Big Swings, Big Misses
Putting your fingers in your ears and singing too loud to hear the messenger is not a strategy, for arts organizations or anyone else.
Alan Harrison, previously discussed, has a book to sell. So he took to the podcast of fellow ArtsJournal blogger Katie Birenboim to hawk it. She gave him a laudatory review at a post titled Taking Big Swings:
Alan’s thesis is simple but somewhat polarizing: as Keri Mesropov, Former Chief Talent Officer of TRG Arts summarizes in the Foreword, Alan argues that nonprofit arts organizations must truly “earn and honor [their] status as a 501c3 by reflecting and serving the communities [they’re] in and the people that comprise them.”…Indeed, Alan asserts that most nonprofit arts orgs have things rather backwards: “Art being enough is not the question,” he writes, “Art is enough. But nonprofit arts organizations are not art. They don’t even create art; that’s what artists do. They are charities, in the business of creating positive impact using art as a tool.” In other words, Alan challenges and in actuality takes down the old adage “art for art’s sake.” For him, making “great art” cannot and should not be any arts organization’s mission, with educational and community engagement initiatives shunted off as sort of organizational side projects.
Since Harrison deletes comments challenging his ideas from his own blog, I tried voicing some criticisms on Birenboim’s.
Harrison’s premise is wrong, and his conclusions from that premise are at best unproven. Yes, a literal reading of the qualified entities in the 501(c)(3) designation does not include arts organizations. But in practice, several decades of legal precedent does recognize arts organizations whose purpose is to present and preserve art, as educational in a broad sense. A list of several dozen institutional types is described under the “Arts, Culture & Humanities” range of of the National Taxonomy of Exempt Entities Codes, and they include museums, performing arts centers, and any aspect of cultural life that you can think of. Pace Harrison, the production of art is a valid charitable mission, whether he personally regards it thus or not. The IRS’s generosity on the topic exceeds Harrison’s, which is saying something. That organizations “don’t even create art; that’s what artists do,” is not a sensible account of the manner in which artists have long worked with the institutions.
There are many organizations, including several criticized by name by Harrison, that had community-facing efforts to solve practical social problems, educational and otherwise, and were nevertheless forced to close in recent years. While Harrison exhorts nonprofit arts leaders to pivot into social justice work or be ruined, the fiscal environment seems to be worsening for everyone. It’s not clear that anyone will be protected by such pivots, and it’s not demonstrated that donors will reward them. The organizations may in fact waste resources they need to survive by investing them in social projects for which the organizations are neither qualified, nor equipped to measure impact.
That comment has been awaiting moderation for five days, and I assume will do so forever.
Saying that these people don’t matter is an overstatement. But they exemplify an attitude—particularly among certain progressives, but not at all exclusively—that everything will be peachy keen if they pretend that there aren’t major problems going on regarding certain subjects that they’d rather not talk about. This is a perennial impulse, but in recent times doing so has started to become increasingly expensive.
For instance, it was obvious to some of us early on that the Diversity, Equity, and Inclusion project had an implicit antisemitic component. It was so deeply committed to the demonization of “whiteness” that the idea of light-skinned victims of racism was intolerable to it. You could get away with expressing that intolerance in 2021, but in the post-October 7 world, its obvious lack of correlation with reality may cost you paid work, even if you’re Susan Sarandon. If the early adopters of DEI had the courage to point out, “Hey, this model threw out 140 years of progressive thought regarding class issues, is weirdly race-essentialist in its own way, and fails to account sensibly for antisemitism,” Ibram X. Kendi might have been denied the opportunity to light tens of millions of dollars on fire at Boston University.
Or consider the federal response to Covid. If the powers that be admitted early on that China’s lack of transparency and the features of the disease indicated a possibility that it was the product of gain-of-function research and was out in the world due to sloppy lab protocol, and if they had the humility to say that the vaccines were pretty good but masking was probably ineffective and either should be employed voluntarily in any case, the reputation of the nation’s heath bureaucracy might now be better than cheap dog food.
Let’s talk about some things that are not being adequately discussed.
One, Israeli women were raped to death by Hamas terrorists on October 7. It took two months of international criticism for the United Nations division ostensibly concerned with women’s empowerment to condemn the attack. No ceasefire with Hamas is possible until every Israeli hostage is returned, dead or alive. The human cost of that operation is going to be enormous but it will be necessary to prevent Hamas’s stated promise to deliver October 7 over and over again. Unfortunately, the elimination of Hamas, while necessary, will not be sufficient. The region will subsequently have to be, basically, denazified.
Two and related, antisemitism is now primarily a progressive phenomenon and has been for years. Principled criticism of Israel is not antisemitism. Hatred of Israel is. While the work to chase the Jew-haters out of the conservative movements is as persistently needed as dental hygiene, progressives must start doing likewise or be overtaken by bigoted cranks. Denazifying the progressives will necessitate unwinding the DEI bureaucracy.
Three and partially related, we are entering a new era of ochlocracy. “The resurgence of public protests in support of Hamas has revealed a disturbing truth: the left-wing rioting following George Floyd’s death in 2020 was not an anomaly, but a tactic that activists can repurpose for any cause,” writes
. “Whether by coincidence or design, these recent outbursts could be a dress rehearsal for possible violence during next year’s election campaign.”Four and not related, national debt is now $34 trillion and we have, maybe, twenty years to reduce it through spending cuts before it becomes impossible to fix, and we end up with debt default or hyperinflation. Interest payments on that debt are expected to exceed military spending in ten years. We are vulnerable to a recession. Economically, the USA is a nonagenarian smoker in a pneumonia ward. Neither mainstream party is motivated to do anything about this. Much of the rhetoric around the climate, that we need to accept sacrifices to our lifestyles in order to preserve a world in which our descendants can thrive, ought to be transferred immediately to the national debt.
Share your own favorite suppressio veri in the comments.
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"Using art as a tool." Do tell. There's no end of art worlders who've been doing that for quite a long time now, only I would call it using art as a pretext, or as a means to ends which have little or nothing to do with art as such. Really, Harrison needs someone to vet everything he says on record, though obviously his target audience does not include Dissident Muse types.
As for your comment languishing in moderation limbo, Franklin, let it be a lesson to you. Rather than casting pearls before, well, you know, you might as well throw bricks, as in:
"Harrison is full of it, and if he truly believes what he's saying, he's even worse off than if he's just being fashionably 'edgy.' So please, spare me, and think of your own image, why don't you."
Yes, and yes. Now our challenge is how to move you from being a lone voice in the wilderness -- a prophet, however disdained -- to being a force that few would dare to confront -- and a force that those who pull levers & move societies will pause to consider rather than attack.