The graying of the non-profit arts sector? On what planet?

A large and generally very smart foundation recently published a really silly report. The basic premise is that non-profit arts organizations are facing a crisis of failure to attract the younger generations of adults as artists, staff or supporters. Therefore, the foundation argues, the non-profit arts sector must adopt "a systemic approach to the challenge of generational succession in the areas of governance, membership, advocacy, [and] financial support."

Heh. Are they kidding? Well no they're not, alas; rather, they are offering conclusions that are wildly unsupported by the fairly trivial amount of actual data offered. Andrew Taylor with The Artful Manager, and especially some of the commenters to his post, nicely point out some glaring logic flaws in the above argument. Best comment: "In reality, younger people have perfectly fine values of their own -- as well as finely honed bullshit detectors -- and the real challenge is for the arts to genuinely mean something to younger people. To be worthy of them, I might even say."

I can't do any better than that on the logic so I'll throw in two cents on the facts: if there is a sector of the U.S. economy that is doing better now at attracting young people than the arts I haven't seen it. I've been working in the non-profit arts sector for several years now, just did some empirical research on it actually, and that trend is blindingly obvious. Theater, dance, music, visual arts, whatever.

Training talented kids for those fields is a booming business at all levels, the number of U.S. tax returns listing artist as a paid occupation doubled in one generation, the biggest current theatrical hit on the planet is minting money around the country based on its appeal to young women ("Wicked"), and so on. In my day job I deal with small to medium sized arts organizations, the number of which has been rising at a crazy rate, and it's long since become a surprise to meet an artistic director or music director as old as 35.

That report notes demographic predictions of the rising average age of the U.S. and claims that this is a danger sign for the arts unless the sector gets organized to meet "increasing competition" for the attention of "a shrinking pool of younger people." You know what, if the shrinking pool prediction turns out to be correct I'm going to predict that it will be other sectors scrambling to figure out how to become as attractive to young people as the arts provably are, rather than the reverse.

Counting on being "too big to be allowed to fail"

Two high-profile arts non-profits on the East Coast are right now engaged in a familiar sort of public brinkmanship, with a distinct odor in both cases of "save us from ourselves."

Having worked in big-city regional non-profit theater myself I was quite startled to learn that the Paper Mill Playhouse in New Jersey is on the verge of collapse. (I'm actually familiar with a couple of the principals involved, since both the departed CEO and the current managing director were hired away in recent years from major Chicago theater companies.) The Paper Mill has long been a poster child for robust successful suburban repertory theaters; twenty years ago they led the nation with a whopping 45,000 subscribers.

So the state they've fallen to is pretty startling: fewer than 20,000 subscribers now (which is a far more drastic falloff than the general national trend), and a budget for the current season which depended on increasing annual fundraising by almost $3 million in one gulp. They're now in so many words daring legislators to let the "official state theater of New Jersey" collapse, with perhaps predictable results.

There's nowhere near enough information in the media coverage to be clear on how this situation came to pass for Paper Mill, but a quick glance at their tax returns on Guidestar does support what Playbill wrote, that "the board at Paper Mill has either not had the ability to get outside contributions or has not seen the need due to the once-high subscribership." It's hard to see that as anything but seriously negligent in a society where per-capita individual contributions for the arts quintupled after inflation from 1964 to 2004.

Meanwhile in Miami, the mammoth Carnival Center for the Performing Arts which opened to huge fanfare only last October is apparently already in financial free-fall. The thing appears to have been a financial Potemkin village actually: a half-billion dollar multi-facility arts complex that opens with zero endowment? For which the pro formas assumed operational profitability from day one? Almost no onsite parking (in South Florida??), and the operating budget didn't include the cost of stagehands? Surely no one with any experience running an actual arts center (or a service-sector business of any kind) was in charge of the planning on this thing.

All the bailout scenarios being discussed are fairly gruesome but they include at least one that's fairly innovative: blackmail the city's major newspaper. Quoting from that article in the area's business newspaper: "The Miami Herald...has a contract to sell its land around the center for $190 million, but the unsold land's value would plummet if the center shut down. Because the land's value soared about $180 million as the center rose nearby with the Herald's strong editorial push, the paper could protect its holding by handing the center, say, 10% of the gain the center caused." The paper does seem to have been covering the center's problems reasonably bluntly, anyway. And what a fine mess it is.

Outreach does not build audiences?

Classical music keeps popping up as a topic in the not-for-profit sector these days, and it's not all about big established institutions: turns out that at least in Chicago and New York there is now a thriving alternative classical-music scene. Not being a big classical fan myself I wasn't really aware of this in Chicago until taking my present job, in which capacity I've become acquainted with the dozens of small independent chamber music, opera, symphony and classical-dance groups around here. There are more than 300 non-profit music organizations in the Chicago region now, not even counting the non-profit multipurpose arts councils and such.

Meanwhile the world of big orchestras is abuzz right now with some startling conclusions of a huge long-term experiment by the large James S. and John L. Knight Foundation. Having spent 10 years and $13 million investing in audience-building efforts by a dozen symphonies around the country, the foundation commissioned a frank assessment of the results. They were trying to figure out why so many orchestras outside the top half-dozen are chronically on the edge of financial collapse?

Among the Knight conclusions: "Free programming and outreach do not turn people into ticket buyers." Also that there is a large audience interested in classical music in the U.S.: "The problems of orchestras stem not from the music they play but from the delivery systems they employ." And this interesting thought: "Orchestras need to do more research on those who do _not_ attend their concerts," that is, audience research is invariably conducted among those who have already gotten the message and is therefore useless for figuring out how to attract new ticketbuyers.

While clearly some of the conditions Knight found are specific to symphonies, I was struck by how much it sounded just like the classical dance, opera and repertory-theater sectors. Don't the folks running those institutions think that the way to entice new people is to "get them in the theater once" with a free ticket? Isn't most audience surveying by theater/dance/opera conducted among folks who are already bought in?