This ArtsJournal Blogger Wants to Save Your Arts Nonprofit by Killing It
"Talking about art is like dancing about architecture," goes the old saw, but wait 'til you see dancing about homelessness.
Alan Harrison, whom you may recall as the author of the inadvertent Monoculture Manifesto, recently made some provocative claims:
We know why people produce ART. It’s a wondrous product, a magical formation of thoughts, ideas, and tools to contextualize life. But anyone can produce art. Anyone.
What the public doesn’t care about (and why they’re not coming) is that YOU produce art. If you have been given the gift of a 501(C)(3) status from your state, you can provide that same public a “why” that differentiates you from that universe of “anyone.” You can find ways to solve the hardest problems that your particular community faces. Right now. And use that magical substance called art not as the culmination of a project, but as the beginning of an answer.
By virtue of that 501(C)(3) golden ticket, you now have a wide path to success. By choosing to be a charity that measurably and positively affects others who need it, you won’t be hemmed in by the outdated and perverted notion of “art for art’s sake” that is killing the whole industry, company by company (as the news keeps coming in).
I asked, in the comments section:
To better understand your thinking, I’d like you to comment on a specific example. The Petronio Residency Center in the Catskills closed this past summer after a six-year run. What should they have done differently to “find ways to solve the hardest problems that [their] particular community faces” and remain solvent?
Harrison replied:
According to the website, the mission of the company is listed as this:
“The mission of Stephen Petronio Company (SPC) is to support the vision of choreographer Stephen Petronio, which includes the creation and presentation of his existing and new works, alongside legacy initiatives meant to preserve the history of postmodern dance lineage, while also advancing its future through new works that honor and extend the history and offer a platform for a greater inclusivity of artistic voices.”
None of that has to do with Greene County, New York, or any charitable purpose. Supporters today, especially after the heart of the pandemic, are seeking organizations that are essential to the health and welfare of people. This is why organizations like this (and others around the country) are in the process of closing. They (like many nonprofit arts organizations) chose their own idea of need rather than asking the people in their community. If they had chosen dance as a catalyst for positive outcomes in homelessness, education, etc. and proved it with measurable data, donors would have lined up to support them. Instead, sadly, they appear to have chosen to do their own thing. This is their right, but it’s a failure scenario in 2023 and the near future.
That prompted some more inquiries from me:
To use your examples, how should the Center have employed dance as a catalyst for positive outcomes in education or homelessness?
And then:
I have a couple of additional questions:
1. You suggest that the Petronio Residency Center should have engaged in the areas of education or homelessness, but that would have obliged it to a competition for donation money against charities that were fully dedicated to each of those causes, which the county in fact has. Why would donors concerned with education or housing support a dance company when they could give to charities that put all of their resources into education or housing? And in the meantime, how would the company have made more dance?
2. Your argument that art for art's sake is not an economically or morally viable mission for a nonprofit implies that an artistic project made for its own sake that can't sustain itself commercially should discontinue. Are you willing to say so explicitly?
He dealt with the subsequent questions by deleting them. Fortunately, I had a feeling that he might, and recorded them, so that the world would know that in response to some modest challenges, he doctored the conversation to give himself the last word and make it look like he had answered me satisfactorily, which he did not. If this is the kind of probity you’re looking for in an arts management professional, by all means, seek him out.
It’s not clear to me that anyone is taking Harrison seriously aside from Douglas McLennan. His blog has almost no engagement. (He also deletes challenges he can’t handle, so it may appear quieter than it is.) He has a book coming out, Scene Change: Why Today's Nonprofit Arts Organizations Have to Stop Producing Art and Start Producing Impact, which I assume is a collection of these detail-free exhortations to the arts nonprofits to abandon their reason for existence in favor of do-gooderism. One can safely conclude from lines like “Anyone can produce art. Anyone.” that the author is not thinking about the related matters with utmost precision. Nevertheless, I think that there’s a version of his thesis that may be correct in a limited sense.
As I’ve discussed before, most recently at Woke Programming as Terminal Rally, art-value as such is becoming difficult to generate. Yesterday I posted a contentious review by Alan Pocaro, who noted that “…late abstraction’s lifeblood is also its fatal flaw. The new colors, shapes, configurations and techniques upon which it depends inevitably become old, tired and predictable. Eventually we come face to face with peculiar-looking paintings that are about an artist making paintings that look peculiar.” Clement Greenberg, in 1971, wrote that “Modernism has been a failing thing in literature these past twenty years and more; it's not yet a failing thing in painting or sculpture, but I can imagine its turning into that in another decade.” That even a modernist sympathizer like Pocaro would come to such conclusions about a contemporary abstractionist appears to vindicate Greenberg’s suspicions from fifty years earlier.
The baby lost with the bathwater is a particular kind of artistic seriousness that makes art-value available, which to my mind is the vital and enduring aspect of modernism separated from its historical trappings. And without that, you may as well indulge in do-gooderism because the art is probably going to be bad anyway.
So yes, in the current situation, donors who don’t believe in art-value support organizations that don’t recognize art-value that support artists who can’t generate art-value.1 If you think that these circumstances are sustainable and ones to which we should aspire, then Harrison’s argument is correct at least directionally. Go get yourself some of that do-gooder money. Do what Petronio should have done and make postmodern dances about homelessness. Just make sure that you have ancillary programming that has a measurable outcome on local homelessness. Donors, promises Harrison, will line up to support you.
Unless they don’t. I picked Petronio because his center’s closure was cited in a San Diego Tribune article that notes, among much else, that 2022 saw charitable giving in the arts and culture sector drop 8.9 percent. In a New York Times piece on the erstwhile Petronio Residency Center, its namesake cited as issues…
…“the wobbling of the stock market,” as well as a shift in the priorities of foundations toward funding social justice-oriented initiatives, which, he said, “I stand 100 percent behind.” Grants that he was counting on didn’t come through, he said, noting that the center is now operating through a $500,000 government loan.
In isolation this seems to prove Harrison correct, that chasing the money into social-justice initiatives might have saved the company. But the article continues:
The property will be listed at $4.2 million, more than three times the $1.3 million it was bought for in 2016. Petronio said he intends to use the revenue to continue supporting younger artists, and he hopes to expand a local dance education program that evolved in tandem with the center.
Behold, the center was a catalyst for positive outcomes in education at the local level, just as prescribed by Doctor Harrison. Yet donors didn’t line up. The article also cites Lumberyard, another dance residency, on seemingly permanent hiatus, whose programs include…
…LUMBERYARD Young Performers, which provides free dance education for students living in low-income communities in and around Catskill, Fresh Start, an intervention program for incarcerated teens, and Junior Crew, which provides local high school students summer jobs and workforce development training – from resume building to learning how to network.
Or rather, did. In January its building was put up for sale.
The Tribune article likewise mentions the San Diego Blues Festival, which ended a 12-year run last year despite that its whole purpose was to benefit a local food bank.
The now-closed Mark Taper Forum, at which Harrison wagged his finger a few months ago, could once boast that “Education has been an integral part of our work since 1971, when we launched our programming for young people as a means of amplifying the diminishing state of arts education programming in Southern California. Each year, our programs reach thousands of students around the region.”
Harrison also lambasted Book-It Repertory, which left a legacy of a “premier, cornerstone Arts and Education program which provided singular K-12 literary-based programming throughout Washington State, reaching tens of thousands of students and teachers annually,” by saying that the company “never reported measurable impact on, say, the numbers of people reading due to their productions, increased reading among those readers, or better test scores among the student readers in that population.” As it happens, my brother is available for that kind of research design, but the expenses and time involved are not trivial, and Harrison did not establish that Book-It’s donors, company, or audience were motivated to see such a thing happen. He merely assumes that if they had, Book-It would still be here today. Yes, you beleaguered arts organizations, you urgently need my brother’s services to verify to donors that your educational initiatives are effective! Don’t take it from me, take it from Alan Harrison! If your nonprofit folds anyway, you may request a refund from Harrison.2
The list of recently closed arts organizations that were connected to robust educational and social-justice missions is extensive: Cry Havoc, Advancing Women Artists, The Arts Barn, Art Conspiracy, on and on. Did they not measure enough? What was Lumberyard supposed to measure in regards to its program of free dance education for poor kids in Catskill, increased degrees of hip rotation? You might as well accept that dance education is good for its own sake in the same way that better reading scores are good for their own sake, at which point you might as well accept that dance is good for its own sake. These utilitarian arguments are repulsive and evidently don’t even ensure donors.
Harrison, at the original post, excerpted a conversation with a theater director about why he chose a particular play for the schedule.
“Okay, it’s a great play, but why? And why now? Is there something new about this production? What do you want your audience to do with the information in the play?”
“You can’t manipulate an audience like that,” he replied. “That’s not what we do.”
“You manipulate an audience anytime there is an audience,” I told him. “How is putting on a play any different from church? Isn’t that manipulation?”
“I don’t see it that way. I just put the play on the stage and let the audience think for themselves.”
We were equally stunned at each other’s seeming lack of knowledge as to the purpose of an arts organization vis-à-vis the purpose of art.
I was stunned at Harrison’s lack of knowledge regarding the purpose of a church. David Mamet does not suffer from such confusion:3
The reward offered by the traditional melodrama… is anxiety undergone in safety…. Myth, religion, and tragedy approach our insecurity somewhat differently. They awaken awe. They do not deny our powerlessness, but through its avowal they free us from the burden of its repression.
If you want your arts nonprofit to survive, awaken awe. This is no guarantee, except that even if your organization fails, it will fail doing what art is meant to do.
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We are in the midst of an Asynchronous Studio Book Club reading of Totality: Abstraction and Meaning in the Art of Barnett Newman by Michael Schreyach. Obtain your copy and jump in.
Preorders are available for Aphorisms for Artists: 100 Ways Toward Better Art by Walter Darby Bannard. More information is available at the site for the book.
This is Creative Capital in a nutshell.
Readers who know statistics and would like to learn the R programming language are directed to my brother’s book.
Feels like a scam
You tortured that guy