{"id":364,"date":"2024-06-09T20:48:12","date_gmt":"2024-06-09T20:48:12","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/?p=364"},"modified":"2024-06-09T20:49:39","modified_gmt":"2024-06-09T20:49:39","slug":"artists-working-as-arts-administrators","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/2024\/06\/09\/artists-working-as-arts-administrators\/","title":{"rendered":"Artists Working as Arts Administrators"},"content":{"rendered":"\n

Artists Working as Arts Administrators<\/strong><\/p>\n\n\n\n

The Complicated Nature of Careers in the Arts<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

The following is an excerpt from  <\/em>Art and Survival<\/a>, a weekly-ish newsletter documenting this theatre-loving boy\u2019s attempt to build a secure life filled with creative acts. You can find out more in the introductory post here<\/a>.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

This week: a meandering reflection on whether or not artists should work as arts administrators.<\/em><\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n\n\n\n

During my second month working a full-time job fresh out of college, I read a chilling quote that haunts me still.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

I believe administration is an art form but if you\u2019re an administrator who really wants to do a different form of art, you should quit your administration job, do that other art, and make room for administrators to take your job who actually love what they do. Because I believe there is nothing better than working with someone who loves what they do\u2026<\/em><\/p>\n\u2013Taylor Mac, in I Believe: A Theatre Manifesto<\/a><\/em><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

I am an administrator. And I am an artist.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

When I was in an undergraduate program at Boston University\u2019s College of Fine Arts, I noticed \u2013 but did not deeply consider \u2013 that little time in class was given to the business side of the arts industry. This is probably for the best. Art catered toward capital gain is content, and I prefer art that centers music and beauty and thought.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

BU\u2019s CFA once sent an email including interviews with a few students about their summer internships, and I remember getting stuck on something a music student said about what he learned working in marketing for a symphony.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\n

This experience in arts administration opened my eyes to the professional possibilities in the music field.<\/em><\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n

This gave me pause. Was the student giving up on music? Was he going white-collar? Should I do that?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

In college, whenever a viable path presented itself \u2013 a clear path with stones showing me where to place each foot \u2013 I was ready to follow it. The thing is, there is no clear path for creative people to follow. It\u2019s up to us to treat our lives like our art, to bring our unique electricity and rigor and creative-problem-solving to bear within our lives. We have the skills to do this. What\u2019s stopping us?<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Just after school, after taking a course called Career Development in the Arts, I landed an internship with Concord Theatricals, a theatre publishing and licensing company. The internship \u2013 in the literary department \u2013 lead me towards a full-time job in the company\u2019s marketing department, thanks to an outspoken manager. Working there, I learned, as the music student did, that steady careers in the arts exist. Careers \u2013 not jobs \u2013 where one is genuinely valued and can survive without worrying about their next gig, or their next paycheck.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

If the artist can escape the scrabble of financial panic and \u201chow the f am I gonna pay rent this month,\u201d perhaps space opens up for more work. While working in marketing, I wrote my first full-length play, and with the help of supportive friends and intelligent collaborators, the play was staged at a queer fringe festival in New York City.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

Between the literary internship and the marketing coordination, I spent about 18 months with Concord. The first paycheck I got \u2013 at my $15\/hr intern rate \u2013 blew my mind.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

This paycheck, however, came with a subtle cost. I\u2019d sold my time. I was wearing golden handcuffs. And let\u2019s be real here: these were $48,000\/year gilded handcuffs, not the nice 24-carat cuffs that come with Some Other Jobs in Tech or Finance.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

\"\"<\/figure>\n\n\n\n

Arts administrators generally experience the art through the filter of emails, website copy, and in marketing\u2019s case, social media content, and this measures out a certain distance between the administrator and the art. For someone who is called to administration, this is good; there needs to be someone minding the payroll, getting the word out, and coordinating everyone\u2019s schedules. In live performance art, we need to be in a room together in order to work, and we eventually need spectators. Arts administrators help get the artists in the room and the spectators in front of the artists. Someone has to do that.<\/p>\n\n\n\n

(Office hours with my astrophysics professor.)<\/em>\n\nME: But professor \u2013 why astrophysics?\n\nPROF: Someone has to keep track of what\u2019s going on out there.<\/pre>\n\n\n\n
Someone has to administrate to make theatre happen and to get writers, actors, directors, designers, and musicians paid.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artists want that administrative support, and we want it to be good. The writer wants to benefit from the publisher\u2019s marketing. The artist-administrator may play a part in making the marketing they know the artist wants, but if they really want to be beneficiary of the marketing they\u2019re doing, their days may become filled with longing \u2013 that longing to do<\/em> the art, rather than act as art\u2019s accomplice.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
\n
\u2026I recognize that sometimes I hate what I do and that the grumpy people around me may be just going through one of the those hate-phases as well and to give them a break.<\/p>\n\u2013Taylor Mac, in I Believe: A Theatre Manifesto<\/em><\/a><\/cite><\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
Even filled with longing \u2013 and who does not feel longing? \u2013 artists can make great administrators because of their unparalleled passion for their art. They know exactly what kind of support will serve the artist best. Unfortunately, this passion can be co-opted.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
Artist-administrators are often underpaid for their work, as companies are either a) broke because the USFG doesn\u2019t fund<\/a> the arts too good or b) sneaky and know that they can get talent for cheap because hardworking multifaceted people want to be close to the art. An old section in Lauren Halvorsen\u2019s delightful theatre substack, Nothing for the Group<\/em><\/a>, <\/em>documented the salary posted on job listings in the theatre industry compared to area living wage, and most positions were paying about $10k under<\/a> that bare-minimum.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
The disparity between listed salaries and living wages in non-profit American theatre reveals a greater injury in the American arts ecosystem. Let\u2019s think about how money reaches artists in this country:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    \n
  1. In lieu of government funding for the arts, non-profit arts organizations fight for individual donations and big philanthropic foundation grants. They\u2019re in a Darwinian race for their lives. Institutions trying new models \u2013 unless those models work right away \u2013 probably won\u2019t survive. Established institutions will.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  2. In this American environment of limited funds, the foundations that pay out large awards generally do so to organizations with a proven track record.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  3. Artists need to be contracted by institutions in order to access that foundation funding.<\/li>\n\n\n\n
  4. Historied organizations prefer to work with people they already know. This is great for artists who are on multiple organizations\u2019 nice lists, but makes it especially hard for emerging artists to get discovered.<\/li>\n<\/ol>\n\n\n\n
    If a skilled and tenacious artist has yet to be discovered, and loves their art form more than anything else, they may turn toward administration as a way of surviving while staying connected to the form. And thus we have the artist-administrator.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    I think there\u2019s a misconception that artist-administrators \u2013 and sometimes this is extended to arts-educators \u2013 are \u201cfailed artists.\u201d But what does that mean? What actually is a failed artist? An unknown artist? The few artists who do pierce a part of collective consciousness are propelled and supported by the artistic research of thousands who came before them. A failed artist, to me, is one who does not labor over art, and does not play. A successful artist makes.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    I opened this piece with a quote from Taylor Mac. If you aren\u2019t familiar with their work, you can visit their website<\/a> to learn more about their gender-expansive, almost-mystical performance aesthetic. The quote is part of a longer manifesto Mac wrote about theatre, and it\u2019s really beautiful and def worth a read. They\u2019ve removed it from their website, but it\u2019s documented on Hannah\u2019s Theatre Collage<\/a>, a Tumblr page. Thanks, Hannah.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    I resonate with so many pieces of Mac\u2019s manifesto, especially this part:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    \n
    I believe in surprise and that if you want to remind your audiences of the things they have dismissed, forgotten, or buried, then you need to surprise them.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    I believe, in the theater, something surprising should happen every ten seconds.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
    \n
    Subscribe to Art and Survival<\/em><\/a><\/div>\n<\/div>\n\n\n\n
    The whole point of writing a manifesto, I think, is to believe in something fully, even if only for a few minutes. That firm belief can spark conversation around the manifesto\u2019s underlying aesthetic vision.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    So, to add to the conversation Taylor Mac began: I think artist-administrators should not quit their jobs. I want artists to survive, and I don\u2019t really care how they do it, as long as they breathe and make work.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    I agree with Mac that administration is an art, and that the best arts administrators are people who want to administrate and only administrate, and who love caring for the arts through their ministrations. I was trained for my current job in company management by a bookkeeper who gave me goosebumps during our video calls because of their raw passion and knowledge around keeping non-profit theaters organized.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    I think that we need good people to be administrators, and if they\u2019re also artists, then that\u2019s one more artist an institution is supporting. Plus it\u2019s probably a good thing to have artists who understand arts-as-business, because the economics of art-making are unescapable.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    In The Arts Management Handbook<\/em><\/a>, the authors open by describing how Shakespeare and Michelangelo engaged in both artistry and administrative activity:<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    \n
    Not only did [Shakespeare] write the plays his actors performed; he also ran rehearsals, wrote playbills to promote his productions and distributed them throughout London, designed his theater, and recruited and contracted actors\u2026he was involved in almost every aspect of his theater\u2019s existence.<\/p>\n<\/blockquote>\n\n\n\n
    If we really want art to appear, then we all need to work however we can to make art happen.<\/p>\n\n\n\n
    So, if an artist is able to eat and create thanks to an admin job \u2013 or any other 9-5 or 10-6 that gives them enough room \u2013 maybe that\u2019s a good thing. And maybe that artist-administrator will see something somewhere that really lets them shake up the model we\u2019ve been using to stand up artwork and support artistic labor under capitalism.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"
    When I was in an undergraduate program at Boston University\u2019s College of Fine Arts, I noticed \u2013\u00a0but did not deeply consider \u2013\u00a0that little time in class was given to the business side of the arts industry. This is probably for the best. Art catered toward capital gain is content, and I prefer art that centers music and beauty and thought.<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":1,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"open","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_vp_format_video_url":"","_vp_image_focal_point":[],"footnotes":""},"categories":[15],"tags":[10,14,7,11,9,13,12],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364"}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/1"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=364"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":376,"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/364\/revisions\/376"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=364"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=364"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/michaelvalladares.net\/index.php\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=364"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}