What should we teach future arts administrators and where should we teach it?

(Indiana University Bloomington, Kelley School of Business (left) and O’Neill School of Public and Environmental Affairs (right)).

At her blog Arts Analytics, Joanna Woronkowicz has written a post – reposted to a wide audience at artsjournal.com – trying to answer the two questions in the title of this post, with the heading (which I don’t fully understand) “Stop teaching arts administrators to run organizations.”

Some background: in the United States, Arts Administration is often taught at the Masters degree level, with many of the students coming from an undergraduate degree in some genre of the arts. These are students who would like to keep working in the art world but who don’t see themselves making a career out of being an artist. These are wonderful students, and I always welcome an invitation to visit a class.

The degrees are quick and practical – the basics of financial management, relevant aspects of the law, organizational behaviour and the ABC’s of good management, fund raising, and marketing and audience development, all with applications to the arts, but drawing upon other relevant sectors as well. It is not a route to a doctoral degree.

Joanna’s post is about what she sees as related questions: the inside-baseball question of where in a university such a Masters program ought to be housed, and the bigger and more general question of how it should be taught, with a specific focus on the patron-facing subjects of fund raising, marketing, and audience development.

I disagree with her take on this, but I will give the reader fair notice: before I retired, Joanna was a colleague, even a singing partner, of mine, and so this should be read as a disagreement between friends.

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In the US, graduate programs in Arts Admin are located in different parts of different universities, typically on the basis of the home of the individual faculty member who in days of yore thought it would be a nice idea to create such a program. And so they are in schools of public affairs (Carnegie-Mellon), business (Wisconsin), education (Columbia), music (Florida State), media arts and design (Drexel), and so on. The program Joanna and I taught in, at Indiana University, began in the business school, then moved to the music school, then moved to the school of public and environmental affairs, according to who was willing to take it on.

I don’t think it makes much difference to the nature of the program. Graduate degrees in Arts Admin are very similar across schools, for all the usual institutional isomorphism reasons – faculty are similar in interests and outlook, serve as external reviewers over each other’s programs and, when there is an application for a promotion, individual faculty. Employers have certain expectations of a job applicant who says they have an MA in Arts Admin, regardless of where it is from. To try to discern differences based on college home is to engage in the narcissism of very small differences.

But Joanna, who is currently visiting a business school, thinks otherwise:

I’ve been thinking a lot lately about how we train arts administrators, and being around a business school this year has pushed that thinking in directions I didn’t expect. It’s made me realize that many of the problems we face in the arts aren’t really about funding structures or demographics or leadership pipelines, but about something much more foundational: the perspective we start from. So much of the sector’s instability stems from approaching our work from the standpoint of supply—assuming the art, the institution, the season, the budget, the mission are all inherently meaningful—and then teaching people how to operate that system. We pass along the belief that the organization is the anchor and that the public’s role is to be convinced, educated, persuaded, marketed to.

Spending time in a business school has made that contrast feel sharper than ever. Everything in a b-school is oriented around demand. What do people want? How do we know? How intense is that desire? How do you validate it? How do you respond to it or build around it? Entire courses are built on the premise that you don’t create a plan until you’re sure there’s an appetite for what you’re doing—or until you have a reliable strategy for cultivating one. It’s not that business schools have all the answers; they certainly don’t. But they model a worldview that is almost completely absent in most arts administration programs: the idea that an organization does not deserve to exist simply because someone believes in it. Demand—not intention—grounds the work.

This has made me rethink the usual conversations about where arts administration programs should live. People often say public affairs schools make sense because they focus on nonprofits, civic responsibility, and public value. On paper, that alignment looks neat. But public affairs programs are designed for institutions that already have a recognized public mandate. Their students learn to steward systems that society has already agreed are necessary. Arts organizations almost never start that way. They begin as creative visions that no one has asked for. Their public value isn’t pre-established; it’s fragile, aspirational, in need of cultivation. Public affairs schools don’t really teach how to build a constituency from scratch, how to make someone care who didn’t care before.

Others argue that arts administration belongs in arts schools. And there is a certain comfort in proximity—being close to the artistic process, immersed in creativity, surrounded by working artists. But arts schools, almost by definition, assume the centrality of the art itself. They reinforce the idea that the work is intrinsically valuable and that the public simply needs help recognizing that value. This is one of the most persistent and damaging assumptions in our field. It sounds benign, even noble, but it is still supply thinking. The art exists; therefore the public should care. And when they don’t, we treat it as a communication problem rather than a relevance problem.

Once you see the supply mindset, it shows up everywhere. It shows up in programming decisions rooted in tradition rather than curiosity. It shows up in marketing strategies that start with “How do we sell this?” rather than “Why would anyone want this?” It shows up in fundraising pitches that depend on the belief that donors should care because the organization is “important.” It shows up in conversations about audience development that treat participation as something people must be ushered into, not something that emerges from genuine desire or connection.

This is really an overreach into finding significant differences in what I can only call the vibe of different schools. But it doesn’t hold up.

Every existing business, every potential entrepreneurial undertaking, has some aspect of what she calls the “supply” side, and what the firm believes is its value. If I come to inherit an apple orchard, and want to make a go of it, it will only work if I have some sort of conviction that my apples are healthy and tasty, that I will be a reliable and valued wholesaler, that my orchard is a pleasant place for people to visit on a late summer afternoon to buy apples and try some cider and walk around a bit. I don’t know if that counts as a claim that my apples are “inherently” good (I’m not sure what that would mean), but I have to have some kind of passion for being an apple supplier.

In terms of the b-school questions about what customers really want, sure: I will keep an eye on what varieties are most popular, whether making cider is worth the effort or if people around here aren’t that interested, what sort of opening hours are most convenient for people, what activities would be most valued if we offered them to visitors. The “demand” side matters, obviously. But what I do – grow apples – my core business,1 is set. I’m not going to be asking whether my customers would prefer that I ran a barber shop, or a deli, or a tax preparation service. I have an orchard, and that is what I do.

And the same holds true with the arts. An orchestra is a collection of individuals with specific talents, with a consistent personnel and structure, that is designed to perform orchestral music. That is its “supply.” There are people, most people in fact, who like other genres of music, for whom orchestral music is not their thing, nor is it going to be. But for the orchestra to stick to their genre – music written for orchestras – is not to say that there is some magical inherent value to it, or a “public mandate,” or that it has an inordinate focus on “supply.” It’s just what orchestras do. And art museums do what art museums do, and ballet companies do what ballet companies do and on and on (and, speaking as a customer, I’m glad). There’s nothing odd about this, in the same way that it is not odd that an apple grower focuses on apples, and an automobile maintenance shop focuses on cars.

And nobody neglects “demand.” Orchestra managers spend huge amounts of time trying to figure out: is this a schedule that works for people? What sort of pops concerts are most popular? Do guest artists matter a lot, or do the works chosen matter more? Should we try playing in different venues? Earlier in the evening? What pricing structure for season tickets and individual concerts and scaling the hall seem to work best? (I wrote a book on arts pricing, for use in our public-affairs-school domiciled Arts Admin program, on which I would spend a few weeks each year, and it is entirely about demand, with not a word on “intrinsic values”).

And every Arts Admin program teaches these things. Joanna and I both taught the arts marketing and audience development classes at IU, and our syllabi were packed with papers and discussion on what we know about trends in arts participation and demand, how to do a proper audience (existing and potential) survey, how best to use various media to reach people, and all that. The same holds for people working in fund raising, or in entrepreneurship (which I also used to teach). To suggest that Arts Admin as taught in public affairs schools or arts schools don’t think about these demand side questions is just incorrect.

Joanna presents two false dilemmas: where should graduate programs in Arts Admin be housed, and whether the focus is best placed on the “supply” side rather than the “demand” side.

On the first question, she does a surprising backtrack at the end of the post: “When I think about the future of arts administration, I’m increasingly convinced that its academic home is much less important than its intellectual orientation.” Okay then.

But on the second question she is imagining a divide in “intellectual orientation” that I have never seen in my couple of decades teaching this stuff, and getting to know other Arts Admin faculty, who teach in business schools, public affairs schools, and art schools. Arts organizations exist, and they are focused on a “supply” of something they think worthwhile, but are necessarily always thinking about what their patrons are looking for, how that might be shifting, whether something has been overlooked, what connections people are hoping for in the world – the “demand” side. This is not really different from other businesses, and holds true for those wanting to start a new business as well.

Arts Admin programs can always do with the occasional rethink – at IU we often adjusted course structure and topics within courses to ensure we were keeping up with what was happening in the art world. But we weren’t naive, and I never saw my faculty colleagues or our students putting capital A art on some sort of pedestal.

Cross posted at https://michaelrushton.substack.com/