They worked for years to get an audition with a company most singers at their stage would have died to sing for. They sang well and got an offer. Not for what they had auditioned for, but for something else with higher visibility, as part of an annual festival. After that follow-up, I had to make the call I didn’t want to make. I called them and told them not to take the offer. Yes, you read that right: not to take it.

It wasn’t the right role at that moment. It was a house and a festival where they would be making one of their first major impressions in the industry. We were building something important, and this wasn’t the right next step. They were unhappy. They had waited three years, and I was asking them to wait a little longer.

I didn’t charge them for that call. As an agent, we only get paid when our artists get paid. In this case, those conversations weren’t tracked by the hour, but by the level of investment we had in the artist's long-term career trajectory. I didn’t charge the opera house for the relationship-building that allowed me to know exactly which artists matched which needs before anyone had to ask.

What was I doing? I was investing in relationships. I was protecting a return I wouldn’t collect for years, with a client who wasn’t happy about the decision to delay this particular debut.

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The artist sang at the house later, many times, in the right role, with the right director, and it went the way we both needed it to go.

Here’s what shifted. The performing arts sector has been shrinking for a decade or more, and the chairs at the top haven’t kept pace. There are more people with thirty years of expertise than there are executive director, general director, or other chief-level positions for them to hold. That math doesn’t work. People who build real knowledge, real relationships, and real judgment about what a specific institution needs at a specific moment look for a container to put that value in.

I don’t think there’s anything wrong with that. It is honest, mostly. But I’ve watched something happen inside nonprofit boardrooms that tells me the word “consultant” has started to carry a cost. Say, “We should bring in a consultant,” in a board meeting, and watch the room’s shoulders go up half an inch. The unspoken sentence underneath it is: they’re going to tell us what’s wrong with us and then leave us to fix it. Diagnosis without delivery. A bill for the bad news and no stake in whether anyone survives it.

The fear is earned, because some consulting relationships really do work that way: a fee up front, a report at the end, no exposure to what happens next, and no investment in the outcome. But the fear has started to fall on everyone using the word, unfortunately, including people doing something closer to what I did with my clients. People who take a smaller fee, or none at all, or a deferred one, or negotiate some sort of return because they’ve put on what I think of as the investor’s hat instead of the consultant’s hat.

They’re not selling a diagnosis, but taking a role in the outcome.

The fractional executive, the buzzy term these days, is the clearest modern version of this. A young organization can’t afford a full-time CFO. It can afford a fraction of one, ten or fifteen hours a month, from someone who used to run the finances of an institution five times its size. The arrangement gets lumped in with consulting because the invoice looks the same. But the person taking it on often does so because they believe in where the organization is headed, not because the hourly rate replaces what they used to make running an entire department at a legacy organization. They become an integral part of the organization, even if only for a fraction of the time.

In a sense, this kind of investment in an organization should be, and often is, part of the role of the board of directors, particularly when board members can’t contribute at the financial level the organization usually requires. Their investment is in the mission and in the people who execute it.

These fractional leaders take a cut of the fee or make an alternative, creative arrangement because they’re betting on the upside, the same way I bet on my client’s career instead of a single booking fee.

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That’s the actual distinction, right? It isn’t about the job title. A consultant can invest. An investor can extract. The line runs through the long-term relationship, not what people call themselves in the transaction.

Anthropologists have drawn this same line for decades. Marshall Sahlins, in his classic study of gift economies, mapped a spectrum from generalized reciprocity, where something is given without a defined return, to negative reciprocity, where one party tries to extract more than they give. The extractive consultant sits at one end of that spectrum. The investor sits at the other. An exchange while playing for the relationship instead of the invoice.

I’ve been in this industry for a while, and I can point to specific people I spent serious time with, giving them serious brain currency, with no expectation of a fee, because I believed the investment would come back. Sometimes it did, and sometimes it didn’t, but that is the investor model as we understand it. And it has come back, more than once, at a scale I couldn’t have priced at the time.

The venture world has a name for money that doesn’t expect returns for years, sometimes decades: patient capital. (Term of the day.)

Capital invested because the fund believes in the trajectory, not the quarter. Artist managers have never had a word for this version of the work, and there have been artist managers for as long as, or longer than, I’ve been alive.

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The bias against the word “consultant” isn’t really about consultants. Most people doing that work do it in good faith, making a living in a sector that has gotten harder every year. The bias is a proxy for something the sector hasn’t figured out how to ask directly: Are you here because you believe in what happens next, or because you need the income?

Both are legitimate ways to work, especially if the scope of work and delivery are worth the price. But they are different relationships, and treating them as the same is part of what makes us react the way we do when the word comes up.

What I would say to the leaders coming up, the ones inheriting this shrinking pool of chairs, is what I had to ask myself while managing that artist and deciding whether that contract and its compensation were worth taking:

Are you willing to say “not now” to the easy yes for the larger outcome later? Every consultant will tell you they’re not just doing a transaction. But time will tell. The short game pays this week. Knowledge nobody puts into practice gets lost. The position you’re waiting for might not open. The relationship you invest in without billing for it might be what actually does.

It should have been a simple question. It became an event. We didn’t know the area, the restaurant chains, or where to go that would please kids' and adults' appetites. But everybody had an opinion, and because we were family, and because everybody was trying to be fair, everybody got to weigh in. The adults had opinions. The teenagers had opinions. Somebody had heard about a place. Somebody didn’t want that kind of food. Somebody thought it was too expensive. By the time we actually sat down, the question of where to eat had almost nothing to do with food anymore.

I don’t remember where we ate. I remember circling those same three blocks of International Drive for what felt like an hour, minivan windows down, everybody shouting suggestions mostly in Spanish at the same time.

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We wanted to be democratic. We wanted everyone to feel heard. What we never decided was how we'd decide, and that turned out to be a completely different problem.

There’s a surprising amount of research on this. Herbert Simon, who won the Nobel Prize in economics for his work on decision-making inside organizations, challenged the idea that we calmly gather every fact and weigh every outcome before choosing. We don’t have unlimited information, unlimited time, or unlimited capacity to hold it all in our heads at once. Simon called this bounded rationality: we decide within boundaries set by the information we have, the time we have, the people available, our own experience, and, honestly, how tired everyone is by the time the question reaches the table.

That sounds obvious once you say it. It’s less obvious in the middle of running an organization.

I’m currently working toward a qualification in management accounting (CGMA); in this type of accounting, we spend real time on what’s in front of us, instead of reporting what has happened. Gives us tools to understand what happens if we do this. What happens if we don’t? What are we assuming, and what’s the risk if we’re wrong.

I see this pattern everywhere in the arts. Put three artists after the same date on a season calendar, and suddenly you’re making a dozen decisions at once. Who asked first, whether there’s an exclusivity issue, whether one project has funding attached, whether one is likely to sell more tickets or bring press, whether there’s a donor relationship in the mix. There’s a fantasy version of this where someone builds a matrix, weighs every variable, and arrives at the obviously correct answer. I’ve tried to build it. But there’s mid-week afternoon, with the artist waiting, marketing needing to build the season, and someone with another call and can’t spend more time making the decision. The organization makes the best call it can with what it has. Bounded rationality.

A hire runs on the same logic, with more at stake. A seat has been open for six weeks. Everyone around it is covering the extra work. Three finalists could all do the job well. The thorough version of this process- more interviews, full reference checks on everyone, conversations with people who’ve worked with each candidate- produces real information. It also takes weeks, and the seat stays empty while you gather it. Leaving it vacant has a cost too, just a quieter one, paid in overtime and burnout instead of a bad hire. So eventually someone says they have a good feeling about a candidate, and they make the hire on that. It isn’t necessarily irrational. Twenty years of hiring people gives you a read that never fits neatly into a spreadsheet. The trouble comes when you can’t tell the difference between that read and habit. “I’ve seen this before” is useful. “This is how we’ve always done it” is something else.

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More information doesn’t always produce a better decision. Anyone who’s sat through a full day of board meetings has felt this without needing research to back it up: sharp and engaged at 9:30 in the morning, ready to approve almost anything by 4:45 if it means going home.

It also helps to remember that the room making the decision isn’t one mind. Put five people from the same organization in front of the exact same information, and you’ll get five different comfort levels with risk. One person hears “we might lose the exclusivity window” and wants six more weeks of research. Another hears “we might lose the artist” and wants to decide today. Both reactions make sense. But if nobody has agreed on how to weigh them, the outcome ends up depending less on the facts in the room and more on who happened to be the most anxious or most confident person in it that day.

People sometimes reach for the phrase analysis paralysis here: one more meeting, one more consultant, one more round of feedback. But rushing and paralysis can come from the same place: nobody decided how the decision would get made before it arrived, or whose judgment should carry the most weight when the risks point in different directions.

Go back to Orlando/Disney Trip. Imagine someone had said that afternoon: we’re eating together at seven; three people will scout restaurants within twenty minutes with room for the whole group and something the kids will eat; they’ll come back with two options; and then we decide. Everyone still has a voice. Twenty people just don’t have to do the research at the same time. The decision has a shape.

That’s what organizations tend to miss. We spend a lot of time talking about what we’re going to decide and much less time talking about how we’ll decide it, who owns the call, and how much information is actually enough before we act. A reversible decision doesn’t need the same process as an irreversible one. Changing a staff meeting time isn’t the same as signing a twenty-year lease, but inside most institutions, both can travel through the exact same machinery: a meeting, an email, another meeting, maybe a committee.

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Small organizations feel this hardest, because there’s rarely a person whose only job is to think about the decision. The person responsible for strategy is also dealing with the broken HVAC. The person running fundraising is also writing gala copy. Everyone is too close to the machinery, and the week keeps winning: payroll, a sick employee, a rehearsal running late, the copier. Strategic thinking needs room, on the calendar and in people’s heads, and room is expensive.

The point isn’t to know everything before we decide. We couldn’t if we wanted to. It’s to get better at deciding inside what we don’t know, and that starts before the decision is on the table, with some sense of which calls can move fast, which need real research, and whose judgment should carry the most weight when the risks point in different directions.

I still don’t remember where we ate that night in Orlando. I remember how long it took us to find the place, and how much louder the argument got the closer we were to giving up. Maybe that’s the real thing about decisions: we remember the outcome for a while, and we live with the system that produced it much longer.

Term of the Week: Bounded Rationality.
Making decisions within the limits of the information, time, and attention available to us.

Which sounds academic until you put twenty relatives in two minivans on International Drive and ask where everybody wants to eat.

I was sixteen the first time I stood on the corner of 8th and 52th, outside the Howard Johnson, and looked straight up at New York City, the taxis, buildings that didn’t end, way more people crossing a single intersection than I could count. I knew with the absolute confidence that only a teenager can have: I’m going to live here. After many trips later, in 2002, I finally moved here. And what an interesting time to be in the city that was.

My grandmother is 95. Decades before I stood on that corner, she was standing on another one, a few blocks away, teaching elementary school in a neighborhood called San Juan Hill. My grandparents came north as part of Operation Bootstrap, the U.S. and Puerto Rican governments’ postwar plan to industrialize the island. My grandfather picked tomatoes outside the city under the day-haul system, while she taught children to read. In the 1940s, the city’s own housing authority called San Juan Hill “the worst slum in New York.” Seventeen thousand people lived there. In 1959, construction began on what would replace it, so they moved to Camden before returning to the island permanently.

What replaced San Juan Hill was Lincoln Center.

New York doesn’t preserve people; it constantly renews itself, whether the change comes through the clearance of a neighborhood in 1959 or a mortgage rate and a school-district decision in 2026. Today, fewer than half of New Yorkers were born in New York State. Manhattan is the least “native” of the five boroughs: historically, it is where people arrive rather than where they come from. Compare that with the 1970s, when four out of five New Yorkers were natives, and the story changes completely. The city then wasn’t losing people because they had better opportunities somewhere else. It was losing them because the city itself was coming apart. Two different eras, two different reasons; nobody who comes here is promised they’ll stay.

That fact has become particularly interesting to me in an industry that depends on and wants to build community, wants to share and give space for culture, art, and conversation to happen.

Young people are moving to Manhattan more than ever. Families are leaving faster than ever; households with young children are roughly twice as likely to leave New York City as households without children. Many mid-sized arts organizations live between that gap. A theater or chamber music ensemble builds its community with the people who are here now. But “here now” has an expiration date.

Businesses call it churn. For example, when a software company loses a customer, it calls it attrition, worries about the number, and builds an entire department to slow it down. An arts organization loses a donor because they moved to Westchester, and we wonder where we missed an opportunity for engagement. We look at our data and wonder where our loyal audience member went or where that one donor that we saw every month in the theater went. Most times, they don’t let us know they have moved.

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The donors giving in the $1,000 to $5,000 range—the real community-building level for most arts organizations—aren’t necessarily leaving because they stopped caring. They just leave New York, and that is a very different problem from losing someone because they no longer believe in what you’re doing.

Maybe those relationships are not meant to be permanent, but renewable. Not every person who doesn’t come back or signs up for a subscription has been lost. Sometimes the relationship has simply changed shape.

This matters because New York’s arts ecosystem was never really one thing.

There is the heritage tier—the Lincoln Centers and Carnegie Halls—built and sustained by capital that, to begin with, was never entirely local. Their donors were never necessarily going to move away because they were never necessarily from anywhere in particular. It’s part of why those institutions can promise permanence. They were built with money that doesn’t necessarily reside here.

Then there is the tourist layer, the one everyone in this field quietly depends on and almost nobody acknowledges out loud: the steady flow of people who will never become members, never join a board, but who keep the city’s stages full and its box offices open. We are grateful and dependent on them.

And then there is the community or grassroots layer, the one my mother’s generation and mine actually inhabit: the neighborhood theaters, the small music spaces, the organizations built by people who came here pursuing exactly what I felt when I was sixteen on that corner.

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This layer doesn’t have Rockefeller money. It has something that the heritage institutions structurally can’t offer in quite the same way: it can make people who know they won’t stay forever feel, while they’re here, completely at home.

That is the hardest to build but the most rewarding, and the one that makes our spaces a community space.

The 1960s and 1970s are proof. The city was nearly bankrupt and lost hundreds of thousands of people. And in the middle of that instability, people were building. They were creating La MaMa in a basement, carrying instruments into abandoned SoHo lofts, turning church basements into theaters. It wasn’t “safe,” but they built it anyway.

_{Ross Alexander’s “Little Mother” at La Mama’s second home on Second Avenue.
Photo via Caffe Cino Pictures courtesy of John Borske.}

Fifty years later, we don’t remember the instability first. We remember those rooms, and the intimacy, the community, and the incredible artistry.

That’s the part of this history we need to remember and keep as a guiding star.

Not the myth that New York belongs equally to everyone. It didn’t belong equally to my grandmother’s neighborhood. It doesn’t belong equally to the families leaving for the suburbs right now. And it certainly doesn’t belong equally to everyone who arrives here with the expectation that hard work alone will guarantee they can stay.

But there is something else New York has always offered, and that is the opportunity to make something. To build a room and open its doors to the neighbors.

To create a place where someone else can walk in and, for a few hours, feel like they belong.

My grandmother at 95 still remembers exactly what she could see from the window of her classroom in San Juan Hill. There is a building standing on that ground tonight. Someone will walk past it without knowing what was there, or what it cost to put what is there now in its place.

_{My grandmother, Felicita Rodriguez Echevarria}

And someone else, three blocks away, will walk into a small room filled with strangers. Maybe they’ll be in New York for one night. Maybe they’ll stay for twenty years. Maybe they’ll leave next month.

For that night, they will have a place.

Maybe that is what I was responding to when I was 16, standing on that corner and looking up. I thought I was falling in love with a city that would become mine.

I didn’t understand yet that New York doesn’t really work that way.

It doesn’t promise to keep you.

What it can do, if you’re lucky, is give you a place to build something, and give someone else a place to feel at home while they’re here.

That may be the New York that belongs to all of us and that we all belong to.

Term of the Week: Churn

The rate at which customers stop doing business with you over a given period.

If I'm honest, The Odyssey wasn't on my list. My husband had to convince me to go, and I was surprised not only that he wanted to see it, but that he insisted we see it in a theater. We used to go to the movies almost every week, before we both got COVID there the last time, and just... stopped. My reaction wasn’t exactly enthusiastic. Three hours? Are you sure?

We went anyway. Our son, 21, a film lover — not a movie lover, he’d correct you — wanted in.

The house was sold out. I grabbed the biggest popcorn I could find; I was going to be there a while. This is a 172-minute, R-rated adaptation of a poem that is roughly 2,700 years old. Not trimmed down, or English modernized past what the story needed. And there wasn’t an empty seat in the house.

I’ve sat through operas as long as this movie. I read the Odyssey as a kid, La Odisea, but I never once thought of it as blockbuster material. Except for the different versions of the story we saw inserted in popular shows, songs, or movies.

Watching it, I kept hearing a sentence I know from the opera world: audiences won’t sit through something that dense. Let’s make it more accessible — cut it, modernize it, set it in space, turn the characters into aliens. We have to meet them where they are. It’s the sentence that gets ballet trimmed and Shakespeare modernized until the language barely resembles itself. It’s the sentence that assumes the audience is the problem.

Marketing wisdom today says: keep it short, add an intermission, people have no attention span. Someone should tell that to the 20-year-old who waited weeks for an Odyssey ticket. This film is long. It’s operatic. It’s dense. It’s loud. Those are exactly the things we’ve convinced ourselves people won’t pay for.

Sitting in that packed house, watching people choose a 172-minute mythology lecture over almost anything else playing that weekend, I couldn’t stop thinking: we’ve been telling ourselves the wrong story about what people will show up for.

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The sentence gets easier to dismantle once you put two real movies next to each other.

In December 2024, a film called The Return came out — Ralph Fiennes and Juliette Binoche, adapting the same material, the back half of Homer’s Odyssey. It was made for roughly $20 million. Critics liked it, strong reviews, a performance from Fiennes people are still talking about. It made $3.2 million worldwide. Most people never heard of it. It’s quietly finding a second life on streaming now, mostly from people curious what the “other” Odyssey movie looked like.

Nolan’s version cost roughly $250 million to make and another $125 million to market. It opened to $264 million globally, his biggest opening ever. Ninety-five percent on Rotten Tomatoes. Half the opening weekend audience was between 18 and 34. IMAX seats were selling out in some cities a full year before release.

That comparison proves something other than what it looks like at first. Both films had quality; The Return is a genuinely good movie. (I watched after) The difference wasn’t the work. It was the framework built around the work. One had a machine capable of carrying serious material to scale. One didn’t. Quality and infrastructure are two separate levers, and the field has spent years telling itself you can only pull one of them.

“Long, dense, and requires homework to enjoy” is the exact reputation The Odyssey carries as source material, and it’s the same sentence used, almost word for word, to justify shrinking a ballet program or over-explaining an opera synopsis before curtain. The Odyssey wore that reputation into theaters, and the machine turned it into the biggest live-action opening of the year anyway.

Term of the Week: Scale Economics

In economics: the principle that the cost of doing any one part of a project well drops as the total scale of investment grows, because fixed costs spread across more output.

Plain version: the bigger the check, the cheaper it gets to do each individual part right, but only after someone’s willing to write that first, biggest check.

At The Return‘s $20 million, every dollar spent on craft competed directly against the dollars needed just to finish the film. At Nolan’s scale, filming on real locations across six countries, Greece, Morocco, Iceland, Scotland, the U.S., Italy, with only a single set built from scratch wasn’t a luxury choice. It was affordable precisely because the budget was big enough to make practical, on-location filmmaking the efficient option instead of the expensive one. Scale doesn’t only buy reach. It changes what a production can afford to get right.

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The framework, the patience to build anticipation over a year, the confidence to market difficulty instead of apologizing for it, the willingness to invest at a scale that matches the ambition of the work; is transferable. None of it required cutting the runtime, softening the rating, or trimming the parts of the story that ask something of the audience. The machine served the work. It didn’t shrink it.

That’s the piece our field keeps getting backward. We treat investment and excellence as if funding one means compromising the other, as if commercial is a dirty word the classical arts can’t be associated with. My case is the opposite: stop treating the classical arts as charity. The creative force in this field is ready to take on work at this scale, to reach audiences this size, what’s missing isn’t ambition. It’s a system of investment built for scale economics instead of survival.

What would it look like to invest in your hardest work with that kind of confidence, not to shrink it down to a budget, but to fund the depth it actually deserves?

Six months in, he proposed something simple: dedicate 10 percent of staff time to testing a new earned-revenue model. The board would see results by year two.

The grants manager recommended against it.

Not “no, that’s not aligned with our mission.” Not “no, we need you focused on current programs.” Just: “We can’t fund a reduction in service delivery. The grant requires us to serve X participants. That’s the contract.”

He asked: But what if we serve fewer people better, and help our bottom line with this work?

The argument was simple: “That’s not what we’re measuring. And honestly, if you generate revenue, the funder might assume we don’t need this money anymore. We can’t afford to fund our way out of a job.”

What they meant: We want you innovative only within the constraints that keep us funded.

“The American nonprofit theater movement is over,” Oskar Eustis, the artistic director of New York’s Public Theater, said this month. “It’s not coming back.”

He said it. Eustis is one of the most prominent leaders in American theater, the man who helped foster Hamilton. When he announced he’ll step down in 2028 after 23 years, he named what everyone has whispered since the pandemic: the consensus that built the regional theater movement in the late 1950s has fractured beyond repair. That belief, that Americans deserved serious, non-market-driven performing arts, was never written into law. It lived in the goodwill of foundations, state arts agencies, corporate departments. It dissolved the moment that goodwill had to compete with other priorities.

But here’s what Eustis didn’t have to say, because Danny Feldman, artistic director of Pasadena Playhouse, said it for him: the original model worked because of what nobody discussed. “The underbelly of that — that maybe has not been discussed as much — was always an element of subsidized labor involved.”

That is just exactly it.

Translation: artists worked for nearly nothing. The nonprofit could stay lean because everyone onstage and backstage was giving away the hours.

That model is over. The pandemic forced the reckoning. Workers unionized. Artists demanded fair pay. Health insurance became non-negotiable. Suddenly the cost of producing shows skyrocketed — not only because prices went up, but because people started getting paid for their work. Or at least better than before.

That’s all correct. That’s all as it should be.

But now the architecture shows itself.

Here’s what happened: In the 1980s, when foundations started funding arts organizations systematically, they funded what worked. Operating costs. Program delivery. Organizational health. The math was simple: money in, mission out. Measurable. Safe. The people running foundations then—and often still—came from institutions with stable models. They hired staff who understood and replicated those models. Over decades, the governance and KPIs built around that logic became doctrine.

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Today’s KPIs still measure compliance: Did you spend the grant as proposed? Did you serve the target audience? Did you maintain fiscal health? None of that is wrong. All of it is also useless for what we actually need now.

Brett Egan, president of the DeVos Institute, pushes back on the apocalypse framing. Only .6-1% of nonprofit theaters have gone bankrupt in the last decade, he notes on LinkedIn. Most are still here. But “still here” is not the same as “thriving.” It’s not the same as innovation. Most nonprofits are surviving because they’ve learned to survive on the old model, not because the model is working. They’re locked in by their own stability. The funding structure rewards that. Foundations measure survival. KPIs track service delivery. Nobody measures whether the organization is actually changing.

Here’s the real problem: Governance in older organizations is built by people who succeeded in the status quo. The board member who gives $100k got there because the old model worked. The donor who funded the founding director sees that director’s success as validation. The foundation officer came up through institutions built on the same logic. They’re not being cynical. They’re protecting what they know works. I don’t necessarily blame them for protecting the fragility of what has “worked.”

And because they’re the ones approving strategy, funding experiments, and hiring disruptors, they filter for people who won’t actually disrupt. You can hire for “cultural add” in the job posting. The hiring process itself still selects for “cultural fit.” Which means you hire the disruptor who won’t actually disturb anyone.

What we need is the opposite question: What dependency did you eliminate? What new revenue source did you develop? What did you stop doing so you could risk something untested?

No foundation measures that. Some won’t even fund the experiment.

There’s also a gap nobody talks about. The Seed Gap.

Foundations have floor funding. You need to be at $250k annual revenue before most funders take you seriously. Before then, you’re too small, too risky, too hard to monitor. So you get scrappy board fundraising, individual donations, sweat equity.

By the time you hit $250k, your model is locked.

That’s the precise moment you should be experimenting most. You’re stable enough to risk a failure. You’re small enough to pivot fast. You’re not yet beholden to major donors who funded your original thing.

But funders want to fund organizations after they’ve proven the model works. Which means you never get money to prove a new model. You get money to optimize the one that already exists.

Can we inject a bit of risk-taking startup mentality? We like your idea; you’ve done a great job putting it into motion. Let’s give you seed money to develop it.

So every nonprofit I know under $250k is either running the same program for twelve years straight, or held together by founder desperation and board member guilt. And every nonprofit over $250k is asking the same question: How do we fund innovation when our entire structure was built to protect what we have?

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Here’s the real transaction: Funders say we want sustainability. What they fund is compliance with current service levels. They say we want innovation. What they measure is compliance. They say we want organizations that thrive. What they pay for is organizations that don’t threaten the people who built them.

A disruptor gets hired because the org needs a new story. The board wants to signal they’re awake. The funder wants to see fresh thinking. Then the KPIs, the governance, the committee sign-offs, everything built by yesterday’s winners, pushes back.

The disruptor either leaves or learns to fail quietly. And the org concludes innovation didn’t take

What would it look like if philanthropic support was built around the opposite bet?

What if a grant’s success meant you needed less of it? What if foundations measured reduced dependency the way they measure program growth? What if funding new revenue streams was as important as funding direct service?

What if there was actual seed capital for nonprofits under $250k—not capacity building, not technical assistance, but real experimental money—so the model could be tested before it got locked in?

What if the people on boards and in funding roles weren’t all people who succeeded in the status quo?

I’m not asking for chaos. Governance exists for reasons. Risk management matters. But risk management that only protects what exists is just calcification dressed up as prudence.

The arts are full of people hired to change things.
Some funding is built to ensure they won’t,
and nothing changes.

Term of the Week: Risk Capacity vs. Risk Tolerance
An organization has risk capacity (the financial resources to absorb a failed experiment). Risk tolerance is different — it’s the governance appetite to actually try it. Most nonprofits have the first. Few have the second. That gap is where innovation dies.

A colleague recently told me she enjoys going into her New York office mainly because she can catch a show afterward.

It’s an unspoken transaction: the privilege of working from home comes with a price, and the price is giving back more hours than the commute ever cost us. We started working later and longer, until the workday lost its edges entirely. By the end of eight straight hours of video calls, catching up with emails and prepping for the next day's meetings, there’s nothing left for the room.

People now have to create community on purpose: a ticket bought ahead of time, a flight across the country, a night that has to feel worth the price because it’s no longer free.

Darren Walker recently wrote about arriving in Hollywood during a crisis, when the industry believed it had lost a whole generation to YouTube, TikTok, and Twitch. Then he watched Knicks fans fill the streets of New York and watched Barnes & Noble open new stores in a business many thought was finished. He’s right that young people are craving the shared, in-person experience the industry thought they’d left behind. He reads it as a business opportunity, a reason to invest in more content and partnerships. What he misses is what that hunger is actually replacing: the everyday belonging a neighborhood or a job used to give people for free.

Sociologists call this a third place — a space that’s neither home nor work, where people show up to be around others. A neighborhood bar does this. A barbershop does this. At Sawdust, we’ve been asking in real meetings about our own space, whether a concert hall can do it too. Our hall is modular, built to rearrange rather than lock into rows facing a stage. It was never about the best seat closest to the art. We keep asking: what would it take to be there for people before the show starts and after it ends, not just during? The hour before and after could be the real reason to come, with the performance as what brings everyone together.

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Arts spaces can fill some of the roles congregations once did, especially for people who left their families to start new lives elsewhere. It’s an old purpose. It just needs a name again.

Gen Z is already making this trade. They spend more on live music than any previous generation — $101 a month on average in early 2026, compared to millennials’ $94. Surveys show 16% choosing a concert over saving for a home, 19% delaying a vacation, and one in five admitting they’ve spent more than they can afford for these experiences. Three in five have crossed state lines in the past year for the chance. For them, presence is worth more than what it used to cost. The industry keeps trying to reach them through an app. They’ve already left the app to find the room.

Term of the Week: Opportunity Cost
In economics: what you give up in order to get something else.
Plain version: the vacation skipped, the sleep lost, the down payment delayed — the price of being in the room, paid in everything else you didn’t get to have instead.

The push for digital reach during the pandemic aimed at the wrong goal. Digital is still best for discovery — reaching people who haven’t heard of us and giving them a reason to look twice — and that discovery now happens in seconds, through a short clip, not a long stream. People still watch movies or full seasons of shows on their own time, alone, because those experiences are built to work alone. A digital encounter with art is personal, tailored to you. A room full of strangers works differently: everyone shares the same two hours, and that shared thing is what matters. Sports understood this first. Sit in a stadium, and you don’t know who’s next to you until your team scores and the whole section is on its feet together. Digital’s job is making someone curious enough to walk in. The room’s job is making them want to come back.

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Creating a real gathering means a pre-show hour that isn’t a VIP or donor reception, open to anyone from the neighborhood — a specific school, a specific congregation, a specific block. Showing up should cost curiosity, not a gift-tier minimum. It means a room people arrive early to, gather in, linger in, and leave still talking to each other. The superfans every field tries to manufacture through membership tiers already exist. They’re the ones willing to cross state lines and skip a big purchase just to stand in a room together. They’re waiting for a door that opens earlier, closes later, and doesn’t ask what they gave first.

What would it look like if our third spaces let us see each other as people, not as comments on social media? A space where we talk and think together about our neighborhoods and what our community actually needs. We used to have these conversations face-to-face — sitting with someone we disagreed with, watching their expression as they spoke, leaving still disagreeing but understanding why they believed it. Being in the same room, unable to just scroll past someone, is most of what real community and civic conversation used to run on.

The fix is a longer door: open early enough for people to gather and talk before the show starts, and late enough to keep talking after it ends. In Williamsburg, we’re excited to build ours to be exactly that.

There’s a dirt track worn into the grass on almost every campus that has a quad, a straight line cutting the corner some architect drew as a graceful curve. Enough students took the shorter way, enough times, between the same two buildings, that the ground gave up growing grass there and recorded the truth instead: this is the route people actually wanted. Landscape architects have a name for it, a desire path, and some campuses have started designing around it on purpose, leaving the ground bare for the first year and watching where students actually walk before anyone pours concrete.

Science and tech built a version of that idea into federal law. When an experiment goes nowhere, the system doesn’t call it a mistake to bury. It reads it the way a landscape architect reads bare dirt, evidence of where the real work was headed, and it pays for the ground to get walked on. The arts wore their own path the same way, in the same dirt, and we didn’t get it revised, paved, or given a name anyone in a budget meeting would recognize.

In 1980, Congress passed a law that never asks whether the experiment worked. The Bayh-Dole Act lets universities and companies keep ownership of anything they invent using federal research dollars, regardless of how many dead ends it took to get there. The government keeps a license to use it too, and in theory can step in if the invention never gets developed. But the ownership, the upside, the patent — the IP — goes to whoever did the research, dead ends included. Congress wrote the terms into statute: you can spend our money trying and failing as many times as it takes. If something eventually works, it’s yours.

Layered on top of that is the federal R&D tax credit, and… the credit doesn’t require success. Research that produces nothing usable still qualifies, as long as it was systematic. Failure isn’t a cost you eat quietly. It’s a line item that reduces your tax bill. The system was built assuming most attempts won’t work, and it paid for that assumption in advance.

And then there’s the sentence, sitting plainly in Section 41(d)(4)(G) of the federal tax code, that tells you who this was never for. The statute names three fields and excludes them, full stop: “research in the social sciences, arts, or humanities.” Nine words. No exception for rigor, no test for how systematic the work was, the exclusion is by category. Business management doesn’t even get its own clause; a separate provision knocks it out earlier, under the requirement that qualifying research be “technological in nature.” Two different sentences, one message: whatever you’re doing, it doesn’t count as the kind of research this law was written to reward.

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None of this means arts and culture got nothing from the tax code. It got something, earlier, in fact, from a different part of the law entirely. The Revenue Act of 1913 exempted charitable, religious, and educational organizations from the new federal income tax the same year that tax was created. In 1917, Congress added the other half: a donor who gave to one of those organizations could deduct the gift. By 1954, when the tax code was overhauled and renumbered, that arrangement got the name it still carries, Section 501(c)(3). An arts organization can operate without paying tax on its income, and the people who fund it can write off the gift. That’s the transaction the field was actually offered, more than sixty years before Bayh-Dole existed and 67 years before the R&D tax credit did.

It’s a real deal, and a different one. Section 501(c)(3) protects your right to ask for money and hold it tax-free. It says nothing about what happens when the thing you built with that money doesn’t work. It doesn’t capture ownership of an idea, doesn’t treat a failed season as an asset, doesn’t assume in advance that some percentage of what you try will go nowhere and still be worth doing. The two instruments solve different problems, decades apart, and nobody ever went back to ask whether the older one still covered what the field needed by the time the newer one existed.

Meanwhile, U.S. businesses spent $722 billion on research and development in 2023. Software and tech companies routinely put 14% to 32% of revenue into it, depending on the sector. It's not something they reapply for, it's fixed, built to still be there next year.

: studies and tests that are done in order to design new or improved products

The performing arts field actually has a name for its version of this. We call it R&D — a week or a few days where a writer, a director, and a handful of actors get in a room and test a script before it’s locked. It’s a real practice, and it produces real knowledge about what a piece needs. But there’s no statute protecting it, no tax credit assuming it might fail and being fine with that. What exists instead is a patchwork of project grants: the NEA’s Grants for Arts Projects, regional programs like LA Performance Practice, state-level artist R&D grants in places like Arizona, each one applied for fresh, each one tied to a specific project, none of them a standing assumption that experimentation gets to happen whether or not it produces a finished thing. The field wore its own path the same way the quad did, worn down by people walking it, over and over, never poured into anything permanent. It borrowed the name of the paved road next door without borrowing any of the concrete.

Nobody teaches artists to expect this gap, because nobody builds it into the training. A science PhD is structurally required to produce something nobody has proven before, that’s what a dissertation is. A conservatory degree, even at the doctoral level, mostly asks you to prove you can do something extremely well that’s already been done: recitals of existing repertoire, a document in support of them, mastery measured against a canon. Technique, style, and legacy are the curriculum. Trial and error was never built in as a funded, sanctioned stage of becoming an artist. It’s something you find out you need only after you’ve left the building with the degree, and by then it isn’t tuition anymore, it’s just your own time, on your own dime.

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And underneath both of those groups is a third one, harder to see because it leaves no record at all: the artist with no relationship to a workshop-producing theater, no grants officer who knows their name, no cohort showing up to the same lab year after year. They do the exploratory work anyway, in a living room, on their own time, unpaid, unfiled. Nobody studies what they made because nothing was ever submitted as research. There’s no institution whose ledger it could show up on.

There's a cost to all of this that never shows up on a balance sheet. Amy Edmondson, who has spent two decades at Harvard studying how organizations learn, draws a line between preventable failure and what she calls intelligent failure, a thoughtful attempt at something genuinely new, where failing was the only way to find out. The infrastructure around science and tech is built, in part, to protect the intelligent kind. Nobody has to defend the year on its own.

Without that protection, failure doesn’t get filed as data. It gets filed as a fact about you. Fear-of-failure research keeps landing on the same finding: what people are actually afraid of isn’t the failure itself, it’s that the mark never resets, which is why it shows up hardest in people who are already high achieving. The longer the visible track record, the more a single miss looks like it undoes all of it. Under that fear, people stop chasing gains and start only guarding against losses. That’s a measurable shift in what goals people choose.

Run that through a nonprofit board table or a solo career and the shape is the same. You cannot hand a funder, a donor, or a hiring committee a chart with a dip in it and call the dip research. It reads as decline. So the year you tried something and it didn’t work either disappears from the story or gets rewritten into a success you’re still finding words for.

Here is the transaction, named plainly: whether your failure counts as knowledge, or just counts against you, was decided by category, not by rigor. An artist runs an experiment that goes nowhere and calls it a year she can’t explain to her family, the same shape of experiment that, run inside a lab, gets filed as an asset. Both of them were testing something real. Only one of them was told, in advance, that trying and failing was a legitimate way to spend the year, and had that promise backed by federal law. The second group didn’t get the memo.

The closest things that already exist prove the shape works. The MacArthur Fellowship hands over money with no strings and no report due, built explicitly around risk-taking and the willingness to fail at something new, it just does it for twenty or thirty people a year, chosen after the fact, not offered as a standing option anyone can plan around. The Ford Foundation's BUILD initiative has put close to two billion dollars into unrestricted, multi-year general operating support since 2015, on the theory that an organization can't take a real risk while also accounting for every dollar of it in advance. Both are treated as the exception. Restricted funding, money tied to a specific project, with a specific outcome promised before the work starts, still makes up roughly two-thirds of what foundations give. The instrument that would change the terms already exists, in two working models. What's missing is more foundations, government funders, and boards willing to write "some of this will not work" into a budget line before the year starts, the way a corporation writes it into a tax filing every April.

None of what comes next needs Congress. And it won’t look like a lab. Science’s version of R&D works because you can isolate one variable, run the same test twice, and get a clean answer. Art doesn’t run that way, and it shouldn’t have to, forcing it into that shape would kill the thing that makes it art. What’s worth borrowing isn’t the method but the permission. Show an unfinished piece to real people more than once before you call it done. Not to get their vote on whether it’s good enough. To find out, in your own judgment, what’s alive in it and what isn’t. That’s not tech’s R&D, run through tech’s process. It’s the arts’ own versio, messier, harder to measure, still real. And it deserves what theirs already gets: room to happen without someone deciding, on sight of a rough draft, that you’ve failed.

Nobody is going to pave this path for you. Wear it anyway, in front of witnesses.

I was a hyperactive kid. I got into trouble, more than once (there are some really juicy stories there for later), the kind of energy that doesn’t sit still in a classroom or a quiet house. My mother was a controller for an USA owned company in Puerto Rico, and she was raising us mostly alone. After school, she brought me to her office because there was nowhere else for me to go some days, and because she knew exactly what I needed: somewhere to put all that energy where it wouldn’t turn into trouble.

So she gave me a box of canceled checks, hundreds of them, sent back from the bank after they cleared, and had me file them in order by check number, so there was a record that everything had been paid. Later it was inventory: long legal-pad pages, hundreds of numbers, added by calculator, no shortcuts, start over if you made a mistake. By high school I was running the sales floor on weekends, handling cash and inventory for the family business.

Here’s the transaction, named plainly: I gave my energy and my attention. In return, I got my mother close to me, a home, food on the table, an extended family that held all of us. That’s fair. That’s not nothing. And I know now it was a privilege — plenty of kids that age were home alone with that same restless energy and nowhere to put it. I was lucky enough to have an office to sit in.

Term of the Day: Sweat Equity

*noun.* Contribution of unpaid labor or time toward a venture, in exchange for an ownership stake in what that labor helps build. In a family, sweat equity is straightforward — the “ownership stake” is belonging, safety, closeness. Everyone can see the return.

In the professional performing arts, the same phrase gets used, but the return disappears. Arts workers and administrators give labor, hours, and identity to institutions in exchange for meaning, mission, and the occasional standing ovation. The ownership stake — the actual, material return — never arrives.

The Trade Gets Skewed at Scale

A kid filing checks for her mother is a fair trade. A 35-year-old company manager working 60-hour weeks for a regional theater, living without benefits, without a retirement account, without a raise in three years, is not the same transaction — even though the field talks about it the same way. “You get to do meaningful work.” “You get to be part of something bigger than yourself.”

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Applause with a job title attached — that’s the wage. Meaning was never the wage; it was the deflection from asking about the wage.

Most arts organizations aren’t withholding pay because they don’t want to give it. They’re running the only funding model they’ve ever been handed — one built on contributed revenue, on scarcity as the price of eligibility, on indirect costs that get hidden behind a reported overhead number small enough to stay fundable. Ask any executive if they’d raise wages tomorrow if the model let them, and most will say yes without hesitating. Cultural organizations tend to believe in equity and worker support more than most industries do — it’s part of why so many of us stayed in the first place.

The 501(c)(3) status was built to keep organizations from extracting private profit. Somewhere along the way, the field turned that into an apology for wanting resources at all — as if needing a healthy surplus, consistent funding, and a fair wage is itself a violation of the mission, instead of the thing that lets the mission survive.

Nobody Should Apologize for the Trade

Every transaction is fair or it isn’t. The question was never whether an exchange exists, it always does. The question is whether both sides know the terms, and whether the terms hold up.

At nine, mine did. My mother named the trade without ever using the word: structure for help, closeness for attention. She didn’t ask me to believe in something bigger than myself to earn it.

That’s the version most of us never got. The daughter who takes over the family restaurant books because “that’s what family does.” The nail tech who works through a migraine because a regular is already in the chair and regulars don’t cancel. The staffer who picks up a fourth show because the mission needs her more than her rent does. Different rooms, same unnamed trade: love, loyalty, or purpose offered as payment, with nobody ever asked to countersign.

That belief is exactly why the collective fight matters. Fixing the model isn’t a fight against the mission, it’s the fight the mission has been asking for all along. The arts didn’t invent this trade. They built an entire funding model on top of it and called it a calling. Until that model is fixed, we’re all still negotiating in the dark, together.

The synthesis document that came out last week is one of the more honest cross-sections of sector thinking to emerge from this field. A prolonged argument between people who agree on values and disagree, sometimes sharply, on what those values require.

Read it. Then read it again. Slowly. For what isn’t there.

One participant said this: “We have fundamentally lost sight of what our power is in shaping society. That is what culture does.”

Many agreed. Across 13 breakout groups, across geography and discipline and career stage, the diagnosis was consistent. The nonprofit model was built for a 19th century civilization that no longer exists. It chokes artists and organizations alike by locking resources in the hands of a few foundations and a shrinking pool of major donors. Accountability runs upward, to funders, instead of downward, to artists and communities.

That’s a hard thing to say in a grant application. In a room under Chatham House Rule, 300 people said it without hesitation.

The diagnosis is complete. It has been complete, honestly, for at least a decade. We keep arriving at the same door.

What I want to know is who’s going to open it.

Here is what the synthesis does not contain: a single voice defending the current system.

The status quo has plenty of beneficiaries. They just weren’t there making the case.

In a sector that runs on rooms and relationships, absence is a position. The people with the most to lose from structural change, and the most power to drive it, were not in that conversation. And the conversation, for all its honesty, stopped at the door they weren’t behind.

That is what we are not reading.

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Think about what actually happened in that zoom call. Three hundred people gave their time, their most honest thinking. They named things that cannot be named in grant applications. They described a system designed to keep them dependent and grateful. And then they left. With no named obligation on anyone to act. No terms posted. No agreement signed.

That is a transaction where one party gave everything and the other party, the institutions, the foundations, the people with the power to change the structure, gave nothing back. Not because they are villains. Because the terms were never made visible. And invisible exchanges always benefit the party with more power.

Here is a number that should change how this sector talks about money: 85% of all philanthropy in America is individual. Not foundationso or government. People.

The sector keeps chasing institutional money while the actual majority of philanthropic capacity sits with individuals who have never been asked in the right language. We have been negotiating with the wrong counterparty, using the wrong currency, and wondering why the terms never improve.

Art is not a luxury. It never was. It's in the playlist on your commute, the show everyone's texting about, the cover art you scroll past a hundred times a day, the mural on the building you walk into every morning. Artists made all of it. Every last thing.

Go back far enough — to the fire circles, to the cave walls, and what you find is art. Ritual. Story. People trying to say: I was here. This mattered. Remember. Every generation has faced something that threatened to make us obsolete. None of them succeeded. Because what makes us human was never efficiency, or speed, or scale. It was the need to make meaning together.

One participant put it simply: “By 2045, I envision a world where artists are trusted to observe our world, to hold up mirrors that may be painful, and to invite the kind of reflection that makes collective growth possible.”

We don’t need to wait until 2045. We just forgot to make the practice match the belief.

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One voice in the convening offered this frame: “We’re not necessarily trying to come to one centralized goal together, but we’re going to need an ecosystem building approach — a lot of different tiers, a lot of different approaches at a lot of different levels. And for that to be okay, but networked.” I believe this.

That’s right. This doesn’t require one organization, one leader, one national campaign. It requires people with influence deciding that the ecosystem is worth their active participation, their leadership, not just their appreciation.

The individuals in that room on January 14 can convene. They did. What they cannot do alone is compel the people with the most institutional power to act against their short-term interest for the long-term health of something that outlasts all of us.

That requires the people who weren’t in the room to show up.

I am an operator by profession. An artist at the root of it. And I suspect most of the people reading this are too, whether or not they would use that word for themselves. The reason any of us stay in a sector that routinely asks us to do more with less and justify our existence every funding cycle is because we know what art does to a person, to a community, to a country trying to understand itself.

We have forgotten our responsibility to pass that forward.

The synthesis document this gathering is a mirror. What it shows is a sector that knows exactly what it is, what it needs, and what is broken. What it doesn’t show is who is going to lead.

So let me tell you what I’m doing. And then let me ask you to do something too.

I’m in an R&D phase. I meet with at least one leader a week — no agenda, or ask, just a conversation. What’s working for you? What isn’t? What are you looking at? What are you trying? I’m not an expert in any of this. I know a lot of things at a moderate level that help me figure out my next question. What I’m building is a picture of the landscape, inside my market and outside it, so that every next conversation starts a little further down the road. Consistent, not complicated.

Here is what I’d ask you to do. Carve out 5% of your work time to look beyond what’s directly in front of you. Beyond your territory, beyond your market, beyond your moment. Schedule a conversation with someone in your field, or outside it, with no agenda other than curiosity. Bring these questions into your foundation meetings, your grant conversations, your conference panels. You don’t have to be an expert. Just don’t be afraid to put the question in the room.

In this sector, information is currency. The question is your contribution.

The foundations with the biggest mandates, the ones whose stated purpose is to protect what humanity has built, need to hear from us directly. Not in grant applications. In real conversations about what the next chapter looks like. They have the patience, the relationships, and the capital to move the timeline from a decade to a funding cycle. What they need is for us to stop assuming they already know what we need and start telling them directly.

This conversation didn’t happen by accident. Brett Egan and his co-organizers at Arts Paths Forward convened nearly 350 people, held the space, and released nearly 400 pages of transcripts openly so the field could keep thinking. One participant said it plainly: “We can no longer be bystanders in the reframing of our own cultural sector and our own democracy.”

That’s the call. The transcripts are available. There is a briefing on July 15th. I’ll be there.

The bus is running. Everyone agrees on the general direction. Nobody’s at the wheel.

This essay draws on the synthesis document from the National Discussion on Paths Forward for the American Arts and Culture Sector, January 14, 2026, used under Chatham House Rule.

[Link to transcripts]
[Link to July 15 briefing registration]

But I think it’s time to lift the veil.

The performing arts is using AI. Quietly, privately, without policy or acknowledgment or shared language. It is happening in development offices and marketing departments and executive directors’ inboxes across the country. The worst-kept secret in our field is that the skepticism we perform in public and the tools we reach for in private are not the same thing.

I have been one of those people. And I am done pretending otherwise.

The first thing you need to know about AI is that it is not a brilliant, all-knowing robot that does your bidding the moment you ask.

It is your newest staff member. One who arrived without context, without institutional memory, and without any understanding of what you actually need — until you teach them. It will get things wrong. It will misread the assignment. It will give you something technically correct that completely misses the point. Sound familiar?

What you get out of it reflects exactly what you put in. Your clarity. Your experience. Your ability to give direction. Your judgment about whether the output is right.

The people who struggle most with these tools are often struggling with something they would struggle with in any management context: they haven’t yet learned how to articulate what they want.

Prompting an AI is not unlike briefing a team. You have to know the subject. You have to know what you need. You have to be able to recognize when something is wrong, and why. The output reflects the quality of the direction. Always.

This is why younger administrators — people earlier in their leadership journey — often find these tools disorienting. They may be sensing something true: not that the tool is dangerous, but that using it well requires a kind of clarity and experience they are still building. That is not a reason to avoid it. It is a reason to develop the skills that make it useful. And it is an argument for training programs that teach not just the tools, but the judgment required to direct them.

The field is starting to move. Slowly, carefully, but it is moving.

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In March 2026, the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management published an AI roadmap built from a seven-month program called A³ — Arts times Admin times AI — conducted with sixteen U.S. arts organizations including Alvin Ailey, American Ballet Theatre, the American Repertory Theatre, Opera Baltimore, and Mark Morris Dance Group. The findings are worth sitting with.

Nearly all nonprofits are now experimenting with AI. But fewer than a quarter have a coherent strategy, only 11% say they have a strategy they can actually describe, and 80% report having no acceptable use policy. The experimentation is real. The governance is not.

What the organizations that made the fastest progress had in common was not the most sophisticated tools or the largest budgets. It was specificity. They started with a concrete problem — a workflow that was eating staff time, a recurring task that no one had bandwidth for — and found a focused AI response. They didn’t go fishing for applications. They knew what they needed.

That is the management argument again. Knowing what you need is the skill. The tool is secondary.

The A³ cohort averaged between twelve and thirty-five hours saved per person per week once they found their footing — roughly equivalent to adding a full-time staff role without adding a salary line. For organizations that run on sweat equity and deferred maintenance, that is not a small number.

To the artists reading this: I want to be precise about something.

The sensitivity in this field around AI is legitimate. The fear that these tools will touch the art — replace it, devalue it, hollow it out — is real and worth taking seriously. I share it. If we can protect the creative act itself from these tools, I am for that world.

But that is not what I am talking about.

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I am talking about the other work. The grant applications. The budget models. The board reports. The data analysis that would take three days if you had three days, which you don’t. The casting research. The foundation materials. The operational grind that has to happen for the art to happen — and that is quietly consuming everyone who works in this field.

That is where AI lives in my work. Not in the art. In the infrastructure that makes the art possible.

Before we talk about the cost of these tools, we should talk about what they made possible.

Sensorium Ex is an opera by composer Paola Prestini and poet Brenda Shaughnessy, produced by VisionIntoArt and Beth Morrison Projects, that operates at the intersection of artificial intelligence, disability, and the performing arts. It asks a question that opera has never quite asked before: what does it mean to have a voice — and who gets to have one?

The answer required building something new. Working with researchers at NYU’s Ability Project, the creative team developed Sensorium AI — a system that records the natural vocalizations of minimally verbal and non-speaking performers, infers from those recordings the physical body that produced them, and creates a customized voice model built entirely from each individual’s own expressivity. Performers can then trigger and modify their vocal qualities through motion — giving them a form of creative agency that no existing assistive technology had offered before.

The AI doesn’t replace the human voice. It builds one from what was already there.

That is what happens when artists who know what they want from a tool are given the infrastructure to build it. The result premiered to critical acclaim, received major coverage from PBS and NPR, and just presented at Royal Opera House. It also produced technology with significant standalone commercialization potential — assistive communication tools that could change what is possible for people with disabilities far beyond the opera stage.

_{Sensorium Ex, VisionIntoArt. Photo: © Jill Steinberg}

This is the version of AI in the arts that doesn’t get discussed at the panels where people are booing. It should be.

Now the cost.

AI’s infrastructure currently generates more greenhouse gas emissions than the entire aviation industry — a fact that anyone making the case for these tools has an obligation to name. Data centers consumed roughly 415 terawatt-hours of electricity globally in 2024, and that figure is projected to more than double by 2030. The energy demand of AI-focused facilities is growing even faster than the sector overall.

This is not a footnote. For a field that cares about the world we are making, it belongs in the conversation.

What I would also say is this: the picture is more complicated than the headline. The energy required per AI task is declining rapidly. Renewable energy is being deployed to power data centers at scale. And AI is already being used to reduce emissions in agriculture, building management, and aviation — in one case, guiding pilots to flight paths that reduce contrails enough that, if adopted industry-wide, the savings would exceed AI’s own footprint.

The tool is not absolved by its potential. But responsible use includes holding the companies that build these tools accountable for how they power them — and supporting the policy and investment that makes that transition faster. An ethical AI policy is not optional. It is part of how we use these tools in a way we can defend.

There is something else worth naming: the institutional memory problem.

Arts organizations carry decades of extraordinary work — commissions, productions, performances, community relationships, artist trajectories. Much of it exists in formats that were never designed to be retrieved. Video and audio that documents years of groundbreaking work. Institutional knowledge that hasn’t been organized into something legible. This is not a failure of care. It is a failure of bandwidth. We were always on to the next thing, because the next thing needed us.

What that costs us is real. Funders want data. They want to know how many artists you’ve supported, where those artists are now, what impact you can demonstrate across a decade of work. Without that documentation organized and accessible, you are making your case with one hand tied behind your back.

AI can move through that material. It can surface names, trace relationships, pull numbers, connect dots across years of organizational history and turn it into something legible — and fundable. It can find the connective threads among existing cultural assets that could help maximize the value of work already made. That is not replacing anyone’s judgment. That is finally doing the work we never had time to do.

In a larger organization, this kind of analysis moves through layers of staff and abundant team review. There are people whose entire job is to confirm a number, copy edit a document, or stress-test a budget assumption before it reaches leadership. In a small nonprofit, that infrastructure doesn’t exist. Time is money, and every time someone has to go over the same data twice — to confirm an actual against a budget, to catch an inconsistency in a contract, to verify a date in a grant timeline — the work slows down. In an understaffed organization, slow is expensive. It compounds. It delays decisions, pushes deadlines, and pulls leadership away from the strategic work that only they can do.

AI compresses that cycle. Not by replacing judgment — but by handling the confirmation, the comparison, the first-pass review, so that human judgment can be applied where it actually matters.

The infrastructure to learn this already exists — and much of it is free.

The DeVos Institute’s A³ roadmap is the most comprehensive arts-specific framework currently available — built from real organizations doing real work, with case studies, policy frameworks, and implementation roadmaps. NTEN runs a cohort-based AI readiness program open to any nonprofit at no cost. NetHope and Microsoft have launched a free certified course called Unlocking AI for Nonprofits. Kellogg Executive Education offers a program called Leading in the Age of AI designed specifically for nonprofit leaders. And Anthropic has published a free AI Fluency for Nonprofits course built around four skills — Delegation, Description, Discernment, and Diligence — that are, not coincidentally, also the core skills of good management.

The training is there. The access is there. The excuse of not knowing where to start no longer holds.

I have watched this field absorb things it said it never would. Electricity. Amplification. Digital recording. Streaming. We complained about all of it. Some of the complaints were right. And we kept going, because the work demanded it.

This is not different.

The paste is not going back in the tube. The question is not whether AI enters the performing arts. It already has. The question is whether we engage with it honestly — with policy, with ethics, with the same rigor we bring to everything else that matters — or whether we keep performing resistance in public while quietly building dependency in private.

I know which one serves the artists better.

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For those who want to explore further, resources and a practical list are below.

Resources for Arts Administrators

• DeVos Institute A³ (Arts × Admin × AI) Roadmap — The most comprehensive arts-specific AI framework available. Case studies from sixteen organizations including Alvin Ailey, ABT, American Repertory Theatre, Opera Baltimore, and Mark Morris Dance Group. Free to download. devosInstitute.net

• NTEN AI for Nonprofits — Free cohort program, hands-on and assessment-based. Open to any nonprofit staff. nten.org

• Unlocking AI for Nonprofits — Free certified course from NetHope and Microsoft. Practical tools, real nonprofit use cases. nethope.org

• Leading in the Age of AI — Live virtual program for nonprofit leaders from Kellogg Executive Education. Strategic frameworks and implementation roadmaps. kellogg.northwestern.edu

• AI Fluency for Nonprofits — Free course from Anthropic. Built around the 4D framework: Delegation, Description, Discernment, Diligence. anthropic.skilljar.com

What I Actually Use AI For A working list for arts administrators who want to start somewhere practical.

• Reading and summarizing long, complex email threads — where things stand, who’s waiting, and what decision is needed

• Copy editing and grammar — particularly valuable for those of us working in a language other than our first

• Reading, comparing, and flagging issues in contracts and agreements

• Building commissioning agreements and MOUs from scratch, or screening existing documents for inconsistencies and redundancies

• Converting grant timelines and program schedules into calendar events and tasks

• Grant application copy editing and materials development

• Budget modeling and financial narrative for boards

• Researching projects and preparing briefs to share with teams, producers, and funders

• Pulling action items and decisions from meeting transcripts

• Scanning large folders of applicant materials for connections and signals

• Archival organization — surfacing artist names, dates, and impact data from years of organizational records

• Finding connective threads among cultural assets that could help maximize the value of existing work

• Analyzing calendar patterns across programs to identify scheduling inefficiencies and inform future planning

• Comparing budget versus actuals across similar programming to recognize patterns and improve decisions next time

• Pattern recognition from third-party data — surfacing insights from external sources that would otherwise require dedicated research staff

• Drafting announcements, Slack messages, and internal communications

• Strategic thinking — using AI as a thinking partner to pressure-test arguments before presenting to a board or funder

• Risk mitigation — stress-testing decisions from multiple angles before committing to a direction

• Deepening understanding of complex concepts — when research or studying surfaces something worth exploring further, AI can explain, contextualize, and go as deep as needed

Wrong question.

The field has been designing solutions for organizations that were never going to move fast, while the organizations that already figured out how to move have been largely invisible to the people writing the reports and running the conferences.

That changes, at least in one room, this Saturday.

Two days ago, a conversation with one of my fellow panelists got me thinking about all of this differently.

Raquel Vázquez Varela co-founded Teatro Público de Puerto Rico in 2017, restarted it in 2019 after Hurricane María, and has been building something genuinely unusual ever since. Two leaders running the organization — both doing other work on the side to support their own salaries, because that’s what the reality requires right now. Budget just under $200,000. Up to four full productions in a single year, including world premieres of Puerto Rican work. Revenue running roughly 50/50 earned to contributed — which almost never happens at this scale — with part of that earned revenue coming from functioning as a full production house for outside projects. No physical space. About $10,000 a year in overhead.

When Raquel described how Teatro Público got here, she said something that stayed with me: “We grew up in innovation. We had to innovate to exist.”

She wasn’t making a pitch. She was describing the conditions. There was no other way.

And then she asked a question that reframed everything. Not “how do we innovate?” She’s past that. Her question was: “How do we build roots?”
That’s the question of an organization that has already done the hard part. The roots she’s talking about aren’t abstract. She wants to pay artists a living wage from day one — not at the back end of box office, not when the budget allows, but as a baseline assumption. That’s what sustainability means to her. Not revenue for its own sake. A world where the people making the art can actually live from it.

Art is a right. The organizations that actually believe that are the ones building toward something real.

Cruise ships are extraordinary. Feats of engineering. They carry thousands of people across oceans. They are also very difficult to turn, and they cannot go where cruise ships cannot go.

Large legacy arts institutions are similar. They carry enormous cultural weight — endowments, buildings, donor relationships that took generations to build. They also carry everything that makes change slow: physical assets and debt service, donor relationships built on preservation promises, boards optimized for stability, staff structures and grant cycles that don’t bend quickly. That’s not a flaw in the people running them. It’s the nature of the vessel.

Chad Bauman, Executive Director of Milwaukee Repertory Theater, will be at the table Saturday. Milwaukee Rep just completed the first phase of an $80 million renovation — a three-theater complex in a converted power plant along the Milwaukee River. Seven decades of history. Fifteen million audience members since founding. Forty million dollars in annual economic impact for the city. That is a cruise ship, and a magnificent one.

What’s interesting is that Chad isn’t pretending otherwise. His presentation for Saturday asks directly: why do established performing arts organizations find it so hard to innovate? And then he starts answering it — with MRT Productions LLC, an AI Lab Group, Milwaukee Rep University. He’s trying to build the speedboat alongside the cruise ship. Getting a ship that size to move takes real political will and a board that trusts you. He’s doing that work. But the conditions are not the same as Raquel’s, and pretending they are helps no one.

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Speedboats don’t wait for cruise ships to show them where to go.

Teatro Público has no building. The $10,000 annual overhead buys something most organizations can’t afford: the freedom to make every decision based entirely on what the work requires, with no facility demanding to be programmed and staffed regardless of what the season looks like.

A recent conversation with another young organization brought this into focus. One of their ten-year goals was to own a building. The question worth sitting with is whether that comes from what the work needs, or from what legitimacy has traditionally looked like in this field. Those are different things, and conflating them has cost a lot of organizations a lot of flexibility.

Teatro Público’s staffing model deserves its own conversation — and that conversation is coming. Two leaders, a network of contracted professionals brought in project by project, no permanent overhead beyond the core. The field has been slow to take this seriously as an intentional structure rather than a workaround. Teatro Público didn’t theorize it. They built it because the alternative was not existing.

“Can’t The Show Go On?” is a 90-minute working session at TCG this Saturday in Puerto Rico. Frances Pollock, Director of the Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale, will be presenting the infrastructure model her team has been building in Connecticut — real capital, real legal infrastructure, real implementation through the Collective CT accelerator. The rest of the session goes live with two organizations, two very different scales, and one shared question.

A lot of what gets called innovation in the arts is large institutions running pilot programs that take five years to evaluate and three more to scale. Meanwhile, organizations like Teatro Público have been running real experiments with real stakes, learning in real time, because they had no alternative.

Raquel’s question — how do we build roots? — is one the field doesn’t know how to answer yet. Not because the answer doesn’t exist. Because we’ve spent so long asking the wrong people.

The organizations born into necessity, the ones that never had the option of moving slowly, the ones where the founder is still doing outside work to keep the lights on while making sure every artist gets paid — they have been running the experiments.

The question is whether the field is paying attention.

For a long time I carried that ending the way you carry something heavy, not sure whether what I was feeling was grief or failure or both. I suspect Sting felt something similar when The Last Ship closed on Broadway in 2015 after losing $15 million. I suspect Puccini felt it too, standing in the wings at La Scala in 1904 while the audience responded to Madama Butterfly with growls, jeering, and laughter.

The question all three of us were asking, in different ways, is the same one. Does this ending mean it was worth nothing?

The field has no language for what survives an ending.

Puccini withdrew Butterfly immediately and began revising. Three months later a new version opened in Brescia to thunderous applause and 32 curtain calls. He ultimately wrote five versions of the opera. It has since been performed 881 times at the Met alone and is now one of the most staged operas in the world. The La Scala disaster didn’t end Butterfly. It became Butterfly.

Sting kept the rights to The Last Ship and kept working. Different cities, different directors, different versions of the story. He rewrote characters, added roles, kept revising until the show became what it was trying to be. In a conversation with New York Magazine published this week, he said he’s willing to do it anywhere, outdoors, scaled down, as an oratorio. The version that opens at the Met on June 9 is meaningfully different from the one that closed eleven years ago. What Sting bought with $15 million is the right to keep going.

Not everyone can afford that price. That’s worth saying plainly. The runway Sting had, the resources to absorb a $15 million loss and stay in the room with the work, is not available to most artists. Neither was Puccini’s, if we’re honest. But both are proof of what iteration produces when someone has the means and the ownership to sustain it.

What I want artists to hear is this: the investment doesn’t disappear when the form ends. The sixteen years I spent building ADA didn’t vanish when it closed. They became the foundation for everything I’ve done since, every conversation I’ve had about artist equity, every negotiation I’ve understood from the inside, every room I’ve been able to walk into with credibility. The form changed. The value compounded.

Roughly 80% of Broadway productions lose money. Nobody is walking away from Broadway. Venture capital funds operate on the same math. Most bets fail, the model prices that in from the start, and the ones that work generate enough return to justify the whole portfolio. What the performing arts hasn’t built yet is the structural equivalent of that logic. The mechanism that says: this didn’t work in this form, but the asset survives, and here is who holds it and what they can do with it next.

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That mechanism starts with how you go in. What happens if this scales — do your partners want the same things you want? What happens if it closes — who holds the rights, and can they follow the work into its next form? These questions feel premature when you’re excited about something new. They are the questions that determine whether the investment survives the ending.

Sting could stay in the room because he owned the work. Puccini could write five versions of Butterfly because he owned the score. The revision is where the work lives, in the space between what you made and what it’s still becoming.

The Met is calling this engagement a rental. The distinction matters to them institutionally. It protects their identity, their sense of what they are. But the audience sitting in those seats on June 9 will experience it as opera. What the Met has quietly done is find a smart use of its primary asset during a moment when that kind of thinking is the difference between institutions that survive and institutions that don’t. Whether they learn from it or treat it as a one-time exception is the open question.

Sting told New York Magazine something I keep returning to. Asked about his plans for the show he said: “I have an advantage over Verdi. He’s dead.”

Living artists have leverage the canon doesn’t. The work can keep evolving as long as the person who made it is alive, holds the rights, and is willing to stay in the room with it.

ADA ended. The investment didn’t. That’s what we’re still building toward.

The stock market goes up. The stock market goes down. You hear about it constantly — on the radio, in the news, in your group chat, from the friend who just started paying attention and bought something he can't pronounce. And unless you own a piece of something, it has nothing to do with you. You're just watching numbers move. I know this firsthand. I had Apple in the early 2000s and sold in 2008 when everything was freefalling. One of the more expensive lessons I've given myself. Anyway.

sample 1 - Apple in 2008 (can you blame me?)

My son is a junior at Binghamton, studying neuroscience, and he is what he calls himself: a snob. Film and music, specifically. He finds things early, before the algorithm catches up, before the artist is on a late night show explaining their influences. He doesn’t follow what commerce tells him to like. He is, in the most literal sense, ahead of the market.

A few weeks ago he said he wished he could buy stock in his favorite artists. The ones he discovers when they have maybe 1,000 streams, easier to find on SoundCloud than Spotify. He sees the trajectory. He has no way to participate in what he helped build.

That’s the most honest diagnosis of a structural problem the performing arts has been avoiding for decades.

When an artist signs to a label, they often sign away the most valuable thing they own. The recordings belong to the label. The artist gets a royalty. The label holds the asset. It appreciates. It can be sold.

Taylor Swift made this a headline. She couldn’t buy back her catalog, so she re-recorded it. People understood instantly: you made the thing, someone else owns it.

What my son was describing, without using any of this language, is equity. An ownership stake that lets early believers share in what something earns as it grows. In every other industry, that’s how early risk gets compensated. In the performing arts, that instrument doesn’t exist for audiences. You can buy a ticket, a record, a t-shirt. You cannot buy a stake in the thing you saw coming.

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Here I want to pause, because equity is a word that carries a specific logic with it. In most markets, that logic runs like this: get in early, wait for value to arrive, sell at the top. The instrument is designed for exit. Profit is the organizing principle.

If that logic becomes the organizing principle of the performing arts, we will have solved the ownership problem by creating a worse one. Art that exists to be monetized eventually becomes art that was designed to be monetized. That’s not an ecosystem. That’s a pipeline.

So let me be clear about what I’m not arguing. I’m not arguing that philanthropy should evaporate. The foundations that have held this field together, not because it was profitable but because they understood that the culture of a democracy depends on it, are doing something irreplaceable. The individual donors who gave because they loved a specific artist or a specific organization, before anyone told them it was a good investment, are doing something irreplaceable. Government has a civic responsibility to the arts that it has consistently underfunded, and no equity structure should absorb that obligation or give anyone a reason to stop demanding it. None of that goes away. None of it should.

What I’m arguing for is options.

The reason those options are so limited right now is structural. Most arts organizations are 501(c)(3) nonprofits. That status opens the door to foundation grants, government funding, tax-deductible donations. It’s genuinely powerful for keeping the lights on.

It also means the organization cannot be owned by any party. No shareholders. No equity. No mechanism to share financial upside with the people who helped build the value, the artist, the early presenter, the audience member who showed up before anyone else did.

Think of it like a restaurant that can never franchise. The chef cannot hold an ownership stake in what they built. The restaurant succeeds, and the value goes back into operations. Nothing accumulates.

The 501(c)(3) form was designed for stewardship. It was never designed for a composer whose work tours internationally, generates a film, and licenses its methodology to universities. That world is here. The legal container predates it by decades.

Contributed revenue (grants, donations, foundation support) funds activity. It funds the commission, the production, the premiere. It has no mechanism for capturing what the work becomes after it leaves the building. The IP gets made on philanthropic dollars and then either sits dormant or flows into someone else’s ownership structure. The nonprofit holds the mission. Someone else holds the asset.

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I was in the audience at the Yale Innovation Summit on May 28, listening to a panel on artist ownership and economic agency. Yancey Strickler — co-founder of Kickstarter — said something I wrote down immediately. He was explaining why he had rejected the charity frame from the beginning of his work. “I definitely reject the idea that art should be viewed as a charitable enterprise. That people use guilt and charity as a means of excusing funding things that they need to do.”

Emil Kang, Former Program Director at the Mellon Foundation and member of the National Council on the Arts, was on the same panel. He was talking about Strickler’s work — the A-Corp, the push to get artists to define their economic relationships on their own terms from the start. He didn’t hedge. “The culture that he is doing around artists having to define their economic relationships to each other on their own terms from the beginning — that is radical. That’s going to change the ecosystem.”

One who built a platform that democratized creative funding and still found the charity model insufficient. One who has worked inside philanthropic infrastructure for decades and is watching something new arrive and calling it radical.

My son said the same thing without any of that history. He just looked at a system he loves and asked why he couldn’t participate in it.

This is what makes what’s happening in Colorado worth paying attention to.

A bill moving through the state legislature — Senate Bill 26-133, the Colorado Artist Company Act — would create a new legal entity called an Artist Corporation, or A-Corp. Developed by Strickler through the Artist Corporations Foundation, it works like an LLC: flexible, can hold intellectual property, can distribute revenue among multiple owners. What it adds is a set of rules that can’t be overridden. Artists must hold at least 51% of voting shares at all times. Artistic work assigned to the company can never be transferred to outside investors. If the company dissolves, the IP reverts to the artists who made it.’

Here’s the part that answers my son’s question. Economic rights can be separated from governance rights. An outside investor — a fan, a presenting organization, an early believer — can hold a revenue stake without holding a creative vote. They participate in the upside without controlling the work.

That separation already exists informally in the music business, the collaborator who gets points on the back end, the co-commissioner who shares touring revenue. The A-Corp makes it formal, protectable, and transferable. It turns a handshake into a structure that holds.

If the bill passes, it takes effect August 12, 2026.

The tiniest nonprofit in Anchorage and Lincoln Center and Tulsa Ballet and a composer working out of a borrowed studio in Crown Heights are not the same organization. They don’t have the same needs, the same audiences, the same relationship to IP, or the same risk tolerance. One model has never served all of them. It doesn’t now.

Philanthropy. Government support. Earned revenue. Equity. These are not competing religions. They’re instruments. The question isn’t which structure wins — it’s whether every organization and every artist has access to the structure that fits what they’re actually trying to build. A well-run orchestra doesn’t play with one.

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The performing arts have always understood value. They’ve been poor at retaining it. Every generation of artists builds something — a body of work, an audience, a methodology — and most of it disappears. Into the operating budget of the organization that produced it. Into nothing when the grant period ends.

Commissioning is the performing arts version of R&D. A funder pays for something new, the way a pharmaceutical company funds a lab. But most commission agreements leave IP terms vague. The presenter gets a premiere. The artist retains rights in theory. Neither builds anything from it. The drug gets made. Nobody files the patent.

If you’ve been reading UNSCRIPTED, some of this will feel familiar. An earlier essay — *Who Owns the Work* — made the same argument from inside the field, for the people who run the institutions. This essay comes at it from the outside, through the eyes of a 21-year-old who has no stake in protecting the current system and no reason to speak carefully around it. That’s the conversation this publication wants to keep having. The same structural problem, seen from different angles, by different people, until it stops feeling like a provocation and starts feeling like common sense.

My son finds artists early. He watches them break through. He watches the machine arrive and absorb them. And he wants to know why the people who were there first — who took the real risk, the social risk, the risk of caring before it was safe to — walk away with nothing but a memory of a small room.

That’s an infrastructure problem. The infrastructure is starting to change. Not toward one model. Toward many, each one built to serve a different kind of artist, a different kind of organization, a different relationship between the work and the world.

My son will probably never buy stock in his favorite band. But someone younger than him might.

That same person, earlier in the week, used a $10 ticket to a symphony concert. The institution called it an access initiative. They called it a choice between two drinks.

As we build our next season, the question I keep returning to is simpler: has anyone honestly asked what a discounted ticket is actually solving?

The performing arts has spent decades treating ticket price as the primary barrier between art and audience. Lower the price and new people walk in. Keep lowering it and the room diversifies. Make it free and you’ve done something meaningful about equity. I’ve believed versions of this. I’ve acted on versions of this. And I’ve watched it not work in ways the field still hasn’t fully reckoned with.

The family that genuinely cannot afford a night out is not making a price calculation about the symphony. They are navigating transportation, childcare, work schedules, and the particular exhaustion of financial stress. A $10 ticket doesn’t solve any of that. Neither does $5. Neither does free, without a substantially different set of conditions around it. Price was not their barrier. It was never their barrier.

The person using that discounted ticket is someone with discretionary income who made a values decision. The institution affirmed it. They said: this experience is worth whatever you decide. And that person decided $10. Then went for martinis 2 blocks away.

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The data has been telling us this for a while, even if we haven’t wanted to hear it. A 2025 JCA Performing Arts study tracking 17 major American performing arts organizations found that new ticket buyers now make up more than 60 percent of audiences — a share that keeps growing. That sounds like momentum until you read the next line: ticket sales overall haven’t returned to pre-pandemic levels. More strangers are walking in. The regulars thinned out and haven’t been replaced by people who come back. Average yield per ticket is lagging behind inflation, and fuller houses increasingly mean more lower-priced tickets sold. The institution is working harder, filling more seats, and making less in real terms.

Opera America’s 2025 field report adds the detail that reframes everything: newcomers who bought the most expensive tickets were substantially more likely to return a year later. Not slightly. Substantially. The person who paid more showed up differently, and decided the experience was worth repeating. Which starts to suggest that price doesn’t just filter who gets in. It shapes what people believe they’re walking into.

Opera Philadelphia has tested this more seriously than almost anyone. Under Anthony Roth Costanzo, they dropped every ticket to $11 for the 2024–25 season — a genuine institutional bet, not a promotional gesture, backed by $7 million in new fundraising he raised in his first ten weeks. The results were real: sold out in three weeks, two-thirds of buyers were first-timers, more than 700 first-time donors. Costanzo was clear-eyed about what it cost — ticket revenue dropped $400,000, covered by donors galvanized by the boldness of the move. He also said something the field rarely says out loud: we have to be honest that not many people are interested in opera. The $11 ticket didn’t solve that. It lowered the cost of finding out. What it hasn’t answered yet is whether those first-timers come back. They’re still collecting that data. We all are watching it closely.

Because there is a version of low-price strategy that works, and it looks different from a blanket discount. Rush tickets and lotteries — the model Off-Broadway has used for years — require something from you. You have to want it enough to show up day-of, enter the lottery, wait. The low price is a reward for desire, not a substitute for it. Hamilton’s lottery didn’t make Hamilton feel cheap. It made getting in feel like winning something. That’s a different psychology entirely from a ticket that starts at $11 for anyone who clicks. Price without stakes doesn’t create value. It removes it.

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Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City is the clearest proof of what the alternative looks like. Most events are free. Some are choose-what-you-pay starting at $5. And since launching in 2022, the festival has drawn more than 1.6 million visitors — now in its fifth year and one of the city’s defining summer traditions. When Lincoln Center first took programming outdoors during the pandemic, 250,000 people showed up, nearly a quarter of them visiting Lincoln Center for the first time. People came because it was somewhere they wanted to be. The free ticket removed the reason to hesitate. The experience was the offer. That’s a completely different proposition from a discounted seat in a room that wasn’t designed with you in mind. One says: we lowered the price so you could afford it. The other says: we built something and we want you here.

Lincoln Center’s Summer for the City

I read Nina Simon’s The Art of Relevance in 2020 and marked a page. She writes that relevance is the key to a locked room where meaning lives — and that it doesn’t matter how powerful the experience is inside if people don’t feel they can enter. I’ve been sitting with that ever since. Because the honest follow-up question, the one the book doesn’t fully answer, is: what if you’ve already unlocked the door, and people still don’t come in?

I think about this every year at Student CoLab — National Sawdust’s culminating concert for our middle school composers program. Kids from Williamsburg and Greenpoint, original works performed alongside professional musicians, interdisciplinary, alive, completely free. It is one of my favorite days of the year. There are no marquee names. There is no press. There is just the work, and what it says about why we exist. And every year, I watch us struggle to fill the room.

Families care. They’re working. Sunday afternoon is not neutral time when you have two jobs and kids and a week that never really ended. I’ve offered free tickets to youth audiences more times than I can count, because I wanted young people inside that experience. It rarely sticks. The conditions that would make it a priority — I haven’t solved those yet. The ticket was never the problem. I know that now more clearly than I ever have.

If you want to see what it looks like when it works, join us. Student CoLab is May 31st, free and open to all.

If the goal is genuinely to reach communities that have been structurally excluded, ticket price is approximately the last variable to adjust. Transportation matters. Childcare matters. Cultural familiarity and whether someone sees themselves reflected onstage — those matter. These are harder problems that require real partnership with communities, not a promotional tier and a press release.

And if the goal is to build a sustainable audience, one that returns, pays more over time, becomes the donor base , then the question isn’t how to lower the entry cost. It’s how to make the experience worth the full price.

The bar didn’t get full by discounting cocktails. It got full by being somewhere people wanted to be.

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There is something worth sitting with in the assumption that lower price equals wider welcome. The person who saves up for a ticket, who plans the night, who gets dressed and shows up — that ticket means something to them. It represents a choice, not a charity. Accessibility isn’t about removing the cost.

It’s about making the room feel like theirs when they walk in.

Accessible tickets are a conscience mechanism for institutions. Whether they function as an access mechanism for communities is a question most organizations have declined to ask — and the ones that have already know the answer.

Student CoLab 2026 - Upcoming May 31, 2026

Free with RSVP

Which is what makes Boston so difficult to explain.

Most performing arts organizations are built the same way. A Board protects the mission and stewards the resources. A Chair sets the agenda and holds the room. A Chief Executive runs the operations. An Artist leads the work that justifies the existence of everyone else in the building.

It is, when you think about it, a rather elegant arrangement. Each role has a purpose. Each person knows what they are there to do. The structure asks only that everyone inside it operate in good faith, with shared information and a common understanding of what they are collectively trying to protect.

Most of the time, they do.

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Signora says this sincerely. She has seen it work. She has sat in halls that hum with the particular confidence of an institution that knows what it is and why. It is a beautiful thing.

Which is why she finds herself, this season, somewhat at a loss.

Now. Boston.

In January 2024, the Boston Symphony Orchestra announced with considerable fanfare that its Music Director, Andris Nelsons, would be moving to an evergreen contract. Open-ended. Rolling. A public declaration of confidence. The Chief Executive’s own words at the time: “We are so pleased… this expresses our deep confidence in his artistic leadership.”

Thirteen months later, the board voted to terminate it.

Nelsons learned he was being dismissed in early February. The board had voted weeks before that. He was not in the room. He was not consulted. He walks to work from his Boston apartment, has led the orchestra for thirteen years, has six Grammys, and had no idea the people responsible for his institution had already decided he was leaving.

The vote itself: as few as 22 of 42 trustees present. Barely a quorum. The decision that ended a thirteen-year tenure was made by just over half the board.

The reason given: not aligned on future vision.

The vision itself has never been described.

On the morning of April 21 — the very day the musicians sat down to begin contract negotiations — the Chair sent a message to the Board of Advisors. Accusatory in tone. Certain people within the organization, it suggested, were working to undermine the institution’s future. No names. Everyone understood.

The next morning she sent a second message, this one to all staff. Harsher. It was rescinded thirty minutes later.

But a message, once sent, does not unread itself.

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The musicians appeared at their next performance wearing red flowers. A gesture requiring no translation. Players from more than twenty orchestras worldwide — Berlin, Vienna, Philadelphia, Chicago, Cleveland among them — sent word of solidarity. Not to the Chair. To the Maestro.

The Vienna Philharmonic named Nelsons an honorary member. The honor arrived while Boston was pushing him out the door.

Lang Lang wrote publicly: “Please find a way to keep Andris longer.”

Nelsons himself, when asked if he would stay: “I don’t want to go anywhere.”

The donors grew very quiet.

Seicento milioni di dollari in endowment. And the fundraising stopped.

That is not a development problem. That is a verdict delivered by people who stopped trusting the stewardship of something they love.

And now Signora will tell you what puzzles her most.

No one inside that organization appears to have been working from the same score. The Chair had her understanding of events. The Chief Executive had his. The Maestro had his. The musicians had theirs — and noted, pointedly, that when a draft of the new mission statement arrived, the word excellence had been removed. They had to fight to put it back.

Signora does not believe these were bad people. She has attended too many of these rooms to think that. What she believes is that somewhere along the way, the thing that makes the structure work — the shared information, the common purpose, the basic requirement that everyone is playing from the same page — quietly disappeared. And no one noticed until the flowers appeared on stage.

The Boston Globe put it plainly: a sensible board wouldn’t have gotten itself into this mess in the first place.

Signora does not disagree. But she would add, gently, that sensible boards are not born. They are built. Maintained. Held to account by the people inside them and around them. When that stops happening, even the most elegant structure will eventually produce exactly this kind of season.

The musicians, for their part, have drawn their own conclusion. They are now at the bargaining table, and among their demands is a formal voice in selecting the next music director. The structure, it seems, is being renegotiated from the stage up.

Boston is not the rule. But it is not as much the exception as we would like to believe.

Signora will be in her usual seat. Watching, as she always does, with great affection and considerable attention.

Con stima e occhi sempre aperti —

I didn’t make it to Opera America this year. First time in more than a decade. I wanted to be there — in the rooms, in the hallways, in the late dinners where the real conversations and brainstorming happen. That gathering is one of the few times a year we get to lean on the love we share, compare notes on what’s working, and remind ourselves why we chose this.

From a distance, listening to friends who were there, I kept hearing the same thing underneath the conversations: a nostalgia for how things used to be, sitting right next to concern about what they are. The excitement about what’s coming tends to live in a specific generation — people who arrived in this field more recently, who didn’t experience what we did, who didn’t lose what we feel we’ve lost. But there is real news worth paying attention to. The appointment of David Lomeli to lead the Dallas Opera is one of them. Congrats, Dallas.

I understand that nostalgia. I feel it too.

I came to this field the way a lot of us did — not through a plan, but through a moment. I was nineteen years old in Puerto Rico when I got recruited to sing in the opera chorus. To tell you that listening to Mirella Freni singing Mimì in rehearsal was a moment would be underselling it. The last act broke me open. Something happened in that room that I didn’t have language for and didn’t need language for. I watched her from inside the production. That is a thing that does not leave you. Within months I was listening to everything — Sutherland, Caballe, Bartoli just arriving. I was swept. Completely and without reservation. That love is what moved me into this career. That love is what moves all of us.

Mirella Freni’s portrayal of Mimì in Puccini’s La Bohème is widely considered one of the definitive operatic performances of the 20th century.

But I was also honest with myself early. I was okay as an artist. Not great — and greatness was required. But I had something else: an innate entrepreneurship, an ability to execute, to open doors, to manifest possibilities for other artists. I found a different path into the field. That path existed for me. I wonder sometimes how many people never found it, or never knew to look.

Because here’s what I know: for every artist who found a sustainable life in this field, there are dozens who didn’t. And this is where David Lomeli matters. He was a great singer who evolved into a leader. That arc — performer to institution-builder — should not be the exception. A successful singing career may span twenty to twenty-five years. What is the 2.0? The knowledge accumulated over that time, about repertoire, about audiences, about what actually happens on a stage, is extraordinary. We should be building real pathways for it.

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But putting artists into leadership without the training and tools to run an organization is not a solution. Fundraising, operations, governance — these are not instincts. They are skills. The answer is not choosing between artist-leaders and administrator-leaders. The answer is building artist entrepreneurship into the training process early, so that the people who love this field from the inside also know how to sustain it.

We train for one outcome and act surprised when everyone else disappears. The ones who didn’t make it as performers — who spent years and real money following a dream the industry encouraged without qualification — when it didn’t land, they walked away. Not just from performing, but from opera entirely. Not as patrons. Not as administrators. Just away.

I’m not arguing against music education. I believe in it — the chorus programs, the youth symphonies, the daily work people like Anthony Mazzocchi do at Kaufman Music Center. I’m arguing for a wider door and an earlier conversation — one that says: there are many ways to build a life inside this art form, and we will show you all of them.

There are people already doing this, and we should be paying attention. Not always from inside opera — but that’s almost the point. Kerriann Otaño, a former opera singer, built Opera Hype Girl from the ground up — demystifying the art form on TikTok and Instagram, fighting gatekeeping, building the audience the field keeps saying it can’t find. At the Yale School of Music, a student ensemble called Solaris was born out of an entrepreneurship class — commissioning new work, performing in intimate spaces, reaching people who are not already classical music insiders. And VisionIntoArt, co-founded by composer Paola Prestini and cellist Jeff Zeigler, “Built Without Permission” (April, 2026) has spent years proving that artist-led models can produce work of the highest ambition without waiting for institutional permission.

These people carry something our generation didn’t: a clear-eyed acceptance that talent alone is not a guarantee. We came up believing that if you were good enough, someone would find you. A hand of God would come down and put you on a big stage — because it happened, and we saw it. What we were not prepared for was being among the 90++% it didn’t happen to.

They were. And that changes everything about how they move.

To the colleagues who are in leadership right now, or coming into it: let go of the models we fell in love with. Not the art. Not the values. The models. None of that will feel natural at first. Some of it will feel like loss. That feeling is not a signal to stop. It’s what evolution actually feels like from the inside — not transformation, not reinvention, just the slow friction of becoming something you don’t fully recognize yet.

The nostalgia is real. I feel it too. But the discomfort is where the work is. And the generation coming behind us already knows that. They are not waiting for permission.

We don’t have to have it figured out. We just have to be willing to be in it.

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Solaris is a dynamic, student-led chamber music collective at Yale University that bridges the gap between contemporary classical and popular music.

Twenty minutes later, I got into the car with them.

The second the door closed, 80s Top 40. Full volume. Singing along to every word.

I didn’t say anything. I filed it.

Do me a favor. Pick up your phone right now and open your listening history — not the story you tell about yourself, the real one. What would I think about you if that was all I had?

In my case, you’d be convinced I’m a Bad Bunny all the time. Full stop. You’d build a whole profile (as bizare as that might sound with my work). Then suddenly — in the middle of all of it — Chopin. A Ballade, played multiple times that morning.

We are not who we say we are at the panel. We are something more complicated, more honest, and frankly more interesting than that.

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And yet there are people who will make you feel bad for what you listen to. Not people with different taste — that’s fine, taste is personal — but the ones who weaponize it. Who raise an eyebrow. Who treat the question of what’s in your headphones as a referendum on your intelligence, your seriousness, your right to be in the room. That move — small, social, constant — is worth naming. Because it doesn’t stay personal. It scales.

Now imagine someone who takes that panel version of themselves and builds an institution around it. Who argues, with complete seriousness, that classical is classical and commercial is commercial and the two shall not meet. That the wall is not just a preference — it’s a principle. That maintaining it is what excellence requires.

That person is running some of our most important cultural organizations right now. And that argument is costing the field more than it knows.

The frustrating part is we already proved this was wrong. And we proved it in the most spectacular way possible.

In 1990, three opera singers performed together in Rome for the FIFA World Cup. Classical artists, classical repertoire — but amplified, outdoor, broadcast to millions. The recording became the highest-selling classical disc in history. Four years later they filled Dodger Stadium while 1.3 billion people watched worldwide. Each singer earned around a million dollars per concert, unheard of in classical music at the time.

The field’s response was telling. Some celebrated. Others flinched. Critics who should have known better called it spectacle — accessibility mistaken for compromise. The field generated an entire genre from the momentum, watched Bocelli and Groban carry it to mainstream audiences, and then quietly disowned it. Treated it as an anomaly rather than a blueprint. Moved on.

We had the proof. We looked away.

Now the proof is back, and it didn’t come from us.

In November 2025, Rosalía released LUX — recorded with the London Symphony Orchestra, arranged by Pulitzer Prize-winning composer Caroline Shaw, sung in fourteen languages, structured in four movements. Critics spent weeks arguing about whether it was classical or pop. Rosalía declined to resolve the argument. She has said she needs to believe she makes pop — because pop has reach, it belongs to many, not to a selected few — even as the music she makes requires an orchestra, a Pulitzer-winning arranger, and years of conservatory-level vocal training to exist.

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The art doesn’t know where the wall is. The artists moved past it already.

The people who built our institutions didn’t get it wrong exactly. They built for the world as it was. The problem is that some of them are still running those institutions, still making decisions as though that world is intact, still treating the wall as the thing worth protecting. My generation inherited both the infrastructure and the argument. We know the argument is wrong. What we haven’t figured out is how to lead without it.

And while the artists moved forward, our most prominent institutions were still arguing about which names belonged on the marquee.

I won’t name the institution. I don’t need to. This is not a story about one organization or one leader. It’s a story about a posture — the particular brand of institutional ego that mistakes identity protection for artistic integrity.

Here is what that posture looks like in practice. A major performing arts institution is approached by other organizations wanting to host events in its space. Declined. The building sits dark. Its communications department recommends programming that could reach new audiences and generate significant earned revenue. Ignored. Naming opportunities worth millions of dollars are turned down because the prospective names don’t match the internal idea of what excellence looks like. Meanwhile, the endowment is drawn down year after year to cover operating costs. Thirty million one year. Forty million the next. The institution that once staged 28 productions a season now stages 18 — the fewest since a strike nearly shut it down in 1980.

The building still has 3,800 seats. The stage is one of the most iconic in the world, in the most media-saturated city in the world. Artists already working at orchestral scale, with global audiences that would fill that house and then some, are not being invited. Not because they wouldn’t come. Not because the audience wouldn’t respond. But because the names don’t match the internal picture of what this place is supposed to be.

That is not a standard. That is a mirror.

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I understand the instinct. I spent eighteen years in the for-profit world before coming to arts administration — long enough to know that commercial value is real, and also that it is not the only thing. I came to the nonprofit arts because I believed in something the market couldn’t fully hold. I still do.

Here's what nobody tells you about this moment. The old model isn't gone. The new one isn't here yet. My generation of administrators is caught between the two — not passing through, but actually living there. Leading from a place that hasn't resolved, toward something nobody has named yet.

What we do know — about curation, context, what it means to build an audience rather than just capture one — is real. It has value. But it cannot survive if we use it only as a gate.

Here is what I think we need to stop pretending: that quality and reach are in competition. That welcoming a broader audience means abandoning standards. That an institution whose stage hosts a pop festival on a Tuesday has somehow compromised the Verdi on Saturday.

Rosalía didn’t lower the bar when she called the London Symphony Orchestra. She raised the stakes. The Three Tenors didn’t cheapen opera by filling Dodger Stadium — they proved that the emotion at the center of it was always meant to travel.

We are sitting on exactly the infrastructure, prestige, and institutional knowledge that artists like these need and would pay to access. The artists are ready. The audiences are ready.

The only thing not ready is us.

And if you need proof, check your listening history. The answer is already there.

The Chopin and the reggaeton are playing in the same library. They always were. We just built a wall between them and called it taste.

No. And I want to show you why.

The first thing I want to know when I meet another arts leader is their earned revenue percentage. Most people laugh when I ask. Some change the subject. A few actually answer.

That number — the share of your budget that comes from something you made, sold, or built rather than something someone gave you — tells me more about an organization’s structural health than almost anything else. It tells me how many legs the stool has. It tells me what happens when a major donor dies, a foundation shifts its priorities, or a pandemic shuts the doors for eighteen months.

I spent nearly two decades in for-profit artist services before moving into arts administration. In that world, the revenue question wasn’t philosophical. It was just the question. So when I arrived in the nonprofit performing arts — and specifically in opera — I was genuinely surprised by how rarely people talked about earned revenue as something to build, rather than something that just happened to you.
The numbers are clarifying in the way that cold water is clarifying. Douglas McLennan at ArtsJournal recently mapped the full scale of the cultural economy: Disney alone generates more annual revenue than every US nonprofit arts organization combined. The Dallas Cowboys’ profit last year was larger than the total operating budgets of the ten largest US nonprofit arts institutions.

His conclusion lands hard: “When we argue about $207 million in NEA appropriations, we are arguing about a rounding error in the broader cultural economy. Perhaps the conversation should grow up to the size of the field it’s trying to describe.”

McLennan’s data proves the sector is small. My argument is about what we do with that. You can’t outgrow Disney. But fragility isn’t a function of size — it’s a function of dependency. And dependency, unlike scale, is something we can actuall change.

That’s where this starts.

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First, let’s get the language straight.

Earned revenue is money that follows an exchange. You make something, someone pays for it. A ticket. A rental fee. A streaming license. A set built for another company. The transaction is the proof of value.

Contributed revenue is money given in support of what you do. A grant. A donation. A sponsorship. No one is buying a seat. They are investing in your mission, your potential impact, your existence. The relationship is the proof of value.

Most nonprofits live on some combination of both, but the mix varies wildly by art form. Across the broader nonprofit arts sector, earned income covers roughly 60% of expenses on average. Opera lives at the other end of that spectrum. For major U.S. opera companies, box office covers about 26% of total expenses, and even when you add other earned sources, total earned revenue typically lands between 30% and 35%. The rest is philanthropy.

When I tell colleagues from other fields that number, some go quiet. A 65-70% reliance on contributed revenue sounds, to someone outside classical music, like a company in permanent crisis. To those of us inside the field, it just sounds like opera.

This is not a failure. It’s structural. (I feel like I say this a lot )

Opera costs what it costs. The labor, the production, the infrastructure — none of it has ever been recoverable through ticket sales alone. The art form was built on patronage, and the American nonprofit model formalized that arrangement in the twentieth century. Foundations, individual donors, and government support became the assumed architecture of how opera gets made. Symphony orchestras and ballet companies are in a similar position. The League of American Orchestras found that in 2014, 43% of orchestra revenue came from contributed income, and the trend since has moved further in that direction.

The field isn’t broken. But it is fragile. And the fragility becomes visible at exactly the moments when you can least afford it.

Some organizations figured out a different way.

The evidence from inside our field and adjacent to it is consistent: earned revenue done right doesn’t compromise the mission. It protects it.

1. The Cincinnati Symphony Orchestra built a wholly-owned subsidiary, Music and Event Management Inc., that produces concerts and manages commercial venues including Riverbend Music Center. In 2022-23, the subsidiary generated $66.9 million in revenue, more than the orchestra’s own $51.1 million. The commercial arm funds the artistic mission rather than threatening it. The CSO is simultaneously one of the top orchestras in the country and one of the most financially engineered.

2. Gibney Dance nearly closed after the 2008 financial crisis when its donor base evaporated. Choreographer Gina Gibney’s response wasn’t an emergency fundraising campaign. She started renting her studios to Broadway productions at market rates. That commercial income became the engine for two things simultaneously: employing her own dancers on full-time, year-round contracts with health insurance and paid vacation — radical in a field that runs almost entirely on gig terms — and offering subsidized studio space to independent artists and small companies who couldn’t afford market rate. Broadway pays full price so everyone else doesn’t have to.

3. Park Avenue Armory and New York City Center have both crossed the 50% earned revenue threshold. The Armory’s commercial events fund the large-scale art installations it’s known for. City Center’s royalties and program revenue fund work that wouldn’t survive in a purely commercial environment. In both cases, the building is the business model. The art fills the building. The building pays for the art.
   

   

4. In opera specifically, the Metropolitan Opera's Live in HD program is the most instructive example — and not only for its successes. When Peter Gelb launched the cinema broadcast series in 2006, the Met invented an entirely new revenue category for the art form, one that at its peak generated roughly $17 million annually from a single global distribution channel. No other opera house has replicated it at scale. But the Met has also faced persistent deficits, labor disputes, and post-pandemic attendance challenges that no earned revenue stream has fully solved. The lesson isn't that Live in HD saved the Met. It's that even a house with that kind of financial imagination still can't outrun structural dependency on philanthropy — and that the field as a whole has been slow to follow their lead on diversification even when the model was sitting right in front of us.
   

These are examples, not exceptions. The organizations doing this work aren't all famous. Most aren't. They just asked the question earlier than everyone else.

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The hard moments proved it. The 2008 financial crisis and the COVID-19 pandemic were stress tests. Organizations that had built earned revenue infrastructure going into 2020 had something the others didn’t: time. Reserves. Cash flow from sources that didn’t require donor cultivation or grant applications. They could keep people on payroll and make strategic decisions from a position of stability rather than panic.

Organizations that were 80 or 90% contribution-dependent had almost no cushion. When the doors closed and the galas were canceled, the money stopped almost immediately.

Earned revenue is self-insurance. It doesn’t eliminate risk, but it distributes it. You’re not betting everything on whether your donors stay healthy, stay interested, and stay generous all at the same time.

The worry is that chasing revenue changes what you make. That you start programming for the market instead of the mission. That commercial logic slowly colonizes artistic logic until you don’t recognize the organization anymore.

Look at the evidence. The Armory's rental business funds art that no commercial producer would touch. Gibney's Broadway income pays for dancers to be full-time employees and community workers. The CSO's commercial subsidiary generates more revenue than the orchestra itself — and the orchestra is still one of the best in the country. These organizations haven't built earned revenue instead of mission. They've built it in service of mission, at the intersection of what they're good at and what someone will pay for. The ones that struggle aren’t the ones who tried to earn more. They’re the ones who waited to be rescued.

So what does this mean for you?

Maybe you run an organization. Maybe you work inside one, or alongside one, or you’re trying to build something. Either way, understanding how the money works isn’t someone else’s job.

Dependency is the threat to artistic integrity. Fragility is. An organization that can only exist when donors are feeling generous and foundations haven’t shifted their priorities is one bad year away from not existing at all.

Whether to earn isn't the question. The question is what you're good enough at — beyond the art — that someone will pay for. Sometimes it's your building. Sometimes it's your production capacity. Sometimes it's your IP. Sometimes it's your audience relationship. The answer looks different for every organization. But we're all sitting with the same problem.

None of this replaces the argument we still need to make — that live performance is essential to human life, that these art forms matter to communities in ways that market logic can’t measure, that the philanthropic case for opera and dance and symphony is real and urgent and nowhere near finished. We have to keep making that argument. We will.

We just can’t make it from a position of permanent emergency.

Great things get made. Everyone agrees not to ask too hard about who actually owns them.

This is Florence. Roughly 1470.

Patronage (n.): the support, encouragement, privilege, or financial aid that an organization or individual bestows on another. In the arts, historically: a wealthy or powerful person who gives financial or other support to a person, organization, or cause.

The word is older than the Medicis. So is the arrangement.

We updated the vocabulary. The Medicis became foundations. The chapels became concert halls. The commissions became grants and naming opportunities and galas where tables start at $10,000. But the architecture of the relationship — who holds the capital, who holds the power, who decides what survives — hasn’t changed as much as we’d like to think.

Italian has two words for what we collapse into one. Mecenatismo — the pure fostering of art and intellect. And clientelismo — a social system of powerful people protecting a retinue of dependents. We have always told ourselves we operate in the first. The structural reality is closer to the second.

And the research backs this up in ways that should make us uncomfortable.

A 2024 study published in Human Nature introduced what its authors call the Collector Hypothesis. Tested among indigenous Papuan communities with no Western cultural conditioning, the findings were stark: artworks function primarily as markers of the collector’s wealth and status — not the artist’s. In the study, 72% of women preferred the collector as a long-term partner over the artist who made the work. 86% rated the collector as having higher social status. Among men, 95% agreed the collector held higher status. The authors conclude that “if the possession of valuable artworks is a marker of social success, wealth, and status, it tends to benefit collectors more than artists themselves.”

This is not a modern distortion. It is ancient wiring. The patron has always gained more from the arrangement than the artist. We built a field on top of that asymmetry — and then wondered why artists don’t have power.

The economics confirm what the anthropology suggests. A 2018 study in the American Economic Review tracked patronage appointments across 112 years of the British colonial administration and found that patronage consistently distorted who got promoted and reduced the performance of those who did. Favored appointments raised less revenue, invested less, and underperformed on nearly every measure. The gap disappeared only after patronage was abolished. Patronage, in other words, is not just inequitable. It is structurally inefficient — for everyone.

We know all of this. That’s what’s strange.

The program officers know it. The board members know it. The artists — especially the artists — know it. As Ty Jones, artistic director of the Classical Theatre of Harlem, said recently: “This is a tough field to be in, because the economics don’t really make sense when you’re so dependent on foundations and the government.” That’s not a complaint. That’s a diagnosis. And it’s one most of us in this field quietly agree with while changing the subject.

The current moment is making the architecture impossible to ignore. Foundation giving to the performing arts dropped 41% in 2024, falling below pre-pandemic levels. Federal funding is being dismantled — the NEA, the NEH, the Institute of Museum and Library Services all facing elimination or severe cuts. When the Trump administration terminated hundreds of NEA grants in May 2025, the emails cited awards falling outside priorities “as prioritized by the President.” The Kennedy Center got a new name on the building. Artists began canceling performances.

You can read all of that as a political story. I read it as a patronage story. When the patron changes, everything downstream changes with them. That is the system working exactly as designed.

And the field’s response — almost uniformly — has been to ask the remaining donors to give more. The architecture isn’t being questioned. Just the weather inside it.

Every other creative industry — imperfectly, messily, with plenty of its own failures — built some mechanism for artists to own their work, generate internal capital, and have a stake in what they create. Film did it. Music did it. Games did it. The performing arts never really tried. We told ourselves the work was too expensive, too ephemeral, too civic in nature to function that way. Maybe. But we also never built the infrastructure to find out.

The goal isn’t to turn off the lights. You don’t dismantle what’s keeping the institution alive. But there’s a meaningful difference between a system that includes philanthropy and one that cannot imagine anything else. One has options. The other has a ceiling.

What I’m proposing isn’t a switch. It’s a dimmer.

There are signs — careful, early, still funded by philanthropy — that the field is beginning to reach for it.

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This spring, the Doris Duke Foundation launched Creative Labor, Creative Conditions — a $3 million national campaign built around a single, long-overdue premise: that artists are workers, their labor has value, and the conditions that allow them to create are worth investing in structurally, not just project by project.

The same week, Remuseum and the Doris Duke Foundation announced The Vanguard — a $100,000 award and year-long accelerator for arts leaders willing to try something new. The initiative exists, in the words of its founders, because the field suffers from “a risk-averse culture and a lack of risk capital.” Which is another way of saying: we’ve been so organized around dependency that institutional imagination has atrophied along with it.

These are philanthropic programs designed to solve a philanthropy problem. That tension is real, and worth sitting with. But they are also, finally, naming the right question.



What does it look like to build a field where artists have a stake in what they make? Where survival doesn’t depend entirely on the continued generosity of outside capital? Where the answer to every funding crisis isn’t to ask the remaining patrons to give more?

That’s the conversation this field hasn’t had. Not because we don’t see the problem. But because we’ve decided in advance we can’t afford the answer.

Maybe it’s time to find out if that’s actually true.

Primero Sueño — a processional opera by composer Paola Prestini, vocalist Magos Herrera, and director Louisa Proske — took sixty-five people through medieval rooms as scenes unfolded around them. Gregorian chant, Baroque structures, Mexican folk traditions, jazz, Sephardic harmonies woven together without apology. The audience didn’t sit and watch. They moved, followed, listened. The architecture was part of the score.

I’ve been in this field for 25 years. I’ve seen a lot of opera. What I felt that night wasn’t just admiration. It was a question I couldn’t stop turning over:

why does this feel so rare?

I’ve felt something close to it before. Opera Philadelphia’s War Stories during Festival O in 2017 — another museum setting, audiences moving room to room, opera refusing to stay in its seat. And more recently, Stuttgart’s Staatsoper turned Saint François d’Assise into an eight-hour pilgrimage through the city: audiences on public transit, listening through headphones in a park, the orchestra and soloists waiting at an outdoor stage. Both productions were extraordinary. Both came from institutions with real resources and the courage to use them differently.

I don’t know what either production cost to step away from the proscenium, or whether the institutions considered them successful by their own metrics. What I do know is that neither became what Primero Sueño is becoming. The question isn’t whether traditional institutions can make ambitious, boundary-breaking work. Clearly they can. The question is what infrastructure they build around it — and whether a single exceptional production is enough to change the conditions that made it feel exceptional in the first place.

I think I finally know what the rarity is pointing at.

Primero Sueño clarified something specific about what becomes possible when artists stop waiting for existing institutions to catch up and build the infrastructure themselves.

Paola Prestini is not the only artist who has made that choice. She is the one I know best, and the one whose work I can speak to with the most specificity. But she represents a pattern visible across the field — composers, directors, performers who looked at the traditional commissioning and presenting structure, decided it wasn’t built to hold what they were making, and built something new.

In Paola’s case, that meant co-founding VisionIntoArt with cellist Jeffrey Zeigler in 1999, while they were both still at Juilliard. Twenty-five years later, VIA has built and toured major works on nearly every continent, developed producers who now run their own organizations, and reached audiences who didn’t know they were opera audiences until they were standing inside one. Its model is not traditional presenting. VIA builds collaborative ecosystems around each project — partnering with universities, foundations, and major institutions to develop work that spans disciplines, communities, and industries.

Primero Sueño was co-commissioned by VIA and the Met Museum. The Met provided institutional credibility and an extraordinary space. VIA provided the creative vision, the producing infrastructure, and the long-term commitment to the work. That partnership is exactly what the field needs more of — institutions and artist-built organizations working together, each contributing what they’re actually built to do.

I should say here that I serve on VisionIntoArt’s board and work at National Sawdust. I’m not observing this from outside. I’m inside the infrastructure I’m describing, which is part of why I think about it the way I do.

What VIA has built is an answer to a structural question the traditional opera field has mostly avoided: what does producing infrastructure actually need to look like to support work that doesn’t fit existing categories? The answer, it turns out, is not a bigger budget or a more flexible commissioning process. It is an entirely different organizational logic — one built around the work first and the institution second.

The traditional opera world has resources. What it often lacks is the organizational architecture to deploy those resources around work that requires genuine risk. Boards, subscribers, donor relationships, institutional reputations — these are not obstacles. They are real constraints that shape what gets made. Recognizing that honestly is not a criticism. It’s a starting point for understanding what the field needs to build alongside its existing institutions.

Artists like Paola have been building that infrastructure for decades. Not because they rejected the traditional opera world, but because they needed something it couldn’t yet provide. The result is a parallel ecosystem of artist-founded organizations, hybrid producers, and independent structures now responsible for some of the most significant work the field is making.

The question for the larger opera world is not whether that ecosystem is impressive. The question is what relationship traditional institutions want to have with it — and whether they are building the capacity to be genuine partners rather than co-commission credits on work they didn’t develop.

Here is what Primero Sueño does that stays with me: it treats opera as a living form with a history worth drawing on and a future worth imagining. The Cloisters wasn’t a clever location choice. It was a structural argument — that opera belongs in spaces that carry memory, that the audience’s relationship to the work changes when they move through it, that the separation between performer and witness is a convention, not a requirement.

None of that is new. Opera began closer to this than what it became. The processional, the immersive, the interdisciplinary — these are recoveries as much as innovations. Which is precisely what makes the work feel urgent rather than experimental. It is not asking the audience to accept something unfamiliar. It is reminding them of something they already knew was possible.

That reminder is what artist-built infrastructure makes possible. Not because it is better than institutional infrastructure — it has its own constraints and limitations. But because it is built around a different question. Not what can we afford to risk — but what does this work actually need.

Primero Sueño did not stay in the Cloisters.

After its sold-out world premiere, the production toured to Puebla Cathedral and the Chamber of Deputies in Mexico City. A studio album is out on VIA Records. A performance film is in development. A feature film version is in planning. Confirmed upcoming dates include Oaxaca, Chihuahua, and Mexico City. A processional from Brooklyn Bridge to City Hall is in development, along with European dates being explored.

VIA has also built El Sueño de Todos — a community engagement platform developing educational content and cultural diplomacy partnerships with Mexican government and business collaborators, building infrastructure around the opera and around Sor Juana as a cultural figure with international reach.

This is not a successful opera. It’s a scalable cultural enterprise with touring rights, film rights, a label, and an education platform. Someone built the right container for it.

That is the argument Primero Sueño makes without saying a word about it.

Opera doesn’t need permission to be what it can be. It needs infrastructure. And increasingly, the artists are the ones building it.

This work is everything dreamed and imagined, produced and performed with utmost care, consciousness and soul. “Primero Sueño” lights the way forward for all - Opera Wire