The arts in crisis: Whose fault?

Michael Kaiser, president of the John F. Kennedy Center for the Performing Arts, recently predicted that the recession could kill off at least 10,000 arts organizations this year. The situation is so dire that Kaiser and his staff have formed a new program entitled "Arts in Crisis: A Kennedy Center Initiative" to address the concerns of arts organizations at peril. Within 24 hours of announcing this free consulting program, Kaiser received 110 e-mailed pleas for assistance from 31 states and one from Iceland.

As a former volunteer "change agent"—management consultant, if you will— from the for-profit world to several arts organizations, I can't help thinking that many organizations might have avoided this doomsday scenario had they developed working cultures to function differently. Notwithstanding the current disasters in some parts of the for-profit world, my experience has been that not-for-profit enterprises are simply more resistant to self-scrutiny.

When fund-raisers run the show

An organization showered for years with philanthropic largesse can become just as complacent as, say, a Wall Street investment bank that bets its future on profitable but risky mortgage-backed securities. In the process it may add on functions and bureaucracies peripheral to its purpose until it loses sight of its primary mission. In such an organization, lacking investors or shareholders whose money is at stake, how does one know whether a job has been done well?

Most leaders of arts organizations these days are chosen above all for their fund-raising skills. Their ability to weather tumultuous markets by constantly reviewing spending practices and productivity tend to be secondary concerns. One can always go back to the philanthropic well—if it hasn't gone dry, that is.

At many arts organizations, the status quo— the friends, the relationships, the job security— is so pleasant that just about everyone has a vested interest in maintaining it. Often the whole group marches lockstep until a crisis shakes them up and makes them fight for their very lives.

A complaint at the Barnes

When I worked in certain arts organizations as a volunteer, I would hear (or overhear) administrators or curators grumble about supposedly intractable operations problems. As an outsider who possessed a different set of skills and experiences, I would suggest possible solutions. But no one ever expressed interest in pursuing those suggestions or even discussing them. Instead, the reaction was surprise that I didn't simply empathize with their plight.

The Barnes Foundation, an organization that ran itself for years on the bare-bones budgeting of Violette de Mazia, found itself in the '90s suddenly forced by its financial needs to expand its vision and thus its operational capabilities. At one point an employee— a man who is highly creative in his artistic life— repeatedly complained to me about problems with the new personal computers in the administrative offices. When I offered to procure the advice of a capable professional, free of charge, the administrator insisted that the problem wasn't really all that bad, and thereafter he stopped mentioning the situation in my presence.

To be sure, the Barnes Foundation has a well-earned reputation as an idiosyncratic arts organization. But in this respect, I suspect, it's quite typical.

Herd-like suspicion

Another place I volunteered— the Woodmere Museum, in Chestnut Hill— is an excellent organization in many respects. But here too, I found a herd-like suspicion among employees toward any volunteer who displayed more than the usual attentiveness to a task. Hard work was viewed askance if it might point to a different perspective on how to handle matters. Woodmere employees were all for hard work if it involved, say, rewriting artist biographies, cleaning out file drawers or stuffing envelopes. But insight into deeper matters was rebuffed. Anyone who deviated from the prevailing wisdom about problem-solving— or even the art on display— was made to know that he or she didn't fit in there. Imagine if the combined energy devoted to keeping dissenters in line were focused on the organization's real work?

By contrast, I've never encountered similar resistance to expressing ideas in any for-profit situation.

Some organizations encourage individuals to speak up and participate; others don't. But those that do so usually open up a floodgate of insight and opportunity.

The trouble with aggressive marketing

Michael Kaiser recommends, among other things, that arts organizations focus on aggressively marketing their art. I would caution him against relying solely on marketing as cure. In the arts, spending on advertising is fine, but not to the exclusion of improving the programming. Arts administrators must ask themselves: Why am I in this business, anyway? Have some faith that people come to art for the same reasons you came to it.

There is a point of diminishing returns where spending on arts marketing is concerned. The Art Museum's current "Cézanne and Beyond" exhibit may well be worth $24 for the ticket, plus $10 for parking and $20 for lunch. But if I hear one more radio commercial for "Cézanne and Beyond" or the TV food show hostess Rachel Ray touting it, or read one more effusive PR-driven review of the same, I'll think hard and long before returning. And I suspect I'm not alone.

The good news is that arts organizations are already staffed by individuals with creative talents. The solution is a matter of applying their creativity toward their own organizations as well as to their art.



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