Markets making art ill

Editor's note: Four essays ago, I wrote about three instances where economics might be used to predict the behavior of the theater industry, specifically regarding playwrights, amateurs, and academics. Below is some continued discussion of the economics that influence the non-profit (and for-profit) theater industry directly. Professional theater disappoints me. I know there are a lot of reasons why it disappoints me, but I want to find market-based reasons for it because, well, people seem to listen more to economists than playwrights. How might money be the cause of the problem? Money for not-for-profit theater comes from four places: ticket buyers, wealthy individuals, foundations, and the government.1 In a sense, not-for-profit theater attempts to package the same product for four different markets. You may begin to see the problem right there.

An overview of how the system is supposed to work

In theory, contributed income (money from rich people, foundations, and the government) simply subsidizes the ticket price of live performance so that it can remain affordable for a larger percentage of ticket buyers.2 Our 21st century economy thrives on mass distribution networks and economies of scale (i.e. we can make more of something and distribute it to more people without increasing its cost, thereby decreasing its cost per person), but theater barely benefits from these industrial innovations. A live performance of Hamlet has not grown smaller or cheaper to make since it was first performed, and mass distribution of a performance changes it from live performance into something else. As a result, theaters that depend entirely on ticket buyers produce work of a limited scope and/or charge ticket prices that only a limited range of people can afford. Broadway theater almost always costs more than $100 per seat and most of what they produce are musicals—which strive to be spectacular enough to justify the incredible cost. Locally, for-profit theaters like the Old Log and Actor's Theater of Minnesota produce reliably populist fare like Tony and Tina's Wedding, Bye-Bye Liver, Mom's the Word, Deer Camp, and, at the Old Log, a parade of farces. Every show is a comedy with an easily-defined and broad audience (mothers, hunters, families, etc.) that the theater works hard to please—not to challenge or alienate.3 The government allows theater to receive tax-deductible contributions from wealthy individuals and foundations so that Art, as opposed to only populist entertainment, is possible at all. Hamlet needs to be performed for successive generations; it is an important experience of our culture. Likewise King Lear, The Iceman Cometh, The Importance of Being Ernest, the list of expensive yet important live cultural artifacts goes on. Plus, new cultural artifacts need to be made. The theory is that a culture that is not exploring its relationship to human nature stagnates and dies. But while live performance is expensive by itself, research and development and the cost of enough failure to produce success is even more expensive. Unfortunately, real wealthy individuals and actual Foundations are not like regular ticket buyers at all. They do not subsidize the choices of ticket buyers. They purchase their own idiosyncractic products through markets they manipulate. Each of these three different consumers reward different outcomes with their money, making the nonprofit theater the servant of three masters and deeply pathological in that way where the same body contains a bunch of different personalities, and you don't know which one you're going to get when you meet up, and though individually you may not hate any of the personalities too strongly, you all kind of know that they're all fucked-up because they really shouldn't be sharing the same body in the first place.

What do wealthy individuals want?

I heard this apocryphal story in a class on not-for-profit fundraising. It was a type of truth-telling joke that had been passed around among Development Directors who work with individual donors:

Some time in the 20th century, after the Texas oil boom, the mayor of Houston gathered the 20 richest men in the state together for a meeting. He said, "Gentlemen, we have the opportunity to make Houston a world class city, but we have to have Culture here. For just 20 million dollars—one million dollars each—we can build an opera house and a big theater and a symphony. What do you say?" And nineteen men around the table each in turn agreed to provide one million dollars. Finally, their attention turned to the 20th man at the table, the richest and most successful of them all, and he said, "How much are you saying this thing called 'Culture' is going to cost us?" "20 million dollars," replied the mayor, "but you only need provide one million dollars for it." There was a pause as the rich oil man thought it over. "Tell you what," he says finally, "Here's 21 million dollars. Let's buy two."

In the brilliant book Highbrow/Lowbrow, Lawrence Levine explains how America transformed from a non-hierarchal culture in the 19th century to a country where art and entertainment were enjoyed differently by different classes of people. In the 19th century, Shakespeare, Bach, and Dickens were enjoyed in all strata of society alongside vaudeville, burlesque and popular music. By the early 20th century—long before television and movies—the divide between highbrow and lowbrow was already growing. Why is theater considered an elitist art form by many people? Why do theaters feel intimidating and unwelcoming to a good number of the population? Basically, because wealthy individuals wanted it that way. They did not want to listen to Shakespeare sullied by his proximity to dirty vaudeville jokes. (Weird but true.) They didn't want to sit in smelly auditoriums among the lower classes. They used their money to create the temples to art that we expect today (and that we spend lots of money building anew today). They weren't being elitist, consciously. They had better educations and more leisure time than the rest of the country. They had developed different tastes than less wealthy people. They paid for the experience of art that they wanted: refined, elegant, graceful. Ironically, they set out to create precisely the type of theater—distant, elitist, exclusive, homogeneous—that most theater makers now say we want to reverse in order to be "relevant". The process, which of course still exists today, is not intentionally malevolent. It's simply driven by market forces. Say a wealthy individual finds a theater whose work he or she admires and decides to donate money, no strings attached, to help the theater make more of that work or lower their ticket prices. In most theaters, a good development manager will look at that donation and strategize how they might increase its volume. If they're good at their job, they'll probe: What precisely do you like about our theater? What work have we done that moved you the most? Armed with these answers, your development manager is going to steer their new rich patrons toward the aspects of the organization that satisfy the wealthy individual's desires even more so that, as a consequence, those aspects of the organization can be fed with more money. In our culture, projects that are well-funded often are projects that get the most attention and the greatest chance of success. The other projects—the ones that didn't draw the affection of a wealthy individual for whatever reason—may whither on the vine. And I just described a scenario where everyone is acting in good faith. How hard is it to imagine a scenario where the wealthy individual who now feels a "sense of ownership" in the organization (spending money does that for people) actually advocates, subtly or not, for the type of programming that most of all they want to experience rather than, perhaps, the type of programming the organization thought it was producing? (And what happens when a theater recruits a few of those wealthy individuals to their board of directors where those individuals will, in actual fact, exercise a type of ownership responsibility over the organization?) Activity moves toward money and wealthy individuals can provide it in larger quantities and quicker than most average ticket buyers. When their interests diverge—when for example a small group of wealthy individuals want to experience Culture with a capital C and Prestige while general ticket buyers want a different kind of experience—which interest does the theater wind up serving? Of course, I assume that most arts organizations resist being influenced by this kind of market behavior. The thing about resistance though is that it eventually wears down.

What do foundations want?

Foundations are interested in helping to create positive social outcomes, and they use the market system to distribute resources to the places that achieve their goals best. To the extent that theater can make the case that their art creates positive social results, they can receive more funding. When foundations realized in the 1980s that theater needed to diversify both their audiences and their artists, they created grant programs that incentivized a kind of "diversity". It was an absurd thing to witness, at regional theaters around the country that had never had African-American audiences or, really, African-American employees--to suddenly see a "black" play appear as though out of an clear blue sky and land on the stage just in time for, coincidentally, Black History Month only to mysteriously disappear again for the next eleven months. Today, as another one example, some foundations see how art and artists have helped create stronger, more cohesive, more active neighborhoods, so they are moving money through granting programs toward what's called "creative placemaking." I don't mean to criticize such generous and kind-hearted organizations, yet more and more, it seems, foundations look down from their offices and design programs that they think will create the outcomes they desire—top-down and centralized like the old Soviet Politburo's Five Year Plans, and about as effective. Sometimes artistic institutions fail (like businesses do), but foundations decided, as though it were an epiphany, that all artistic institutions needed more business-like financial management. They all needed fundraising boards of directors, and hierarchical management structures, and mission statements, and strategic plans that identify careful market niches, and stable, rational arts administration staff. So these foundations moved their money into programs that established and reinforced these basic management norms. Now you can find lots of efficiently-run arts organizations that lack the presence of full-time artists, that don't involved artists in the decision-making processes, and that don't spend the majority of their labor costs on artists. And artistic institutions still sometimes fail. In theory, foundations are just trying to move support to the work that theaters across the country are already doing so that it can reach a broader ticket buying audience. In reality, the way they distribute money motivates theaters to point their missions toward whatever they need to do to earn the necessary funds. (See "New Play Development" in places that never produced new plays.) Institutions see what the Foundation market rewards and find in themselves—or rationalize to themselves—that they have the capacity to meet this market where it is.

What is the point?

Theater disappoints me because I don't want to watch it when it has such clear and simple social service goals or when it's incubated in the perverse reserve-engineering labs of a foundation grant process. I don't think theater is the best way to "raise awareness" or "change people's minds" or "make the world a better place" or that art is made by carefully measuring the characteristics that made previous art and then painting inside the lines. I also don't want it to be so elegant, and refined, and distant, an object of rich contemplation (and sometimes self-satisfaction). If I had to choose among the three main markets, I'd rather see Tony and Tina's Wedding because, at least, that type of theater is up-front about its purposes and still, potentially, able to surprise me with insight. . . But, the truth is that I really don't want to see Tony and Tina's Wedding either. I want to see challenging, intense, provocative, relevant, dirty, insane, beautiful, crazy, wooly mammouth-like art that swallows the culture like a gluttonous king at a stupidly lavish feast and then regurgitates it up into a compelling, precise, compact, blindingly beautiful jewel like the dirty carbon of our society has been squeezed into a diamond—through art. Theater to me is about as important as meeting the world's coolest people. Maybe they will change your life. Maybe they are elegant and refined. Or maybe they just make you laugh. But you don't enjoy them and want to hang with them simply because of the pragmatic outcomes they may provide you or because of what you can purchase from them; you enjoy them because, well, what else were you doing with your life that was so much better than actually experiencing it with people?

What's the question?

I realize that the theater I want to watch is hard to make in any environment, but I doubt we can make it if it isn't even our goal. Right now, our system rewards the neat little by-products that artists help create—prestige, social change, and pure entertainment—but rarely the art itself. In Moneyball, a revolutionary baseball executive says, "People who run ball clubs, they think in terms of buying players. Your goal shouldn't be to buy players, your goal should be to buy wins. And in order to buy wins, you need to buy runs." What would it look like if the consumers of theater stopped "buying" the wrong things? What new joy might we "win" if we found a way to buy Art directly instead of the secondary effects of art?