Diane Ragsdale Provides a Thanksgiving Pi
Wednesday, December 4, 2024
I recently stumbled up a thirteen-year-old blog post by the always-insightful arts thinker Diane Ragdale, who tragically passed away less than a year ago. (You could do a lot worse than to spend time working through her ArtsJournal blog Jumper from beginning to end.) The post I’m looking at here is entitled “How to avoid a strip-mall future for the arts sector: Lessons from the boutique label, Pi”, and I’m not exaggerating when I say that just about every paragraph provides an insight that could instantly make our theater system better.
The first half of the essay is a summary–actually, more than a summary; an _analysis – of an article in the NY Times about the indie jazz label Pi Recordings, and I think we are best served by simply quoting her:
Here are a few keys to Pi’s success (which I gleaned from the article):
(1) Unlike many labels that flood the market with product (often as a hedge against the uncertainty of not knowing which will succeed or not), Pi releases a handful of albums per year and is highly selective in choosing which artists to get behind. Virtually everything it releases meets with critical acclaim. Because it has earned a reputation for consistently putting out great albums and has a very clear niche, it has a devoted (and growing) fan base.
(2) Given its limited release schedule, and the limited revenue potential of each of its releases (these are not mainstream artists), Pi keeps its overhead low. Its owners are pragmatic and disciplined. By staying small they have been able to maintain artistic integrity.
(3) Pi has a long courtship with an artist before it makes a commitment. Once in, however, Pi invests deeply in the development of its artists and ensures that each receives sufficient resources, attention, and support from the label. This is a critical factor in the label’s remarkable track record and reputation.
Pi’s strategies are serving both its artists and its customers.
To boil it down further:
- Be selective
- Keep overhead low
- Commit to specific artists over time
Ragsdale then goes on to share her own brutally honest points about arts organizations today (I’m going to use bold to highlight my personal favorites):
It seems that more than a few overleveraged and underperforming professional nonprofit arts organizations need to both better differentiate themselves and hold themselves to higher artistic standards; to right-size their institutions and reduce fixed costs given the amount of income they can reasonably expect for the forseeable future; and to provide more time, attention, and resources to artists and to the development, production, and thoughtful promotion of artistic works.
And then there is a paragraph that ought to become the screensaver on every computer at Americans for the Arts and the National Endowment for the Arts (consider the whole paragraph bolded):
I’d much rather live in a community with a sustainable number of boutique arts organizations than one with a deluxe mall featuring four high-end department-stores (the “flagship” orchestra, theater, opera, and ballet companies) that suck up the majority of the resources and a bunch of strip malls made up of undercapitalized retail chains and mom-and-pop shops that either saw their best days in 1985 and haven’t been able to make improvements since, or were formed in recent years and (while perhaps promising) are struggling for attention, customers and capital.
I seriously fear that the strip mall nonprofit arts sector is our future.
Her diagnosis (back to my bolding):
We tend to think of a ˜sustainable state" for the arts and culture sector as being one in which existing arts organizations have achieved equilibrium and can crank along in perpetuity. This is wrongheaded: even if we could achieve a state in which all existing organizations could secure adequate resources to keep running year-after-year, the lack of creative destruction in the sector would eventually lead to its stultification (oh wait, we may be there now). This is one of the consequences of letting some institutions get ‘too big to fail’ (and too big is relative to the size of city you are in and the other arts organizations in your market): the majority of arts sector resources get sucked into the incumbents and rather than creative destruction (reinvention of those firms or their replacement by younger, more innovative ones) we end up with plain old destruction (losing the boutiques and watching the big organizations calcify).
As Ragsdale predicted, we are seeing the calcification of our “too big to fail” regional theaters even as we speak. For example, this year Minneapolis’s Guthrie Theatre has used its subsidy to produce Dial M for Murder, ART, Little Shop of Horrors, and the upcoming production of Agatha Christie’s The Mousetrap. Color me unimpressed.
There needs to be a whole lot of “creative destruction."
As Diane Ragsdale’s analysis of Pi Recordings suggests, if theater is going to not just survive but creatively thrive, it isn’t going be because of the Big Theaters, it’s going to be through the efforts of the Indies who are focused on high quality, developing artists, serving audiences, and staying small and focused. This has certainly been true historically. You can see these principles in action within the theaters that revolutionized the theater in the late 19th- the early-20th centuries: Andre Antoine’s Theatre Libre in Paris, J. T. Grein’s Independent Theatre Society in London, Otto Brahm’s Die Freie Buhne in Berlin, and the America’s entire Little Theater Movement that resisted the artistically barren commercial Broadway stage in the first decades of the 20th century. All were small, selective, and artist-focused.
And this is why former-NEA Chair Rocco Landesmann had it completely backwards when he suggested, at the Arena Stage’s “From Scarcity to Abundance” convening in January 2011, that because the supply of theater [in the major metropolises – after all, Landesmann was a New Yorker] had outstripped audience demand for it, therefore the NEA ought to stop giving grants to a bunch small, obscure theaters scattered across America and instead focus it’s largesse on a few major insitutions (e.g., Steppenwolf and the Guthrie, or the Arena for that matter). Ironically, it was Diane Ragsdale who was interviewing Landesmann when he said these words. Seven months later, it is clear she disagreed with his diagnosis: Ragsdale is putting her money on the pi’s.
It is also why we shouldn’t rely on organizations like the Professional Non-Profit Theatre Coalition, led by “a small leadership committee consisting of Arena Stage, Center Theatre Group, Pasadena Playhouse, The Public Theater, and Woolly Mammoth Theatre of Washington DC” who are asking Congress to provide –get this – $500M a year for five years to help regional theaters stay afloat (the entire annual allocation for the NEA currently stands at a grudging $207.5M). First of all, the geographical footprint of that “leadership committee” is breathtakingly narrow: two theaters from Washington DC, two from LA, and one from New York. I mean, come on. As importantly, the collective annual budgets for those five theaters? Between $60M and $77M (averaging $12-$15 each). This group is the theater’s fat boys pulling up to the table for a feast. Nevertheless, it’s all nothing but a pipe dream: we’ll be lucky if Trump, Musk, and Ravaswamy even allow the NEA to continue to exist after January 20.
No, this is not the group that is going to revive the theater. It’s going to be the scrappy boutique theaters that show the way. Theaters rooted in a community, run by visionary artists committed to figuring out what a vibrant theater looks like in the 21st century. Independent, and proud of it.