Caught in a Money Trap

(First published on July 10, 2008 on www.onthecommons.org)

The demise of an acclaimed, inimitable theater company gives pause for reflection on the history and future of arts infrastructure in America.

Gosh, you go on vacation and bad things happen to artists. I ran into a colleague after a few weeks away with my family and she told me that one of our most beloved, Tony Award winning, Minnesota theater companies, Theatre de la Jeune Lune is going out of business. “It’s dying time for the arts,” she said. She told me that her own organization, a spunky, definition-defying place that supports individual artists of all disciplines and cultures, is suffering too. She expects to cut her paid time back and will be looking for more non-arts work to support her creative life. “Yeah, its dying time again,” I said.

I lament this ongoing loss of the cultural commons. Once more, when times are bad and the potential pot of contributed dollars shrinks, the arts are dying on the vine. However, it is not the economy that needs fixing—but the arts system that is dependent upon and trapped in a tenuous relationship with it.



Theatre de la Jeune Lune -- CARMEN, performer Christina Baldwin © 2003 Michal Daniel

We need a vital arts sector. Artists are symbol creators who tell stories and create images that bring meaning to our lives. They show us beauty and evil. Through metaphor and narrative they expose and challenge the status quo. They have the courage to speak of unspeakable wrongs. They express what is complex, controversial, contested and timeless. And they also have the ability to help us envision a better world.

Yet here are the economic pressures placed on arts groups today and it is no wonder they falter. Cut staff. Trim expenses. Do more with less. Earn more income. Diversify your contributed income. Hone your brand identity. Target your audience. Get out there and “sell” corporate sponsorships. And in the meantime you better know how to comply with the IRS, foundation guidelines and state and local tax rules. The business side of the arts grows fat to keep up with all this complicated revenue raising and reporting while the creative side grows thin. Seasoned and wannabe arts workers fork out tuition for colleges and universities that offer degrees in “arts administration.” Service organizations hold filled-to-capacity workshops on donor relations and audience development—as if there is some secret to prosperity that the professionals know. If only we were in on it we could roll in the dough.

How long can we continue to erode the base and tinker with the system of (non)support for the symbol makers, the truth tellers, and the seers among us? Whenever the economy goes south so do government and private funds for artistic work, never to return to previous levels. Economist Ann Markusen, in her studies of the arts labor force, art centers and regional economies has shown the significant “arts dividend” reaped by arts rich communities. However, the sector depends on discounted labor by artists. The human capital they invest, by working other jobs to support their creative work, is never fully compensated. Flagship institutions’ costs, both the bricks and mortar and their ongoing operations, might be adequately supported by civic and philanthropic sources with the Herculean efforts of elaborate and specialized staff. However the community dividend doesn’t make it into the pocket of most artists—most certainly not the edgy, the grassroots, the hard to define or the locally based ones.



Theatre de la Jeune Lune – FISHTANK – Conceived by Steven Epp, Nathan Keepers, and Dominique Serrand, Created and performed by Steven Epp, Nathan Keepers, Dominique Serrand, and Jennifer Baldwin Peden, February 16 – March 22, 2008. Photo © 2008 Michal Daniel

In a report on the demise of Theatre de la Jeune Lune, City Pages, a Minneapolis/Saint Paul arts and entertainment weekly, says “[artistic director] Dominique Serrand’s eyes widen in consternation when he describes how administration-heavy arts organizations have become, with the grinding apparatus of raising donations essentially becoming a monster that feeds on itself.”

Theatre de la Juene Lune is a groundbreaking Minneapolis based theater troupe—not your average regional repertory company. Founded in France in 1978 by Parisians Dominique Serrand and Vincent Gracieux and Minneapolis native Barbra Berlovitz, they began by splitting the season between countries. Minneapolitans Robert Rosen and Stephen Epp joined later and eventually the group settled permanently here in 1985. They created significant new works and unique adaptations of contemporary and classic plays. Known for originality, humor, razor sharp satire and a tempestuous creative process, they are a zany, zesty, very serious artist collaborative of stature. Of course they had their financial ups and downs. The scuttlebutt about money trouble was there on and off, especially after they stuck their necks out to buy and renovate a large warehouse space. The plays, however, were consistently first rate. American theater is much the richer for their existence. Now the building is up for sale. The staff is laid off. And a few board volunteers are left to pay off debts and close the operation down.

This system of nonprofit arts organizations dependent on contributed support is an invention of the 20th Century. In Industrial America the non-amateur arts were commercial proprietorships and/or patron supported—mostly homegrown. Artists could make a modest if perhaps second class living performing, teaching, touring, composing, conducting, publishing or otherwise selling their work.

Times changed. Popular art and fine art parted ways with popular art mainly following the commercial path of new technologies like sound recording, film, television and the entertainment business. The era of private, tax deductible and government subsidy for museums, orchestras, dance companies and the like began. The beast called the arts grant, initiated to grow the “high art” sector, started big time with the Ford Foundation in the 1950s, followed thereafter by a flood of other foundations, corporations and government agencies looking to invest, leverage and increase output of arts organizations. The National Endowment for the Arts (a Kennedy Administration idea to propel the country into a position of world class cultural prominence) began in 1965 and seeded a network of state and local government grant makers focused as the Ford Foundation was on leveraging other contributions and growing the arts infrastructure.

The nonprofit arts sector (indeed all nonprofits) grew exponentially—for many reasons including the baby boom, societal changes like embracing free expression, and a good economy. Three side effects of all this philanthropy and taxpayer benevolence run deep in the current nonprofit arts system and are evident in the final story of Theatre de la Jeune Lune and many others.

One, the spread of the arts grants phenomenon started the professionalization of both the grant giving and the grant getting. In the past (and still sometimes today) an arts patron would support an individual artist or group of artists in a personalized way. Patrons and artists found each other somehow. No “development department” or “grants officers” needed. A proprietor of one’s own arts concern was unfettered with regulations and reporting. Not so in the nonprofit world today. Getting and managing contributions is hard work.

Two, labor and art products were devalued even further than before. Arts offerings for the public exploded but the growth was and continues to be dependent on the willingness of individuals (with the exception of a few “stars”) to work for a fraction of the worth of their labor and sell their goods for a fraction of their cost.

Three, the hole in contributed support that was to be filled by leveraging Ford Foundation-style and NEA matching grants never manifested to the degree needed to support a full grown sector. Sometimes it was there, sometimes not, like a shell game—turn over the shell and look for the coin. Ooops. Guess not. Now we are hooked and just keep playing the game.

Some people apply a supply and demand model and say the attrition of nonprofit groups during tough times is a necessary adjustment. We have all heard someone sometime say: “ if these artists can’t earn enough from their work then nobody wants it and they should just give up.” This free market logic denies the intangible, priceless value of the arts to society. It perpetuates the abuse of human capital that artists contribute to keep art alive and available. And it provides little or nothing to effectively replenish the collective well of human creativity.

We are at a crossroads of the commons today in many ways, including the arts. We have ourselves to blame if, complicit in our martyrdom and blind in our ignorance of the systemic flaws, we continue to claw for the same resources in the same old way. The economy has failed the arts, not vice versa. There is more dying to come.

Again from the City Pages article: “Our mistake was flirting with the existing system. It backfired,” he [Serrand] says. “What we need to do at a national level, if we want to have artists and real art, is look at the system. We’d be better off taking a portion of taxes and public money to fund art. Because the amount of bureaucracy that it takes to fundraise for an organization is a gigantic effort. And it takes away from the work, from the purpose of the work, and the results. Nationally right now the business is more important than the art, and that’s wrong.”

If we don’t start treating the arts differently who will be the risk takers and visionaries tomorrow? Many young people don’t see themselves following their elders’ footsteps into the enclave of the nonprofit arts—too much work for too little reward and they aren’t falling for it. Plus the division between commercial, entertainment, pop culture and the nonprofit arts seems arbitrary to them. In fact some don’t see a division at all. They move freely between both kinds of venues as musicians, spoken word, media and visual artists taking advantage of whatever opportunity they find in their quest to express themselves. Life, art, streaming music, hanging out at a street front gallery and YouTube meld together for them. I find such young people to be hopeful harbingers of change.

Theatre de la Jeune Lune – Amerika, Or the Disappearance – inspired by Kafka, originally produced with the American Repertory Theatre, text by Gideon Lester, adapted for Jeune Lune by Steven Epp and Dominique Serrand, featuring Sarah Agnew, Steven Epp, Nathan Keepers, Luverne Seifert and Suzanne Warmanen. Photo copyright 2006 Michal DANIEL

The creators of the nonprofit theater organization formerly known as Theatre de la Jeune Lune give me hope also. They are aware of a system crumbling of its own weight around them and ready to start again in a new way. Here are the farewell remarks from their website:

Starting today, we begin imagining a new way of working. What should a theatre-generating organization of the 21st Century look like? How can artists create truly groundbreaking art in a fast changing world? Times have changed and so have we. Building upon our artistic legacy, and facing a different future, we are exploring ways to reinvent an agile, nomadic, entrepreneurial theatre with a new name. One that can embrace the concentric circles of artists we have worked with over the years. Together we will create essential and innovative theatre for today’s changing audience. It’s an exciting new journey and we hope you’ll join us with your support, with your presence, with your belief. Fear not: the art is alive and coming soon to a theatre near you. Keep in touch.

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Afterthoughts:

I told a colleague that it took 30 years for me to write this--20+ years in the arts trenches producing and fundraising; several years to study the recurring crises in the system from a birds eye perspective; and then the epiphany that this is a commons issue.

The latter revelation changes everything. Recognizing the arts as part of the commons removes the need to justify their monetary value or to be pitted against social service needs. The commons--whether natural, socially created or cultural-- is of immense intrinsic and monetary value. No part of the commons should be depleted; indeed resources should be poured back in. If so, arts and cultural groups need not go begging for subsistence.

Do you think the next step is to start dreaming--to imagine a new way? It would be a courageous and breakthrough act to question the hands that feed the non-profit arts. Is anybody up for that dangerous discussion?

Notes: 

Photos by Michal Daniel used with permission.

For an overview of the rise of the nonprofit arts see “Leverage Lost: The Nonprofit Arts in the Post-Ford Era” by John Kriedler. This 1996 article is available to download from In Motion magazine

Many thanks to Professor Ann Markusen at the University of Minnesota Humphrey Institute for Public Affairs for introducing me to a world of research and scholarly writing about the arts economy. She opened my eyes to the big picture.

Thank you to Theresa Sweetwater, Artistic Director of Intermedia Arts in Minneapolis, and soon-to-be new mom, for discussing and working through this theme with me.

Thank you to Mankwe Ndosi, Marcus Young, and Rachel Breen for back and forth dialogue also.