What can donors and the foundation community do?

Here is something no one will tell you.

You need to redirect your generosity toward artistic ideas and realizations that are not only able to predict their independence from you but believe that they’re so good they not only evolve society forward but they compete effectively against video games, television and cable. If not we loose a generation.

You help create the future of the arts; in many ways you determine it.

The most basic function of the arts is to be relevant in the advancement of society. Your job should be winding up good ideas and letting them go, not letting people live off an allowance in Mom’s house forever.

This is New York City. One of the greatest cultural cities to have ever risen; perhaps the greatest, yet there is a culture of dependency in the arts that cuts deeply into their effectiveness and directly hobbles the achievement of their mission. No one wants to talk about it, but everyone is unhappy about it.

We think arts organizations want to be free to pursue the ideas they feel are important to them, be packed full of audiences and be earning their own income without having to beg for it. The presenting community needs to stop asking for an allowance, move out of the house and get their own apartment.

With subscriber bases shrinking * the arts must be mature enough to succeed because they’re considered relevant by audiences, not because they can write good grants or live off donations or cry loudly that subscriber bases are shrinking. Full houses allow organizations to proudly focus on the quality of the work they do.

It’s a privilege to work in the arts. Our society is so wealthy that there are actually jobs for us to do what we do. We shouldn’t take that lightly. New York, the city with the largest built in audience in the world is the one place we can experiment to make a new system work effectively.

Your mission should be to find the people that make that evolution possible, and judge the effectiveness and intelligence of your bets by whether or not the ideas you funded were able to survive in the wild.

Robert Elmes
Director Galapagos Art Space

Appendix:

* Subscriber bases aren’t grown in a vacuum. Emerging audiences start out just like young artists, they find a niche and develop a relationship with the arts at the emergent level and later translate that into the experienced and literate interactions that support the larger cultural institutions. The largest cultural institutions can import all the artists they want but they cannot import emerging audiences, the emerging arts do that work.

** The future health of the arts community can be divined from looking at the emerging arts. In New York there is a risk that much of them are about to disappear. Where goes the emerging arts goes the larger art community in fifteen years.

To see our plans to expand, click here

“A New York that is seen by the emerging arts here and in other parts of the country as too expensive to either dream about or continue producing work in begins a tipping of the very understanding of New York City as a cultural capital.”

Canaries in the Goldmine: The Emerging Arts In New York City
2006 Galapagos Art Space

Forward freely.