arts institutions are failing artists
or, the challenge of learning financial and creative autonomy in a late capitalist economy
This past week, I had the utter privilege of meeting Fred Moten—poet, thinker extraordinaire, and one of the few people I have zero qualms about calling “brilliant.” I will write about his talk, my brief conversation with him, and his interview with poet Nikki Giovanni (postponed to end of this month because of Hurricane Milton), so stay tuned for that in a few weeks!!
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Last Sunday, I received a phone call from the CEO of my booking agency Astral Artists. A few days prior, she had emailed asking to call to “share some information,” leaving me to guess what that information was.
Not entirely surprisingly, the call was to tell me and all the artists on Astral's roster that the agency was shutting down and that the news would be officially published later that week (original Philadelphia Inquirer article here and the non-paywalled version on the League of American Orchestras website here). The main reason was, as Lourdes told us and to the press, that Astral's business model—relying primarily on foundations and philanthropy/private donors—was ultimately unsustainable. In other words, it had no means of financially self-sustaining if a major piece of external funding evaporated.
The purpose of today's post is not to rag on Astral, and I won't comment more on its specific situation than what I've just written. Rather, what interests me is thinking through funding in the arts (coincidentally, one of this week's topics in my entrepreneurship class is “Introduction to Arts Funding”), and my completely unsolicited thoughts about why we artists need to figure out how to take back the reins a bit more in this industry. How do we dismantle professional gatekeeping without resorting to totally laissez-faire economics? Is it possible to reject the institution without rejecting its umbrella reach? In other words, are institutions the only answer to caring for and funding innovative and weird (and often non-commercially viable arts)? Is it possible to think about financial sustainability in the arts without reducing artists to the bottom line?
on finding utopia
The tagline for this blog—“a rogue harpist's quest to find utopia”—is utterly sincere. I feel that being alive is inherently an act of inequality, and moreover, acts of consuming (which is what one does as a living organism) further widens that inequality. The point isn't to try to be a good person or a good consumer, which I find futile given my other fundamental philosophical beliefs, but to take part in creating more ethical worlds for others. Furthermore, “ethical,” at least to me, isn't about justice; while I value social justice, I find that the latter can become itself a heavy ideological stricture that pushes away any exceptions that contradict its logic.
In my head, ethical world-building is about carving out pockets of spaces to breathe; it is fugitive, fungi-tive (mycelial?), unafraid of the monstrous and the dead, the secret dark places where no one wants to go, the secret dark places that are the safest to make a home.
In the arts, the secret dark place may perhaps be a euphemism for being a completely underground, unknown artist, which is not what most people want. It is the opposite of being a star on the stage, of having your face on a billboard, of being the first female musician to make a billion dollars from music (Taylor Swift can be that and go home to her all-American hunky football player boyfriend…I guess it is possible to have it all).
What Taylor Swift represents—and what she reflects in the arts industry writ large—is how the bottom line loves a good monopoly. For agencies and presenters in classical music, why support a large roster of emerging artists when you could make the same, or even higher, amount of money from a handful of artists who are money-making machines? Social media hasn't changed the game for independent musicians. It hasn't created more slices of the pie; what it has really done is forced us to bake our own pies and then beg industry gatekeepers—the labels, promoters, and agencies—to take the biggest slice.
because the state of things feels pretty dystopic
Unfortunately, the institutions who choose not to go this route, who are in the old non-profit business of dividing their pies, are really struggling. A few weeks ago, Patrick sent me this great article (in Esquire of all places!) called “Who Pays for the Arts?” that told a grim tale about arts funding, and, ironically, discusses why Taylor Swift is so successful. The takeaway? Top-down arts funding sucks. Foundations are re-prioritizing, philanthropy is fickle, and based on my observations, many artists and arts institutions have lost touch with why we as a society even ought to engage with the arts in the first place (and I'm definitely not a pragmatist…don't talk to me about the arts as a vehicle for STEM fields or human cognitive optimization. I will explode.). For the arts to really show its value, people have to be making it, talking about it, and living through it (socially embedded), not just consuming it (i.e., entertainment).
However, the article references ways in which artists might find their secret dark places outside of the non-profit model. One can consider structures of collective funding or “non-hierarchical, distributed income” models that could be more sustainable/”regenerative” than the current top-down approach that puts power in the hands of the few. There's also the hybrid non-profit/for-profit model, like what the self-proclaimed bar-meets-bookstore “Third Place haven” Kibbitznest in Chicago does. And side note: anyone who has written grants knows that government-sponsored arts funding—while that resource is amazing and I would never take it for granted, is SUPER SUPER hegemonic. State arts funding isn't really about encouraging artistic creation across a wide demographic; it's ultimately a highly nationalistic project that prioritizes art-making that reenforces certain politico-cultural ideals.
As an artist, arts philanthropy is not a sustainable way to make a living, and it’s not sustainable for an organization to depend on it, because philanthropists fund for some time and then move on
~ Eric Gottesman, visual artist and faculty at SUNY Purchase
artist, inform thyself!
At the end of the day, my takeaway is that artists need to be far more literate in economics and social/cultural theory than our educational and creative institutions are encouraging them to be. Why are our music performance students not discussing Marx? Adorno? Debord? Williams? Attali? Piketty? Why are they not reading Marianne Ritchey and Anna Bull's books on class, capitalism, and classical music? As I tell my entrepreneurship students, knowing the history of the arts industry through how it has been historically funded and the values behind that funding is SO vital to keeping their head up if they want to pursue a career in the arts.
I really despise the culture that valorizes artists to “just be artists,” because in the long-term, we have to deal with the hellscape of the bottom line that comes when corporate/organizational executives get to decide what kind of art is valuable. And, when I say economics, I don't mean the bullshit about how twenty-first century artists need to think like start-ups, because it’s highly unsustainable for us to all be creating separate entities in direct competition with each other (for funding, audiences, press, etc.).
When there’s a real sense of abundance, not just in giving money but in surrounding the artists with support, it unlocks a different ease and level of creativity.
~ Gottesman
After we received the news about Astral's closure, the cohort of us who were signed at the same time dropped messages in our group chat, offering encouragement and support to each other. At one point, one member mentioned starting an arts collective, which I think is would be a great idea, though I spoke separately with another member about how we could make a collective that is both artistically cohesive and financially stable.
In an age when art institutions are failing us by falling, it is artists that need to take on the responsibility of deciding what our future looks like. Where is our secret dark place, our utopia?
I don't know yet, but I sure as hell am excited to figure it out.
live long & prosper,
✨ Noël Éternel 🎅🏼 🎄
This week's Corner of Wondrous and Powerful is about loving music:
👂🏼 Re-kindling my love of Bartok's Violin Concerto no. 2 by listening to my favorite recording by Isaac Stern
📖 Fred Moten's “Amuse-bouche” from Black and Blur. The man's writing is sometime so unreal:
So may I offer you something? Something rich, strange and abundant but on a plate so small it’s not even a plate; a spoonful, really; just a mouthful, just enough to taste, just for a moment, the alchemical magic, the terrible and beautiful and immeasurable richness and impurity of a train or a streetcar or a sidewalk held in the flavor of solfège, in simultaneously encrypted and decrypted composition, sung until it can be tasted, that taste made music from embouchure to batterie, hand to mouth, in ongoing haptic incident and percussive hors d’oeuvre.
👀 Nikki Giovanni reading her poem “Quilting the Black-Eyed Pea (We're Going to Mars)” because listen to that musical flow! I also loved her documentary Going to Mars that was screened in Tallahassee last week - huge gratitude to my English department colleagues Ali Sperling and L. Lamar Wilson for putting together this once-in-a-lifetime Giovanni/Moten residency at FSU.