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.

Counting non-profit arts groups

Today's dot-org entry is a bit of an infomercial, in the sense that it's about my own work.
The following "Dear Colleague" email went out from our offices late today to arts groups, funders, service organizations, and others around the Chicago area:

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The Gaylord and Dorothy Donnelley Foundation, in keeping with its longstanding mission interest in the artistic vitality of the Chicago region, has conducted a detailed comprehensive scan of active non-profit arts organizations in the region. The full written report on “The Arts Scan Project”, a two-page executive summary, and an Excel file containing the underlying data are now available for download.

Key findings of this effort will shortly be reported in the Chicago Tribune and it is scheduled for discussion on the "848" program on Chicago Public Radio WBEZ-FM (91.5) Tuesday morning. Highlights include:

-- As of summer 2006 there were about 1,158 arts non-profits active in the greater Chicago region.

-- About twice as many new arts non-profits were founded from 1997-2006 as from 1987-1996.
-- The creation of new arts non-profits today is more concentrated within the city of Chicago than was true a generation ago.

-- More than a quarter of all active arts non-profits in this region are focused on live theater and another quarter are focused on music.

-- While one-quarter of all active groups are concentrated in ten zip codes along the city's central and North Side lakefront, the enormous recent surge of new groups appears to include a number of new clusters in outlying areas of the city and suburbs.

We believe this to be the most comprehensive snapshot of this region's non-profit arts community ever assembled. We hope it will spark discussion about the region's artistic vitality and believe that such conversations are always most productive when rooted in real-world data.


P.S. YOUR THOUGHTS on this report would be of great interest to us and to the entire artistic community. Chicago Artists Resource [which, as an aside, is one of our current grantees] has created a public online forum for discussion of the Arts Scan and its findings, in which Donnelley Foundation staff [i.e., me] will answer questions about this research and report. We look forward to your comments about the Arts Scan and its implications. You can link to CAR's online forum from our website or by going directly here.
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The comments in that online forum will naturally be about the study's findings, that is, about the state of the non-profit arts world in Chicago. Here I'd be happy to respond to comments or questions about why and how we did the research, or perhaps about the reports' data regarding arts groups' budget sizes, more the non-profit inside-baseball aspects.

The arts did well in the election, too

Last week I mentioned that a lot of land-conservation bond issues around the U.S. passed easily on November 7th. It turns out that local referenda to fund the arts also did great.

Americans for the Arts reports that in eleven cities or counties plus one state, Americans voted to tax themselves for the arts or art education. The list includes the state of Louisiana; Akron (OH); Alameda County/San Leandro (CA); Alameda County/Berkeley (CA); Austin (TX); Cuyahoga County/Cleveland (OH); Dallas (TX); Marin County (CA); Portland (OR); Salt Lake County (UT); San Francisco(CA); and Santa Clara County (CA). Some of them were one-time bond issues and others were new standing taxes; if we use the ten-year total on the latter the total funding passed was something like $1.3 billion. That's without counting Louisiana's measure which was actually a tax exemption for works of art, the exact value of which is hard to project.

That may not sound like a lot in national context given this country's huge public funding for the arts (of which the NEA is a drop in the bucket), not to mention that tax-deductible philanthropy for the arts had by 2004 reached nearly $14 billion per year (quintuple, after inflation, what it was in 1964; figures are from the Giving USA 2005 report). But the really exciting part may be the precedent: unlike the land conservation referenda this election, not one ballot initiative for the arts failed to pass. Twelve for twelve is as good as it gets in any game.