No one is arguing against the former. Certainly not me. All I’m asking is how is your nonprofit arts organization disproving the latter?
There will be naysayers from now until the end of time.
“You can’t make art and keep greedy bastards from burning up the planet.” “You can’t measure art; there are no tangible metrics.” “You can’t prevent or stop a war with art.” “You can’t solve homelessness with art.”
“The art I want to create has to vary to make its point. It must, above all else, be entertaining in order to sell tickets. It cannot be wholly religious, educational, scientific, or literary; nor can it test for public safety, foster national or international amateur sports competition, or prevent cruelty to children or animals. And, incidentally, the art we produce is educational. While we don’t test them to see if they actually learned anything, students come all the time.”
To that, I say, “Nay.”
Assuming you’re not lying when you say all these ridiculous things, it might be better said that you’re not willing to act as a charity, not that you can’t. Two different things. Like art and arts organizations.
It bears repeating that art is, in fact, essential. It is everywhere, whether it’s beautiful or not — whether it’s even built to be art or not. Art is like air and water. It is inevitable. There is nothing that is not art. The least artistic thing in your eye’s view right now (a blank wall, for example) is still artistic. The only place where there is no art is a void, and even that’s arguable.
So please excuse me when I ask this question of you. I expect an answer.
Given that there’s a war going on involving six of the seven continents; homelessness is at an all-time high; the wage gap between men and women hasn’t budged more than a penny over the last half-century; Black people are spat upon in every possible insult and injury out of fear and bigotry; Latino people are being rounded up, shot, and enduring racist ICE raids all over the country (especially in cities whose population voted for the better presidential candidate a couple of years back); families are being ripped apart; the wealthiest six people in America have more than 50% of the money; and CINO (Christians in Name Only) evangelists are more interested in Israel becoming fully Jewish so they can trigger that clause in Revelations, because they certainly have no love for Jews, Arabs, Palestinians, or any other tribes of people in the Middle East…
…why in the Highlands, the Highlands of Scotland are you producing Brigadoon?
Good music. Dated story. Full of fantasy. Escapist silliness with some hummable hits. Great for a commercial theater to produce. After all, they can use the rationale of making people feel better during a winter of discontent as reason enough to sell bundles of tickets. And that’s fine for them; they have no responsibility to the community whatsoever. Their responsibility is to their stakeholders, and it’s entirely financial.
During the depression, lots of fluff was produced in order to make paying audiences feel better. However, the nonprofit arts organization movement did not begin until the 1960s, which means that calling back to those times is an irrelevant, specious argument for producing Brigadoon.
If your theater company is a 501(C)(3), your stakeholders are not your ticket-buyers. They’re not your board. They’re not artists. Most importantly, they’re not the people who work there.
Your stakeholders are the taxpayers of the community. Your community needs charitable assistance. That’s what you, as a charitable organization, do. If you don’t want to help, then get out of the nonprofit business, where you’re sucking away resources that might actually help people get out of poverty, sickness, or any of the other issues of the day that beleaguer your community’s most vulnerable.
If you then make the argument, “That’s not what arts organizations do,” then you, at best, are a naïve toady. If you make the argument, “The IRS says we don’t have to,” then you are no less than an idiot, because, while that’s barely true (and only because of a flimsy court case whose tenets probably don’t apply to you), today’s donors want their charities to solve an issue that they care about. In short, they want their charities to be charitable, not acquisitive.
Only those who want their names on the buildings, the seats, the staff, the walls, and even the toilets — the most toxic donors in the world — will support something that only offers that and nothing else.
Producing Brigadoon —or any other escapist arts piece for your symphony, your ballet company, your museum, or any other nonprofit arts organization — for no other reason than to sell tickets should alert the IRS to take your nonprofit status away for fraud. If you’re the executive director, the managing director, the artistic director, or the chair of the board, you should rightly feel ashamed of yourself.
[Note: if you are producing Brigadoon or any other escapist art and you are employing the unemployable, the lost, prisoners (incarcerated or not); producing it in found stages in rough neighborhoods, church basements, living rooms, or other non-traditional performance spaces; you’re charging no fee for tickets; and you offer a full educational program that includes not merely materials and teachers, but also rubrics and testing to ensure that the program is effective in whatever it is you’re teaching; then, go ahead and produce Brigadoon.]
Otherwise, your next action, of course, should be to convert your company into a commercial organization. This path is neither difficult, disgraceful, nor a bad idea. There is no high moral ground attached to running a nonprofit organization. When you don’t use other people’s taxes to do your work, you can do just about anything you want. Ask any entrepreneur about that.
Honestly, I feel sorry for development directors at today’s nonprofit arts organizations. They not only have to act as though they’re part of the hoity-toity crowd (they’re assuredly not, but Muffy and Buffy do so love to slum with hoi polloi development directors), but they have to sell a product rather than a service. It’s become a relatively disgusting business, and each one of these people should have a copy of the American Fundraising Professionals Official Code of Ethical Standards, but paste it on their walls just to see how many times per day that they are forced to break it. It won’t help them get mondo bucks, but it’ll make them feel a skosh more human.
So, to be as clear as possible: art is essential. Water is wet. Air is gaseous. Most birds can fly. It’s not a big deal. For nonprofit arts organizations, art is simply a tool. It is definitely not a product. The fact that it’s essential is not a good argument for support.
Your company’s charitable actions are the only things that make a good argument for support.
By the way, excellence is nothing special, either. Excellence is the lowest baseline to your work. No one is out there trying to produce anything less than excellent work, given the laws of scarcity. Excellence (which is entirely subjective) is merely irrelevant, except in the managing of services and producing impact that tangibly improves the community in ways that fit the definition of “charitable.”
We’ve gone over this before, but I wanted to make it clear. These messages are not anti-art, anti-artist, nor are they intended to negate the power of art to make a difference in the world. Just the opposite. The charge here is that too many nonprofit arts organizations — sadly, it’s especially true of the largest ones, the flagships — are anti-community, anti-charity, and, as such, should change or make way for those that understand the point of nonprofit arts.
Do the right thing. That’s all we ask.
WATCH THIS SPACE FOR A SPECIAL ANNOUNCEMENT NEXT WEEK, ON MAY 14
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