January 18, 2006

Solving the Challenges Facing Artists

Dance/USA posted the transcript of a plenary speech given by Ken Foster, executive director, Yerba Buena Center for the Arts, at a November 12, 2005 Dance/USA On Tour program in Los Angeles.

The speech, titled "Dance in The Contemporary World," offers a harsh indictment of the social and political environment in the United States and castigates artists for internalizing the same distorted values pursued by the business community.

While I share much of the anger that Ken Foster describes in his compelling speech and very much appreciate it when artists grapple directly with the challenging issues of our time, I don't agree with him on the sources of the problem and I think his recommendations for strengthening the financial health of the arts world - especially dance - are too limited.

Foster opens his speech by describing the extent to which many Americans are deeply disturbed by US actions at home and abroad. Art must address this deep-seated anger, he believes, before it is transformed into madness.

I'm wondering if it isn't time for our artists to lead us deeper into the madness...in order that we can fully understand the rage the "blazing anger" that is out there now. By making us examine this anger and its source, our art and our artists not only move us to action, but also provide us avenues for understanding and action that is other than madness. Madness unleashed, which one can argue is indeed the currency of our time, is madness unchecked, and the results terrify me to consider. Can our artists bring us back from the abyss by showing it to us? I think they must.

Foster then shares his shame and disbelief while watching the TV images of Hurricane Katrina while he was in London:

What in the hell kind of a country have we created in which the weakest of our citizens are left to fend for themselves in the wake of a tragedy beyond imagining; when all we can do is watch and shake our head in disbelief? It was as if a lid had been lifted off the illusion that is America and for a brief moment, again, we faced the madness -- that we had indeed been remade in the Bushian image and it was here for the entire world to see. Shame only begins to describe my depth of feeling at this event.

The source of the problem explains the speaker:

...the values that we saw exhibited by Katrina and that we find so abhorrent are the same values that we have internalized as members of the arts community in the United States. Shrugging our shoulders that "that's the way it is," we have allowed "those" values to become "our" values. Values like the primacy of the marketplace. Values like a token, but not actual, concern for the weakest members of our community. Values like a desire to grab the resources that are "rightfully ours;" that "we worked hard to get" and that we are not going to give up easily if at all, especially to the weaker, dare I say it, browner members of our community?

Like many others who watched the images of despair and inaction during the first week following Katrina, I was appalled and shocked. But I don't think that everybody within the arts community was indifferent to the pain and suffering. Many dance organizations including Dance/USA as well as dancers, dance companies and dance studios made significant efforts to help fellow artists and others.

I also don't think it makes sense to indict the "primacy of the marketplace" as a major culprit. I'm disgusted with the Bush administration as well on just about all fronts - their contempt for the arts, science, the environment, social justice and many other issues. I also think the close ties among the Bush administration, large corporations and lobbying groups is very dangerous and unhealthy. But that doesn't mean that business in the abstract and the values it represents is in and of itself a negative thing. Without a vibrant free-market economy there would be many fewer corporate supporters of the arts. And by completely discounting the positive aspects of the market economy, I believe that Foster and many others in the arts are actually prohibiting the arts community from exploring new and untapped revenue sources - more about this in a moment.

Foster continues by saying that artists are fighting over an ever smaller economic pie:

We are not just invited, we are encouraged to fight amongst ourselves for the scrapes of resources available to us. We are rewarded for co-opting ourselves and our professed values in order to create one more dance, to present one more company, or frankly, even to survive in an actively hostile world? Looters? Is that the word for us that are scrambling over each other to get even the simplest basic resources of artistic survival - money to create, to commission, to present dance?

He concludes with two recommendations for addressing these challenges:

First, the greatest contribution we can make ...is to do work that matters... get your values up front in your work, strongly, unashamedly, aggressively...Art, dance, is about cultural values, so please, please, make it about cultural values in what you create and what you present. Otherwise, you are part of the problem.

Second, we can no longer afford to fight among ourselves for the few crumbs of resources that our benefactors have made available to us. Simple as it sounds, we need to work with each other, not against each other. We need to stand up not for our piece of the pie, but for making the pie bigger. We need to be outraged and enraged that we live in a society that has placed so little apparent value on its art and culture and we need to shout that message from the rooftops wherever and whenever we can with whatever power and voice we have, which is, I might add, far stronger, more far reaching and more powerful that we are willing to admit.

I don't think that anybody involved in arts in the US is going to argue against the premise that the government - local, state and federal - should be more supportive of the arts. But in today's political and economic environment, this is simply not going to happen. People within the arts community can speak with as loud a voice as they want, but their calls for more funding from the government is not going to amount to very much.

What is desperately needed in the arts community is some new, fresh thinking about alternative, additional ways to help arts be more financially secure and healthy. And, as I mentioned above, if one starts with the premise that the marketplace is evil, than you are sabotaging at the outset any possibility of diversifying the funding base for the arts and artists.

My recommendation for how artists - especially in the dance world - should respond to decreasing funding is to jump head-first into the marketplace. Despite all the complaints about evaporating funding sources - these complaints are often justified - nobody has really broken out of the box with new approaches and thinking. The usuall complaint about the funding pie has to be bigger just doesn't cut it anymore.

Given, for example, the growth of video distribution and sales on the Internet, why has not a single dance company created Internet-specific content for sale through their website and/or blog and through iTunes? Why has not a single dance company created a blog to communicate directly with their audiences to increase ticket sales and related product sales?

The online audience is millions of times large than the capacity of a sold-out theater. While I don't have a magical answer as to what specific type of dance content should be created for the web (I do have a lot of ideas), I do know the following: If you sell a video clip for $2 and sell it to 5,000 people, you just made $10,000.

I've written extensively (in this blog and in white papers) and will continue to write about new creative avenues and business opportunities that are available now in the online world for dancers and dance companies who are willing to take their art and their business models in as yet unexplored innovative directions. Given the uncertain economic climate that many dancers face today, there is no reason not to at least consider some of these possibilities.

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