Making things that matter
Artistic practice, at its core, is about making things that matter. How those things matter, and to whom, is a core concern of Arts Management.
No artist is pleased.… There is only a queer divine dissatisfaction, a blessed unrest that keeps us marching and makes us more alive than the others.”
Martha Graham, as reported by Agnes DeMille (1991)
Teaching artist and advocate Eric Booth (2020) defines the core value of artists as the “fire-in-the-gut determination and skill to make things that matter.” Choreographer Martha Graham expressed a similar insight when advising Agnes de Mille (1991):
There is a vitality, a life force, an energy, a quickening that is translated through you into action….
Graham went on to explain how to sustain that life force rather than dampen it:
It is not your business to determine how good it is nor how valuable nor how it compares with other expressions. It is your business to keep it yours clearly and directly, to keep the channel open.”
And yet, in assembling the people, stuff, and money required to produce, present, preserve, and connect artistic expression in durable ways, somebody has to think about value. That delicate bit of business often falls to Arts Management.
Arts Management, as I define it, is the “practice of aggregating and animating people, stuff, and money toward expressive ends.” Both aggregating (drawing together) and animating (activating and aligning) are fueled by expected or experienced value – sometimes money, sometimes meaning, sometimes a combination of the two.
Therefore, in addition to supporting and sustaining creative individuals and teams as they make things that matter, Arts Management has to answer how and to whom that work might matter. Depending on the answers, arts managers can choose three broad arenas (or sectors) in which to aggregate and animate the necessary people, stuff, and money:
For things that matter to sufficient numbers with sufficient resources to exceed the total cost of production, we have a private sector – where private ownership and profit-seeking can organize the work.
For things that matter to whole communities but in public ways that defy private benefit, we have a public sector that captures revenue and allocates capital in service of the public good.
For things that matter to groups of people, where one group is willing and able to cover costs or provide volunteer labor for the benefit of others, we have a plural sector of nonprofit organizations and social movements.
“Things that matter” exist in all three sectors. Although conventional “Arts Management” theory and practice focus on the plural. But in any sector, thoughtful arts managers need to find durable ways to gather and deploy resources, without disrupting, discounting, or disrespecting the “vitality,” “life force,” or '“quickening,” that makes artistic work thrive.
As Bill Sharpe (2010) framed the challenge:
We have banks that coin the currency of trade in those things we can pass among us. We have art that coins meaning that we can share only by living it…. How can we speak both languages with integrity?
From the ArtsManaged Field Guide
Function of the Week: Finance
Finance involves designing, maintaining, and sustaining systems of money and stuff.
Framework of the Week: Three Sectors
The Three Sectors framework offers a useful way to categorize different forms of collective effort in a society. Each sector has a different structure and logic. Each has access to a different bundle of resources. And each is governed by a different array of control and decision structures.
Photo by Malcolm Lightbody on Unsplash
Sources
Booth, Eric. “Teaching Artists and the Pandemic Crisis, Mid-May 2020,” May 17, 2020.
Mille, Agnes de. Martha: The Life and Work of Martha Graham - A Biography. First Edition. Random House, 1991.
Sharpe, Bill. Economies of Life: Patterns of Health and Wealth. Fife, Scotland: Triarchy Press Ltd, 2010.