huffingtonpost.com: On my first day in the nonprofit world, I was introduced as "the new suit." Short shrift indeed for the years I'd spent undergoing rigorous formal musical training. My decades of hard-won success in the for-profit sector, it seemed, had marked me with a sort taint in certain corners of the art world -- had made me seem somehow less artistically chaste than I had been considered in my younger days. After all, I must have sold out by choosing to create companies rather than compositions over the intervening span of years. And now here I was suggesting we, as artists, ought to figure out a better way to pay for what we do. What nerve. What gall.
Saturday, April 07, 2012
Richard Dare: Paradise Lost: Can We Keep Nonprofits From Failing?
huffingtonpost.com: On my first day in the nonprofit world, I was introduced as "the new suit." Short shrift indeed for the years I'd spent undergoing rigorous formal musical training. My decades of hard-won success in the for-profit sector, it seemed, had marked me with a sort taint in certain corners of the art world -- had made me seem somehow less artistically chaste than I had been considered in my younger days. After all, I must have sold out by choosing to create companies rather than compositions over the intervening span of years. And now here I was suggesting we, as artists, ought to figure out a better way to pay for what we do. What nerve. What gall.
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4 comments:
What a fascinating read that was. And as sad as it is to say, I completely agree with what mr. Dare is saying. Art has become way too focused on begging for money, the fuel it needs to keep producing results. Grants and donations are certainly important, but they have crossed a dangerousness and become crucial, as the article says. There are few things worse than having to rely on something inconsistent such as donations; even in the case of theatres with a subscriber base and annual donors, those checks are no guarantee (as seen when the pittsburgh public quickly changed their season a few years back after the announcement of their originally planned shows almost lost them half their subscribers). Not-for-profit means that any extra money earned on top of operational costs (including salaries) gets pooled back into the company and goes towards keeping it afloat. The model itself isn't broken, just its sources. No one is coming close to even breaking even anymore, and the art is going to suffer. So what do we do? No one seems to know exactly, but it's clear that knocking on more doors and sending more postcards and emails won't save us in the long run. We have to find another way.
You need to make sure that you have a solid buisness plan as a not-for-profit arts organization and this article is proof of that. We are in show buisness and you need to be on solid financial footing in order to produce quality theatre. The idea that a small community theatre can survive off of donations may be true but it will not allow you to be proactive and plan ahead. Without breathing room in your budget you end up not being able to keep your staff and not being able to do work that will allow you to grow as an organization. If people's jobs are not dependent on a sound buisness model then you can try to run off of donations but if you want to be a decent place to work you need to be able to instill confidence in your donors and in your staff.
Well it does make sense that this happens. I mean art people aren't really versed in business. Which really is unfortunate because this could help with the situation we are in. I think there is also something that happens to artists where they are basically told that they should be happy that they are doing their art at all and shouldn't complain about the fact that they have no money to do it. Or my mothers favorite saying, that if you want to be an artist you have to be prepared to be starving and under appreciated. Think about it other industries that are non-profit, they work fine, and get enough funding. Artists run into the problem of being labeled as less worthy of money because of what we do, and what we produce.
I wonder where the idea that business is the antithesis of art, or that an artist trying to make money is selling out, comes from,particularly when the non-profit business model seems to be do whatever you have to to make the donators happy. This contradicts the idea that people seem to cling to of the artist as above money, as pointed out in the article
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