ gravitate to a mode of decision making that embraces each of these that modernism tended to push managers to exclude the aesthetic. He argues that in post-modernity aesthetics is being restored and thus managers will increasingly have the ability and necessity to embrace the aesthetic, as well as the moral and economic, to lead in the 21st century. His name for this expanded ability (drawing on Heidegger) is “dwelling poetically.” While I have gone in a different direction with my own research inquiry – seeking to understand how these three areas become mutually interdependent in business models – I continue to be inspired by John’s ideas and contributions.

Changes Afoot: What’s Next For Me

For those who don’t know, for the past three years I have been working in NYC at The New School, a progressive university with a rich history, located in the West Village of Manhattan. I was hired in 2017 as an assistant professor and program director at The College of Performing Arts to help build a new MA in Arts Management and Entrepreneurship for artists.

That program (MA AME) has now come to fruition, having graduated two cohorts—a total of 30 talented and socially engaged artist-entrepreneurs—and has a third cohort of 15 terrific students slated to graduate in spring 2021. During my tenure, I also had the opportunity to help design and launch a new graduate minor in Creative Community Development—one of several projects across the US to receive support from ArtPlace America under its last round of grants to support institutions of higher education. The graphic above is from the launch event for that graduate minor—a webinar with Sarah Calderon, Marty Pottenger, Juanli Carrión, and Yasmin Vega discussing the role of artists in equitable community development that you can watch here.

My three-year contract with The New School ends next week. While the College of Performing Arts generously offered me the opportunity to extend my time, in January I made the difficult decision to leave The New School when my current contract ends. I am deeply grateful to have been part of building these programs the past three years–it has been both a joy and a privilege. However, my heart and mind have been calling me to other lands, to other ways of being and living in the world, and to center work that has been squeezed into the margins the past few years.

What’s next? Read on …

Clockwise: My appearance on Erik Gensler’s podcast CI to Eye (see link below); Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity; a big stack of texts related to my dissertation; a report on the Amsterdam City Doughnut; my moving boxes; a business student at UW-Madison doing an exercise at the Chazen Art Museum for my course, Approaching Beauty taught in 2015; my husband and stepdaughers.

Time for Family in the Netherlands & Missouri

First and foremost, I miss my husband, stepdaughters, and the rest of my Dutch family. For the foreseeable future I want to work in the world in such a way that I can be based in the Netherlands with them and also spend some solid chunks of time with my parents, siblings, in-laws, nieces, and nephews back in Missouri.

Cultural Leadership @ Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity

For the past three years I have been teaching periodically at The Banff Centre for Arts and Creativity. In 2019, I was offered the opportunity to become the external director of the Cultural Leadership Program and co-lead faculty with my colleague, Alexia McKinnon.

I feel incredibly grateful and privileged now to have the opportunity to continue working with this incomparable institution and to take on an expanded role with this particular program, which is focused on helping arts leaders transform themselves and their institutions in response to the changing cultural context. The co-leadership structure enables us to bring together Indigenous and Western ways of being, doing, and knowing as we approach the philosophy and practices of cultural leadership. The program’s goals have become even more vital over the past few months; and as July begins, we are actively re-imagining a revised and expanded suite of programs as we head into next year. I could not be more enthused to have increased time and energy to devote to this work (about which I’ll say more in future).

Given my increased bandwidth, I am also looking forward to continuing to deepen and expand my skills as a facilitator, adviser, coach, and teacher at a time of immense cultural differences (to be celebrated), divides (to be understood) and changes (to be navigated).This past fall I took a course in Working Creatively with Conflict: 40-hr Basic Mediation and Conflict Resolution Training, a week-long intensive in Truth & Reconciliation Through Right Relations at Banff; and Patti Digh’s month-long online course Hard Conversations: Intro to Racism. These were all three exceptional programs that are already informing my work as a facilitator at Banff and elsewhere. (Other course recommendations welcome!).

My Back-Burnered Doctoral Dissertation

Working full-time for an academic institution, ironically enough, afforded me little opportunity to work on my dissertation. I am intent on moving it to the front burner and getting it DONE. My topic is the the evolution in the relationship between the commercial and nonprofit theater in the US since the mid-twentieth century, if you’re new to my dissertation saga.

And, yes, that is a book on making no-alcohol and low-alcohol craft cocktails in the stack of research books above. While not related to the dissertation it is a text I picked up on a vacation in Porto, purchased at the amazing Livraria Lello, that I suspect I will reference on an ongoing basis.

“The Amsterdam City Doughnut”

I am incredibly inspired to be moving back to the Netherlands at a moment when it is, evidently, exploring Doughnut Economics as part of its Covid-19 recovery plan. I am curious to learn more about The Amsterdam City Doughnut and how Kate Raworth’s Doughnut concept is being applied as a tool for city-level transformation. More generally, as a Dutch Citizen, I am enthused to jump in with both feet and become much more involved in the culture, politics, and social life of the Netherlands (and Europe more generally) than I was my first seven years living there. (If you know people and want to make intros, or want to connect directly, please reach out!)

Ongoing Work with Aesthetic Values & Beauty

This past year I developed a new workshop on aesthetic values in a changed cultural context for the Theater Management MA at the Yale School of Drama. This is also a topic I cover as a faculty member at Banff within the context of Cultural Leadership. When I finish my dissertation I would love to turn my attention back to beauty & moral imagination and build on the work I began with my course for business majors at the University of Wisconsin-Madison in 2015, Approaching Beauty; and the leadership intensive I facilitated for social and cultural entrepreneurs at Banff in 2017, The Aesthetic Advantage.

Provocateur-at-Large

Finally, though I have never officially hung out my shingle, so to speak, I have had a steady stream of requests for consulting, facilitation, research, writing, and speaking engagements the past 10 years since leaving The Mellon Foundation. I am now looking forward to having more time to invest in such work. This image is from my guest appearance last fall on Erik Gensler’s podcast CI to Eye. It offers a nice intro to me and the basket of questions I carry around. Erik and I talked about beauty, the purposes of nonprofit professional arts institutions, and much more.

Click here to listen to the episode.

*

Needless to say, I will miss teaching my soulful, tenacious, visionary MA AME students and supervising them on their beautiful capstone projects. I will miss the luminous and generous MA AME faculty, without whom there would be no program, as well as my comrades in Arnhold Hall 620. And I will miss my talented, inspiring, and incredibly hard working colleagues Maggie Koozer, Alex Chadwell, Raphael Anastas (also a graduate of the MA AME program), and Mac Blair, with whom it has been a pleasure and privilege to work on an ongoing basis.

An extra shout out to composer, teaching artist, and administrator Alex Chadwell, who joined me in late 2018 as a program coordinator and quickly became indispensable in helping me manage the program and take it to the next level. Alex, you were a lifesaver; and it was intellectually rewarding and a great joy to work with you day-in and day-out these past 18 months.

Barring travel disruptions, I will be headed back to the Netherlands this time next week. I leave grateful that so many are now fluent in Zoom meetings, happy hours, dinner parties, coffees, coaching sessions, conferences, lectures, interviews, breakouts, workshops, and much much more.

If you need to reach me, as always you can get in touch through the contact form located in the About section of Jumper, or LinkedIn.

Stay safe, stay awake, and thanks for reading!

When to Stop? My essay in “A Moment on the Clock of the World” in the context of Covid-19 & Black Lives Matter

In a 2018 I was invited by Melanie Joseph to write an essay for a book that would mark the final production of the company she founded 25 years earlier, The Foundry Theatre. The book, A Moment on the Clock of the World (pictured above) was published by Haymarket last fall. I am deeply grateful to Melanie Joseph & David Bruin for the invitation to make a contribution as well as for their editorial support, which made it a much better essay than I could ever have written on my own.

Melanie Joseph is a true activist-aesthete and The Foundry Theatre is that rare institution that has seamlessly produced exquisitely beautiful work while upholding social justice values. I write in my essay, on p. 118 of the book:

Among its most distinguishing features, the warp and weft of the organization were art and social justice. While these began as dyadic complements crossing in the organizational weave they eventually blended to create an entirely new and unexpected hue.

There is a great lesson in the Foundry’s work and evolution in this regard for many arts organizations at this particular moment and thus I highly recommend the book itself.

My essay, “To What End Permanence?,” takes a broader lens than the Foundry, however. It grapples with Institutionalization and the difficult organizational question of When to Stop. More specifically, it seeks to get beyond the question of economic solvency to examine other signs that it may be time to shut a thing down and other motivations for closing. As I write on p. 121:

The decision for an arts organization to endure beyond the founder needs to be about something more than whether there is a stash of fixed assets, sufficient cash in the bank, subscribers and donors willing to renew, players wanting to play, and individuals technically qualified and desiring to take over. And this something more has to do with what it means to be a living art firm.

There are predictions that we could lose a significant number of cultural institutions in the coming months due to Covid-19. As I began to argue in last week’s post, we should care greatly which institutions persist and the values, cultures, and practices they advance, represent, and embody. Put another way, given expected closings, we find ourselves at an inflection point when, between Covid-19 and the more than 750 cities protesting as of June 8, it should be possible to allow / stimulate a long overdue evolution in the arts and culture landscape—an evolution specifically in the direction of pluralism and cultural democracy.

To be clear, the evolution in a field or sector suggests the death of some types of organization and the birth and growth of other types of organizations–that is, those with characteristics that are better suited to the present environment. Organizational deaths have tended to be emotionally difficult and operationally clumsy for arts organizations. On p. 115 I write:

Arts organization deaths seem to come in two varieties: the shockingly swift kind, which leaves staffers, artists, and audiences out in the cold wondering what the hell happened; or the painfully slow kind, characterized by drastic measures and multiple resuscitations in the form of eleventh-hour appeals to stakeholders to step up with cash infusions to keep the doors open.

This is in part because the ideal of permanence has been baked into the DNA of the nonprofit-professional form of organizing since its inception. To a great extent the essay is aimed at unpacking and challenging the merits of permanence (or institutionalization) in the living arts, while weighing in on the decision to close the Foundry Theatre, rather than invite a cohort of producers in the company to take it over.

What the essay does not address head-on is the present moment and the implications for under-performing White Arts Institutions. By under-performing I don’t mean financially challenged (as most nonprofits consider themselves to be thus); I mean failing to deliver on their missions and goals. Now is the time for such organizations to exercise some moral imagination. Now is the time to recognize that the persistence of an institution that is in decline—and that is unlikely to turnaround and emerge as more relevant to the changing cultural context—harms the field because its existence comes at the expense of the necessary evolution I am describing.

Beyond the economic or mission-based reasons for closing, there are moral reasons for privileged White Arts Institutions that persist decade after decade—in large part because day-in and day-out, as well as at times of crisis, historically and today, they quite often have had easier access to money—to consider the resources, as well as the physical and cognitive real estate, they are capturing and controlling year-upon-year at the expense of organizations largely staffed, governed by, and serving one or more BIPOC populations.

For those brave leaders who recognize in the coming weeks and months that Now is the time to bring things to a close, one final thought: Perhaps consider how you might further advance necessary change in the landscape of arts and culture in the US by gifting any remaining assets to an organization that is, again, largely staffed, governed by, and serving one or more BIPOC populations, or one that is perhaps advancing pluralism, cultural democracy, or social justice goals through its existence or work.

I hope you will read the full essay published in A Moment on the Clock of the World (linked below) and I would love to hear your thoughts in response to it, especially in the context of Covid-19 and Black Lives Matter.

***

“To What End Permanence?” 

In A Moment on the Clock of the World, A Foundry Theatre Production, Edited by Melanie Joseph & David Bruin with a forward by Cornel West (Chicago: Haymarket Press, 2019) 111-122.

My contract with the Foundry Theatre generously gave me permission to post and distribute my essay as per April 1, 2020. Given the number of organizations that are currently struggling and trying to determine next moves now seemed as good a time as any to share it with a wider audience. However, I hope you will still consider buying the beautiful book, A Moment on the Clock of the World, edited by Melanie Joseph and David Bruin. At the moment Haymarket is offering a 30% discount if you purchase directly through them. It contains essays by 15 thinkers and reflections on the Foundry Theatre by Melanie Joseph running through the footnotes.

Here’s the essay. It’s a little of 3,000 words (a 10-minute read) so perhaps grab a cuppa jo.

Stay safe, stay awake, and thanks for reading!

With a country “on the brink” does it matter if your arts venue is shuttered?

By Singlespeedfahrer – Own work, CC0

In three short months Americans have shifted from tuning into the daily drama surrounding the democratic primaries, to daily Covid-19 briefings and debates over whether or not lives matter more than money, to now 24/7 coverage of the protests erupting across a reported 350 cities in the US (as of June 2) in the aftermath of the horrific killing of George Floyd—an act that has quickly become emblematic of systemic racism and the longstanding and escalating hatred, violence and injustices toward people of color in the US and in particular black people.

News commentators are characterizing the present moment as a “tipping point”—a country “on the brink,” unable to contain or carry the collective grief, anger, humiliation, fear, and desperation that so many are feeling. It is profound that performing arts venues and museums are dark at a moment when so many are clamoring for their thoughts, emotions, embodied pain, and voices to be expressed and heard by others. While our first impulse may be to mourn that many arts venues are darkened, I find myself sincerely wondering to what extent it matters that “flagship” cultural institutions in this country cannot put on tonight’s Show.

Had theaters, performing arts centers, museums and concert halls still been open—how much of the planned programming would have mattered in the context of 100,000 people dying of Covid-19? How much would have mattered in the context of last week’s unjust killing of a black man in Minneapolis and the paranoid hostilities against another in Central Park–and the injustices that have continued to mount since then?

I hear from nearly all corners of the arts sector that there is “no going back to normal” with the accompanying recognition that something fundamental needs to be redesigned in our systems to make them more equitable, healthy, and sustainable. If this is the case, it matters which arts organizations survive the next two years and which go away. It also matters greatly how arts organizations are defining their short-term and long-term crises and goals.

Since March 18th or so I’ve had the opportunity to share some reflections here and there on the pandemic. I’ve included links to these at the end of this post, which is aimed at synthesizing and developing some of my thoughts, as I continue to shelter-in-place in my Jersey City sublet and start week 12 on pause. Mine is but one voice among hundreds at this moment weighing in on this topic. I hope if folx see things differently they will raise counter-points in the comments or share links to their own ideas (or ideas of others) so that my thinking can expand and be tested.

One caveat: There are cultural organizations that are providing extraordinary value to their communities right now. This is post is highlighting areas of concern and future posts will highlight bright spots.

I.

To transcend the pandemic, purpose must transcend the box.

Still from KSTP Video

The pandemic shuttering has revealed the extent to which mission and venue are conflated for many nonprofit cultural institutions and the extent to which institutions are essentially in Show Business.When Broadway went dark I assumed it would only be a matter of days before many if not all other nonprofit stages in the US would go dark. What I didn’t expect was that cultural institutions would put themselves into a kind of programmatic hibernation—some until next spring—ostensibly, in an effort to preserve cash. Not only are shows cancelled (leading to lost gigs for many artists) but commissions are drying up, teaching artists are being laid off, and education programs are being suspended, as well. (Not everywhere but at plenty of places–including some rather well endowed institutions.)

Many organizations have simply replaced live shows with online shows (whether performances, galas, or discussions). Given the messaging that tends to bookend these online offerings many clearly are designed to Spur Donations Now, Reinforce the Institutional Brand, and Deliver on a Promise to Subscribers & Donors (so they return next year)–rather than, say, to support the economic welfare of artists (whose compensation may be minimal), to bring forward a piece that speaks to the moment, or to genuinely experiment with the intersection and integration of liveness and online platforms. (There are exceptions including e.g. Richard Nelson’s What Do We Need To Talk About? at The Public Theater, which appeared to do all three of these things quite well.)

It is telling that these are a few of the gnawing questions I keep hearing cultural leaders ask:

  • “When can we get back into the theater?”
  • “What would safe social distancing look like in the concert hall / theater / museum?”
  • “What’s the post-pandemic economic model?”

Here are some different (and I would argue more interesting and essential) questions posed by independent curator Carmen Salas in a recent Medium post:

In a world where we are already confronting critical interconnected challenges: climate change, the refugee crisis, food scarcity, system collapse, etc. I think it is essential that we continue asking these questions: what is the role of art at a time of social transformation? Why do we make art, for whom and does it make sense to continue using the same formats and materials? What should art be focusing on and what difference can it make? How far can artists go in social transformation without renouncing their role as creators/artists? When does it stop being art? Can the art world provoke and drive social transformation, a shift in values, making us rethink our relationship to material culture? Can it reveal new definitions of what progress means? Without doubt, the current situation leads us to question/rethink/reimagine the way art institutions, art practices and artists operate.

If one were to deconstruct any given cultural institution and look with fresh eyes at its assets, technologies, resources, networks, relationships, capabilities, forms of knowledge, artifacts, and symbolic capital how might it be of greatest value in the Now and in the Future?

Here’s one possibility imagined by Salas and posed in that same piece:

I had a dream last night. In my dream, our cities, communities and the natural environment are the museums and galleries of tomorrow. In my dream, the traditional exhibition spaces and art objects (material objects) no longer exist, and artists, cultural agents and creative practitioners collaborate with citizens, communities and professionals from other sectors (scientists, farmers and politicians) to design better systems and to co-create activities and programmes that encourage creativity and bring about social change.

Salas’s vision is quixotic if cultural institutions cannot imagine a fulsome purpose in the world that transcends putting on shows in their spaces–in large part because mission and venue have become so closely coupled they are now inseparable if not conflated.

II.

Art could lead now and reshape our institutions for the future. So why are artists being kicked to the curb?

Screen shot of Hyperallergic website. Full article here.

Back in March the journal Artivate wrote to those of us on the editorial board to ask if we’d like to share some Covid reflections. In mine I riffed on a video by Liz Lerman talking about cultivating a Toolbox Mentality and a Guardian article by Rebecca Solnit reminding us that this pandemic is going to reveal the strong, weak, and hidden in our society. My takeaway from these two:

  1. Now will be a time of rampant grassroots experimentation; if we’re lucky some of what we land on will lead us to develop new “tools” that will help us forge our way into the future (even if some experiments will essentially lead to coping mechanisms that help us sustain the status quo).
  2. We need to pay attention as this pandemic can reveal a great deal (e.g. our strong bits, weak bits, hidden bits, and seemingly solid but hollow bits)–if we are open to learning from it rather than merely vanquishing it. Among other things we may learn to discern the difference between these two types of experiments.

God help us if, instead of approaching this time with deep listening and moral imagination, we end up with “change strategies” that emerge from senior leadership, propped up by a consultant, who set out to determine what’s best for everyone and then push out their ideas to the rest of the staff–who will then be expected to get on board, even though the new strategies are not, it turns out, actually in their best interest. (For more on this I highly recommend the Adam Kahane book Collaborating with the Enemy: How to Work with People You Don’t Agree With or Like or Trust).

If arts institutions want to be relevant and responsive to the culture change, and if they want a mechanism for re-shaping themselves, they would be wise to begin by working in deep collaboration with artists (and others, as well, as I explore in the next section). Art leads. And yet artists are, for the most part, cut off from institutions at this moment that is demanding experimentation, observation, negative capability, courage, and empathy.

I was deeply saddened and frustrated, but not at all surprised, that actors, musicians, directors, and designers lost gigs and saw two-thirds of their income dry up overnight. I have been writing for the better part of the past decade about the ways that arts institutions have kicked artists to the curb over the past four decades (e.g. here and here). However, I was dumbfounded by cultural institutions who decided to suspend their education programs or lay off their teaching artists while holding on to a stable of marketing, development, or production types.

Teaching artists have not only personal relationships in communities but particularly valuable skills for this moment. They provide us with the means to share with one another what it means to be human; they give us tools to create joy and make meaning; they create scaffolds of learning all manner of things including, and through, an artistic practice; and they are great cultural translators, facilitators, mediators, and guides. If I ran a cultural institution right now, I’d be trying to hire as many artists as possible—and teaching artists and community-based artists, in particular—to help me understand how the institution might re-imagine itself and respond to the Now and re-build for the Future.

Now is the moment to care for the artists on whom cultural institutions depend—first for their welfare and second for their capacity to keep working, if desired. Now is the moment to develop covenants with artists, rather than contracts with Force Majeure clauses, and to take whatever resources remain from grants or donations intended to support cancelled productions and re-purpose them as, e.g., unrestricted artist grants. Now could be a time for artists to think, undertake research, plan, practice, experiment, document, reflect, read, learn, network, collaborate, design, build, write, develop new skills, care for the archive, flesh out a business plan (perhaps with some technical assistance from a larger cultural institution), or even relocate to a city with better prospects, to start anew.

III.

Governance must be addressed if we really want a better future for all. So do we?

Flyer for an event launching a new graduate minor at The New School in Creative Community Development. Photo from Marty Pottenger.

For all the talk about wanting to see the sector re-build in a manner that will leave it healthier, more equitable, and more sustainable, I haven’t yet heard much talk about re-vamping governance structures, policies, and practices. Many have been pushing for a revival of the W.P.A. and, like others, I have been thinking a lot about workers movements and, in particular, cooperatives.

On a hunch I Googled worker cooperative and 501c3 and landed on the page for the Sustainable Economies Law Center, which calls itself a Worker Self Directed Nonprofit (basically worker coop meets 501c3), and which seeks to help other such entities come into existence with training and a range of resources. Here’s a recent article on the growth in cooperatives this past decade, now primed for a significant bump as a result of the economic crisis stemming from Covid-19 and tens of millions of disenfranchised workers.

A couple key takeaways from browsing this overview page, which includes a one-hour webinar (which I recommend):

  • Every member of the organization is compensated equally for their work at a level that relates to the regional living wage (lawyers make the same as everyone else) and everyone works 30 hours per week and has a flexible work schedule and time off policy;
  • They have a decentralized governance structure in which all workers have the power to influence the programs in which they work, the conditions of their workplace, their own career paths, and the direction of the organization as a whole;
  • They work closely with an advisory board made up of a diverse cross-section of representatives working in community and designed to create an additional layer of accountability to other organizations, movements, and communities they exist to serve;
  • They have a traditional board that meets regularly that ensures that there is compliance with the mission, hires and fires leaders, sets policy, and approves the budget; and
  • They are fully transparent about their finances and operations.

On its website, SELC quotes a review of The Revolution Will Not be Funded edited by the INCITE! Women of Color Against Violence collective. The passage conveys the major downside of the traditional nonprofit governance model for those who want to change the world, for real:

The nonprofit system has tamed a generation of activists. They’ve traded in grand visions of social change for salaries and stationery; given up recruiting people to the cause in favor of writing grant proposals and wooing foundations; and ceded control of their movements to business executives in boardrooms.

UTNE Reader, The Revolution Will Not Be Funded: It’s Time to Liberate Activists from the Nonprofit Industrial Complex

Here are just a few of the benefits SELC has discovered with its model:

… [W]e’ve found that giving our staff significant decision-making power and autonomy has made us 1) more effective at advancing our mission to create more just and resilient economies, 2) more accountable to each other and our community, 3) more resilient and adaptive to change, and 4) more fun and empowering to be part of!

Imagine that!

I am inspired and intrigued by this model and actively learning more.

In contrast to SELC, establishment cultural institutions tend to operate with a traditional hierarchical nonprofit governance structure that is loose, unaccountable to stakeholders, and designed to serve the special interests of: institutionalized philanthropy with their carrots and sticks, donors who serve on the boards of institutions, corporations and industry partners, and (not always, but often enough) the personal interests of their leaders who amass enormous top-down decision making power and quite often a correlating exponentially higher salary over time. All the while artists responsible for the actual substance and content of the mission and staffers on the front lines who are working round-the-clock running the programs and interfacing day-to-day with those the institution exists to serve have little autonomy, collective decision-making authority, or capacity to influence the direction of the institution.

And this dynamic shapes and is shaped by inequities in the sector overall, which are revealed in our hourglass-shaped, winner-take-all cultural sector comprised of a small number of giants at the top, thousands of lightly institutionalized entities in the bottom, and an exceedingly fragile and vital, often undervalued, middle that connects the two.

It is being predicted that we could lose a significant number of cultural institutions in the coming months and years. We should care greatly which institutions endure and the values and material practices for which they are carriers. As institutions approach or achieve collapse there is great potential for new, more equitable governance models to be explored within the existing 501c3 corporate form.

This is a critical time to re-think not only these issues–the role of art in society and the business that cultural institutions are in, the link between mission and venue, the relationship of artists to institutions, and governance structures more generally–but also growth in the sector (how it is defined and where it is taking us exactly), the natural lifecycles of cultural organizations (i.e. why permanence is an unquestioned goal in the nonprofit arts and culture sector in the first place), and the relationship between the economics, aesthetics, and ethics of institutions.

More to come on these over the next few weeks.

Stay safe, stay awake, and thanks for reading.

***

Here are the links to recent Covid-19 related reflections:

The Changing Face of Arts Engagement: My remarks at the Stratford Festival Forum

Rendering of the Tom Patterson Theatre, opening in 2020 at the Stratford Festival, designed by Siamak Hariri of Toronto-based Hariri Pontarini, an architect passionate about the transformative potential of architecture. Image: the Stratford Festival website.

Earlier this month I had the privilege and pleasure to speak at the Meighan Forum at the Stratford Festival–a public lecture series hosted by the renowned theater festival in Stratford, Ontario, launched in anticipation of the opening of the new Tom Patterson Theatre in 2020, which will feature a dedicated forum space. I was particularly grateful for the quality and depth of the questions, moderated brilliantly by Ted Witzel a theatre-maker and programmer who also has a blog, which I highly recommend. Since the Q&A was not captured in the transcript I thought I’d reflect on a couple of the questions here.

One of the first, centered on whether the Stratford Festival should be expected to focus on diversity in its programming and audiences, given that Stratford, Ontario is a largely white community. This is a question I’ve encountered before from arts leaders.

I responded first by suggesting that we have perhaps gone down an unhelpful path in the arts by channeling much of the energy around diversity, equity, and inclusion into the goal of having a “representative” staff and board and drawing a “representative” audience as this by-the-numbers approach may lead some to conclude that cities with low percentages of people who are non-White do not have an obligation to concern themselves with diversity. Moreover, focusing on quotients does not, in and of itself, address the racial climate of an institution.

I then talked about having grown up in the suburbs of St. Louis, Missouri and having known a grand total of four black people before I went to college in New Orleans: the one black girl in my all-girls Roman Catholic college prep high school; a cousin that was adopted into my family; and two men who worked for my father. I then remarked (and I’m paraphrasing from memory):

“Growing up and living as an adult without exposure to people who are different from you (on any number of dimensions of diversity) is part of what contributes to fear and misunderstanding and a feeling of “the other” and even “us” versus “them.” Thus, I would say it is perhaps more important in places like Stratford–or other places in the world that have low ethnic or racial diversity–that arts organizations tell the stories of those who are not represented. One of the ways we can gain empathy and understanding of people, places, and experiences outside of our day-to-day existence is by going to the theater where we can be asked to imagine them.”

Another patron asked what she could do to help engage the estimated 51% of the local population that is lower income and unlikely to be able to afford tickets. Among other suggestions, I took the opportunity to talk about Nina Simon’s book The Art of Relevance and her nudge to arts organizations to cultivate “open-hearted insiders … who are thrilled to welcome in new people.” I explained that cultural institutions can’t make this shift without their patrons moving with them. I’ve written more about this here.

In the past ten years I’ve given dozens of talks but none for the general public (as I’m generally speaking to those working in the cultural sector). I realized during the Q&A for this forum how much I miss talking with arts patrons–with whom I haven’t had much day-to-day engagement since co-leading On the Boards with Lane Czaplinski, and running the Festival at Sandpoint before that.

Those who have read previous talks will recognize some anecdotes; however, there are definitely new ideas throughout and particularly in the middle. It’s a relatively short talk (9 pages). Here, again, is a link to the transcript.

Thanks for reading and I am, as always, grateful for any comments you might like to share.

My panel remarks at the IU Center for Cultural Affairs Symposium: New Frontiers in Arts Research

This past Wednesday I participated in a symposium at Indiana University, as part of the opening of its new Center for Cultural Affairs. Among other programs, the Center features a new Arts, Entrepreneurship, and Innovation Lab launched in collaboration with the National Endowment for the Arts; and will also help to support a new a doctoral fellowship program.

It was a terrific day of discussions aimed primarily at surfacing possible areas of future research for the Center. I was on a panel moderated by Doug Noonan, Professor at the O’Neill School at IU. Others on the panel were Will Miller, President of the Wallace Foundation, Michael Orlove, Director of State, Regional and Local Partnerships at the National Endowment for the Arts, and Bronwyn Mauldin, Director of Research and Evaluation at the LA County Arts Commission. Our broad topic was “Demonstrating Impact of the Arts in Society” and we were asked (among other reflections) to identify questions that, if answered, would enable tangible progress in the arts and culture sector.

As we discussed on one of our planning calls, each panelist was approaching the topic from a different perspective. My own was, for better or worse, informed by having worked in a variety of roles: from being a practicing theatermaker early in my career, to working in various administrative and leadership roles at nonprofit cultural institutions, to being a philanthropoid at Mellon with Susan Feder, and finally to being an academic directing two programs in cultural leadership, as well as a blogger and ponderer and provocateur at large.

I’ll let my comments speak for themselves but will leave you with the following reflection from Iris Murdoch which was on my mind when I wrote my remarks:

A good society contains many different artists doing many different things. A bad society coerces artists because it knows that they can reveal all kinds of truths.

Iris Murdoch (1997)
Existentialists and Mystics: Writings on Philosophy and Literature, p. 18.

Panel Remarks by Diane Ragsdale at the May 9, 2019 “New Frontiers in Arts Research” symposium at the launch of the Center for Cultural Affairs at Indiana University

Good afternoon!

It is a pleasure and privilege to be here. My sincere thanks to Joanna Woronkowicz, Doug Noonan, Michael Rushton, and others at the O’Neill Center at Indiana University for the invitation and opportunity to be here. And congratulations on the launch of this new Center!

I have wrestled for the past decade or so with, essentially, two sets of questions in my own research practice.

One set underpins my doctoral research, which examines the relationship between the nonprofit and commercial theater in the US. Essentially, I’m seeking to understand how interactions and distinctions between these two types of theater have evolved since the mid-twentieth century and how, in particular, artistic control and aesthetic values have shifted.

A second set of questions stems from having taught a course in beauty and aesthetics for business school students, aimed at helping them see the world (and valuate experiences in life) through something other than an economic lens–through, essentially, an aesthetic lens.

The enduring questions arising from that experience have been:

  • What is the relationship between beauty and human development?
  • Can developing the capacity to form aesthetic judgments help business leaders and other professionals approach critical decisions holistically and contextually?
  • If so, how do you cultivate such a capacity? What are the practices in the classroom, in the cultural center, in life?

I give you this context because it informs my opinions on the topic at hand.

Without further ado, here is an odd assemblage of six or so observations, provocations, pet peeves, and wishes.

First, an observation. I recently attended a small confab in Montreal organized and co-hosted by the Metcalf Foundation and Canadian musician and academic David Maggs who is artistic director of Gros Morne Summer Music in Newfoundland. The topic was art and social impact. One of the questions Maggs gave us to think about in advance of the meeting was this:

Who is authoring this expanding [“social change”] role the arts are expected to play? Artists? Researchers? Activists? Funding and policy personnel?

David Maggs, Phd

It’s a really good question. Anecdotally, it feels like quite a bit of arts research in the US that succeeds in getting traction is done by consultants hired by private foundations, government agencies, trade associations, or large organizations. This has no doubt skewed the kinds of problems and questions that are pursued.

Second, a pet peeve: I wonder if we could consider removing the term “intrinsic impacts” from our lexicons? As the sculptor and blogger Carter Gillies has schooled me, this pairing is incongruous (and also just awkward) as “impact” is “already the language of instrumentality and … denote(s) an effect … what something can be good for.”

In other words, not belonging to the nature of the thing itself.

Third, like others I have been critical of the widespread use of economic impact studies to justify investments in the arts. I have lately added to this lament an additional ethical concern about undertaking economic impact studies in the arts without additionally undertaking what are often called cultural impact assessments. I am following Arlene Goldbard in this who has been a fierce advocate for the adoption of such studies. As the people-powered US Department of Arts & Culture website states (for which Goldbard is Chief Policy Wonk):

Community development policy is marred by a widespread proclivity to see communities of color and low-income communities as disposable in the face of economic “progress.” Longstanding neighborhoods and cultural and social fabric are demolished to make way for new freeways or sports stadiums.

STANDING FOR CULTURAL DEMOCRACY
THE USDAC’S POLICY AND ACTION PLATFORM SUMMARY

Of course, it’s not just new freeways and sports stadia that harm the local culture. Things done in the name of arts-related “community cultural development” can do as well.

Fourth, and related to this, it seems we spend so much time these days trying to justify the value or worth of historic investments in what we’ve still got (and significant parts of that picture are enduring flagship institutions) we seem to be failing to assess the cultural consequences of what has been lost.

What is lost in the culture when the only theater company in the region dedicated exclusively to new plays is extinguished?

 Or when mergers happen in the arts and entertainment industries?

Or when vital (but often smaller) experimental or community-based arts organizations are weakened and sometimes made redundant as large flagship institutions expand their footprints or get hefty grants to essentially co-opt their missions?

Or when that flagship institution itself collapses?

Fifth, I wonder if we might undertake more research seeking to understand how the arts work on individuals over a lifetime; or on communities over generations. Mark Slouka once wrote of humanities scholar Danielle Allen, a trustee at the Mellon Foundation when I was there a decade ago: “[She] patiently advances the argument that the work of the humanities doesn’t reveal itself within the typical three- or five-year cycle, that the humanities work on a 50-year cycle, a 100-year cycle.”

I’ve long been compelled by this statement as it also seems to speak to the way “the arts” work.

Are we examining this 50-year cycle? This 100-year cycle? Cultural centers, arts ed programs, public arts programs, independent cinemas, bookstores, small shops and clubs that make a town distinctive, etc.—these all “work” on their communities over time; they “work” on the hearts and minds of individuals over time, as well.

And by work I mean a number of things but one of these arguably has something to do with influencing values–aesthetic values, economic values, and social or ethical values.

But philanthropy is impatient and so is government and we seem to abandon initiatives every five years sometimes because they haven’t shown results and this is in large part because we don’t have a realistic idea about how long this work takes.

And at the same time is it possible that some of the resource-and-energy-intensive institutions started 50 or 100 years ago may be coming to the end of their cycle? And, if so, now what?

Sixth, something woolly that is not yet clearly formed.

It seems we now have sufficient data going back 50-70 years on various global, national, and local (city, neighborhood, school district) cultural policy regimes to undertake historical comparative research aimed at understanding the relationship between divergent cultural policy approaches (including the aesthetic values prioritized or problematized by them) and any number of social dimensions. For example, cohesion, division, tolerance, trust, corruption, cognitive empathy, oppression, racism—all the stuff some of us are desperately worried about in the US these days.

Finally, two wishes.

Wish One: alongside seeking to measure the “impact” of “the arts” on the economy, on well-being, or on other social goods, I wish “the arts” could be understood and treated as one of several measures of a “good” society.

Wish Two: After presenting at a conference on “the arts” and well-being at University of Wisconsin Madison last year that pulled together philosophers, economists, medical scientists, sociologists, religious studies scholars, artists, anthropologists and historians I wish there were more such conferences.

Thank you for your kind attention.

My remarks at the 8th World Summit on Arts & Culture

This past week I had the privilege to participate in the 8th World Summit on Arts & Culture, produced by the International Federation of Arts Councils and Culture Agencies (IFACCA). The Theme of the 2019 Summit, which took place in Kuala Lumpur, Malaysia, was Mobile Minds: Culture, Knowledge and Change. And the panel on which I spoke was listed as a provocation called: Actors in Change. Below is a transcript of my remarks.

Good morning!

It is a privilege and pleasure to be here with all of you and to have an opportunity to offer some reflections today, which are rooted in my personal experiences within primarily a US context and consciousness. My sincere thanks to Magdalena Moreno Mujica, Kiley Arroyo, and others at IFACCA for the invitation.

A few weeks back, on a Zoom call, Magdalena suggested that I talk about “cultural leadership”—my current focus at both The New School and Banff Centre for Arts & Creativity—within the larger frame of “what makes change difficult.” She then remarked, “It’s important to know that this is not about Arts Practice. It’s about the Policy Space.”

I wrote down her statement thinking, “Got it!”

But later I thought, “Wait a minute …”

Because if I were to pinpoint anything that is making change difficult, anything in which I would center cultural leadership at this moment, it would be in aesthetic values and in practices that we might characterize as artistic.

So that’s what I have decided to talk about. (This is a 12-minute talk in three sections and the first section is the longest.)

#1. On Controlling the Means of Production

On February 28th, the American theater lost an important cultural figure: John O’Neal, who founded with a few friends the boundary-breaking Free Southern Theater, which was part of the Black Arts Movement in the US and allied with the civil rights movement. In a 1964 interview with The New York Times (cited in this recent New York Times obituary), O’Neal said of his troupe:

We want to strengthen communication among Southern blacks and to assert that self-knowledge and creativity are the foundations of human dignity. …

In the South it has been very hard for a Negro to look at and see anything but a distorted view of himself.

These words feel even more vital in the US today than in 1964. Between politicized news channels and filtered Facebook feeds, it feels like none of us has the possibility of a clear view of self or others.

The US is not alone in this. In so many places, the social imaginary is a highly contested space; and this is one of the reasons, of course, we need artists.

John O’Neal’s Free Southern Theater was practicing what some would call community cultural development, which my friend Dudley Cocke defines as: “developing the intellectual, emotional, spiritual, and material traditions and features of a community.”[1]

Dudley is a legend in his own right and was a longtime friend and theatrical comrade of John O’Neal. With others he formed Roadside Theater in Whitesburg, KY to serve the people of the central Appalachian region of the US—to help them tell their own stories. He and others in his company then took their methods on the road to help others tell their stories.

If the arts hold the potential to bring people together across divides on equal terms, Roadside Theater is one of a handful of US cultural organizations I know that has actually done this for years. Its own artistic practices combined with policies in its contracts ensure that for every performance an audience shows up that is representative of the socio-economic demographics of the community.

Last year Dudley contributed a chapter in the anthology Arts and Community Change, in which he wrote, “Those who control the means of cultural production control the stories the nation tells itself.”[2] It is a common refrain of his.

The work of Roadside Theater has been squarely aimed at disrupting this production system and fostering the democratic culture that so many of us claim we want to see. However, in the US, such community-based cultural organizations do not have (and have not had for decades) an equal opportunity to develop and grow.

This is in large part because in the US we still embrace the notion of the democratization of elite culture and our notion of excellence in the arts is still largely based in an “aesthetics of dominion” copied from Europe.

What do I mean by that?

“Aesthetics of dominion” is a powerful, poignant phrase I first heard used by composer Ashley Fure the evening before I flew to Kuala Lumpur. She used the concept within the context of a brief but extraordinary talk on the long-term cultural consequences of music notation—which (as some of you may know) emerged from Charlemagne’s desire to control the means and quality of church music production in his empire. As her talk clearly demonstrated, we are living with these consequences to this day.[3]

Not dissimilar to the influences of Charlemagne’s intervention, one can see in the US the long-term cultural consequences of the desire of organized philanthropy and government agencies to ensure high quality throughout their “empires” by developing criteria, models, and indicators of success that have basically resulted in the exponential growth of a small number of large, well-housed, historically white institutions, who to this day capture most of the sector’s resources.

To wit, A 2011 report from Helicon Collaborative found that more than half of the sector’s revenue goes to less than 2% of cultural institutions. These larger, prestige institutions “focus primarily on Western European art forms, and their programs serve audiences that are predominantly white and upper income.” A second study released in 2017 found the picture had only worsened. 

If the flow of money determines to a great extent who controls the means of cultural production, in the US we seem to be dominated by commercial interests (on the one hand), or elite interests advanced through the nonprofit industrial complex (on the other). Imagine what distorted stories our nation continues to tell itself as a result?

Even though we’ve lately seen an embrace of “social justice” ideals across the sector, it is quite difficult to trust this turn—in part because if historically powerful institutions are the evident backers of this “social justice movement” one can be almost guaranteed that they will design their interventions to contain any possibility of actual revolution in the cultural sector and any genuine shift in the power balance. 

We can’t keep dolling out small grants to the actors of change in Horizon Two and expect control of the means of cultural production to shift.

No matter the rhetoric about arts and social justice, or cultural democracy, the status quo will persevere as long as corporate and elite interests continue to control the flow of resources and continue to funnel a majority of those resources to sustaining Horizon One institutions—whose economics, aesthetics, and ethics are decreasingly fit for future purpose.[4]  

#2. On Beauty in a Business School:

A few years back I designed and taught an experimental course in aesthetics and beauty for business students at the University of Wisconsin-Madison. The course was an opportunity for those trained to look at the world through an economic lens, to practice seeing the world through an aesthetic lens and thereby learn a different basis for valuation and decision making. 

To be clear, this was not a course in arts appreciation. I was not concerned with having students experience a canon of great works. A premise of the course was that beauty is whatever wakes you up, grabs your attention and breath, stills your mind and heart, and decenters you.

A child. A whale surfacing. A Giacometti sculpture. A tattoo. A story. The closing argument in a court case.

The beautiful experience was also not the end—it was the means, the spur, the teacher, the stimulus intended to stir these business students to imagine, create, and one day perhaps work to build a better world.

When asked how the course had affected them, students said:

  • I do things I wouldn’t do.
  • I look at things harder.
  • I see other people’s points of view. I think, “There might be more going on here so I won’t jump to a conclusion.”
  • I am re-evaluating relationships in my life. I am asking whether I’ve had the emphasis on the wrong things.
  • I am thinking about homework differently—how to make it creative, not anxiety provoking.
  • I’m trying to focus on the process, not the product.
  • I am slowing down.

One student said, “This course is teaching us how to care.”

I would say the beauty course was essentially a course in human development and moral imagination.

The US has become a “market society,” to use Michael Sandel’s term, in which market values, market incentives and market relations dominate.[5] We desperately need business leaders, lawyers, doctors, police officers, government workers, politicians, policy makers, heads of NGOs (including cultural institutions), and others in positions of power and authority to exercise wiser, more responsible, cultural leadership. To have skills in empathy, collaboration, and creative problem-solving. To be able to look beyond self-interest and distinguish excellence from its byproducts, money and fame (to quote John Dobson’s article, Aesthetics as a Foundation for Business Activity).

And for this to happen our education system must change and we in the arts and culture realm must care more about that than we presently do.

#3. On Cultural-Enterprise Skills for Artists

I am currently working—in one of my capacities—as Asst. Professor and Program Director at The New School, helping to launch an Arts Management and Entrepreneurship Master’s degree. There are dozens of arts management programs in the US; this is the only master’s program in arts management that is offered exclusively to artists, who are required to continue their artistic practice, as they learn about finance, and creative producing, and community cultural development, and a host of other things.

I agreed to help launch this program because I believe artists need such skills so they can have greater agency, autonomy, impact and influence in this world—so they can exercise cultural leadership.

If we are scratching our heads and wondering why things in the sector haven’t changed—if we are having a hard time moving towards the unknown future—perhaps this is in part because when we gather to deliberate and decide about important cultural matters in the US artists often don’t have seats at the table; or if they do administrators or other professionals outnumber them 20 to 1; or we have invited them in but have put them in service of pre-determined strategies and goals—rather than bringing them in as actors of change.

If we want to reduce the policy-practice gap then I believe practicing artists need to have keys to buildings, seats at the heads of boardroom tables, posts in government, power over budgets, and access to data.

In closing I’d like to offer three summary questions:

  1. Who controls the means of cultural production and how might existing policies, while celebrating and encouraging Horizon 2 activity, be perpetuating Horizon 1 power structures?[6]
  2. To what extent are existing cultural policies engaged with changing educational policies, which at primary, secondary and tertiary levels are more-and-more aimed at training future workers rather than well-rounded humans with the capacity to participate fully in our democratic experiment?
  3. Are practicing artists—representing in diverse ways the full spectrum of cultural production—central to and powerful within our institutions; and, if not, why not?

Thank you for your kind attention.

[1] Cocke, D. (2015). Community Cultural Development as a Site of Joy, Struggle, and Transformation in Max O. Stephenson, Jr. and A. Scott Tate (Ed’s) Arts and Community Change. (New York and London: Routledge) p. 136.  

[2] Ibid, p. 162.

[3] Ashley Fure was a speaker on a panel on the topic of Creating (in) a More Just Society, co-produced by The College of Performing Arts at The New School and International Contemporary Ensemble on March 7, 2019.

[4] The Three Horizons framework was discussed at the conference. If you aren’t familiar with the framework, it is a tool for structuring thinking about future innovations, including social change. Horizon One represents the present state of things, most aspects of which will be decreasingly fit for future purpose; Horizon Three represents the future state we imagine and hope to create; and Horizon Two represents the space of experimentation and green-housing that will help us make the transition between the two.

[5] See Michael Sandel’s 2012 book, What Money Can’t Buy: The Moral Limits of Markets

[6] See Footnote 5 for a description of the Three Horizons Framework

Is it time to resurrect the artistic leader discretionary fund?

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At one point in my tenure as a philanthropoid at the Andrew W. Mellon Foundation I went back to the board dockets of decades past to try to piece together the evolution in the Foundation’s theater and dance grantmaking over time. In some early dockets I discovered a number of grants awarded to arts organizations to support what the Foundation called (if memory serves) an artistic leader discretionary fund. I was amazed by the discovery.

After a recent conversation with Arts Emerson’s David Dower, it struck me that the theater field (perhaps other parts of the arts and culture sector, as well) are overdue for some philanthropic entity (not necessarily Mellon) to resurrect something akin to a New Artistic Leader Discretionary Fund.

Not only have we recently witnessed a significant turnover in artistic leadership positions in the nonprofit-professional theater, but after decades of watching the sector play musical chairs with leadership positions, a number of top posts have gone to women, or people of color, or others who, though mid-career in many cases, are taking the helm of an institution for the first time.

HowlRound has recently published a series of posts on this seismic shift in the theater, featuring discussions with outgoing and incoming leaders, among others. (The screen shot above captures one of the posts.) In an essay introducing this series, David Dower writes:

There is a lot at stake here. Not just for the individuals or the institutions directly engaged in transitions. These risks are ours as a field. If the institutions with incoming individuals—many of them women and people of color who have been long kept out of these roles—stumble, we open the door to old arguments about “readiness” and “qualified candidates” that have masked and abetted the dominance of the white male in our field.

(BTW, I did an interview for this series with Bill Rauch, who is exiting his post at Oregon Shakespeare Festival this coming summer to take over the new Perelman Center in NYC, in which we discussed values alignment.)

To perhaps state the obvious, what I’m calling for is distinct from awarding funds to support a specific proposal 6-12 months into the tenure of a new leader, putting forward a new strategy that is aligned with the priorities of a foundation. I am advocating for a genuine discretionary fund that says, “Welcome to your new job! We don’t care how you choose to spend this money, we are backing you.”

Why do we need such grants–and why now? They would provide critical, immediate endorsement and leverage for these new leaders. When a new artistic director is the embodied mechanism for necessary change in an institution it seems important that this individual have power to effect a new strategy. It is naïve to assume that just because the roles may look equal on the org chart that new artistic leaders feel they can command the same authority over the institution and its budget, data, brand, staffing, programming, stakeholder relations, contracts, union negotiations, or board meeting agendas as their (perhaps longer-standing) managing directors or executive directors. There is nothing like bringing a nice chunk of cold, hard cash to an institution within one’s first few months (with perhaps the strong possibility of more where that came from) to gain a more solid seat at the table.

On a more tactical level, as anyone who has taken over an organization at the start of a season planned by a predecessor knows, it can be important early on to signal if change is coming and, if so, the direction of that change. Funds would enable these leaders to bypass existing budgetary and programmatic constraints and e.g. jump start a few initiatives, or make a few high profile commissions, or add an event to the season, or undertake some necessary research and development, or invest in more PR, or make a critical hire. Such early actions and investments can speak volumes and help to spur other stakeholders (many of whom are waiting-and-seeing) to jump on board.

For those rolling their eyes thinking, “An artistic leader discretionary fund is so … old school” I would counter by arguing that if we are, indeed, living in a time when those with different backgrounds, perspectives, identities, aesthetic values, and priorities are, at increasing rates, moving into critical leadership positions then quick and meaningful backing of these individuals would actually be quite strategic for those who care about, say, social justice or the role of arts organizations in culture change, or having a more vibrant and relevant arts sector.

For years many have been saying that necessary change in the arts and culture sector would not come until there was a new generation of leaders holding the reigns of the major institutions. Well, they’ve arrived. But to enact necessary change they need to be in a position in which they can afford to lose some longtime subscribers and ticket buyers, lose some donors, lose some staff, lose some board members, lose some sponsors, or even lose the plot for a bit—and carry on with confidence nevertheless.

Do the new artistic leaders coming into institutions today (particularly women and people of color) feel the backing of their boards? Do they feel authorized to make necessary changes? Has the risk capital been raised and set aside to support their first three years and possible financial losses? Or are they being cautioned from a few too many fronts not to rock the boat and not to do anything to disrupt the finances, the relationship to the community, or the general vibe of the place?

The New Artistic Leader Discretionary Fund concept hearkens back to a time when artists were trusted with money and when not every penny a nonprofit spent had to be accounted for in advance of spending it. Is it a coincidence that this was also a time when the leaders of establishment cultural institutions were quite often white and male?

I don’t know …

What I do know is that it would be incredibly refreshing to see one or more foundations grant this same level of historic trust to this new, beautifully diverse generation of leaders.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

Why is that?

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

What’s my point?

Artists are doing something about it, same as always.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

She says this is, in part …

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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

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

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

From the Wikipedia Commons

From the Wikipedia Commons

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

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

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

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

How did this happen?

Virginia Woolf writes in her book, Three Guineas:

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

So how do we begin again?

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

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

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

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

It’s a small way to begin.

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

***

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

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

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

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The Arts in a Civic World Upside Down

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

But are they?

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

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

occupy-wall-street-posterThe Civic World Upside Down

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

He said:

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

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

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

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

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

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

I’ve asked many of these questions myself.

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

On Civic Leadership

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

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

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

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

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

You can hear the common threads in these elaborations.

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

Civic Capacity is made up of three components:

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

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

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

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

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

Change is needed.

Conclusion

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

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

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

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

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

There is a challenge/opportunity before all of us.

I leave you with two final questions:

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

***

[1] Chrislip & O’Malley 2013, p. 3

[2] Chrislip & O’Malley, p. 5.

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

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

[5] Chrislip & O’Malley, p. 7

[6] Chrislip and O’Malley, p. 11

[7] Chrislip and O’Malley, p. 7

[8][8] Chrislip and O’Malley, p. 7

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

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

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

Change in the arts sector. Can we speed it up or must we wait it out?

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EvolveFish

 

Devon Smith has written a smart, provocative post on a debate she engaged in at the recent Americans for the Arts Conference in Nashville. It’s called We Should Allow Failing Arts Organizations to Die and it has lit up the arts blogosphere, Twitter, and Facebook the past few days. So much so that she has added a second post responding to the internet comments. This topic is close to my heart. In 2009 I was on a panel at the Grantmakers in the Arts Conference alled Graceful Exits,What Can Funders Do When It’s Time to Pull the Plug. In 2011 I was interviewing Rocco when he made his now infamous supply and demand comment. And over the past few years I’ve written four Jumper posts on the subject.***

While one could argue that I’ve had more than my say on the topic, Devon’s terrific post, along with a recent academic article recommended by one of my PhD advisors, has inspired me out of an extended hiatus from Jumper (during which I’ve been working on my dissertation). I thought I would reflect on the following issues related to ossified organizations that fail to change or die: (1) why organizations arise in the first place; (2) why inertia sets in; and (3) how organizational change happens.

The academic article that I’m referencing is called Structural Inertia and Organizational Change and it is by Mike T. Hannan and John Freeman (who work in a realm of the social sciences known as organizational ecology).

Why organizations arise in the first place:

One of the many provocative points that Devon makes is that a lot of what counts as culture, captures our interest and imagination, and gives meaning to our lives does not, necessarily require an arts organization to be created or delivered. She writes:

I don’t have the stats to support this, but for every hour of “traditional” nonprofit arts that a consumer experiences this year, they’ll spend 20 or 30 times times that experiencing “nontraditional” arts and culture. Those experiences that reveal or question our humanity. That enable us to see the world and each other in a new light. Those experiences that delight our mind and our senses. That teach us about other cultures and expand our capacity for imagination. Because for me, those “nontraditional” experiences include going to a folk music concert, funding a poetry book on Kickstarter, appreciating the aesthetic design of an especially beautiful video game, the art of a pulling a great shot of espresso, and the craft of a great pair of raw denim jeans. All things that I’ve done these past 3 days in Nashville. And none of those experience required an arts organization to support them.

Many of them did, however, require organizations (video game companies, coffee houses, fashion houses and manufacturers, etc.). This raises a couple interesting questions. Why do organizations arise, generally? And why do we see a sector made up of arts organizations more so than a sector made up of artist collectives that are not permanently structured into organizational form?

If I asked a room of arts conference attendees this question they would probably answer that you can only get grants if you are formed as an organization and this may, indeed, be a significant part of the story. At the heart of it, organizations are means by which a collective of individuals can pursue common goals and also aggregate resources. While economists tend to explain the emergence of organizations in terms of efficiency organizational ecologists looks at it differently. They argue that organizations are favored over loose collectives because they are reliable (i.e., they can reproduce a given product at a certain level of quality) and they are accountable (i.e., they are able to rationalize their decisions and account for their actions to customers, investors, governments, et cetera).

The nonprofit organizational form, in particular, was not heavily utilized in the US until the mid-twentieth century when it became authorized (the IRS began to approve its use among arts organizations), legitimate (donors and others had begun to recognize arts organizations as having a valid educational or charitable social purpose, worthy of contributions), and materially beneficial (there were actually sources of funding that opened up that made the nonprofit form preferable to the LLC or other forms).

Why inertia sets in:

In the article mentioned above, Hannan and Freeman make the case that structural inertia (meaning a failure to change, or change fast enough, in response to changes in the environment) is an outcome of a system that tends to select organizations (over unincorporated collectives) and certain kinds of organizations (those perceived as reliable and accountable) over others.

In the arts sector, with the emergence of grants from government agencies and funders came the emergence of eligibility requirements: the presence of managerial staff, minimum number of years in existence, minimum number of weeks of programming per year, track record of producing good works as demonstrated by positive reviews, a minimum level of annual operating budget, stable operations (lack of turnover), a persuasive mission statement, clear organizational goals, and a long-range plan. These are basically signs of reliability and accountability.

And it stands to reason that within a given field it is often the oldest organizations that are perceived to be most reliable and accountable. So funding tends to gravitate toward them–funding which enables them in many cases to build buildings or hire staff, which further contribute to their structural inertia.

Not only does structural inertia increase with age and size but transformation is a gamble for organizations as it may jeopardize their perceived reliability and accountability. Big change seems to have paid off pretty well for Diane Paulus at American Repertory Theatre, but not so well at New York City Opera, where attempts to reinvent in the final years (when the organization was already in a weakened state financially) resulted in a loss of confidence among stakeholders.

For this reason, large, old under-performing organizations often resist transformation. This is the idea at the heart of the book, Permanently Failing Organizations, in which the authors essentially ask why low-performing organizations persist. They answer that it’s largely due to the fact that those who rely upon the organization for a livelihood and also have the power to make decisions (i.e., managers) keep organizations alive (so they can continue to earn a living) but fail to make necessary changes that might lead to higher performance because doing so is a gamble that could result in outright failure.

Other internal factors that contribute to structural intertia are sunk costs; political alliances; and the tendency for precedents (things that worked once) to become norms (the way things are done around here).

There’s much more I could write as it’s a complex subject but these are the key points that seem relevant for the current conversation.

How organizational change happens:

So if inertia is a consequence of these external and internal factors, and seems almost inevitable, how does change happen?

I’m oversimplifying things, but there are basically three major points of view on this: individual organizations can make conscious decisions to adapt to their environments (rational adaptation); individual organizations do change but often such change is random, rather than in rational response to goals or the external environment (random transformation); and that change tends to happen at the population level, rather than at the individual organization level. Meaning, change happens with the death of some organizations and their replacement by those with different traits (more suitable or favored in the current environment).

The last perspective is that of population ecology and the one advanced by Hannan and Freeman.

While these are divergent points of view on organizational change it is also fair to say that all three types of change can be observed. Those who advance the idea of population ecology, for instance, also recognize that there are types of organizations, and points in the life cycles of organizations, when organizations can and do change individually. A population ecology perspective would also suggest, however, that this type of change can be challenging and risky (as noted above).

So if I put this all together and reflect on Devon’s post, here’s the picture:

  • Generally speaking, organizations are favored over those entities that are not organized.
  • Selection systems also tend to favor organizations that are older as they are perceived to be both more reliable and accountable.
  • Structural inertia is a consequence of both this selection process (which favors older organizations) but other internal factors.
  • While it is possible for arts organizations to change, generally speaking change (particularly in attributes of an organization that are deeply tied to identity) is likely to be resisted. Why? Because of the expectations of funders, donors, and audiences for reliability and accountability, because of investments in large concrete venues, because managers and musicians want to keep their jobs, because board members want to protect their investments and social standing, and because the general lack of risk capital in the sector makes it less likely that any change that is attempted will be successful (and more likely that the organization will fail).
  • Thus, it is perhaps more likely that change in the arts sector will happen at the population level, with the death of old forms and the birth of new ones.

Can we facilitate or speed up the death of old forms?

The short answer, from what I’ve read, is that permanently failing organizations are hard to kill. Having said that, I do wonder whether there are changes that could be made at the field level that might influence the pace of evolution in the sector.

Here are a few ideas:

(1)    Shift grants away from large organizations to midsized and smaller ones: If you are an avid reader of the annual Grantmakers in the Arts funding reports you will have noticed a couple stagnant trends the past ten years: the “average” arts grant is (and has been for some time now) around $25,000 per year and the majority of contributed income tends to flow to the largest organizations in the sector. When I was still at Mellon I began to wonder whether the arts sector would look different today if (over the past 30 years) arts organizations with budgets over a certain threshold (say $10 million for argument’s sake) had not been eligible for grants from government agencies or foundations.

The rationale for such a norm in the arts sector is that if an arts organization has been able to grow its annual operating budget to $10 million (perhaps larger in some disciplines) it has most likely done so either through increased earned revenues or individual contributions. This leads me to a normative proposition: organizations that have the capacity and stature to attract financially and socially elite board members, large individual contributions, corporate sponsors, or large levels of earned income should cease to be the recipients of grants from government agencies and private foundations. Instead, such funding should be channeled to organizations that do not yet have the stature or size to garner such support from their communities or whose mission prohibits earning large revenues.

If such a threshold (as I’m proposing) were normalized then donors would not interpret the loss of NEA and foundation grants, for instance, as a demerit or loss of legitimacy (which is often the rationale for maintaining tiny NEA grants to big organizations); they would see such as loss as a natural consequence of growth. Funds redistributed to smaller organizations could help to encourage the scaling of artistic innovations and the development of new forms of organization (which often fail to gain traction because they are unable to capture significant grants). And in the long run, perhaps such a rule would also act as a counterweight to the general incentive toward growth that is embedded in the system. How many organizations might cap their growth at the $5-$10 million level if such a norm were to be enacted?

(2)    Taxing the assets of the big and redistributing in the form of income to the small: I’ve just started Pikkety’s Capital in the Twenty-First Century and so am thinking quite a bit about assets versus income, the problem of inequality, and (related to this post) how a small number of organizations in the arts sector accumulate signicant assets while the rest of the sector is living in relative poverty. In the nonprofit arts sector, in many states, 501c3 organizations are freed from the burdens of both property tax and income tax. What if a property tax on arts facilities were instituted, paid to the local authority, and then redistributed in the form of grants to organizations that do not own buildings but do pay rents. As a side benefit such a shift might provide a nice disincentive for continued facility expansion in an already overbuilt arts sector.

(3)    Term limits in most organizations: What if the following positions were all limited to 7 years: artistic leaders (once the organizational founder has left), managing/executive leaders (once the organizational founder has left), board members, foundation program officers, and government agency program directors? The benefits of term limits are not only the opportunity for a fresh perspective in the organization but also an opportunity for “gates” in the system to open to those not favored under previous regimes. Funders and artistic directors amass considerable power (whether by design or not) and term limits are a way of dealing with that inevitability. This is a sensitive proposition (particularly given that not many people working in arts organizations have pensions); but if we are resistant to it I think it is important to put on the table the reasons why, beyond job security (which is valid, but may not be a sufficient reason for avoiding term limits).

***

So after thinking through these options, and possible reactions to them, it occurred to me that there is another option.

We could wait out the change that is coming.

Population ecology theory tells us not only that change often happens at the population level (rather than at the individual organizational level) but also that it often takes a long time.

So here’s an alternative vision.

There will continue to be the occasional deaths (and I suspect they will increase over the next 15-20 years) and new organizations will continue to be born. And some of those new organizations will have different traits–traits potentially more suitable for the 21st century. There is and will continue to be turnover at foundations and government agencies. There will also be an inter-generational transfer of wealth. New people—with new perspectives and views on the world–will be hired to run organizations, or will serve as grants managers and board members, or will have significant personal resources to invest in the sector. Some (maybe many) will see the merits in new organizations that are cropping up and will choose to redirect money to them. Dynamic leaders running these younger arts organizations will garner attention and legitimacy and either their organizations will grow in stature and size, or they will be hired to bring their values, ideas, principles, and new modes of operating to larger organizations already in existence.

It wouldn’t be entirely smooth and it wouldn’t be fast. There would be failures, tragic deaths, and some zombies would go on stalking the landscape. But change would happen.

So am I suggesting we just wait it out?

While I tend to be in favor of making structural changes to influence both the direction and the pace of change (I’d love to see all three of the ideas above explored and debated) I also recognize how difficult such changes (and those Devon suggests) would be in reality.

Waiting it out may be the only realistic option.

Does this depress me?

Not really–in large part because I have tremendous faith in the younger leaders that I see coming up through the ranks of larger institutions, or leading their own enterprises, or stepping into influential policy and funding positions. Last week I gave a talk on Civic Leadership for the fellows of the renowned Clore Leadership Programme in the UK. I was utterly impressed by the work these fellows are doing, by their deep thinking, and by their energy and courage. I see that young leaders have (in spades) the motivation and desire, networks, and capacity to potentially lead the changes that are needed. Smart boards and organizations are already investing in these young leaders (and young, in my mind, ranges from 25-45) and implementing their ideas.

In the meantime, I think that Devon has given us such great food for thought.

We are all accountable for the shape of our sector. 

Whenever a permanently failing organization is allowed to continue cranking out mediocre programming while capturing precious sector resources it should trouble us. I imagine that many of us recognize these organizations in our midst. Some of us shrug our shoulders and some of us blog about them in the abstract. But perhaps these are cowardly moves. It’s easy to criticize in the abstract and it’s easy to shrug off truly discouraging developments in organizations as inevitable. I’ve been guilty of both.

Calling out the zombies (in the blogosphere, in any event) seems mean and destructive and I’m not sure it would lead to any positive developments.

Perhaps a better route is to ignore them entirely, trust that they will die or change eventually, and (as Devon suggests) turn our attention and channel our resources to the those that are knocking our socks off. I think if foundations, government agencies, corporate sponsors, high profile artists and arts leaders, traditional arts media, bloggers, and influential board members led the way, and shifted their attention and resources, they would have tremendous influence on others.

And such a shift doesn’t have to happen en mass.

One person at a time will work, too.

*** Previous Jumper posts related to this topic: 

 

 

 

 

 

 

Can arts organizations be both art-focused and community-focused?

 

False Dilemma-thumb-300x254-153811[1]Doug Borwick has a new post (inspired by comments made by Lyz Crane at the Creative Placemaking Summit) on the “central disconnect” between arts organizations and community engagement. The cornerstones of his argument appear to be that the “art world” exists to do what it wants to do (in contrast to most of the social sectors that exist to solve a problem or need); that arts organizations, therefore, depend upon true believers that are willing to support them in their self-interested pursuits; that community engagement requires seeing art (not as an end in-and-of itself but) as a tool for social change; and thus, ipso facto, given their we-want-to-do-what-we-want-to-do orientation there is little possibility for arts organizations to extend their reach and work to advance their communities.

[contextly_auto_sidebar id=”1A7B3Gcrbg4kK2PBSza7iEfMVb5P5Sfk”]I’m a fan of Doug’s writing on Engaging Matters, generally, but I’m not sure I buy the argument in this instance.

First, the “art world” (his word) encompasses (or more accurately various “art worlds” encompass) much more than artists, art, and arts organizations. As Howard Becker asserts in his book of the same name, art worlds are made up of artists; organizations and individuals of various types that support them; the media and the cultural elite who legitimize and often patronize them; and the audiences who choose (or not) to pay attention to them. In other words, and this is an important point made by Becker, the audience is not only part of the art world, it has a critical role to pay: in giving attention to art works and experiences, audiences “reconstitute” (Becker’s word) them on a daily basis. That is, art lives only to the degree that it receives attention.

Following from the point above, one of the primary roles of nonprofit arts organizations, in particular but not exclusively, is to encourage people to pay attention to art works or artists that they might otherwise disregard or miss because they are not being produced and promoted for the masses by commercial firms. Doug seems to suggest that there is a limited pool of “true believers” that are the prime targets for any arts organization; while that may be true it is also true that nonprofit arts organizations exist to provide “education” and to encourage “taste formation”. They work to create more “true believers” in the arts experience (i.e., people for whom the experience matters, is relevant, or meaningful).

Another role is to serve markets (whether based on taste, income, geography or other factors) that are typically too unprofitable to be of interest to commercial producers and distributors. Thus, it’s debatable whether arts organizations are primarily “doing what they want to do”; rather, it’s arguable that nonprofit arts organizations are generally doing things (they perceive to be important or of value) that would not otherwise get done by commercial firms, but for which there is value to society. I would concede that perhaps too many of these things appeal to the eccentric tastes of upper middle class white people (and too little to the tastes of others in society); but that is a topic for another day. The main point is that, in and of itself, paying attention to markets or goods that the commercial world ignores, and getting others to pay attention to them, as well, are two of the great values of mission-based, nonprofit arts organizations. Moreover, these would seem to be (at least two of) “the problems” many arts organizations exist “to solve.”

Finally, I don’t buy that it is near-to-impossible for arts organizations to pursue a community engagement strategy. We are living in a period in which longstanding dichotomies (many tangentially related to this topic) are being challenged left and right: the assumption that you are either a professional or an amateur (and that the two should not work together); that one is either a maker or a consumer; that the focus is either on the product or the customer; and that as a business you either exist for financial profit or social profit. There is growing evidence such dichotomies are false and divides can be bridged. Indeed, a potential value for arts organizations is to make connections between amateurs and pros, between making and consuming, and between producers (i.e., artists) and consumers (i.e., patrons). Yes, there has been a pervasive sentiment for decades that nonprofit arts organizations either exist to advance art or the community. I would argue that we should add this to the list of false dichotomies above and start from the assumption that it is possible to do both.

Do you agree? Do you have examples to share?

Innovation to what end?

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

INNOVATION TO WHAT END?

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

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

four scenarios

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

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

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

bad scenarios

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

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

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

But we know this, right?

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

We know this.

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

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

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

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

Not enough.

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

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

That’s what this model is showing.

pralahad and bennis 2

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

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

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

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

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

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

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

From my experience innovation is a side product of:

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

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

Or to do something else?

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

What would sector-wide transformation look like?

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

Innovation is a process, not a destination.

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

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

 

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