Every so often writers for illustrious publications like the Wall Street Journal or the National Post weigh in on the state of the arts in North America. Sometimes these articles even come from people within the industry, like Michael Kaiser, current President of the Kennedy Center in Washington DC who writes (sometimes controversially) for Huffington Post. My favourite kinds of articles begin on the premise that arts organizations are failing and ask whether they deserve their fate based on the quality and quantity of work they have done in their history, however long or short.
These articles are my favourite because they imply that arts organizations have any kind of entitlement. The undercurrent to many of the articles is the same undercurrent following many people throughout their lives – if you are diligent and work hard and produce good results the world will eventually reward you for that. And yet, there are two major flaws with this way of thinking.
The first is that arts organizations are not living, breathing entities – they are organizations built by people and (though many are loath to admit) independent from its creators. We have an especially hard time with this in Canada where the founders of many companies are heavily involved for years before their founders leave and the company hands the reins over to a new leader (either artistically or administratively) which is often a risky hurdle organizationally.
We saw this first hand in what I like to call the Factory Debacle, where many of the people speaking out often implied that the theatre somehow owed something to the founding Artistic Director who left so abruptly. I agree that the board owed it to the AD to treat him with respect and with courtesy, especially under the Employment Standards Act, but they had no obligation to keep him employed simply by virtue of the fact that he was a founder.
Which leads me to the second flawed assumption. I know it’s a difficult one to accept because it goes directly against all we’ve been taught as industrious, North-American-Dream-following citizens, but sometimes the world does not always repay you for all your hard work. It’s an incredibly cynical and pessimistic view, I know, but the world works in ebbs and flows and sometimes the timing just isn’t right and no matter how much time and effort you put in it just won’t happen. Sometimes life really works for you (I like to call those people Baby Boomers) and sometimes it’s tougher (hey there, Millennials), and it just goes to prove that once we leave childhood there is no direct correlation between the amount of work put in and the amount of reward reaped.
This is my major beef with the articles that crop up talking about the state of symphony orchestras or the closing of the Vancouver Playhouse or the possible dark end for the recording industry as we know it. There are so many more factors in play than ‘is the work good’ and ‘does the company have value’ that to only talk about these issues in those terms seems limiting and short-sighted.
Do some companies deserve to fail, as the latest article posits? No, because companies don’t deserve anything. They are incorporated companies, they are workplaces, they are factories of sorts that create product (whether good or bad) – they are not beings capable of entitlement. If one goes under another will crop up in its place, and the cycle of life will continue on. And maybe that’s a good thing.
Thoughts & Musings 