when non-artists talk about artists and money

ask better questions

That is a guiding imperative in my art practice and my work with artists.

I was interviewed for an online column called Money Talk (read the full interview here), writers and artists discussing how they deal with finances. Lovely interviewer, great idea.

And yet. Underneath the questions, I heard echoes of the assumptions that cling to conversations about artists and money.

Here are some of the questions annotated with my annoyance.

Again, the interviewer was lovely, and I admit I’m a bit sensitive around these issues. But we are all conditioned to make limiting assumptions about artists and money. Maybe pointing them out helps us resist them.

Do you write full-time? 

My annoyance: That being a “real artist” means making a full-time living from your art. Very few artists make a full-time living from selling their work—probably around 2-3%, and those artists are mostly concentrated in specific industries and cities. Most art—and most important art—is made by artists with multiple revenue streams.

My response: I don’t care for the term “full-time writer/artist.” In my experience, most artists spend a similar amount of time actually making their work: between 1/5 and 1/3 of their working hours. Some spend the other hours earning money at an unrelated job; some spend the other hours promoting their art, dealing with agents, clients, galleries, and grants.

When I waited tables to pay the bills as a young choreographer, I was a full-time choreographer: Everything I did with my days was to support my artistic practice. Later, when I made a living from my dance company, I was called a “full-time choreographer,” but I did not have more time in the studio. Rather, my non-rehearsal hours were spent raising money and planning board meetings instead of serving brunch.

Did you study writing (or something else) or has it always come naturally to you?

My annoyance: The idea that artists are Special Humans with gifts that “come naturally,” rather than devoted professionals who hone their craft over decades.

My response: Very little that I care to do comes naturally to me. Making dances is still the hardest work I’ve ever taken on. I didn’t choose it because it came easily, but because it felt impossible, unimaginable and thus unimaginably exciting.

When you first started writing, were there any financial challenges?

My annoyance: What? Of course there were financial challenges. Everybody has financial challenges. I resist the idea that artists’ money problems are categorically different from everyone else’s.

My response: Everyone has financial challenges. Work that capitalism undervalues—art, social work, farming, spiritual practice, activism, community building—has an added challenge: I can’t simply apply for “job of choreographer” and start cashing checks.

Time and money are my—I might say the—structural challenges as an artist. There are other challenges to making art, some of them beautiful and spiritual, but the things I see stop artists, myself included, are time and money.

The positive way of saying that is: If I have a reasonable budget that pays for my life and a reasonable schedule with time for art making, I can make my art. Forever. I focus on those two numbers: the dollars I need to earn and the hours I need to spend making art each month. There are many, many ways I have gotten to those numbers in the last thirty years, but always by treating it as a math puzzle, not as a question of my value or success.

What advice would you give someone who's creative or wants to change their lifestyle about balancing passion for their art and earning an income?

My annoyance: Mostly the words "passion" and "lifestyle," and the fantasies non-artists have of quitting their jobs and living a "passionate lifestyle."

My response: Definitely make art. It is a powerful addition to life, a form of devotion that feeds the artist and feeds the world.

Set up your life so you can keep creating. Think in decades, not years. Art is a long, gorgeous arc.

Making art and earning money can overlap differently at different times. I have earned 0% of my income from art and 100% from art. Both were great revenue models; both helped me make work that was important to me and to my community.

Earning money from my art does not make me a real artist. My commitment to my practice is what makes me a real artist. Period. A dollar earned waiting tables is worth exactly the same as a dollar earned making art.

Tell me a financial rule that you never break.

My annoyance: None. This is a great question. It’s personal and specific, and it does not position artists as Special Humans. I'd love a whole interview like this.

My response: I only buy used cars, only from individuals, and I always get it looked at by a trusted mechanic. No new cars, no dealers, no loans. I know the difference between depreciating assets (cars, computers) and appreciating assets (real estate, investments.)

great job, artist. now stop making art.

Great job, artist. Now stop making art.

When I was twenty-six, I started a dance program at a high school, a half-time job that was a perfect complement to running my dance company. I lovedthose goddamn kids. Then something happened that happens to many artists: I did it well. The program thrived. Gradually and quietly, it became an overwhelming full-time job.

I was good at building that dance program because I was an artist, invested in the power of dance, committed to a daily practice. The high school, grateful for the skills of a working artist, would happily consume all of my time and prevent me from being a working artist.

another dance with my fab high school students

The world is hungry for artists' skills.

Because we are brilliant planners, designers, project managers, and team builders, we often get hired to imagine, build, and run complex ventures.

The world loves competent artists and will quickly absorb us entirely into teaching or organizing or managing.

I see this with artists who teach in universities: We want you teaching our students because you are a brilliant artist with a powerful practice. Now stop that powerful practice and spend your time in meetings.

A dear artist friend accepted a full-time position in a Big Art Structure, curating and lifting up the work of other artists. She knew the job would squeeze her artistic life. So we wrote this note to her colleagues, her family, and herself, a quiet reminder she could pin to the wall of her artist studio and her curator office. You can download it here.

artists keep going

A theater director had a child and struggled, as many artist parents do, to recalibrate her artistic life. She thought—assumed really—she would move on from making performance, maybe get one of those so-called real jobs.

“But,” she said, “I have not managed to become less interested in art-making.”

And so she persists.

Artists persist.

Artists everywhere are making art right now in spite of the arguments against it, in spite of the doubts and the doubters, long after a “reasonable person” would move on.

We keep at it, often with few resources and scant acknowledgment, often for decades.

The world cannot fathom this perseverance when our tangible "return on investment" is slight.

"Why do you spend so much time on that art stuff?"

The why is hard to answer in the terms it is often asked. We are not getting rich or famous. The deeper why—the calling, the lifelong practice—is something artists all over the world know and experience daily.

And that is what I want to tell you: Art makers everywhere persist in work that fails rational sense and fails capitalist logic.

I want to say: We are right about this, artists. The world is wrong.

The flame inside you burns in artists across cultures and across time. I cannot explain it. And I don’t know what you should do with it. I can only say that I see it everywhere.

You are not crazy. You are not wrong. You are not wasting your time. You—we—are tapped into something true.

I don’t know what you should do. Obviously. If you are questioning whether you should stop making art to focus on something else, I have no advice. I have only this: You are one of many, many who are called to make art. And one of many, many who wonder how to continue when it can be so difficult, so unsung, so misunderstood.

If making your art feels unreasonable and untenable, you are, I daresay, doing it exactly right.

Art is a form of devotion, and, like all acts of devotion, it is not functional or sensible. It is a kind of tending, a cultivation. It is medicine. It is both price-less and priceless: a poor fit with monetary value and beyond monetary value. What art making earns is best measured in invisible, invaluable currencies. Connection, awareness, reverence. Reinvention, possibility, truth telling.

And yes, none of that is helpful as I eat my breakfast, facing another day as an artist called—but not hired—to make art. My coffee mug leaves a steam ring on the table and warms my morning-cold hands. A jumble of to-dos and urgencies crowd my artist brain. And yet. I too have not managed to become less interested in art-making.

I want to make that table as large as it truly is. Thousands—no, millions—of artists seated at a table that stretches out the door, down the block, and over the horizon. We all hold our mugs, all called to this dazzling and demanding practice, all wondering how to make it work today.

Good morning, artists.

It is very good to see you.

the toddler of capitalism

Artists have always created with and without financial compensation.

We make our art as calling, as medicine, fueled by our personal and collective tectonics, the slow and subterranean truths of this human journey. Artists made art thousands of years before capitalism emerged and will make art thousands of years after capitalism recedes.

Art-making is permanent, enduring, a fact of human existence. The free market is recent, brief, and constructed, one of many possible arrangements.

Capitalism is a momentary guest. Artists are permanent residents.

This helps me reframe my artist-economy relationship.

Not: How can I shift my practice to fit the “realities” of the free market?

Rather: How can we artists make allowances for the temporary, opportunistic, and often childish practices of capitalism?

The short-sighted toddler of capitalism fails to support much essential work, art included. (It is not shocking that a system so young and self-interested misses the bigger picture.)

It is up to us, the quiet and eternal ministry of artists, to be discerning, far-sighted, and wise, to be the grown-ups. 

Every artist who slogs through an hourly day job

Every artist who teaches art in order to make art

Every artist with five revenue streams (restaurant, freelance, grants, selling work, crowdfunding)

Every artist who limits expenses in order to earn less and create more

Every artist who pivots from grants one year to a salaried job the next

(and I have been each one of these at some point)

We all make the toddler of capitalism do something it is too foolish and myopic to do itself: Allow an artist to live and create art.

a late summer rant about talent

There is no such thing as talent.

This is what I choose to believe.

It is a choice, not provable or disprovable. As in my artistic practice, I do not ask: Is this finally true? Rather I ask: Is this generative? What does it give rise to?

For me, talent gives rise to fixed and constrained possibilities.

Am I talented? As with all ungenerative questions, neither answer nourishes. The untalented are doomed to mediocrity; the talented can take little credit for their creations.

I should, yes, disclose that I do not feel particularly talented myself. Perhaps my disbelief in talent is self-protective, and so be it.

I don’t know what you believe about talent. Perhaps feeling talented fuels your work. But the grand myths of artistic talent, their use and misuse by non-artists, piss me off. (If you want my not-entirely-crackpot theory about where "talents" come from, skip to the bottom.)

Untalented artist (me) lifting my dear dance friend, Heather. In case you don't know, the lifted person does the most important and difficult work in this kind of partnering.

Talent reinforces the myth that art is birthed spontaneously and instinctively, flung into the world in spasms of Van Gogh-esque expulsion. Talent erupts, unrehearsed and unplanned, spewing brilliance and beauty. It is wild and heedless. The talented artist may well be thought unbalanced, magical, mad.

Actual artistic creation is slow, at times a slog, accompanied by hundreds of hours of plain effort and dumpsters of deleted material, the copious negative results so essential to creation. Would you think me a “talented writer” if I told you my first novel took seven years to write?

A choreographer I adore is introduced by a curator presenting her latest chaotic-magical-ruthless show. He rambles on about her rare talent. He will pay her $350 to perform for the weekend.

My dear dance company)laying our own marley floor for the prestigious touring gig where the presenter stiffed us out of $3,000 in travel expenses.

Talent is ethereal; artistic practice is embodied and weighted. Struggle, trial and error, and useful dead ends are foundational, and they separate artistic practice from the formulaic, instrumentalized processes of product development. Effort, labor, research, dialogue—all are elided by the idea of talent. Talent materializes shiny fruits from the ether, rather than from our plowed fields, June frosts, and failed crops.

As I told my high school students: “The first five letters in choreography are CHORE.” (Feel free to use that one, dance friends.)

Talent makes us enchanted creatures, untethered from the constraints of labor and resource, and is thus one more excuse to underpay us.

If you pay for my talent, that’s free money for me, a gratuity for my inherent, effortless mastery. If you pay for my decades of artistic practice and research and my weeks of toil, that’s compensation, not honorarium or stipend (both derived from the Latin for: I pay you crap.)

Perhaps most damagingly, talent is individualist, erasing community, connection, and interdependence, the true wellsprings of artistic growth. Art is an ecosystem, talent a monoculture. The profound and generative energies of an artist network, a scene, do so much to birth resonant art. But it is cheaper—and more in keeping with capitalist narratives—to pluck and fund one Talented Artist from that scene.

A beloved spoken word artist works in a generous, cantankerous scene where artists push and support each other so thoroughly that shove and support are indistinguishable. A funder grants him a prize and, paying no attention or money to that ecosystem, declares him “a gem, a unique voice, a talent beyond measure, an ambassador for our city.”

I want to dignify artist work. This is a profession that unfolds over decades. It is hard. Like any profession, more perhaps, art making grows and flourishes through hours and years of effort. While based in inspiration, it is built around constant grunt work, scheduling, emails, and schlepping things about. The job description for Professional Choreographer ought to begin: Must be able to carry heavy things and schedule large groups of busy people.

I want to describe skilled artists the way we describe skilled doctors: as learned, expert, practiced, competent, proficient, accomplished, diligent, tenacious.

And like doctors and scientists, we do not rise up alone. We stand on and beside the shoulders of collaborators, mentors, ancestors, and fellow artists whose work excites us or infuriates us. We respond, pollinate, infect, collide.

Artists work in ecosystems, creative biomes that hold and reimagine culture. If you want to understand or nourish our work, first understand and nourish that.

For myself, I ask about talent what I ask about feedback: Does it make me want to get back in the studio, back to making?

Talent does not.

And so I sit down at my desk, chair squeaking, glass of seltzer perspiring in the Philadelphia heat.

I return, untalented, to my Work.

Postscript: So where do talents come from, Andrew?

If there is no talent, how do I account for the oners, the exceptional, the singular?

I do believe certain artists possess superpowers, but, to me, most seem honed, not god-given.

A fuel for my artistic practice—or any Work—is the quiet, invisible things I do all day. Where I place my attention moment by moment generates, over years and decades, skills that look a lot like talent. My hours in the studio are dwarfed by my hours perceiving, thinking, piecing together.

What my mind does “at rest” can be powerful fuel for creating and can become my talent.

A theater director I know is constantly sensing and making sense of the emotional energies around her. From early childhood, she put in thousands of silent hours refining that awareness because she grew up in emotionally fraught situations and needed those skills as protection, refuge, distraction. Directing a play, this comes across as Talent, an innate gift for emotional undertones. It is not innate or god-given, rather an awareness and analysis cultivated out of necessity.

A small personal example: I spend a lot of time “singing” the rhythms of people’s speech. They are music. They have beauty as melodies, and they often hold—in contrast to the words’ literal meaning—the speaker’s subtle and layered interior life. That is to say, I learn more from the song of your speech than the transcript. The back and forth of conversation is call-and-response, an improvised duet of harmony and interruption, rhythms agreed upon and broken. When my editor says I “have a gift for dialogue,” I think: Should I tell her I am hearing her words as a song?

Write what you know is well-worn advice to tell stories close to your experience. I would say: Write what you do. Make art using the quiet, ongoing practices that fill your hours. And wait for people to exclaim, “Such talent!”

This writing is for a sequel to Making your Life as an Artist (maybe titled Sustaining Your Life as an Artist, what do you think?) about the long arc, living for decades in a culture that extracts artists' Work while abandoning us economically.

back together, not back to normal: A messy, Unedited LIST of my art and organizing ideas

I’ve been keeping a document in my phone of post-lockdown ideas: how we get back together but not back to normal. There are ideas for art pieces, ways to incite art pieces, conversations, community organizing. It’s a messy, overambitious list. And the medical situation is profoundly unpredictable, so some of these ideas will surely come to seem outrageous and impossible. Writing them down is, for me, its own kind of making, and helps me move toward whatever is next.

art ideas

FIRST DANCE. An experiential performance for the vaccinated. Show us you got your second dose, and you get a ticket. The audience is made up of people who are re-entering public life after a year away. Use that energy, that potential, that hunger and grief. Is this the most raw and honest audience-performer moment in history?

BACK TOGETHER. A performance series that uses the order of vaccination as a structure. In the first month, performers and audience are all frontline health care workers and elders. Month two adds in immuno-compromised. Make a space hosted and held by those who have been in the most danger and (now) are the first out of the pandemic.

COMING OUT. Make a teachable ritual for welcoming newly vaccinated members of your family or community or social group. It’s your debut, your coming out, your graduation. Do the ritual with whomever just got vaccinated. It’s a growing party, a swelling crowd.

10 STEPS BACK TOGETHER. An incremental series of tasks/practices/rituals to readjust to in-person life. Baby steps.
1) Have lunch with one friend. Hug at the end.
2) Go to a public event (a concert, a talk, a game) and stay for 15 minutes.
…
10) Host your dream gathering, the thing you longed for in lockdown. A singalong? A deferred birthday? A dance party? It can be big or small, formal or low-key.

WHY AM I NOT ECSTATIC? Collect stories and moments of the discomfort of getting back together. Wrap my arms around the complexity of lockdown’s end, the difference between what we should feel and what we do feel.

LOCKDOWN LABEL. Label objects and art made during the Pandemic with some sort of symbol.This was made when we were all separated.Knowing a poem or dance was created during lockdown changes it. Or does it?

BACK TOGETHER PUBLIC SQUARE. Make a public gathering and art space for the newly vaccinated. Anyone can perform, share stories, leave images and objects. A living memorial/open mic/portal to what’s next. [NOTE TO MYSELF: This is probably way too dangerous.]

NEW HANDSHAKES. Add vaccinated options to the current elbow bump. Offer an elbow and a hand the person you’re greeting can indicate their status by bumping (unvaccinated) or shaking (vaccinated).

ARITSTS’ SPRING. Make a community-wide season of artists, happenings, and invitations. Give us something to look forward to this spring, something to carry us through this dark winter. Maybe leave the institutions out, or at least don’t have them lead. Invite people back to art, not back to the Art World.

UNPLUG. Compensate for a year spent online. Can I make and advertise a performance with zero digital communication? I walk to my collaborators’ homes and make a rehearsal schedule. We hand draw posters and postcards to invite people. We allow no posting or photos. Is it possible to de-zoom ourselves and our work? Is it interesting?

structural stuff

RAISE THIS UP. With a big group of local artists, make a list of arts organizations funders should invest in. The brutal economics of the arts means not all organizations have survived or will survive the pandemic. Advocate for artist-led, artist-centered, community-centered, orgs with BIPOC leadership and roots in equity (not just newly launched equity initiatives.) More controversially: Make a LET IT GO list of organizations funders should move away from.

FUND DIRECTLY. Call on funders to fund individual artists directly and to fund through fiscal sponsors. Funding well-established, well-funded arts nonprofits is part of the massive inequities of arts funding. Could this one structural change reallocate a lot of resource to the grassroots?

NOT-BACK-TO-NORMAL: A TOP TEN LIST FOR MY ARTS COMMUNITY. “When we get back together, we will...” How specifically will we make things different this year? What have we learned from the truth-telling and uprisings of 2020? What is our pledge? Can we be specific enough to be useful? Make a lovely poster to hang in our studios and offices. 

Why is Artists U free? Or: Equity, Movement Building, and the Urge to "Fix Artists"

Everything Artists U does is open source and free for artists. Why?

I get asked this a lot, especially at the national level where “professional development” for artists usually comes with a fee attached. They say: people value things they pay for. They say: you get better attendance and follow-through when you charge for it.

And, of course, programs want earned revenue. They have a lot of overhead, and most are funded by grants that love love love to see that little slice of Earned Income.

So why is Artists U always free?

1) Cost is a barrier.

Many artists are living hand-to-mouth in a way that most arts professionals, even in their scrappy, early 20s moments, never do. Artists in their 50s with families with low and unpredictable income. “Successful” artists with significant professional recognition living on $18,000 a year, mostly from day jobs.

And psychologically, many artists misunderstand their money. Too many of us don’t have a budget, we don’t know what our lives cost. We actually could pay $25 for a webinar of $175 for an online course, but many of us won’t. Our scarcity mentality leads us to under-invest in things that are essential.

One goal of Artists U is getting artists to the point where they would pay for a professional development workshop.

2) Cost is also a filter.

The skills and cultural fluencies that allow artists to access resources and opportunities are not distributed evenly. Artists who grew up middle-class and artists with college or MFA training tend to acquire the soft skills, hard skills and markers of class membership that make it easier to advocate, communicate with stakeholders, and get funding.

The good news is that these skills and fluencies are teachable. But we need to “preach to the unconverted,” start conversations about sustainability in all communities of artists. Professional development for artists has some big equity challenges. As of now, it’s primarily serving artists who come from the nonprofit, MFA-based arts world. That population skews dramatically college-educated and middle- and upper-middle-class. In America, that means it skews white.

This does two bad things for artist professional development. First of all, many artists who need these tools don’t get them. And, second, professional development programs don’t get the tactics and wisdom that artists in many communities use to thrive and make their work. As one example, I see more and different models of artist entrepreneurship in communities of color, and the professional development world needs that thinking.

Professional development, potentially a platform for addressing inequity, risks reinforcing it. The scary way of saying this: professional development is currently training artists who receive a disproportionate share of resources to get an even bigger share.

Charging for professional development (and where you do it, and where you publicize it, and the language and images you put out) filters for those artists who see themselves as belonging to the nonprofit high art world.

I have sat in hundreds of rooms of Artist Professional Development. The only ones that were as diverse as their communities were the ones without fees.

3) There is funding for this work.

Here’s a sad fact, artists: a lot of people make a lot of money to “fix” or “help” artists. There is a significant amount of money paid to consultants, strategic planners, and facilitators in the arts sector.

Funders often referred my dance company to strategic planners and consultants. “Here, Headlong, go work with so-and-so, and they’ll fix [your project] [your marketing] [you].” A few of those people were massively helpful, many were so-so, a few were horrid.

When I learned that one of our consultants made $150/hour (in 2001!) to meet with us, I began to ask: why aren’t artists doing this work? Why can’t someone pay a choreographer, an artist who actually knows what I’m going through, to consult with me?

One strategy of Artists U is to take a small portion of the funding that goes to consultants and pay brilliant, rigorous artist consultants to do the work. (You might look at the funding in your community that goes to consultants, and ask: could some portion of this be used to hire artist consultants?)

(Another strategy is to keep infrastructure low. We are hosted by organizations in each location, so we have no office space, no administrative staff, just programming costs. And we are flexible: when there is more money, we do more programming. We are more of a “temporary autonomous space” than an organization.)

4) Free things scale (if they’re good).

I put out my book, Making Your Life as an Artist, as a free download and an $18 paperback. 75,000 people have downloaded it and 400 have purchased it. That’s about 200-to-1. The free book has tens of thousands of readers (probably more than 75,000 because people have started distributing it on their own), and that’s with a marketing budget of $0. I simply put the book out, told everyone I knew, and artists took it from there. Every month, the book reaches more artists than I’ve worked with in ten years of workshops and programming. And it costs nothing to distribute.

(An artist I know who has a similar, not-free book has done 50 book talks all over the country and sold 4,000 books.)

There is so much great content about professional development out there. It’s been created by tax-advantaged, public grant dollars. So why not make it open source and free?

I’ve been blessed to connect with many great programs (you know I love you, Springboard for the Arts, ArtistINC, Creative Capital, GYST, Fresh Arts, et al). But now I want to move beyond programs and build a movement. A movement led by artists and that is exactly as diverse as our country. A movement with free, open-source tools that artists can use and share. A movement with ways for artists to self-enlist. A movement that understands what programs can and cannot do. A movement that interrogates how education, class, and race privilege impact the art world and artists (and how artists can make change).

We are going to put all of Artists U’s tools online for free: videos and podcasts, a downloadable workbook, and even – gasp – an app. We are going to work with any artist who wants use our tools (and other tools) to convene artists to look at building sustainable lives. We are going to gather those artist leaders together for a national conversation.

And all this can be yours for the low price of $0.

How to have a slightly better chance at getting a MAP grant

As someone who applied to the MAP Fund many times in the past (and sometimes got it), I learned a lot by sitting on the dance panel panel this year, and I want to share it. Cause I want you all to write the strongest possible proposals and git that money.

The reason I called this “How to Have a Slightly Better Chance” is that the numbers are brutal: 900 LOIs for 39 grants. Only 22% of LOIs even make it to a panel.

Here are my thoughts on making a stronger MAP Fund application:

Knowing how your work is discussed by thought leaders in your field is power. This is gigantically gigantic: there is a conversation about your work. You can learn about that conversation, affect it, and address it in your writing. If you understand how your work is actually seen in your field, you will be much, much better at writing applications and getting resources. So get panel feedback whenever possible. It can hurt, but it’s gold. It allows you to write to the concerns and questions that a panel has. Years ago, the NEA dance director told me the two worst arguments she’d ever witnessed on the NEA dance panel were about my company’s work. The argument was: is this really dance? Hearing that hurt a lot. But I got over it, and I wrote to that question in my NEA applications, talking about movement invention and refinement and choreographic structure. And that question never came up on the panel again.

Have candid conversations about your work with presenters, funders, thinkers, and artists. Ask people who get what you are doing and have some perspective on the national conversation. Again, this is intense, and maybe not for everyone. But knowing where your work actually lives, how it is actually received, will help you write better and get more resource.

Get thought leaders to see your work. As you can imagine, it was hugely helpful if someone on the panel had seen an artist’s work live. There is not a conspiracy in the art world, but there is a group of thought leaders who serve on a lot of panels (I’m not really one of them, more like a Guest Artist). I strongly recommend making a gentle, ongoing plan to get prominent artists, presenters, and leaders to see your work live. In Headlong, the company I worked with for 20 years, there were maybe five important curators/programmers/funders who advocated strongly for our work. More than half of our gigs and opportunities came from these five champions. This doesn’t require cheesy, schmoozy careerism; just give people a chance to see your work. And if they connect with it, give them chances to get close to it.

            Invite people to your work. Ask people who are already supporters: who else might be interested? If you’re not in New York City and not performing in New York, you might make special efforts to connect with national leaders. Look for convenings (DanceUSA, NPN, Alternate Roots, TCG). When you hear someone is going to be in town, consider having a showing. Sometimes a presenter or funder will help invite people or even buy a plane ticket if asked.

            Today’s emerging leaders will be on the panel in five years. Build relationships with younger folks, people starting out, and they will champion your work as they move up.

            You don’t have to do APAP. Some artists’ work thrives in that environment. Ours didn’t.

            Yes votes mean more than No votes. Some people won’t champion your work, or even like it. Doesn’t matter too much. A champion or two, a few supporters, makes a huge difference and has more impact than detractors. I find that to be true in general and definitely on the MAP panel: champions outweighed detractors.

Mean it. This is part of Knowing Thyself. Address the guidelines, of course, but don’t reverse-engineer the application (“What do these MAP people want to hear?”). Too many applications were general, not self-aware and specific, writing to some imagined consensus that doesn’t exist. So mean it. Applications that said plainly what matters to the artist were refreshing.

Have people look at your work samples. Work samples make or break most applications. We can’t see our own work. Several times, I said things like, “I’ve seen this artist’s work, and it’s stronger and more interesting than this work sample.” Have people look at your work samples, and where you choose to cue. It’s especially good to have someone who has sat on panels look at them, because those folks will cut through whatever you assume about your work and how it conveys on video.

There is no longer any excuse for low quality videos. Twenty years ago, it was cumbersome and expensive to document work well. It’s not anymore. Build documentation into your budget and your schedule. Low-quality work samples don’t convey the strength of your work and suggest carelessness and lack of follow-through, not things you want associated with your application.

Don’t send highlight reels. MAP sort of allows for edited videos, but I strongly recommend against it. In my experience on panels, we are looking for two things: is something real and vivid happening? And then, does it change? Videos that jump around in time can give me the first, but not the second.

Include extra video, if it’s strong and supports your case. MAP tells you how many minutes panelists will definitely watch, but there were many applications where I watched longer because I wanted to know more. If it’s strong work, consider uploading a 10-minute excerpt, knowing the panel will definitely watch the first five minutes, and maybe longer.

If there’s one theme here, it’s: don’t do it alone. Connect with artists and presenters, have honest conversations, and share proposals and work samples with people before you submit them. Panels are social, a microcosm of the larger community of inquiry in our field. If your craft your proposal in isolation, without dialogue and debate, it won't move as fluidly and articulately when it reaches a panel.

MAP Fund dance panel, by the numbers

After serving on the MAP Fund Dance Panel this year, I took a look at data from the pool of applicants. Here's what I found.

MAP Fund got 901 Letters of Inquiry this year.

Each LOI is read by one outside reader and one MAP Fund staff member. MAP invited 400 (44%) to submit full applications.

Each full application was read by one outside evaluator and one MAP staff member. Out of 400 full applications, MAP forwarded 200 to the panels. I didn’t know about this “middle round” of adjudication. If you were invited to submit a full proposal this year, you only had a 50% chance of getting to the panel.

In both rounds, outside readers and evaluators were asked:

Are you familiar with this artist?
How well does the work align with the MAP goals (10, 4, 1)?
How do you rate this project's artistic excellence (10, 4, 1)
Is the project viable based on the information presented (10, 4, 1)?
And what is your gut response to the work (10, 4, 1)?
Include any comments on the proposal.

The 10-4-1 scoring scale (also used on my panel) pushes evaluators to draw stark distinctions in their rankings. It’s BRILLIANT-OK-NO. You need a lot of 10s and maybe some 4s to advance at each stage.

Out of the 200 projects that went to panel, 39 were funded.

There were three panels: Performance/Dance, Performance/Theater, and Performance/Music. If you choose “Interdisciplinary” as your discipline, you will still be evaluated by a disciplinary panel (or you can think of all three panels as interdisciplinary). That’s a change – a positive one, I think – inspired by the prevalence, even mainstreaming, of interdisciplinary work.

LOIs that got funded: 4.3%

Full applications that got funded: 10%

Full applications that make it to the panel that got funded: 19%

[You can look at past applicant pools by discipline and geography on MAP’s website: http://mapfund.org/adp_charts.php. Hell, you can read past applications to MAP here: http://mapfund.org/adp_search.php Other funders take note! If you want artists to focus on data, set a good example and be transparent with your own data.]

On the Dance Panel, we looked at 75 applications and funded 14 of them: 19% of the dance proposals that made it to panel were funded.

These are harsh numbers. As you can imagine, the 75 projects my panel looked at were really strong; the vast majority were yesses if we had enough money to give out. The MAP Fund is national, and it accepts applications from individual artists (through a fiscal conduit), so a ton of artists apply from all over the country. Especially New York.

This chart shows a total of 15 funded projects because one project had lead artists from Chicago and Los Angeles, and I counted it for both cities.

GEOGRAPHY

Unsurprisingly, artists from New York City were the majority of the applications that made it to panel and of the funded applications. Of the 75 applications that made it to the final dance panel, New York and Bay Area artists accounted for 67% of the applications and 79% of the funded applications.

This is a sobering figure for a Philadelphia artist, one I didn’t register until I looked at the numbers: 4/5 of the MAP fund grants went to two communities. I wonder, in retrospect, if we had a thorough enough discussion about different communities. And I wonder about earlier phases of the process. How many LOIs came from artists in other communities? How many full applications? (Fascinating breakdown of applicants by state here: http://mapfund.org/adp_charts.php)

GENDER

We talked a lot about gender on the panel, so what actually happened?

These numbers might appear roughly “balanced,” but it depends a lot on how you look at them. On the one hand, the funded projects included five female lead artists, five male lead artists, and four male-and-female collaborations. Other than the lack of trans artists, it sounds balanced. (I think that’s how we saw it.) But the applicant pool was not equally divided by gender; there were 38 applications from women and 25 from men. So male lead artists were funded 20% of the time, while female lead artists were funded 13.2% of the time. That’s a big difference. In the “Both” category, projects that had a female and a male lead artist, 4 of the 11 projects were funded (36.4%).

If you group projects that included a male lead artist versus projects that didn’t, you get a very different look:

Projects that didn’t have a male leading or co-leading were half as likely to be funded as projects that included a male (12.82% vs. 25%). That’s a tough sentence for me to write, especially given how much gender was a part of our discussions.

But you can also group the data this way: projects that included a female or trans lead artist vs. projects that didn’t:

Seen this way, applications that include a women or trans lead artist were nearly as successful (18%) as applications that did not (20%). Again, it’s the “Both” projects that can make the data look so different: if you count them as female, it’s nearly balanced, if you group them with male, an already unbalanced data set looks downright skewed.

WORD COUNT

Out of curiosity, I compared the word counts in funded vs. unfunded proposals. Maybe successful applications were briefer, more concise? Or maybe they were longer and explained more? Nope.

Average word count for unfunded proposals: 823

Average word count for funded proposals: 824

PROJECT BUDGET SIZE

Proposed project budgets ranged from $32,000 to $747,000. There was a noticeable difference in the averages:

Average project budget for unfunded proposals: $139,081      

Average project budget for funded proposals: $197,142

The funded project budgets were 42% larger than the unfunded. And if you remove one unfunded outlier (the $747,000 budget mentioned above), the difference becomes more striking: the funded project budgets were 53% larger than the unfunded. The funded project budgets did, however, range from $51,000 to $485,000 with half of them below $130,000.

There are many ways to interpret this. The panel could have a bias toward scale and impact. Some projects might be larger because they have already secured support and gigs, which could correlate with a stronger proposal. And of course, artists with big budgets often have track records and strong career histories.

ORGANIZATIONS AND ORGANIZATION SIZE

28 applications came from non-profit organizations run by the lead artists; the other 47 came from fiscal sponsors and conduits. Success rates were nearly the same:

Organizational applications that received funding: 5 out of 28 or 17.9%

Fiscally sponsored applications that received funding: 9 out of 47 or 19.1%

This seems important to me. The MAP Fund allows individual artists to apply with a fiscal sponsor. Allowing that is one thing; actually funding those artists is another. I’m hugely impressed (with the MAP Fund and with the artists who applied) that individual artists who applied through a sponsor were funded at the same rate as organizations.

I also looked at the budget size of the organizational applicants, based on the last two years of revenue they listed.

The 23 unfunded applicants had an average revenue of $697,347

The 5 funded organizations had an average revenue of $317,500

These numbers are, at first look, striking, implying a strong bias away from larger organizations. When you subtract the two largest organizations from the unfunded group, the numbers shift:

The 21 smaller unfunded applicants had an average revenue of $337,571

The 5 funded organizations had an average revenue of $317,500

In any case, I’m encouraged that the usual foundation bias in favor of huge organizations is not present here, nor should it be given MAP’s commitment to innovation and challenging conventions.

Contorting, Transparency, Innovation

Since my last post , many people asked: what can artists and arts professionals specifically do about the constantly shifting goals, strategies, and measurements sweeping through our sector?

What I’d Love to See from the Innovators, Funders, and Business School Grads

Transparency. What is the goal you are choosing for the arts? Who chose it and how? What research or data went into choosing it? And when will you reassess and consider a different goal? Assigning a goal to the arts is the policy; everything flows from that subtle but massive act. Be transparent about it.

Humility. Admit that we are now several rounds into solving the arts with strategic thinking. Don’t refute past efforts unless you have convincing data to back that up. Be courageous and humble enough to say: this goal, this theory of change is a proposal. It follows many equally well-intentioned and intelligent proposals. In all likelihood, it’s not the final answer.

Acknowledge the opportunity cost. Imposing a goal on the arts necessarily eliminates other possibilities, other strategies. Consider that cost. Measure it even. Any cost-benefit analysis of a “disruptive strategy” in the arts needs to take into account the resource and capacity cost of swerving every five years, and making artists and arts organizations swerve to keep up.

Track how much resource organizations provide specifically to artists. Track this as a percentage and total dollar figure, publish it, and set targets around it. Arts professionals have a strong incentive to back goals and strategies that fund their salary lines. Thus we get meta-strategies like creative placemaking steering resources toward arts professionals and away from artists. Good data could provide a counterweight to this.

What I’d Love to See from Artists and Arts Organizations

Advocate for your goal.Tell the world what goal(s) you have chosen to pursue for your art. And measure it, however you think it might be measurable. One reason the MBA mind imposes goals is that we artists have failed to explain, measure, and argue for the goals we are reaching toward.

Be aware of contorting. When funding shifts, artists and organizations bend ourselves to fit the new agenda. Think critically about these contortions, and how much is too much for you. When you do contort to fit the Outcomes du Jour, remember that you are contorting, that your actual work isn’t contained or defined by funder objectives.

Talk back. Ask funders about the goals they are choosing (see above). Let them know the capacity cost of these changes to you or your organization. And if you opt out of an opportunity because you just don’t want to contort that much, tell them why. In a letter (anonymously, if need be), CCing their bosses and board.

can business school grads fix the arts?

Working in the education sector recently, I noticed a familiar dynamic from my life in the arts: the prevalence of MBA-based strategic thinking, emphasizing innovation, disruption, and assessment.

I’m hugely impressed by this kind of strategic thinking. It can be astonishingly effective when two key conditions are present:

1) There is a clear consensus on the goal.
2) That goal can be directly and accurately measured without creating a lot of distortion in the organization or program.

If the goal is financial, for example, both of these conditions are usually present. (1) We want to earn this amount of money. (2) We will look at what we earned and how we earned it on a certain date. And, really, it must be said: this type of thinking is ridiculously powerful in such situations. It has generated untold wealth and innovation. It finds radical solutions. It’s flexible and adaptive, always looking to what actually is over what we expect (in that way, it reminds me of the artistic process). It diagnoses hard-to-see problems in an organization or sector.

It has been so successful that it’s easy to understand why someone with an MBA could be cocky. They think: we’ve cracked it. We’ve got the approach that solves any problem, that cleans up any sluggish sector.

In the last 20 years, that thinking has migrated to sectors where the two key conditions are not present, such as education and the arts. In these situations, the MBA mind is forced to do two subtle but massively impactful things:

1) It imposes a consensus goal: here’s where we all want to go.
2) It asserts that it has a tool to accurately measure success and ignores distortions created by the assessment.

If you care at all about education, you know that all the meaningful debates of the past century were exactly about what the goal of education is, impassioned and far-ranging battles about what a good education should do. The same is true in the arts. Gorgeous and complex debates rage about the role that artists play and their relation to the market economy, to the entertainment industry, to democracy, and to our multi-cultural nation (just to name a few).

The MBA mind breaks down in that context. If we can’t agree on what we are trying to do, how will we know when we’ve accomplished it? So, first, they impose a goal: let’s all just agree that we want our children to be able to learn these skills. Then, they assert that those skills are accurately measurable (standardized testing, No Child Left Behind). And they ignore or decry the inevitable distortions that result from that measurement: teaching to the test, faking test results, and schools expelling children who will drag down their scores.

The same is true in the arts. I have been an artist for long enough to see several cycles of the MBA mind in the art world. The goal is Access. The goal is Artistic Excellence. The goal is Diversity. The goal is Participation. And, now, the goal is Creative Placemaking.

Each time, success was measured by a bunch of hard and soft data that, it was strongly asserted, would tell us if we reached the goal.

Each time, organizations and artists distorted themselves and the data to — surprise! — reach the goal successfully with every project.

And each time, the new goal was rolled out guilelessly: we’ve had it wrong up till now, but we’ve finally solved it.

Strategic, innovation-based thinking has a enormous role to play in education and the arts. But it will continue to distort and fail if we assume goals and assessments work as they do in other sectors. (Eventually, the MBA world gives up: remember when google.org was going to remake the nonprofit sector? I do not celebrate that surrender; I want that thinking in our sector.)

Artists need to make visible and contest the assertions underlying the MBA approach. What is the goal you are imposing on the arts? Who chose it and why? And what are the effects of trying to measure it?

Here’s my contribution to the question: artists have a cultural role, and this is different from a goal.

Artists produce a lot of effects on the world: we affect education, citizenship, multiculturalism, creative placemaking. But those are effects of our role; they are not the role. Our role is to ask rigorous and reckless cultural questions, do our research, and share the results with the public and with each other. Some artists are pure researchers, making discoveries that other artists use. Some are applied researchers, taking discoveries out in the world and popularizing them, making them useful. When we do our role well, all kinds of other things happen. We “placemake.” We spark important and difficult conversations. We educate. We inspire other fields. But when we fund the arts based on these effects, we quickly distort the whole sector.

An analogy: addiction programs in a mosque or church or synagogue can be hugely effective. But what if we started to fund these places of worship based on their ability treat addiction? What if we resourced them based on the effect (addiction recovery) instead of the role (center of spiritual life)? First you’d get some pretty weird churches and mosques, bending over backwards to prove they were curing addiction. And, eventually, they’d lose effectiveness. The effect (addiction recovery) would diminish as their role (place of worship) was neglected.

Let’s have a conversation that acknowledges – and doesn’t conflate – the role of artists and the effects of that role. Then we can really innovate.

read and listen: Artists U approach online

A couple of people have posted materials from what we do. It’s all open source.

Here’s a nice interview by Cara Ober from the Bmoreart blog.

This is an audio recording of a talk I gave, “Why Artists Are Poor and Why They Shouldn’t Be,” at Culturebot’s Brooklyn Commune. If you don’t know them, you should.

And here you’ll find extensive notes by Amy Scheidegger on a talk I gave in Philly, “Building a Sustainable Life as an Artist.”

steal the thinking, not the result

A lot of artists say to me: “I want to have a career like XXXX. What did XXXXX do get where they got?”

One thing I can tell you: XXXX didn’t get there by trying to imitate the path of another artist. The artists I see thrive do it their own way, specifically not imitating the journeys and careers of others.

The bad news about building a life as an artist: THERE IS NO MODEL.

The good news: YOU MAKE YOUR OWN MODEL.

You get to build a life and a living that embody your values, your art practice, and your mission. And other artists can inspire us along the way. But we need to steal their thinking, not the results of that thinking.

Stealing from Miguel. Some years ago, we began sending out “email newsletters,” through Constant Contact, a horribly well-named organization. They looked a lot like Emails From An Arts Organization. They were visually noisy and full of click-throughs. And they were busy telling you All The Great Stuff We’re Doing Right Now, always using the “we” pronoun. And, in 2008, that felt like the right thing. But as my inbox became inundated with the non-specific PR of many other artist newsletters, it started to feel wrong. Like it wasn’t really ours.

Then I got the “Spewsletter” from dear Miguel Gutierrez. It looked like this (you can read full Spewsletters on Miguel’s site here.):

I read the entire thing, which I never do. And it was loooooong. At the very end, where you usually find the required and polite “UNSUBSCRIBE” option, Miguel wrote:

If you don’t wanna get this anymore, obviously you’re conflicted cuz you read this far.

Thank you, Miguel.

He reminded me just how strange an email newsletter is. And he insisted that it reflect him as an artist and person. Now, I could have imitated Miguel’s Spewsletter, but it would have been hollow. I wouldn’t get to his level of brilliance, and it wouldn’t fit me as an artist and person.

Instead, I stole his thinking, which, for my purposes, went like this:

There are no rules.

Newsletters are useless if they are pre-digested PR coming from An Organization. They need to come from someone.

 Make the thing that could only come from you. If you speak in your own voice (with text and with images), your email can be as fun/beguiling/insightful as spending time with you.

So we at Headlong changed the way we email people. It had to come from a person. And it had to be radically honest. No PR, no selling.

When we made MORE, a dark and challenging piece and a difficult piece to “promote,” I wrote this:

From: Andrew Simonet <info@headlong.org>

Subject: Here’s what I’m thinking about 

Date: September 2, 2009 4:35:37 PM EDT

Hello friends,

I have five things I want to tell you.

1. Making more is the first time I’ve ever had to walk out of rehearsal to cry.  For what the piece was showing me.  For the bold and doomed bodies of dancers.  And not-dancers.

2. more feels like the start of a new phase of work for us.

3. Many of you have followed our work on its winding journey from the brash and geeky (Take 3, Permit) through the messy epics (Star Wars, Ulysses, Shosha) and the site work (Pusher, Hotel Pool, Cell). In a world where money always seems to be the top story, we are grateful to continue this journey with you into the strange life of the body in our bright breakneck culture.

4. So often, we have brought something sweet and funny to our audience.  This piece isn’t like that. It has some ridiculous joy, but more is also challenging. For the performers. For the choreographers. And, I’m gonna guess, for you as audience members. But I’m also gonna guess that you’re up for that challenge.

5. If you have or are a body, you already have everything you need to watch and understand more.

With love,

Andrew Simonet

Co-Director in Charge of Finishing more

Unsurprisingly, way more people read these honest emails. And people wrote back. A lot of people. Each one of these emails brought more responses from Headlong followers than I would normally receive in a year. And I felt like myself when I wrote them.

We sent them out at different times, not just when we had a show to promote. (You can read other radically honest emails here, here, and here.)

Don’t steal the thing. Steal the thinking that led to the thing.