{"id":81,"date":"2011-06-21T14:17:17","date_gmt":"2011-06-21T21:17:17","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/?p=81"},"modified":"2011-06-21T14:17:17","modified_gmt":"2011-06-21T21:17:17","slug":"tearing-the-middle-man-limb-from-limb-or-so-whats-an-arts-organization-to-do","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.artsjournal.com\/newbeans\/2011\/06\/tearing-the-middle-man-limb-from-limb-or-so-whats-an-arts-organization-to-do.html","title":{"rendered":"Tearing the Middle Man Limb from Limb (or, So What’s An Arts Organization To Do?)"},"content":{"rendered":"
\"Conflict<\/a>

Conflict (Chess II) by Cristian V. from Flickr. Used under Creative Commons license.<\/p><\/div>\n

I did not jump between the Theatre Communications Group<\/a> (#TCG2011) and Americans for the Arts<\/a>\u00a0(#AFTA11) conferences this past weekend expecting to come away with a vague feeling of impending anarchy and possible civil war, but I did. And if you had told me as I was going into the weekend that I would have taken that general mood seriously enough to write about it, I would have laughed at you. Civil war seems so, well, dramatic\u2026and yet, it is becoming clear to me that the mounting fatigue that\u00a0foundation and government funders are feeling\u00a0around what they see as over-greedy, under-effective arts\u00a0organizations (of all sizes, though Really Big is the dominant mode) that stand between artists and audiences is leading to rumblings of drastic funding realignment\u00a0across the country — which in turn\u00a0are getting the backs of LORT and others up in a way that portends unhealthy future conflict.<\/p>\n

Rocco Landesman, head of the NEA,\u00a0laid out the argument<\/a> as follows:<\/p>\n

“There are 5.7 million arts workers in this country and two million artists. Do we need three administrators for every artist? Resident theaters in this country began as collectives of artists. They have become collectives of arts administrators. Do we need to consider becoming more lightly institutionalized in order to get more creativity to more audiences more often? It might also allow us to pay artists more.”\u00a0<\/p><\/blockquote>\n

It’s worth noting that there was a lot of protest around the numbers Landesman\u00a0used here — TCG, as I understand it,\u00a0even sent a formal letter of complaint.\u00a0\u00a0But, setting aside the specifics,\u00a0the general concept is that larger-than-fair portions\u00a0of the grantmaking\u00a0kitty in any given year go to organizational overhead costs, including paying for all those administrators, many of whom (like me) don’t directly create any of the art the organization’s mission is centered around. Just this week, Diane Ragsdale argued on Jumper<\/a>\u00a0that economic indicators of excellence, many of which matter much more for producing organizations than individual artists, are getting in the way of what she called \u201cthe good:\u201d old-fashioned\u00a0art-making and mission fulfillment. This is all essentially a variation on the supply\/demand discussion, which, while subsequently bastardized\u00a0into an argument about the \u201camount of art in the world,\u201d actually started out as a push for a potential decrease in the complexity of the delivery structure (aka, “there need to be fewer arts organizations”).<\/p>\n

At TCG, futurist and self-described “keynoter, that’s what I do” David Houle<\/a>\u00a0(“rhymes with cool”) noted that the disintegration of strong organizational structures has been going on for many years–and that theatre is actually one of the only bastions left within the fine arts where monolithic organizations are the primary conduit for the art. He argues that the proliferation of technology has created a “neurosphere that holds all of our thought, all of our culture,” and calls what’s coming “the evisceration of the middle man.”<\/p>\n

Which you might take just as hype. Houle\u00a0seems like sort of a\u00a0hyperbolic guy. But then I started hearing whispers, about things like that the main lawyer for LORT\u00a0was at the conference (“and he hates conferences!”) because LORT\u00a0is nervous about the rumbling. About how one local LORT\u00a0house had sent senior advisors into the conference specifically to suss out what was coming down the pike. This of course isn\u2019t about David Houle; it\u2019s about whether the arguments being made about adapting\u00a0away from monolithic theatre organizations are gaining traction, and where, and in what form. It\u2019s about grumbling funders who feel like the major arts institutions have abandoned anyone who isn’t white and old and rich–a charge which, while potentially supported by the make-up of audiences in a given house, is overly simplistic and seems to assume that the leaders of those organizations gather in smoke-filled rooms to figure out how to screw non-white cultures out of arts experiences.<\/p>\n

And perhaps most of all\u00a0it’s about the truth behind funder grumblings–the fact, for example, that disintermediation\u00a0(the so-called evisceration of the middle man) is a societal shift, and that in a lot of ways it’s like toothpaste having been squeezed out of the tube. It’s not going back in. The same person who pointed out the presence of the LORT lawyer worries that the real world consequence of this discomfort is that we’re all going to turn on each other. Or more specifically, that our largest institutions, who lead us in visibility and supposedly carry the torch for our values arguments by serving the most people, will push back on a funding climate that propped them up for 30 or more years as the epitome of what an arts organization should wish to become, and is now changing the game.<\/p>\n

The hum in the air seems to indicate the setting up of sides\u2014one pushing for the continuation of the system, one pushing to upend it. Which all, really, just makes me frustrated.<\/p>\n

The panic and negativity here is masking something really important. Theatre, which can I guess be created without an organizational infrastructure, sure is hard to do alone. It’s a communal enterprise by definition, at least between one actor and one audience member.\u00a0 Yeah, maybe the fact that development staff at certain organizations make more than the executive director is annoying, but that space, or that marketing staff, or that education program sure can come in handy when a playwright wants to reach a particular audience. What I’m saying is, organizations have the potential to be incredible support structures for individual artists. They can elevate and expand what’s best about the work – they can provide curatorial structure to an ecosystem that produces incredibly varied work, and therefore can amplify impact in ways that make them crucial to the larger success of the field. They can bring together playwrights and directors, actors and designers, the best, most talented among us, drawing on large webs and then providing them time and space to make the best work they can. They can do a lot.<\/p>\n

Which isn’t to say they always, or even really ever, do – not completely. Right now, most theatre organizations (and not just the biggest ones) are large, opaque pyramids, heaving on hierarchy and light on new ideas, with impossibly large walls that stretch out east and west to keep the audience and the artist apart. They take in work through the front door and break it down, crush it up, direct it through tiny grates and down hallways it’s not really built for, all the while deciding, often without consulting the artist outside, about who particularly should be involved in the conversation. Then they present it to the audience in the courtyard, maybe bring the artist in for a photo-op, and ask for more money. And, oh yeah, it doesn’t really pay well. This of course is the worst-case scenario, but I think that for an increasing number of people (both makers and funders), it feels like the rule rather than the exception.<\/p>\n

If there’s one thing that resonated for me as the buzz concept of both TCG\u00a0and AFTA, it was this idea of the collapse of the hierarchical, monolithic arts organization not into dust, but into a flatter, brighter, airier and more transparent facilitator. It was the idea that the best organizations won\u2019t go away\u2014and that organizations going away isn\u2019t really terribly viable, at least not completely\u2014but will instead transform themselves into what they were always meant to be: pathways to work.<\/p>\n

Ben Cameron closed AFTA in his usual rousing fashion, talking about how the reformation was a really bad time to be a monastery (get it?) while also making sure to say he wasn’t talking about the death of the organization (an earlier, and not quite the same, version of the speech here<\/a>). He talked about the rise of adaptability as the core defining characteristic of a healthy arts organization, and juxtaposed it against twenty years of the sector talking about stability as the pathway to sustainability. He called the shift “the expansion of aesthetic responsibility and the challenge of traditional models of cultural authority.” He argued that to make economic impact the sole justification for our work is to sell ourselves incredibly short, and posed four questions that any arts organization needs to ask itself in order to judge its value in this new world order:<\/p>\n