Competing ends in arts management
Holding space for creative inquiry while crafting flows of reliable revenue is a central tension in the business of art.
All the time I pray to Buddha
I keep on
killing mosquitoes.
—Kobayashi Issa (1763–1828), haiku translated by Robert Hass
Economics is often described as the study of “the allocation of scarce resources among competing ends.” And while we could argue about whether “scarce” is the best way to frame the world, arts management certainly feels like making difficult choices amid relentless constraints.
It doesn’t help that many of those choices are in direct tension, and likely always will be. For arts organizations that produce new work, especially, the choice between holding space for creative inquiry and crafting flows of reliable revenue can pull in two directions at once.
In The Creative Act, music producer Rick Rubin (2023) describes creative inquiry as a “devotional practice” that is distracted or diminished when seeking specific outcomes:
“Fear of criticism. Attachment to a commercial result. Competing with past work. Time and resource constraints. The aspiration of wanting to change the world. And any story beyond ‘I want to make the best thing I can make, whatever it is’ are all undermining forces in the quest for greatness.”
And yet, building reliable revenue that exceeds expense often depends upon a “commercial result,” comparison to past (and other) work, as well as time and resource constraints.
Economist Richard Caves (2003) also notes this tension when exploring the contracts and collaboration structures in creative industries:
“Great works of art may speak for themselves, as connoisseurs declare, but they do not lead self-sufficient lives. The inspirations of talented artists reach consumers' hands (eyes, ears) only with the aid of other inputs – humdrum inputs – that respond to ordinary economic incentives.”
Caves is being descriptive, not dismissive, when distinguishing artistic from humdrum inputs in creative production (“humdrum” still stings a bit). His point is that the needs of makers and of markets are often incompatible while also being entirely intertwined.
One way to hold this tension without choosing a side is to widen your view. Author Bill Sharpe (2010) suggests that cultural producers aren’t working in a single economy but rather at the intersection of two, with “economy” defined as “a coordinated pattern of human activity enabled by a currency.”
“Money is the currency of exchange… The economy of exchange coordinates individual use values of alienable property into collective markets. Art is the currency of experience… The economy of experience coordinates individual lives into the collective experience of being human…”
Sharpe’s framing recalls Theodore Dreiser’s “Art is the stored honey of the human soul” (1917) and Audre Lorde’s proposition that “Poetry is not only dream or vision, it is the skeleton architecture of our lives” (1977).
Through this lens, the arts manager’s job is not to squeeze artistic practice into the logic of market exchange. Rather, the job is to craft the interplay of two economies, respecting their boundaries and allowing each to operate according to its own logic. What appear to be “business” decisions (aka, the Ten Functions of Arts Management), are actually efforts to defend and define the boundaries of both worlds while developing healthy bridges between them.
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Program & Production
Program & Production involves developing, assembling, presenting, and preserving coherent services or experiences.
Framework of the Week: Calibrating Uncertainty
Informing your decision-making and evidence-gathering by measuring the chance of being wrong against the cost of being wrong.
Photo by GR Stocks on Unsplash
Sources
Caves, Richard E. “Contracts between Art and Commerce.” The Journal of Economic Perspectives 17, no. 2 (2003): 73–84.
Dreiser, Theodore. “Life, Art and America.” The Seven Arts 1, no. 4 (February 1917): 363–89.
Lorde, Audre. “Poems Are Not Luxuries.” Chrysalis, a Magazine of Women’s Culture, no. 3 (March 1977): 7–9.
Rubin, Rick. The Creative Act: A Way of Being. New York: Penguin Press, 2023.
Sharpe, Bill. Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth. Fife, Scotland: Triarchy Press Ltd, 2010.