BLOG: Long Live the NEA Chair!

Petitioning No More Last week on News and Notes (in the middle of all the drinking and incoherent babble), we talked a bit about how President Obama has been dragging his feet in naming a new chair to the National Endowment for the Arts and how there was a petition at We The People to get him to do so. This week, I bring you good news! No, it isn't that the petition was successful. Despite pushing from every major arts advocacy group and union, the petition itself barely grabbed 2,000 signatures out of the 100,000 needed. (By the way, those We The People petitions have a pretty spotty track record of success.) Either the hubbub around the petition caught the White House's ear or the Universe likes well-timed coincidences. Last week, Obama named Jane Chu as his next nominee for the top arts gig in the government. Who is Jane Chu? Good question. Unlike the last NEA chair, Rocco Landesman, a New Yorker who came from the commercial end of the arts spectrum and was well-known as a major Broadway producer and theater owner, Chu comes from the nonprofit world in the Midwest and is relatively unknown on the national scene. Though she still needs to face Senate confirmation (and won't that be fun?), Chu's tenure would be a deliberate 180 degree turn from Landesman's time in the chair. During his time, Landesman seemed to want to treat the NEA like one of his business dealings, and his blunt comments didn't help performing artists and the nonprofit sector trust his intentions; though, in fairness, Landesman did manage to help stave off cuts to the NEA and helped create initiatives that increased its abilities by partnering with private foundations. Chu, by all accounts, is an effective administrator who already has experience navigating the political process to get large projects done and a nice, non-confrontational midwesterner who also happens to be a woman and a person of color. Even though she seems to have been designed in a lab as the absolutely perfect nominee, don't necessarily expect her to sail smoothly through the Senate. Senate Republicans are still feeling sore over the change in Senate filibuster rules for confirmation of presidential nominees, and it wouldn't be a surprise to see them doing as much muckraking and foot dragging as possible to slow the process to a crawl. In the meantime, if you want to do your part to help advance the arts, Minnesota Citizens for the Arts will be hosting Arts Advocacy Day on March 27th. Or, would you rather work from the inside? The NEA is hiring, you know. Losing the Middle My current favorite theatre journalist, Chris Jones at the Chicago Tribune (I'm, like, crushing so hard!), wrote an article recently about the disappearance of mid-range pricing in the performing arts. Jones argues that as the middle class has eroded, so has demand for price points that the middle class would have normally paid for. The result has been the upward spiraling ticket prices in commercial theater. Actually, strike that. It's not just the commercial theater world. Even nonprofits are getting in on this game of jacking up prices. Hey, remember when Alan Cumming rose to fame playing the Emcee in Cabaret? Well, that's going to happen again. Roundabout Theater in New York, a nonprofit company, is reviving the production and jacking up its ticket prices in order to help erase its debts. And they're not alone. Prices for tickets at nonprofits in New York have been rising almost as steadily as those in the Broadway world and are now starting to tread into the same monetary territories. So, how do we get the middle back into the theater world? (And I'm sorry Alan Ayckbourn, I don't think it's just a matter of theatre getting its "liveness" back, whatever that means.) The most effective long-term option would be to shore up the middle class, fix stagnating wages and provide solid education that emphasizes creativity and expression of thought, thus creating new generations of people who have disposable income and want to spend it on art. (But, seriously, come on: it took a year and a half to even nominate someone for the NEA). Another option that Chris Jones threw on the table was the Dollar Tree model: wherein an "off-brand" form of performance is offered for cheap prices (I know some people who have been advocating for this kind of thing for decades). However, branding oneself like Dollar Tree would be tricky in the arts world, where "quality" is still synonymous with "expense". Paying the Bills Theatre is damned expensive to produce, mostly because it requires lots of people to pull it off. If theatre companies don't raise ticket prices to pay for all this, how else can they pull it off? Crowdfunding is the hip new thing that all the cool kids are into these days, and a new West End musical in London just shattered everyone's expectations by raising over £1 million via crowdfunding (Which is what, like a billion dollars? I don't know. I'm an American. I can't convert foreign currency.) And this was not some little non-profit that made a video on Kickstarter that went viral. This is a for-profit enterprise that found all of its investors through an online push. While that's a fascinating breakthrough, does it transfer to other realms? We've all heard stories about how the internet will allow the 1,000 True Fans hypothesis to come to life; but is it working? A recent article in the New Yorker takes a hard look at whether or not artists are truly finding those supportive fans out there. And, out in the nonprofit realm, there are serious concerns that crowdfunding might undermine large legacy institutions. The internet has taught us to assume that this is a good thing, because we now think "large" and "legacy" means "inefficient" and "outdated"; but we forget that organizations like the Red Cross, that are notoriously good at their jobs, are also "large" and "legacy". Advocating at Home Like I said above, Arts Advocacy Day is coming soon; but if you good theatre people out there want to do some advocating of your own, boy have I got the perfect opportunity for you! Recently, we talked about how the Theatre Garage may soon fall into a cocoon and emerge again as a beautiful butterfly. However, the plans for the new development that would house a newly-revamped Garage would require changes in zoning to allow it. At a public hearing to discuss the matter, several Minneapolis residents showed up to protest the development. I'm not in the habit of telling you what to advocate for per se, but I do like providing opportunities for people to take their first tiptoe steps into arts advocacy. If you have a vested interest in getting a fancy new Theatre Garage and renovating that particular corner of the world (especially if you're a resident of the area), you'll want to contact your Ward 10 City Council member, Lisa Bender. Good luck. Getting Some Dessert And, before we go today, here's a little something sweet, for no other reason than I found it amusing: British actors acting out YouTube comment flamewars. If you've ever waded into the cesspool that is YouTube comments, you'll know that this is NSFW, but it is damn fun.