I love it. If you’d asked me five years ago if I had any interest in business, I’d have said “No. Hell no.” But five years ago I didn’t have the first clue what “business” meant. The word felt vaguely dirty, tainted with self-interest and full of mysterious people called “managers” who, if they had any function at all, were (I assumed) perversely situated to obstruct the people who actually accomplished things.

I don’t pretend now to have more than the second or perhaps the third clue about business, but I’ve made it far enough past my first impressions to feel a kind giddy delight at escaping that nonsense. The creative forces in play are in every way peers to those that inspire designers or engineers. The satisfaction of elegance and efficiency is the same. To manage complexity well is a thrill, whether the complexity is built out of people or electrons.

This post was about marketing, right?

Right. The point of all that intro was to make it clear: I don’t know what I’m talking about. I’ve only been at this for a few years. I reserve the right to be wrong in what I’m about to say.

Then why are you wasting my time?

Well, I don’t think I am. I think I may want to revise some of these ideas later, but I’m comfortable with the core.

Why?

These ideas are working for me.

Define “working”.

Also, here’s a very incomplete list of where this product is used.

Alright, you’ve got, like, seven minutes.

Thanks.

Okay. Here’s what I know about marketing so far:

Fuck Sexy Umbrellas

Not like you’re thinking, sicko.

Half my background is in theater. Specifically, acting. At some point back there I had an audition class for TV commercials. A class where they told us to pick a noun and an adjective out of a hat, with the instructions to say that noun to the camera in a way described by that adjective. I picked: “sexy” and “umbrella”. Then I got 10 seconds to go say “umbrella” at the camera in a sexy way. All in the name of honing those money-earning, commercial-shooting skills so I wouldn’t flat-out starve trying to make a living as a piss-poor actor.

Fuck that. I used to think I hated marketing. You know why? Because of sexy umbrellas. Sexy umbrellas represent everything I hate about modern marketing. I don’t want people to buy shit they don’t need. I don’t want to lie to people for money. And I don’t want anyone else doing that to me.

I’m pretty sure most ideas I have about marketing are a reaction against sexy umbrellas. It leads directly to rule #1, which is:

Trust is the trump card.

It’s not hard to find information anymore. But it is hard to find information you can trust. Almost everyone is trying to sell you umbrellas, which means almost everyone is lying to you.

If I can trust you, you are special. If I can trust you, our relationship will last.

Discover ways to be surprisingly trustworthy.

Make your mistakes visible.

You know how you can tell if someone can be trusted? Because you see them making mistakes.

An exceptionally trustworthy person will even bring a hidden mistake to your attention—one you might never have known about. Telling the truth even when you don’t have to is good evidence that you’re trustworthy.

It hurts to do this. Get over it. Focus on why you’re doing it. The pain is temporary. The trust is long-term.

Your customers are your sales force.

View every interaction as a chance to recruit a new salesman. Surprise is a good tactic for this: “What can I do here that would be literally remarkable?”

I provide startlingly good customer service, and I let my customers tell their friends. That’s about it. Aside from my website, that’s my marketing.

Do not “make” a sale.

You can make a product. You can not make a sale. You can bully a sale, but you can not make one.

A pressured sale is a mediocre sale at best, and a disaster at worst. I have customers who have used a free version of my product for years. For professional productions. Some of them will never need to purchase an upgrade. That’s fine. They’re still my unpaid sales force. Others will, one day, need an extra feature. In that case, it’s not even that they’re on a fence; they’re floating over my yard. They’ll drop right in when the time is right.

Conference booths are not worth what you pay for them.

In other words, they’re not worthless, but they’re not even remotely worth what they’ll cost you. People will come to you if your software is compelling. If your software isn’t compelling, no amount of gasbagging at a conference booth is going to help that.

Will there be exceptions to this rule? Sure. But be damned sure you know you’re paying for an exception.

Do not advertise.

Advertising is a cousin of brainwashing, and we all know it. I’m not saying brainwashing can’t work. I’m pretty sure it does. But I’m also pretty sure you’re not the Coca-Cola company, which means you’re not big enough to brainwash anyone. So don’t mimic the brainwashers. Even if you’re big enough to try: don’t mimic the brainwashers. Your money is more powerful elsewhere, building something truthful and trustworthy.

If you don’t count some ill-advised trips to conferences, I have spent zero dollars on advertising. I have paid Google no money for search results. No SEO has optimized my website. I have no plans to advertise, ever.

It’s always personal.

The illusion of companies has died. We’re not fooled by that idea anymore. We know a “company” isn’t a real thing. We know it has no point of view. It has no wishes. It has no feelings. A company makes nothing, accomplishes nothing, cares about nothing, and can provide you with nothing. “Company” is a stand-in term for a specific group of people. And it is those people, not the illusory “company”, that make things, accomplish things, care about things. Only a human being can have a perspective. And we’ve figured this out.

The illusion of the company as a living creature with an “official” point of view is a lie. We’re going for trust here. Drop the lie. Be personal.

Robi is a unique human being. It’s really hard to describe the guy. When Robi looks at the world, he sees things you and I don’t see. I’ll give you an example in the form of a single web page:

http://www.robimookerjee.com/arsgratia/mustard.htm

Yeah, right? Crazy as hell. But also strangely revelatory.

He also once spent an idle moment sketching me a coat of arms. It’s not that I’d asked for a coat of arms, it’s just that this is the sort of thing Robi does in his spare time:

[Initial sketch for the arms of Duke Smashworth the Cammervoltaic, of the Space Duchy of Sass.]

As he described it:

Cito maturum, cito putridum: Quickly ripe, quickly rotten. A caution against wasteful and undue haste, a wise maxim for a Duchy so intimately involved with the politics of empire. Originated in reference to the Duchy’s renowned software-development caste, whose diligent and rigorous testing protocols are the stuff of legend. Not that they are slow, by any means. Rumour has it they once made the kessel subroutine run in less than twelve parsecs.

Anyway, Robi does a lot of stuff, and he does a lot of it very well. But the one thing he does better than anything is write. I mean, I know a lot of good writers, but Robi is the kind of luminous talent who proves to the world that there is such a thing as “talent”, and that you don’t have it.

The trouble with telling you this is that I can’t really support it with evidence; casual descriptions of Space Duchy’s aside, I don’t know of any public Robi writing I can show you.

I know it because I went to the same college, and that college has a private forum for students and alumni. On this forum Robi has quietly published dozens and dozens of stunning stories, essays, and unclassifiable compositions.

But the treasures are all locked behind a private wall, and Robi, despite the incessant pesterings of his college tribe, is not yet publicly published.

Well, Mr. Mookerjee, I’m calling you out: it’s time to get real. It’s time to get published. And no, I don’t care if you’ve already “tried” to get published. Whatever that idea means to you is wrong. I know this because you are not published.

Somewhere in this world is a company that will create high quality paper books fit for a man of discerning taste. That company probably has a web page. And if that company does not print-on-demand, but instead requires a traditional up-front payment for the run, then I direct your attention to several dozen rabid fans who would very likely contribute to the up-front costs. At least in the form of a pre-order. (And by the way, how did you get the power of leveraging several dozen rabid fans? By publishing your stuff free on a protected piece of the Internet. So: reconsider that no-blogging rule you’ve set for yourself.)

The age of needing a company to publish music, text, software, or other artwork is over, man. The barrier to “making” is now lower than at any other time in history. If you want your thing made, it’s your fault if it’s not.

I have no good excuse for the fact that I only today started lending money there, but hey, at least I’m honest.

I’m kicking myself that it took me this long, because this is, quite frankly, a blast.

Here’s how it works: You’ve got cash in your bank account that you’re not using. (I know the economy sucks, but be honest with yourself here: you can’t spare 25 bucks? Really?) What Kiva does is make it incredibly easy and efficient to let someone else, somewhere else in the world, put this money to work.

You get to build a portfolio of small businesses you have funded with micro-loans. You can lend as little as $25 to any individual business, and that can be a big chunk of an important loan. (It’s amazing how far your dollars can go in other parts of the world.) Then, over a period specified with the loan, you get paid back. It’s not a profit-making venture; you’re not making interest. Once you get your money back (which you almost always do), you can either re-lend it, or take it back and put it in your own bank account again.

There’s more to it than that—you get updates from the businesses you’re helping, for one—but Kiva has a great website and does an excellent job explaining the whole fabulous setup the’ve built. Check it out.

Today I lent business funds to:

• Corazon Abero - a fish and meat vendor in the Philippines
• Charlita Ending - a photo laminator in the Philippines
• Mirzorahim Rahimov - a flour and ice cream seller in Tajikistan

This is insanely cool. This is the magic of the Internet, people! You’ve got money sitting in your checking account doing nothing, and almost instantaneously you can move that money into the hands of a vetted, hard-working entrepreneur who can do something useful with it. Go help someone today!

They also just climbed on board the Twitter wagon.

Now, I’ve got nothing but love for Everyman. And there’s nothing really wrong about how they’re using Twitter. They’ve set it up just like anyone else would. They’ve got a link on their homepage (next to the link for their Facebook page), they’ve got a decent list of followers already (although a fair number of those are fake tag-back followers, like WholeFoods, or BarackObama), and they’re usually posting in a personal, genuine way (although they’re still getting warmed up to the style of a good Tweet, which counsels against awkwardly retrofitting a marketing moment by painting it in the guise of a personal update, or giving in to the lure of generic filler).

All in all? A great company that’s smart enough to know Twitter is something worth investigating.

So why mention them? Because this is a good example of what I think Gavin Clabaugh means when he says:

From the nonprofit’s perspective, [...] despite the increasingly ubiquitous nature of technology, they’re never too sure that they’ve put it to the right use. It may not be true. They may be using it very well. But they’re never too sure that it really fits. [...] It doesn’t ever seem to be fully formed, fully realized.

— Gavin Clabaugh, CIO at the Charles Stuart Mott Foundation

Everyman has every reason to go whole hog on Twitter. They’re already the smaller, hipper alternative to the heavy monolith in town—who, by the way, is also on Twitter, but shows less evidence of understanding why they signed up, and isn’t confident enough in the value of Twitter to announce it on their homepage. Everyman already has the feel of being an accessible, personal organization woven from the people of this city. They’re pros, and they’re our pros. So Twitter is a perfect fit to Everyman. They’ve already shown they want to have a personal relationship to their city. Twitter is a way to do that.

And yet…it feels…tepid. Like they’re sure they don’t want to get left behind…but they’re not completely sure it’s a good fit.

Dear Everyman: Show some confidence! It’s a good fit!

You’ve stumbled on a chance to distinguish yourselves even more as the company that’s connected to Baltimore. Don’t pussyfoot around, man, go for it.

Do it simply—no over-worked slogans that come off as trying too hard to be cool—tone and savvy are everything here. You can’t afford to try to be cool, you have to actually be cool. Your audience can spot a marketing bullshitter from a hundred city blocks.

The key is that you don’t have to be a marketing bullshitter to let people know you really, genuinely care about having a relationship with them, in a small way, each day.

And the way you do that is by starting with an understanding of what the heck Twitter is, and what people might be trying to get out of it. (You’re not just jumping on the wagon because everyone else is, right? You actually have a specific underlying reason why you think that Twitter is a good idea, right?)

The consequence of achieving that understanding is it lets you know how to talk to the people who might care. It lets you know how simple you can go with this.

A Digression: How to Spot a Company that’s Uncomfortable with Technology

Look for an overcompensating explanation.

“Check out our new blog, where you’ll get to hear the inside scoop from Artsy Pants Theatre! You’ll get production updates, thoughts from the Artistic Director, and more!”

Reality check: anyone who might care about your blog already knows why they will. At best, explaining it is just patronizing. At worst, it’s a red flag that you don’t know why you’re doing it—if you feel the need to clarify the point, maybe it’s because the point isn’t very clear to you. You don’t spend time explaining your phone number, so why your blog or your Twitter account? If they don’t already understand phones, they’re not going to call you.

Anyway, back to Everyman

Okay, Everyman, so you’re committed to Twitter. You understand both the possibilities and constraints of a Twitter relationship. You know the etiquette, you know what makes a Twitter account worth following, you know it’s a two-way street, and you’re ready to use all this to lift the Everyman experience even further away from the “generic theater company” brand. Sweet.

Show me that commitment.

You’ve put it on your web site. That’s a good start.

Add it to your business cards.

Put it on every poster you make.

Create an insert for every program.

Make a 30-foot banner for your building.

You’re selling out shows. Every one of the people who walk in your door should see that banner. They should not be able to get to their seat without that thing landing right at eye level at some point on their journey.

You should, and you easily can, have way more than 82 followers.

Keep the campaign simple. You don’t need to explain anything. You’re making an offer to enter into a relationship. All you need to do is make that offer. Do it directly and in good faith. You can relate every piece of information I need with two words and an at sign. Simple. Focused. Easy. The people who get it will appreciate that you respect their intelligence. The people who don’t get it may well be curious enough to figure it out. And the people who don’t get it and don’t care? No harm, no foul.

Sure, you can use Twitter just like everyone else. But being just like everyone else doesn’t win you any points. You guys rock, but you can rock harder.

Photo Credit: Ange Soleil, who has specified that some rights are reserved.

The ensuing conversation is great fun to read, although a little difficult to follow; coherency suffers in the age of aggregated essays. Clarity also suffers: “Is this sentence addressed to me? To a different blog? To a previous comment?”

I have to say, though, that compared to other aggregators this discussion on MetaFilter has a downright respectable signal-to-noise ratio. The thread is full of good comments, but I was especially curious to find the critiques. One of them that caught my attention was from Alexandra Nelson. Not all of her comments are directed at me, but some of them are, and they’re the valuable kind that make me a little uncomfortable with what I’ve written. (Discomfort: the sure sign that someone is making a point that matters.)

Xan takes me to task as follows:

You cannot find a poorly written grant proposal and then use it to condemn an entire industry. Every single grantwriter worth her salt knows that “It’s not about me.” That’s grant writing 101. The people writing the navel-gazing proposals are not getting the grants, because the philanthropic community also knows that.

Is the proposal I focused on particularly poor? Sure. But is it particularly unique? I’d say no. It is unique only in the clarity and severity of its shortcomings, not in the fact that it exists. It was easy enough for me to cite four other proposals infused with fragments of the same core problems in the space of two sentences, and I stopped there because there didn’t seem much reason to belabor the point. These weren’t all proposals culled from the hidden cracks of the artistic landscape, they’re samples of a national dialog. Proposals found in Newsweek are not, unfortunately, just a case of “bad development directors whin[ing] on poorly written blogs”. It’s an interesting point that the grant-writers themselves, if they are to be successful, will be the least vulnerable to these notions. But the cultural conversation is not, apparently, dominated by the enlightened grant-writers.

If I have insulted the innocent by lobbing the “self-centered” label at an industry that is not entirely self-centered, it’s because I see enough of it blabbing in a self-centered way to make me feel the spillover can be excused.

In a later comment Xan says:

Artists have been asked to save public education, rehabilitate prisoners, stop drug abuse, revitalise the cities and for all I know, fill potholes. So many funders, public and private alike, insist that the art itself must pay for itself, and that social uses of the arts are the only acceptable uses of public or tax-supported dollars. There needs to be some understanding that while these very worthwhile uses of the arts do not happen without artists who are trained to be artists, and who are willing to accept low salaries and lousy hours. But you have to train the artists. [...] The artist will work for love (up to a point), which is great for those who want them to do prison reform. But you’ve got to pay for them to be artists, too.

And after that:

The contortion that the business model pulls us into, is convincing the source of 20 to 40% of a our revenues, the donors and foundations, that there is a larger societal good from putting this on a stage (in a gallery, wherever art happens). I think this is one of the places where [Chris Ashworth] goes wrong. The policy value of the arts can be exactly a good reason why “it’s not about me.”

With due respect (and I mean that), I don’t think Xan read my post through to the end. All of this is a reasonable defense of tax-funded art—even tax-funded art created for its own sake. But it assumes the premise that the arts are a particularly good way to accomplish all these things. That they are directly, evidently, and uniquely essential to a healthy human community in a way comparable to other government services. My explicit argument in the post Xan objects to is that that’s a really hard argument to make¹. That doesn’t necessarily mean I think it’s false, it just means I think that right now, in America, that argument is poorly supported in the public discourse. It is axiomatic in the minds of artists, worthy of deep suspicion in the minds of non-artists, and is for that reason a kind of self-centeredness on the part of the artists who refuse to allow for the possibility that the axiom may be poison.

Public funding for the arts may be a morally and practically supportable function of government. It may not. But if we’re not convincing big swaths of our country about the value of, say, the NEA, I’d much rather we spend the energy on other important things, because it’s getting between us and the community we’re trying to animate. Which is to say it’s getting between us and ourselves.

1. I figure I can confidently assume that Xan has successfully made some of those arguments in her 30 years in the indusrty, and as such has been a force for good in her community. To that I would say: awesome, well done.

You know, in terms of business models, just about anything beats theater:

The product can not be mass-produced.

At best, you can replicate it a few hundred seats at a time. Maaaybe a few thousand. But as soon as you digitize it, transmit it, or otherwise pull the audience away from the performer, it’s not theater anymore.

The product must be made fresh for each purchase.

Sure, you’re not making it from scratch unless you’re doing improv. But the product is a live event, and live events don’t fit in bottles, stay fresh under heat lamps, or last beyond the first serving. And making the product fresh each time isn’t even close to a mindless task, so each time you make it you need lots of highly trained people on hand.

The cost of making the product is extremely high.

Typical production costs cover a large, purpose-built room, lots of expensive equipment, scores of educated staff (half of whom are typically shipped in from out of state, because apparently New York is the only state that has staff qualified to create this product), and truly atrocious waste (how much raw material goes into a landfill after every regional theater production?).

The company can not sell the product at a high price…

The customer gets nothing tangible for their money¹. All they get is an experience. Can an experience command a high price? Sure, if it’s extreme.

• YES: space tourism, rock star concerts, high profile sporting events, elite prostitution.
• NO: movies, local cover bands, museum visits, theater performances.

…and yet the customer can not purchase the product for a low price.

Even if tickets are 2 bucks a pop, the show is not cheap. I’ll pay 2 bucks for a piece of candy and it doesn’t matter if it sucks ’cause I’m done with it in 2 minutes and I move on with my life. If the new “Post-Post-Modern Deconstructionist Christmas Carol…on Ice” sucks, that’s 2 hours of my life I can’t get back.

The quality of the product is highly unpredictable.

Perhaps no other product has a wider range of quality, from “sublime” to “unbelievable waste of time”. Moreover, there’s almost no way to know what you’re going to get—the brand of the venue is no guarantee, nor are practically any other traditional consumer signals except word of mouth. As McDonald’s will tell you, that’s no way to get lots of people in the door. Hell, even two different nights of the same show often produce wildly different experiences, depending on who shows up to watch and what mood they’re in.

The product has low demand—and probably always will.

Theater does not command much of the cultural mindscape. That’s fair; nothing gets to claim a cultural stake without earning it. Of course, America has proven that the cultural battlefield is basically the same as the economic battlefield, so waning economic leverage leads to waning cultural leverage and vice versa. It’s a nice little feedback loop that means, barring changes in human nature or laws banning the more economically viable art forms, theater will forever be a niche.

 
In light of all this it’s pretty obvious why theater is a non-profit endeavor, and why the Angry White Guy often argues that Theater is Not a Widget.

I’m not saying theater should be a widget, but man, this is a seriously challenging monetary model. With a model like this its almost a miracle we have any theaters left in a recession.

What should be our relationship to money in the theater? I think most of us would like to make a modest living and have health insurance. We certainly don’t get in to theater because we care about making a lot of money. But can we reasonably expect to meet even those modest goals under a business model like this? I mean, if I asked you to come up with a worse business model than that, it’d be pretty hard: high monetary costs, high temporal costs, high waste, low income, few efficiencies, an inability to scale, little consistency, little demand.

Some of what makes theater a bad business is, alas, also fundamental to what makes it theater. But surely it’s not a completely lost cause. Can we imagine a theater run in any other way? What if we start off with the assumption that a theater can’t make money from its art? ² How would we create a theater that runs under this assumption? Could such a theater exist? Can it be made economically robust and artistically excellent?

If I may borrow Nick Keenan’s rallying call (and his GIF):

1 Exception: dinner theater. But that chimera has historically been a dead end for both the art and the food.

2 I’m not saying I think theaters should stop selling tickets. I’m advocating for a thought experiment.

5 cent consultations!

Welcome to the Recession, I’ll be your Impending Sense of Doom for the evening.

In a year of deep financial crisis the theater community—never far from financial crisis even in healthy years—has understandably begun to fret. They nervously remember the banker’s gift that funded half their season last year, they stare unhappily at their empty seats, they witness the food-stamp existence of their workers, and they’re scared¹. Then they look at Congress passing a bill to pump 790,000,000,000 ever-loving dollars² into the American economy, of which a measly 50 million went to the NEA after the Democrats managed to hold off the art-hating Republicans (causing the art world to hold their collective breath until the “win” could be confirmed), and they think to themselves (and I paraphrase here): Holy shit. We’re screwed.

When the going gets tough, the tough write public policy proposals.

It’s ever the duty of a citizen to participate in their republic, but it sure as hell doesn’t hurt to have 790 billion dollars on the table to encourage you.

For the theater community, that means we start talking very seriously about how much the arts are underfunded. And in a new age of The Change We Need, we get fired up to make it happen. Witness, for example: The New New Deal, Part 2 - A New WPA for Artists: How and Why, wherein Arlene Goldbard makes her case for funding culture on the tax-payer’s dime. And Arlene isn’t alone. Calls for government investment in the arts are popping up all over. Some with celebrity endorsements.

Here’s the problem: They all suck.

Artists Dig Themselves

Why do these proposals suck? Let’s look briefly at Goldbard’s proposal, “A New WPA for Artists: How and Why”. Almost everything you need to know about why that proposal sucks is in the title: A) it’s a proposal for the artists, and B) why comes after how.

Skim through the first half of this proposal and you’ll see things like:

“Including artists in the stimulus bill.”

“One percent for artists. [...] a petition calling on Congress to dedicate one percent of the stimulus package to support artists [...]

“Ballparking this at $50,000 per artist per year for stipend and associated costs, $125 million would support 2,500 artists.”

If you’re looking to sound tone-deaf and self-centered, hey, you win. If you’re looking to make a case for cultural investment in American society, please present this proposal to an American who may or may not know any actual artists, and may or may not have enough money to heat her home this winter, and let’s just see how that goes over.

The second half tries to answer “why” and claims to give “strong public policy arguments” for why the government should spend big bucks on art. The first one starts like this:

1. Things are changing in a way that elevates culture’s role. We are on the cusp between two cultural eras. The old system treats everything like so much material that can be weighed, measured, assigned a number and dismissed. The new system is grounded in…

At which point I stop reading because I want to shoot myself. She gives nine multi-paragraph public policy arguments, and they’re all about that good.

I’m Aiming for A Constructive Point Here, but Not Quite Yet

The fact that these proposals are self-centered and ineffective isn’t news. The theatrical community itself has started to point it out. Tony Adams said it nicely and Scott Walters puts it even better. They observe: don’t make this about the artists, make it about the people the arts will serve. The people who are, incidentally, funding the damn thing.

That’s fine as far as it goes. But I want to push even farther than that. I want us to seriously consider: should the arts get public funding at all?

A Digression: “No Wait, I Actually Love Theater I Promise”

I am a stakeholder in the arts. My livelihood is built upon them. I don’t eat without a healthy theater scene. And it’s more than that: Theater is the closest thing this atheist has to a church. (A truth which cannot be quickly summarized so I’ll leave it for another day.)

So Why Such a Hata?

I care about this because I want our culture to value depth and breadth in our arts. I want more people going to theater. And I think that appealing for public arts funding may not only be morally questionable, but may also be counterproductive.

Back to the Arguments At Hand

At the core of these appeals to fund art with taxes is, almost invariably, the simple belief that the arts deserve public funding. Nearly every conversation between two artists accepts this premise. Sometimes it is explicitly asserted, but often it’s just the accepted wisdom. It is a conviction of the deepest kind.

Why would artists commonly share this conviction? Because artists are, almost by definition, those who have directly experienced the power of art. Therefore they jump to the more expansive premise: “the arts are essential to a healthy human community, and therefore deserve public funding”.

The idea that the arts are essential can take different forms. The most common form I’ve seen is where arts are equated with education:

[...] if it’s public funding for the performance of the arts, or their exhibition, or education about them—if it’s public funding for the arts audience, who can disapprove? Except in the deepest reaches of the glibertarian right, we’re beyond debating whether education should be publicly funded, and making arts displays and performances available to the widest possible audience is simply public education on a grand scale.

— The Nonprofiteer: Second (and third) thoughts about public funding for the arts

I happen to agree about publicly funding education³, but the leap from “everyone loves funding education!” to “everyone will love funding Alvin Ailey tours!” is an awkward lunge from point A to point B. Theater and dance are not education. Theater and dance can bring important and unique elements to educational programs, and to be clear I consider truly educational arts programs to be a separate category in this whole discussion. But I simply do not buy that “art” is just another name for “education”. It’s not, and it does both these important human endeavors a disservice to smoosh them together into a muddy goo in the name of public funding.

After we discard the education argument, laying claim to “essential” gets difficult. The utilitarian arguments ring hollow⁴, and the spiritual ones are closer to the point but give us very loose ground on which to build public policy.

Perspective

Go find a nurse and ask her about her day. Or go read “Mountains Beyond Mountains“. Or go have a chat with a social worker advising single mothers, or a middle school teacher trying to teach students who can’t read. Then come tell me our new president should spend a million dollars on dance tours instead of any of those other things. That’s not just a tough argument to make, it’s a ridiculous argument. But we in the arts community not only make that argument, we feel we’re being ignobly and ignorantly snubbed when a teacher or a police officer or a nurse tells us to stuff it.

I spend my days wondering how people I know and work with in the theatre are surprised that the rest of America doesn’t care about them.

— A close friend who is completing an MFA/MBA in theater management at the Yale School of Drama and Yale School of Management

Theater is not central to our culture. I wish it was, but it’s not. The relationship theater forges with society must be aware of that fact. With the exception of a few rebellious voices, the conversation in the theater community today is dangerously out of touch. Our schools peddle MFA degrees without acknowledging their true worth. Our artists lose touch with the rest of the world and instead of re-investing in a relationship with a community they want to serve, they spoil for fights they can’t win on the merits of poor arguments. And in the process, they leave the rest of the world with a bitter taste of their own self-importance.

It’s Worth Doing This The Right Way

I’m not stupid. I know I’m taking a risk in saying these things. We’re at a vulnerable moment. Not all of our institutions will make it through the fire. We’ve watched multiple theaters reach the brink of insolvency in the last few weeks. For me to argue against the funds that could save them is, to put it mildly, not in my self interest. But I’m doing it out of the fervent belief that theater and the arts are important and are worth fighting for, and I’m more scared that if we do it like boneheads we’ll be worse off than we were before.

So what’s the right way?

Jeez, I make no claims about being that smart. But I’ll take a stab, since I promised to be constructive.

The first step is to spend some time getting away from the bubble. To hear how our own voices sound to the rest of the world, and to make an honest assessment of our current role in the cultural conversation. You’ll flop if you don’t understand your audience, right?

The next step is to be adults, and engage in the broader conversation about the breadth of our society, not just our myopic piece of it. When we do that, we start to notice interesting things:

If [Obama's] health-care plan gets enacted in anything like its current form, it’ll be the government’s greatest gift to culture in a generation.

— Newsweek: Obama and the Arts

“If Obama could create a program for universal health care—the effect on artists of that single change in their lives would release more creativity than any increase in NEA funding could ever do.”

— Scott Walters @ Theatre Ideas

Huh. There’s an idea already. Instead of fighting about NEA funding, why aren’t we all fighting even harder about health care? Yes, it’s a big problem, but it’s a big problem that matters to all of us. Imagine: artists might suddenly find themselves on the same team as the people they were previously battling. And the results of winning the new fight could be—probably would be—more important than the old fight.

What else can we find if we’re willing to deconstruct our assumptions? I don’t know. That’s what we need to figure out as a community. That’s what we desperately need to not avoid talking about. Will some of us get burned in this process? Yes. It’s already happening, and we can’t stop it. It sucks. We all know it sucks. But our system is feeble. It relies on trucking in New York talent, scoffs at any real connection with local communities, and churns out a bunch of moderately entertaining shows about which audiences need not feel much investment. We’ve set it up this way and we can’t prop it up indefinitely with old ideas. Take a cue from our new president: a moment like this is a time to think big, not small. A moment like this is a time for a huge investment for our long-term health. It’s time to build a new vision, and to beat a new path.

[1] I’ve met nationally known, award-winning, full-time playwrights who live their life without health insurance. And that was long before the current recession.

[2] That’s B7EFAB5C00 dollars in hexadecimal, in case you were wondering. Maybe the government should start reporting deficits in hex; it looks smaller that way.

[3] I also happen to have friends I respect who are deeply opposed to publicly funded education and can make an articulate argument against it. I strongly disagree with them, but I don’t dismiss them out of hand.

[4] As the great Clive James said: “The utilitarian view doesn’t work.”

One thing I especially love about this project is the respect Kutiman shows to the people he’s borrowing from. The Internet loves to laugh at people who didn’t know they should not film themselves being imperfect. Plenty of these clips could have easily been turned into a joke—but Kutiman never chooses to laugh. He respects every one of his sources. Not only respects, but elevates.

Stunning.