Ron English, "Money is the Root of All Art", 1994

Okay so I’ve been thinking about a lot of different things, all of which deserve much more rigorous investigation than I can manage at the moment, what with my full-time job, trying to see work in NYC and, you know, trying to have a personal life (ha!) But I wanted to at least get some of these thoughts out there and expand on them, over time, as I gather more information. The conversations that happen in the comments section – complete with links, references, etc. – are really valuable and we are so grateful to the community for engaging in thoughtful discussion on these important issues. Please keep it going!

So first I want to talk about money. Every day on my way to work I would pass Occupy Wall Street and I would think about all the artists I knew that were there, who were posting about it on FB and talking about it at parties and on the street. I would stop by Zucotti every once in a while to see what was going on and found it alternately inspiring and frustrating. I am the 99% and I am, fundamentally, a progressive leftist who believes in the strategic redistribution of wealth for the stability and enhancement of society for the greater good. (See this New Yorker article on Brazil, excerpt available, subscription required for full access). I believe we should talk – and do something – about income inequality and that the government should hold the banks and financial services industry to account for their recklessness and irresponsibility. But as “socialist” as my leanings are, we – especially artists and people working in the arts – can’t and mustn’t ignore the fact that if it weren’t for corporations and the financial services industry, there would probably not be any arts in America to speak of.

The government isn’t investing enough to support an arts infrastructure in America. Check it out – the NEA’s 2012 funding request was as follows:

The National Endowment for the Arts requests a budget of $146.255 million for FY 2012, a reduction of $21.245 million or 13% from FY 2010 appropriated levels and an amount consistent with that appropriated to the NEA in FY 2008.

of which $28.063 million is for salaries and expenses. So that means that the NEA is distributing approximately $118.192 million in funds to support the arts in all 50 states of America. That’s approximately $2.36 million per state. To give a sense of perspective, BAM’s annual budget is in the $25 million range, PS122′s is, roughly, in the $1.3 million range.

NB: Full range of NEA financials are available here. And if you aren’t already familiar, you can check out any non-profit’s financials at Guidestar. (Always a good idea when donating money, researching institutions or job-seeking!)

I’m fortunate enough to live in NYC where the DCA (under the impressive leadership of the indomitable Kate Levin) is incredibly supportive. NYSCA too. If I lived in Kansas, I’d be pretty worried. So arts funding from the public sector, either nationally or on the state and local levels, is unreliable at best.

So then we have foundations – where would the arts be without foundations, large and small? They’re absolutely, vitally important to the arts ecology and they play an incredibly important role in advancing non-market-driven agendas. They support all kinds of projects – not just arts – that are significant, meaningful and vital for a civil, democratic society. Some foundations are conservative, some more liberal, you may not agree with all of their priorities and strategies, but without the philanthropic sector, America would be a much poorer place culturally. But remember – the “gift economy” and corporate economies are directly related. Most foundations, if not all, (and many arts orgs as well) have endowments, which are essentially reserves of capital managed through investment portfolios. Endowments are financial mechanisms for the growth of capital, and a foundation is obligated to spend something like 5% of their returns on their programs. (I am not a financial whiz, but I’m reaching out to some people who are to try and get more thorough data. I hope to share my findings in the new year). So foundations and other organizations that have endowments, rely on the health and success of the financial services industry to do their work.

I was employed at a foundation when the market crashed in 2008 and we had to suspend most of our programs because our endowment was “under water” – we literally had no money to give away. This was a Jewish foundation and when the market crash was followed by the Bernie Madoff scandal it was devastating. Fortunately our foundation hadn’t invested with Madoff, but many Jewish philanthropies had and they were crippled, if not entirely destroyed.

So there’s an interesting situation here – any artist who seeks or accepts a grant from a foundation is, indirectly, being supported by the financial services industry. As an artist should we be concerned or considering the investment strategies of the foundations who support us? Who are they investing in? Who manages their money? We know that fluctuations in the market affect a foundation’s ability to distribute capital, but do their investment portfolios – and advisors and relationships – influence programmatic and strategic initiatives? If we are politically opposed to the policies of a given corporation or investment firm, are we complicit when we benefit, even indirectly, from their profitability? What if you found out that the grant you just received came from a foundation that was heavily invested in Halliburton? Food for thought.

And finally we have corporations. Many large corporations – Chase, American Express, etc. – have philanthropic programs that support the arts. I haven’t been able to adequately do the research but I am going to guess that corporate philanthropic spending in the arts dwarfs the funds distributed by the NEA. If you factor in the non-philanthropic expenditures on culture (event sponsorships, etc.), corporate support of the arts is probably the single largest source of funding in the country. The arts sector as we know it would literally not exist without corporate support.

(Funny side note – I was talking to an arts manager who has been in the business for over 40 years and she was telling me how back in the day when Philip Morris was a major sponsor of BAM and other institutions, you would go to parties and events and they would have free cigarettes out on the tables next to the wine and hors d’oeuvres. Can you imagine?!)

So as artists and cultural workers we should probably think about how our work is supported, who is supporting it and what that means to us. I’m not at all suggesting that we shouldn’t be critical of “the system” – we absolutely should and must – but we need to acknowledge where these worlds intersect, how they interrelate and what the implications are.

Which leads me to Michael Kaiser, his engagement with “the system” and his thoughts on the perils of citizen criticism .

Kaiser’s DeVos Institute of Arts Management is funded by Dick DeVos, billionaire heir to the Amway forutne and Republican heavyweight. (h/t to commenter Richard Kooyman for pointing this out). DeVos has been active in right-wing groups such as the Council for National Policy and The Conservative Caucus. Kooyman also says that the Koch Brothers are supporters of the DeVos Institute, but I have not been able to find documentation of their support.

My instinct is that if Kaiser is being funded by Republican businessmen then their values and worldview are going to influence the management training. I’m still trying to acquire Kaiser-generated materials to study (please send me some if you have taken Kaiser training) but from what I’ve read on Kaiser’s blog, and as I mentioned before, he seems to be coming from a place of privilege that does not acknowledge the facts on the ground for most arts orgs in America. He seems to apply Kennedy Center models to organizations that do not have the capacity, resources or connections to actually implement them. It also tends to privilege institutions that support Ballet, Opera, Symphonies, etc.- the most conservative, institutions that primarily present the work of the White, Western, Male canon. Which is fine, but it also reinforces the elitist model of arts presenting where the educated, wealthy and privileged provide institutionally-approved “culture” for the betterment of the masses.

Interestingly, I found an article about BAM’s new Professional Development Program that will reside in the soon-to-open Richard B. Fisher Building. It is being run by BAM along with the DeVos Institute of Arts Management with the support of the Brooklyn Community Foundation and the New York Community Trust. It is designed to “aid Brooklyn arts groups looking to mount a self-produced performance in the [Fisher Building]‘s new Judith & Alan Fishman Theater Space, and enable them to develop a set of capacity building skills in areas key to their success. The program will focus on the growth and training of each organization as a whole—offered at no fee to participants—and provide a new level of support, not previously offered in Brooklyn, that culminates in a performance.”

Interesting model – providing local arts groups training in management so that they can grow enough to afford to self-produce at BAM. While I question that in and of itself, (the whole rental vs. presentation issue, etc. etc. – too much to go into here without losing my mind in frustration), I also wonder about Kaiser’s ability to adapt his Big Institution model to the sorts of groups that the BAM program will be engaging. Kaiser recently wrote a post on his blog called “Fundraising: the Dilemma of Organizations of Color” in which he asserts:

In fact, as a proportion of their funding, arts organizations receive too much from foundations. These important institutions are overly reliant on foundation and government support. Their bigger weakness is in raising funds from individual donors. Individual donors are the bedrock of American arts funding, giving more than 60% of the money received by arts organizations. Yet the average African American, Latino, Asian American or Native American arts organization receives less than 10% of its funding from individual donors.

I agree with the fundamental idea that arts orgs should focus more on individual donors than on foundation and government support. Art should be supported by, and speak to, their community. But Kaiser seems to elide the very real problem that many orgs of color come from – and serve – disadvantaged populations for whom philanthropic giving is not a reasonable, or likely, expectation. Additionally, some communities do not have a deeply ingrained culture of philanthropy. Some  minority communities don’t have a long enough history of stable wealth accumulation to support philanthropic giving and some communities, from what I have heard from colleagues working in “Organizations of Color”,  just don’t prioritize philanthropy. Even when a member of that community “makes it”, there is very little cultural precedent or pressure to “give back”, at least to the arts. (This is anecdotal, I welcome more information from the field).

Kaiser goes on to say:

As a result, the size of arts organizations of color is bounded and they tend to experience wide swings in funding, especially during bad economic times. Because of this, there are very few large, stable arts organizations of color in our nation. Apart from the Alvin Ailey American Dance Theater it is hard to think of any. And Ailey has been remarkably successful building its individual donor base, a testament to the skills of its Executive Director Sharon Luckman. Sharon recognized early on that the key to a strong individual fundraising effort is a strong board and she has worked relentlessly to engage strong board members and other individual donors. This is unusual for arts organizations of color whose boards tend to resemble community service organizations rather than fundraising boards. [Emphasis mine] In fact, the boards of diverse organizations typically include numerous leaders from other not-for-profit institutions (educators, pastors, political groups) for whom raising money for their own organizations is a priority. The Ailey organization, under Sharon’s leadership, has successfully broken this mold and has reaped the benefits. Any leader of a diverse arts organization would do well to study her work with Ailey over the past twenty years.

There’s a reason why many Organizations of Color have boards that look like they do. Because many of them start in communities and aim to serve their communities. They generally don’t have access to the 1% or their community equivalents. They don’t go to the same schools, or live in the same neighborhoods and rarely network at, say,  The Sun Valley Conference. Ailey’s strategy just won’t work for many of these organizations, because they’re not making work or presenting work that will be shown at Kennedy Center, etc. and thus be exposed to those donors. They’re making and presenting work in their communities, for their communities. So how do you develop a strategy that might actually work for them? And this isn’t even going into the whole issue of support (and management models) that are relevant to developing, producing and presenting contemporary work in smaller arts organizations, where the Alvin Aileys of tomorrow are being incubated.

I don’t have enough direct experience or exposure to Kaiser and his methodology to adequately critique it. But from what I’ve heard anecdotally from other arts professionals, boards love him and then bring that back to the administrative and artistic leadership, frequently creating a disconnect between expectations, capacity, program and organizational culture. I’m all for bringing sound business practices and strategies into the arts sector, but it requires entrepreneurial innovation and nimbleness, more like a start-up than a huge corporation. But it seems that Kaiser’s intent is grooming the next generation of Kennedy Center-style leadership that will propagate a similar model and set of biases. I really don’t see how this will help the overall ecology of America’s vital, diverse and dynamic, multilayered arts landscape.

Finally, I want to bring this back to my earlier response to Kaiser’s HuffPo article on the “Death of Criticism”. Just as the visual arts world has a huge infrastructure devoted to creating value around art objects, so too the large performing arts and music institutions have a structure for creating perceived value. No one is denying that symphonies, ballets, operas and traditional theater have great merit and the classics of Western Literature and Art should be taught, studied and produced. But their continued cultural value is dependent on an academic and “critical” infrastructure that insures that the audience is informed of exactly why it is important. Also, these traditional works of the Western canon have the advantage of being created, largely, by people that are now dead. No pesky live artists making troubling statements about politics, or sexuality, or racism or income inequality.  But there will always be an audience for the classics of the canon – Kaiser and his acolytes will make sure of that, because they are deeply invested in maintaining a critical infrastructure that supports their conservative taste and values.

The rise of the citizen critic undermines cultural hegemony. I agree with Kaiser to some extent – in a world where anyone can be a “critic” there are going to be a lot of people who offer uninformed, unsophisticated opinions.  Just look at the work that won the Grand Rapids ArtPrize  by popular vote (funded by DeVos!) – a huge stained glass Jesus mosaic. Nice. But to dismiss public discussion by educated and informed writers – often arts professionals, artists, writers and aficionados themselves – is irresponsible at best, elitist, dismissive and destructive at worst.

When Kaiser talks about “critics” at mainstream publications that are “vetted” by editorial staff, he perpetuates a long-outdated myth. It has been a long time since newspapers – especially local newspapers – have “vetted” their arts writers. He places a lot of faith in the intellectual acumen of, well, newspapermen. Rupert Murdoch is a newspaperman – and he doesn’t seem to have done a very good job of vetting anybody. The fact is that the age of Kenneth Tynan is long gone and the notion of serious criticism in mainstream papers is quaint. Most of today’s arts writers in major newspapers – with a few exceptions (Hi Claudia, Gia and Alastair!) – are not critics but reviewers. At least in terms of what they publish in those outlets. Their job is not to engage with the larger ideas and aesthetic considerations, history, meaning and context of work being presented. Their job is to tell the ticket-buying public whether it is worth the money and time to see a show. Critics from academia like Bonnie Maranca, Carol Martin, Tom Sellar, Andre Lepecki, et al, are invaluable to our conversation. Unfortunately these kind of writers aren’t even factored into Kaiser’s thinking.

Admittedly every web browser should probably have  some kind of “Caveat Emptor” button that would help you distinguish the good sites from the bad – but the ideas, information and conversations generated by Citizen Critics are a vital component of creating  sustainability for the arts in America. The only reason to find this “scary” – as Kaiser does – is that it represents a challenge to his authority as an arbiter of cultural value and a purveyor of conservative models of arts engagement.

We can do better.

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Today in The Stranger, one of Seattle’s alt-weeklies, theater editor Brendan Kiley has an interesting feature article on how theaters fail. The main inspiration for the piece is dissecting the spectacular collapse of the Intiman, one of Seattle’s big regional houses, formerly directed by Bartlett Sher and then his hand-picked replacement Kate Whoriskey, for just half a season before years of fiscal mismanagement caught up with them. A last minute emergency funding campaign launched in November of last year was largely successful, but the situation continued to worsen, leading ultimately to the cancellation of the rest of the 2011 season to stabilize the situation, with the theater apparently intending to reopen next year should it find the capital.

But Kiley goes beyond the Intiman story to discuss several other collapses over the past decade in town, including the Empty Space, a widely regarded mid-size theater in Seattle producing challenging work in a traditional model; Giant Magnet, a former children’s theater festival that in the past few years had branched out to include work like Ontroerend Goed’s The Smile Off Your Face; and finally Consolidated Works, a contemporary arts center launched by one of Kiley’s predecessors, Matthew Richter, that collapsed after he was fired by the board (interviewing Richter in 2004 was, in fact, my first ever journo gig).

The entire piece is worth reading as a record of incompetence and mismanagement, but I think Kiley sort of misses the point. What he ultimately winds up focusing on is the failure of boards to properly do their job. “The board/staff relationship is fundamentally flawed,” he writes.

Boards do too much or too little. They either don’t raise enough money to keep an organization going or complain that they don’t feel enough sense of participation. Sometimes the board members don’t even attend the performances of the organizations they’re ostensibly there to oversee and support. (That was a problem at ConWorks and Giant Magnet.)

As regular readers know, one of the things we’re skeptical of here at Culturebot is “Big Ideas,” of which the arts has far too many, and unfortunately, I think that blaming boards has become the new “Big Idea” in the current moment, with so many institutions at every level facing crippling financial challenges. When an institution finds itself in collapse, someone has to be blamed, apparently. Sometimes it’s the artistic director (who spends the budget like he’s using an ATM card till he hits the overdraft limit), now it’s the board (for not saying no sooner). The unspoken assumption is that, in all cases, the institution itself was inherently good and needed to be preserved, because, apparently, it served and would continue serving its function well. But not only is it ridiculous to always assume that the institution should have been saved (they fail for different reasons, after all), but I can’t help but wonder if, in fact, it’s not sometimes good that they fail.

“Sustainability” is typically defined as a good thing in this context. Nonprofits, after all, can only hope for sustainability. It’s either that or going under. But calling a spade a spade and re-phrasing it as “self-preservation,” my colleague Michael van Baker at Seattle’s TheSunbreak.com (for whom I’m still an editor-at-large) recently wrote:

Because self-preservation is the defining aspect of arts institutional life–ironically, the non-profit model virtually guarantees it–the business model warps in that direction. People begin to have trouble distinguishing between best business practices and those that have worked in the past to pay everyone’s salaries. Over time, the institution’s existence–its habits and proclivities–mediates the art presented. It’s not just a question of the popularity of one work versus another–it’s a question of box office receipts. That’s what’s being discussed when the directors meet: saleability.

Van Baker is, I think, right in part. Of course, that concern never really translated to ensuring seasons ended in the black for the Intiman, which ran yearly deficits for some years before it really hit trouble, because the deficits were theoretically manageable, through either increased giving or increased sales in the next season. But austerity was never imposed the next year, and again and again they’d run deficits. In effect, the bottom line was set in the red, and each year they managed to scrape up enough money to keep going with yet another lauded, expensive season. Some have blamed the Intiman’s board for being starstruck by Bart Sher, but it’s equally true that they were stuck building a perilous house of cards once they started. Once you start operating that way, you can never go back. You can’t scale back the next season for fear of the collapse finally happening if audiences abandon you or donors aren’t impressed by critical accomplishments, so you keep growing and spending more to keep audiences coming, and even as they dug their own grave, they racked up remarkable critical and popular accomplishment.

And that’s where my disagreement with Michael van Baker comes from: saleability is not the end of the world. Every theater has two masters: the arts community, who want new challenges and opportunities and therefore risk, and audiences, who have more complex but ironically somewhat more predictable expectations. Over time, Van Baker’s right that the model mediates the art in favor of saleability, but to judge by the Intiman’s record of critical success and audience development, its slow, downward slide was anything but a middle- or low-brow disaster.

Which leads me to my point: maybe the Intiman just needed to close. At a certain point, its debt load was so high that continuing to operate would have required (and, if they re-open, will) lesser works, skimpier budgets, and therefore quite likely lesser achievements, because so much money will be spent servicing past deficit-funded operations. That the crisis at the Intiman hit in the current economy is predictable: slowed ticket sales and less charitable giving finally meant that it couldn’t meet its current obligations as well as covering the previous year’s deficit. Like a Ponzi scheme, to which the model bears some resemblance, it only collapsed when the in-flows were insufficient to cover the outflows, which were building up over time.

But if we actually believe in the Intiman’s achievement, as I think we should, then maybe it’s just a sign that the cost of accomplishing that was higher than potential revenues. They had a good run, but if they can no longer credibly meet the expectations of either the artistic community or their audiences, they should stop, because what’s the argument for them to be sustained through paying out for diminishing returns? Because we lose the institutional expertise? (The administrators apparently disappear along with their jobs.) Because it takes so long to build a subscriber base? (The subscribers who stick with you through your austerity seasons are rendered suckers.) The fear that such institutions could never be replaced because of the changed funding structure? (Said argument, I think, proposes they’re doomed, anyway.) What is it other than nostalgia for everything attached to the name of the company and everything associated with it that’s really worth preserving when facing those choices, and who really believes that nostalgia is worth the price tag?

Kiley himself almost touches on this, wondering, “The regional theater movement is less than a century old and might prove to be a failure, especially since corporate and government funding for the arts—the revenue that the regional- theater movement is predicated on—is gone for the foreseeable future.” But of course the regional theater movement was already a failure, to judge by its current incarnation. It was founded to provide a network of theaters that offered employment and opportunities for new challenges to artists in a local community, for a local community. The vast majority of these theaters long ago abandoned their role as an incubator of local talent to serve their audiences by doing shows that people wanted to see more, shows that were more saleable, and hiring non-local talent to make those shows happen.

For good or bad, Van Baker is correct that this is the calculation that comes to dominate over time–it’s a matter for funders and audiences to reward or punish it, just as would be the case if the theater committed itself to producing risky, new, challenging work by emerging local artists that it knew it didn’t have a ready paying audience for. So if you want opportunities for emerging artists (as I do; that’s where my prejudice lies), I see no reason to believe that the death of something like the Intiman doesn’t create room for new growth and development. Quite the opposite, new institutions will likely serve the artistic community better, even as they face distinct business challenges.

I do not remotely believe that arts organizations should try to be more “business-like” by learning from the private sector, nor do I think private partnerships (as has been suggested elsewhere) can save the arts (without further mediating artistic experiences for short-term business ends). But I do think creative destruction can be beneficial to the arts. Again, the institution is not the same as the artists or their products; the institution exists to facilitate the art. This isn’t to suggest we should never try to save institutions–to look at the rest of Kiley’s examples, Giant Magnet and Consolidated Works were both destroyed by the needless termination of a visionary director, which left the organizations floundering, while Empty Space’s board rushed to liquidate following a far more minor financial crisis.

Those are all very different circumstances, and from those we can be judicious in asking whether it was their time or whether they had more to offer. For three of them, compelling evidence exists that they could have gone on; for the Intiman, I see no such information. And lest anyone be mistaken about what’s going on, there’s still a good chance that the Intiman will come back. That’s a shocking injustice and, if achieved, a ridiculous misuse of limited arts dollars, as I’ve already tried to explain. The Intiman should have been allowed to pass, its bitter, not yet set-in-stone eulogy a swansong of success. Instead, nostalgia and attachment to a history that will cost a fortune to maintain are keeping some, misguided hope alive for a burnt-out theater. In an interview for the story, Kiley comes across this very concept:

Richard Linzer is a consultant who has worked with dozens of nonprofits across the country: On the Boards, City University of New York, Empty Space Theatre, Folklife, Stanford University, etc. He and I talked for a few hours about nonprofit theater, but we only got really animated when comparing notes on shows we’d both seen. ‘See there?’ he said. ‘See how excited we just got when talking about performances? In the nonprofit sector, we tend not to want to be cold and rational. We don’t want to look at the cost of raising a dollar or borrowing a dollar or getting involved with appreciation and amortization. It’s the red meat that we love—the dancers and singers. For the audience, that’s why we go. But for the board, it’s a different thing.’

Precisely. The Intiman created many such moments for people, but at too high a cost to preserve indefinitely.

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Better Numbers Say Things Are Worse: Yesterday, I linked to a Culture Monster post that made some difficult to substantiate comments about the benefits of arts spending; last night I found Americans for the Arts recently released arts “vitality” report, which puts some hard numbers in place that present a sobering picture of the state of the arts in America, the “vitality” of which is at its lowest in the twelve years it’s been measured in the report.

It’s an interesting report to dig into, and I encourage anyone involved in the arts to do so. The bad news: the public’s consumption of the arts remains flat, while arts orgs are seeing their share of philanthropic giving fall. For all the talk of NEA cuts, the fall from 4.9 to 4 percent of philanthropic giving took $2.5 billion out of the arts sector in 2009. The good news though is that the arts remain surprisingly vibrant despite a lack of support; during the Great Recession, more than 3,000 new arts ventures were launched around the country. And ethnically and culturally oriented organizations have doubled nationally in the last decade.

More on the Numbers: Interestingly, the NEA’s #NewPlay Festival is currently underway at D.C.’s Arena Theatre, and I came across this fascinating blog post from just yesterday, recapping a talk-back with Rocco Landesman, the head of the NEA. The discussion, featuring a variety of theater producers from all over the US, was apparently a barnstorming affair by Landesman who declared: “Look. You can either increase demand or decrease supply. Demand is not going to increase, so it is time to think about decreasing supply.”

What’s definitely cool about it, though, was how much Landesman focused on how he wants theater around the country to be more locally focused. Plenty of criticism is thrown at the regionals (a lost cause if I’ve ever seen one) for violating the public spirit of their founding. “[H]e is very interested in seeing regional theaters invest in more work that is designed specifically for their own community,” Arena Stage’s blogger summarizes, “rather than passing around the latest Broadway hit. He wants to see regional companies generating work that speaks directly to their own communities…work that shares and reflects the unique values of its particular audience.”

All fair and good, but the really interesting parts don’t get quite as much attention. I think I’ve already made my dubiousness at the possibility that the regional theaters could really step up into this role patently clear, and if Landesman thinks there are too many arts organizations competing for limited dollars, I know exactly where there’s fat to trim. The issue was only obliquely addressed:

As Kirk Lynn from the Rude Mechanicals pointed out in the question period, a $3k grant to an organization of his size has real impact on the work they can generate and how many audience members they can reach with it. The $25k grant to a $4 mil organization has less relative impact. He wonders: Is this weeding out of the overabundance of the theater community going to concentrate more resources into the hands of already large institutions? And what will that mean for the companies whose work isn’t compatible with the structures of large institutions?

Obviously, my sympathies lie with smaller organizations. Yes, I know a lot of people were pleased that Landesman also expressed outrage that professional theater artists in the US don’t make enough to support themselves. But that said, Landesman seems to view the problem through a business lens: concentrating resources in a few larger institutions at the expense of diversity is a recipe for success in the same way Wal-Mart is. The proper place for granting and development institutions in the current moment is to help sustain diversity and risk-taking. The reality is that regional theaters don’t get enough money from public funds that people like Landesman should care. The heavy-lifting is being done by smaller organizations, and that’s why Lynn’s comment is dead-on: the benefit of a small grant to an org like the Rude Mechs is almost always a better investment, in my book, than throwing spare change at legacy institutions that live off the largesse of wealthy patrons.

Republican Realpolitik: And just on a side-note, yesterday I also argued that the Republican opposition to arts funding was purely a matter of bias, not economics. That’s why Sarah Smarsh’s editorial snark today, reporting in the Huffington Post on now-Governor Sam Brownback’s (oh how the senate will miss you, sir!) proposal to make Kansas the first state in the nation without an arts commission, was dead on:

“Happy New Year, Art Fags!”

Personally, I think he’s shooting himself in the foot. Without arts, who’s going to help educate his Snowflake Babies to make those “spontaneous” and suspiciously large-scale art projects for his idiotic presentations?

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Diane Ragsdale on Surviving the Culture Change (Full Remarks) from Arts Alliance Illinois on Vimeo.

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On September 14, the NEA held a live webcast on the subject of Creative Placemaking, which included a panel discussion on the role of the arts in creating livable, sustainable communities. Here’s the video:

[h/t to VNPAC for the link]

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Last Monday, South African playwright Athol Fugard unloaded on the contemporary theatre scene for its lack of serious political engagement in an article in the Guardian, arguing that a combination of PC sensitivities to tackling hard topics, and that, “With so many young playwrights, the true craft of writing for living voices is not what it used to be. They write for attention spans of 10 minutes between adverts.” (There’s a pair of responses here and here.)

That’s a pretty harsh criticism from a playwright who seems above reproach on the topic. Like Vaclav Havel in the former Czechoslovakia, Fugard not only talked the talk, he walked the walk, violating apartheid-era laws by putting black and white actors onstage together, directly challenging the existing political order with his activism at the same time his plays explored the complex racial relations of his time and place. But honestly, if you assume that (a) there really is a major paucity of quality political theatre in America and Britain today, and (b) that this really is a problem, I can’t help but feel that it has as much to do the tradition of writers like Fugard as with the broader contemporary culture. In fact, I’d say it his tradition is really the single biggest problem. Because all too often, young playwrights lionize the dissident theatre of people like Fugard, without realizing that in a different socio-political dynamic, it amounts to little more than preaching to the choir, which is generally what political theatre in America and Britain is.

Context is everything when it comes to politics. In politically repressive environments, such as apartheid South Africa or Iron Curtain Eastern Europe, the theatre could serve as a place for the people–or some subset of them–to see artists challenge the status quo, to speak truth to power. In liberal Western democracies, anyone can speak truth to power–or lie, deceive, mislead, or autodidactically pontificate–more or less whenever they want, thanks today to magic of the Internet. And the greater public is left to choose what information and ideas to consume at its leisure. So what really is the point of producing a confrontational, issue-oriented play, such as one protesting the war in Iraq, if we can safely assume that the audience will arrive and leave more or less in agreement with the work’s sentiments?

The war in Iraq is an excellent example, because Fugard singles out David Hare as an example of the sort of work he thinks is representative of what we need more of. But what, for instance, is the point of producing Stuff Happens, Hare’s “insider’s” account of White House and Number 10 Downing Street political intrigue and mendacity leading to the invasion of Iraq? When I saw the play in Seattle in 2007, what struck me was how much the play represented Hare’s own biases, particularly as Briton. Why, for instance, is Tony Blair portrayed as a sympathetic (in human terms, if not political) but misguided stooge while George W. Bush & co. come off bloodthirsty monsters in their joint effort to use force to re-shape the Middle East, despite the fact Blair bought into that logic as well? And for that matter, you’d suppose Hare might have put aside the British pastime of French-bashing at least a bit when it came to Pres. Jacques Chirac and Dominique de Villepin, the French Foreign Minister at the time, the latter of whom is portrayed as a duplicitous snob playing a game of realpolitik. Surely that’s partially accurate, but Hare has little sympathy for them despite the fact that–whatever their true motivations–they came as close as anyone to preventing the hundreds of thousands of deaths, and years of cost and suffering, the war has entailed.

In America, I’ve also often had a problem with how the work of August Wilson is held up as some sort of political beacon, the apogee of which came with the revival of Joe Turner’s Come and Gone on Broadway last year, when Pres. Barack Obama himself brought the First Lady to the show. It was a beautiful moment of political theatre (the other sort), with the first African-American president watching a play by America’s greatest African-American dramatist, under the direction of Bartlett Sher, the first white director to get a crack at Wilson’s work…ever? It was a paean to a post-racial America that just plain doesn’t exist, anymore than a post-racial American theatre does. I’d hardly be the first to criticize Broadway for its limitations, but it probably deserved more notice that this year when Denzel Washington won a Tony for best leading role in a play, he was the first African-American actor to win since James Earl Jones in 1987. For the same role in the same play. Which–that’s right–was also by August Wilson.

That’s not to say that Wilson’s work isn’t deserving of a lot of praise (and I don’t want to hate on him here, either). His ten-part cycle of plays that sought to reclaim the African-American experience of the 20th Century was a massive undertaking with frequently moving results. But again, context is everything in political theatre, and the very historicity of works like Joe Turner or Fences allows theatre audiences–still overwhelmingly white–to be comfortable with their exploration of race issues precisely because they’re in the past. Instead of encouraging contemporary audiences to ask hard questions about contemporary realities, including their own responsibility for the present, Wilson’s easily allows for a sort of kumbaya experience where theatre-goers spend a lot of money to see just how far we’ve come in America.

The problem in both cases–and what I’m generally get at here–is that the sort of work that’s passed for political theatre for the past several decades has relied too much on telling stories, making moral arguments, and appealing to the biases of their audiences. In a closed society, where the people could legitimately be at odds with their government, stories like that can meaningful and important. In America and Western Europe, they now largely serve to reinforce the already existing opinions of their audiences, and often at the expense of actually challenging their audiences for their role, as members of democratic societies, for the very issues they seek to address.

That doesn’t mean theatre has to be violently confrontational to be good political theatre. Young Jean Lee’s The Shipment is one of the strongest explorations of race in America I’ve seen or read in years, managing to challenge the assumptions of pretty much anyone in the audience no matter their background, without being threatening or off-putting. And the best recent political work I’ve seen is the T.E.A.M’s Mission Drift, which showed in workshop as part of this summer’s Soho Think Tank Ice Factory series. Instead of seeking to make a political argument, in Mission Drift the company creates an intellectual conflict that’s not actively resolved, allowing for the city of Las Vegas to represent both the best and worst aspects of contemporary America, and in the process exploring American capitalism (the good and the bad), expansionism, and the current economic crisis.

In a sense it doesn’t seem fair to compare Broadway and regional theatre with downtown artists–plenty of readers will respond with a passive “duh” to the suggestion one does a better job exploring politics than the other. But all too often, even small and experimental theatre relies to heavily on producing work that appeals to its audiences rather than challenging them. One thing the American theatre has in common from the biggest houses to the smallest, most avant garde companies is a strong leftward tilt. The responsibility of artists who want to be politically engaged–who really do want to make a difference–is to tackle the assumptions not of their society, as Fugard seems to suggest, but of their audiences. Falling back on the safety of our shared assumptions and values isn’t just irresponsible politically; it makes the theatre downright irrelevant.

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Name: Michelle Laflamme-Childs
Title/Occupation: Writer/Residency and Marketing/PR Director.
Organization/Company: Santa Fe Art Institute
URL: Sfai.org

1. Where did you grow up and how did you end up where you are now?

I grew up mostly in North Adams, MA (prior to the arrival of Mass MoCA). I came to Santa Fe almost 20 years ago to go to grad school at St. John’s, and when I finished the program, I just stayed. After a dozen years in marketing for an international packaged goods company that used to be headquartered here, I moved into non-profit by joining the Santa Fe Art Institute team in 2006 and haven’t looked back since.

2. What do you look for when you’re seeking out new work?

Well, I guess I don’t actually “seek” new work, it comes to me in the form of the SFAI’s Artist and Writer Residency applications. I have the distinct and unique pleasure of receiving hundreds of applications per year, each one different and spanning the entire spectrum of literary, visual, and performing arts. It’s pretty damn cool.

3. What was your most remarkable moment as a curator/presenter/producer?

As the Director of the Residency Program, I’m not really any of those things – curator/presenter/producer. The closest I get, is perhaps, the monthly Open Studio event, when we open up the studios of the resident visual artists and have brief readings by the writers. For me, every Open Studio is remarkable. I enjoy having an experience with the resident artists and writers that is the reverse of what most art patrons get. I meet them as people first. I see them in the kitchen, the hallways, in their pajamas first thing in the morning. Then, at Open Studio, I see their work and can put together the person I have come to know with the work they make as artists.

4. Which performance, song, play, movie, painting or other work of art had the biggest influence on you and why?

Really? You’re gonna make me choose *one*? I guess it would be a toss-up between Picasso’s Guernica and e.e. cummings’ poem “next to of course god america I love,” but I would choose either of them for the same reason.  In both cases, they were the first works that I experienced as a young person where I saw that art could break the rules and be innovative and exciting. Paintings didn’t have to be nice pastoral landscapes or portraits, poems didn’t have to rhyme or even use capital letters or follow the basic rules of grammar. Works like these opened up a world of possibilities for me, and I found myself able to see “art” in a much more open-minded and maybe even democratic way. The rarefied world of art began to unfold and expand into something that was accessible. However, I would not recognize the profound effect for another 20 years.

5. What skill, talent or attribute do you most wish you had and why?

I have always wanted to play a string instrument. I grew up playing the flute and sax and some piano, but I regret that I never learned the guitar or violin. I guess there’s still time…

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apropos of my other post on why “live’ matters:

A four-year study by cognitive neuroscientists from seven universities has released new data about the impact of arts study on the brain. Among other specifics, the research shows that music training extends working and long-term memory, and that it aids both reading and geometry skills in children. The research also shows that interest in the performing arts improves motivation and sustained attention. The entire study, funded by the Dana Foundation, demonstrates how arts education is associated with high academic performance.

Read the rest of Agnes Gund’s essay on “taking the arts seriously” over at HuffPo.

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In 2010, EmcArts, the leading nonprofit provider of innovation services to the arts sector, will further advance its pioneering Innovation Lab for the Performing Arts, an immersion program for arts organizations, thanks to a generous $1.6 million grant from the Doris Duke Charitable Foundation (DDCF). EmcArts is pleased to partner with DDCF to deliver three more Rounds of the program to 11 participating organizations from across the country in 2010 and 2011. Eligible organizations are producing, presenting (including arts and college-based presenters) and service organizations in theater, dance, and jazz.

More info? Visit Emcarts site.

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Mayor Michael R. Bloomberg, New York City’s richest man and biggest philanthropist, is quietly pulling the plug on an unusual program that has poured nearly $200 million of his fortune into nonprofit groups across the five boroughs, in a sign of major change under way in his charitable giving plans.

Yikes! Bad news for lots and lots of arts groups!! Read the rest in the NY TIMES.

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