Review: Bad news on the arts delivered in a clear way

Curtains? The Future
of the Arts in America

By Michael M. Kaiser

Brandeis University Press, 145 pp., $26.95.

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Reviewed by Peter Dobrin

It is useful to think of the arts in 20th-century America as a vast benevolent conspiracy. In public schools where serious art education was the accepted standard, children were sent home with instruments, to be met by stay-at-home parents who made sure they practiced. Opera houses and museums were filled with audiences steeped in the art form and not many generations removed from the source in Europe. Tickets were cheap. Opera singers and violinists were mainstream stars, their presence strengthened and validated by the embrace of such mass-audience gatekeepers as Ed Sullivan and Johnny Carson, whose shows helped sell records and tickets, which paid to keep orchestras afloat, which in turn educated and entertained future audiences. So perpetuated a glorious institution.

In the 20th century, we tapped the power of the common good, and it became the norm. But the 21st century has tendered a painful rebuttal of splintered interests. The institutional arts world is shrinking, and Michael M. Kaiser has come forward as its clear-eyed witness in his latest report, Curtains? The Future of the Arts in America. He has had a better perch than most, not only as recently departed president of Washington's Kennedy Center, but also as a Mr. Fix-It consultant to arts groups across the country (including, lately, Pennsylvania Ballet and Philadelphia Theatre Company). Every arts professional offers a slightly different pathology on what ails the arts, and Kaiser finds many of the same maladies others do: lack of arts education, changes in the way we prioritize down time, compellingly self-indulgent ways to idle away hours online, and new buildings and growth that cannot be supported by higher ticket prices.

But where Kaiser's experience is most valuable is in shining a light on a particularly remote corner backstage: the boardroom. Calling the shots at most arts groups today are business leaders who graft onto Brahms and Balanchine theories of productivity and efficiency learned as lords of manufacturing and banking.

"Many board members believe that if an arts organization were managed carefully, it would turn a profit. They cannot understand why an organization that makes something people like should run at a perpetual deficit," Kaiser writes. "This corporate prejudice can affect the way they govern their arts organization, encouraging them to try to cut budgets or to avoid addressing annual fund-raising requirements. Such board members start from the belief that arts managers are doing something wrong. They think that if corporate managers could run the arts organization, then it would become profitable, that if arts managers were smarter, fund-raising targets could be lower. They are simply wrong."

But Kaiser isn't merely defending his arts-administration brethren. He is calling out the very corporate mind-set that has replaced the vanished blue bloods whose sense of noblesse oblige now is viewed as somewhere between passively quaint and foolishly accommodating of the real costs of art.

In tone and substance, Kaiser is hardly a polemicist. He comes bearing gifts rare in our national discussion on the arts, illustrating why things are the way they are: that subscribers now account for about 20 percent of ticket buyers, down from 60 percent to 70 percent three decades ago, and how this makes selling tickets more expensive and less predictable; that federal, state, and local funding for the arts fell 31 percent between 1992 and 2012; that, while corporations once gave to be perceived as good citizens, they now want measurable returns; that in January 2014, the top-selling classical album, by violinist Hilary Hahn, was the best seller by virtue of having sold a miserable 341 copies.

Perhaps most satisfying, Kaiser pierces the veil of a myth that has gone unquestioned: that the economy did us in. "Rather than causing all of our problems, the downturns merely revealed problems that had been lying beneath the surface for many years, including an overreliance on a few donors, an inadequate growth in earned incomes, and the presence of weak governing boards."

And yet, as in his consulting, Kaiser uses hard-nosed business theories to bolster his views. In the second half of the book, he gets out his crystal ball - or rather, the Michael Porter model of the forces at play in the evolution of any industry. The Harvard Business School professor identifies five participants: competitors, buyers, suppliers, new entrants, and substitute products. It's not a bad fit. Kaiser peers ahead to 2035 and predicts disappearing orchestras, dance companies, opera troupes, and others, and it's not a pretty picture. But while you might scoff at his vision of holograms appearing in your living room as proxies for live concerts, it's hard to argue with his prediction of arts groups' following society in dividing into camps of haves and have-nots. Largely because of the ability to overcome geographical barriers with high-quality broadcasting, the big groups will have money to invest in delivering their product electronically (as they simultaneously romance donors and recruit board members worldwide), while the poor groups will become smaller, more local, and more community-oriented. He does doff his hat to one medium-size group that appears to be successfully remaking itself in the face of changing demographic and ticket-buying patterns: Opera Philadelphia. But in truth, it's too soon to declare that a success story.

While a critical statement to the field at a critical time, Curtains? has plenty for anyone curious about what gets on stage, what doesn't, and why. If you ever looked up in an orchestra hall and marveled at all of the missing bodies, you will find this a satisfying read. In a single, compelling 145-page breath, Kaiser clears up the mystery and remains one of the few who doesn't stint on the gory details.

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