Why stop funding art?
Last article I talked about why I think we should fund art.
Because I like to make things complicated, I will now describe why I think that we shouldn’t fund art.
When talking about funding, I think it’s important to dive into the costs of doing art.
With the current technologies and the overabundance of entertainment, we might think that art is free, but it isn’t.
If you take the time to look, you can find high quality produced shows or music on youtube for free. You can find drawings on pinterest or deviantart, you can find similar high quality art for free all over the internet. There is so much art on the internet right now that is accessible for free.
But making art, isn’t free at all.
I like to be concrete. To give you an idea, here are some moments that I’ve experienced myself or had direct contact with. Here are three stories that can give you an idea of the types of costs that go into making art.
The first is from the music, the second is from a contemporary art performance and the last is from a festival.
Feel free to do this exercise for any other art form that you can think of.
Here’s the first one:
When I was starting out as a musician. I had the opportunity to participate in a free jazz concert. Nothing was rehearsed, nothing was written and no agreements were made on tempos, grooves, harmonies or melodies.
We were the opening of the whole event. We were 5 musicians and two freestyle dancers.
As nothing was prepared, our eyes and ears needed to stay open. We needed to listen to each other. I needed to keep my ears open to hear all musicians, but also my eyes to see what the dancers were doing and react accordingly.
It was one of the most enlightening experiences of my life. I have to credit the flutist, he started playing and repeating some of the stuff the audience was saying or doing. It freed me, my mind was opened on another level. I started integrating the audience into what I was doing.
These 30 minutes, were one of the more intense experiences of my life. It was all on the brink of failing. What saved it, was an elevated openness of consciousness to what we were experiencing. We became vessels tasked with enhancing the moment with our instruments and bodies by using our abilities as artists.
It was a very enlightening and illuminating experience for me. I could write about how it changed my perspective and approach to life and made me a better person and other boring stuff like that. But that’s not the subject of this article.
When we finished, we got a standing ovation.
But… As I mentioned… We were the opening act.
As such, we were paid a fairly low but standard amount per musician.
To give some context, this was a type of “contemporary art” festival. We were part of the music section. There were many other things like sculptures, paintings, performances, etc.
I got to talk to the audience before the next performance. We talked about being in the moment, reacting authentically, creating something together, The risk of failure, the fear of failure heightening your consciousness, the relationship between audience and performer and many other interesting and very abstract subjects.
To repeat, those are very interesting subjects that can change your life, but again, not the subject of this article.
After some time, a person asked everyone to return to their seats because the next performance was about to begin.
I went to see it, I will try to give an accurate and objective account of what I saw.
We’re all seated and the light is cut. Everybody becomes silent. We hear footsteps. Bright lights come up on the right. An attractive woman in a pinstripe suit enters the stage with a chair. When I say attractive, I mean that she had her make up on, her hair was done perfectly, Her suit was revealing, not too much to be crass but just enough to be sensual. I guess I find that attractive? The woman enters, the lights follow her. She sets a chair in the middle of the stage. She leaves the stage to the right. Some lights stay on the chair, the others follow her. She comes back with a cello and puts it in front of the chair. She goes away and comes back with a black box. She sits in the chair and opens the black, take the contents in her hands and puts everything next to her on the ground. I recognize some mics and see some type of wallet. She proceeds to put the different mics on her cello at different spots. She connects the mics and activate them. They must have been cable-less mics. We can hear the sounds of what she’s doing more clearly. She puts the cello in front of the chair. She stands up and removes her blazer very slowly, then she removes her pants, again, very slowly. Gasps from the audience, when the gasps happen, she pauses, looks at audience and goes even more slowly. She moans after sounds are emitted from the audience. She continues to remove her clothes, very slowly. Once she’s in her bra and underwear. She takes the cello and proceeds to remove the strings. We can hear every sound of this removal from the mics she has installed. Once they are removed, she removes her bra. She exhales faster, she looks at the audience with a half smile. She proceeds very slowly with ample movements to pick up the wallet. When I write ample, I mean that you can see her breasts and her posterior jiggle around. She strokes her body from her feet to her face as she’s doing this. When the wallet arrives on her face, she opens the zipper with her teeth. She takes out cello strings from the wallet. She throws away the wallet, goes to the cello and sits down on the floor. She puts the cello in front of her body and removes her underwear. She puts the cello between her legs. While doing all of this, as people gasp, she slows down and moans louder and louder at the reactions of the audience. She then proceeds to put the news strings on the cello, again, very slowly. Once finished, She caresses the cello and her moaning reaches a climax. Until all the light cut. We hear her breathing calm down as we hear footsteps. The lights reappear in the center and only the chair remains. The lights then dim down until it’s completely dark. We hear a female voice, I suppose hers, saying “I love you”.
A standing ovation. I only remember that it was louder than what we had received.
I had the opportunity to hear her talk to the audience afterwards. She talked about the same thing as us: being in the moment, the relationship between audience and performer, being vulnerable and daring to show it, the risk linked to this vulnerability, how the risk enhances the moment and many other interesting and very abstract subjects.
I have to admit, the production value of her show was better than ours: One attractive well-dressed woman vs 5 hippy dressed creepy dudes and two loosely dressed dancers, No stage production vs light and sound work, no structure vs Clear steps. Her performance was just better than ours on so many levels.
She credited her technical assistant with helping her making this performance possible.
And finally, the last one:
It’s a beautiful summer day, I’m at a parc with my daughters at an event. There are stands with all kinds of workshops. There are families with kids of all ages. The concerts are supposed to be the main attraction, but we came for the kids’ activities. One of my daughters was a toddler and the other was a baby. For noise reasons, we stayed away from the important events and stayed in the workshop zone. There was several circus, theatre and carnaval troupes performing. I will focus on one that I call, the dragoneers. They had built a big mechanical and moving dragon and several smaller ones. The big dragon was similar to the one in Shrek. It was a she, a female dragon, wearing make-up, lip-stick, eye-liner, etc. Instead of blowing fire, she blew small pink paper hearts. The smaller dragons were her children and they followed her around. Coming from inside her, there came jazz manouche music. The songs had lyrics telling her story, it talked about the hardships of being a dragon mom and how difficult it was, especially when the kids don’t listen to their moms. Around her were the dragoneers, a group of people dressed like early 20th century plane pilots who had flight helmets to pass around to the kids who wanted to ride on the back of the dragon. It was also their job to put the kids on the dragon, sing the songs and show the dance choreography to everyone around.
Needless to say, my toddler loved it and was amazed. To be honest, I was amazed too.
This troupe did everything themselves: the costumes, the mechanical dragons, the music, the lyrics, the dances, the acting, the juggling/circus routines, etc. The closest thing I could compare it to, would be a carnival stout.
Let’s activate our left brains and talk about the funding of those three performances. This is a very high-level analysis but it gives an idea of what funding art costs. Let’s start with my concert.
We were five musicians and two dancers. If we think about material costs for medium cheap instrumentation.
One-time costs Musicians (about 3700€) :
- 1000€ a drumset,
- 500€ bass, 300€ bass amp
- flute 300€, Flute mic 100€
- electric guitar 500€, 300€ guitar amp,
- synth 500€, amp for synth 200€.
I won’t add the costume costs as both we the musicians and dancers performed in our regular clothes.
To perform this concert, we needed to put 3700€ upfront.
Also, all the musicians were very competent in their field. This means that we need to factor in the costs of the training they received all their life along with the time that went into studying their craft. In other words, the costs linked to becoming a competent artists.
For me, I’d been playing music about 5 years at that time. Practicing each day at least 30 minutes a day and 4 hours a day that last year. I was enrolled in the conservatory (500€ a year) and in a academy (300€ a year for four years). I also had some private classes (20€ per hour).
For me, the monetary costs of competence were around 2000€. The other musicians were more experienced than me, so we can suppose that this amount was higher for them.
Because I loved doing this, I will not convert the time costs into a monetary amount.
We were paid 400€ for the performance and we split it 50€ per performer, except the leader who got 100€ for finding the gig.
I’d like to discuss the unseen costs for that specific performance in more detail. I discuss them, because I’ve always hated doing them. In my dream world, I would play all my concerts at my house at a time of day that suits my schedule. But alas, the music business is not so accommodating to my needs.
Here are some recurrent costs for each performance: Transport to and from the place of performance, Parking, etc. Those were nihil for the dancers as they came in with the leader’s van. On average I had about 10€ in gas costs per concert.
Recurrent Immaterial costs: Time for transporting everything, setting it up, doing soundchecks, waiting for our moment of performance, waiting for the moment to remove everything, networking, transporting things back home. Those were mostly nihil for the dancers as they only had to wait.
Let’s say you play a one hour concert at 10pm but have to do sound check a 6pm. After meeting and talking to people. You usually leave the place around midnight to 1 am. You can’t leave your things in the car for the night, it’s valuable and could be stolen, so you need to factor in the storage time. That means that for a 10pm concert, you start at 5pm and end at around 2am. That’s 9 hours, paid at 50€ or about 5,55€ and hour.
I will now take my personal situation. At 50€ per concert, breaking even for me without the immaterial costs means:
Revenue = 50 € * number of concerts
Costs = 800 (gear) + 2000 (training) + 10 € * number of concerts
I’m breaking even around 70 concerts. To reiterate, I’m not factoring in costs like drinks, food, taxes, admin, overhead, phone, other car costs, etc.
Like most musicians, the big problem I had, was finding concerts. There weren’t too many places to play. At one point, I was in about 10 bands at the same time and it still wasn’t enough to have the equivalent of a low-income salary. I had to complement it with other things like teaching or regular jobs.
But I didn’t stop, I still kept doing it. Because, and left brained people might find it difficult to understand this, I loved doing it.
Looking back, yes, I could’ve lived from my music if I lived frugally and combined it with other income streams like teaching for example. I know a lot of artists that live this way, but as my life evolved, I chose to abandon music as a career path.
The benefits? I have a stable and okay income. The drawbacks? I have less time for music. This lost time means less artistic networking, less creative collaborations, less creative output, less interesting musical projects, etc.
Don’t be sad for me, I still create to this day. This article being one project of mine. The difference now is that I have to focus, I can only do so much at a time. It has forced me to focus on the projects that are really close to my heart. I believe that this as a good thing.
Moving on to the cello performance. As she didn’t play the cello, I’ll take a cheap price, 500€. Two sets of cello strings 100€. A pinstripe suit 200€. 4 Cello Mics 800€.
Her costs were about 1600€ upfront as the rest of the material was owned by the place we performed at.
She and her technical assistant were paid 2000€. The next performance, she breaks even. I have no idea how much opportunities she gets for her performances.
Her immaterial costs were similar as ours except that they had less material and thus less time to setup. Her performance was obviously well prepared in advance, so we need to add the preparation time to the immaterial costs that I mentioned for me.
Moving on to the dragon company. I asked some circus/theatre friends how it usually works. I learned that they usually form troupes. Similar to bands in music. They’re usually bigger and require more money to set them up. Some create legal entities for their troupes. Some are subsidized by the government or sponsored by private parties.
I have no idea of the prices and don’t have the time to look everything up but do feel free to make your own calculation with the information I will provide.
The costs of the costumes, the materials for making the dragons, the tools to create those dragons, the music instruments used to record the songs, everything needed to make the dragon “fire” and the tools to make them, the musical equipment to play the dragon music, the production costs of the music.
Compared to the last two described, Transportations costs are even more costly as they need to literally bring 5 dragons to a park. One of them was 4 meters high.
For immaterial costs, add every one that I’ve described in the last two examples but add the creation time for all costumes, dragon, decorations, creation & recording of the music. To me, that seems a lot of time, but as they’re a big troupe, they can delegate and split the work.
Another important detail is that this troupe was performing the whole afternoon and the dragoneers always stayed in character.
Mrs cello and us didn’t perform that long and we didn’t need to stay in character, in other words, our performance was shorter.
From what I gathered of the discussions with some dragoneers at the event, they were operating at a loss.
And I can hear you thinking, and yes, I agree with you: That is a major reason why we fund art, it wouldn’t be possible to have this if they didn’t have any help.
So why am I writing all of this? It seems from the last paragraph that I’m building a case for funding art.
Sure, you can look at it that way. But it’s also possible to look at it from another angle.
I’d like now to discuss some other parts of the conversation with the theatre/circus people. The troupes that don’t get funding usually have their own members contribute monetarily. They usually also offer paid workshops. In summary, they find creative ways to fund their art.
When one asks a question about why we should fund art, the answers will always go in a certain direction: Money !
I did the exercise because I believe it is important to have the practical realities of doing art in our minds. It’s not cheap and it’s time consuming.
Sure, we could talk about the fact that Mrs Cello had a more professional presentation than we had. I could talk about the rising costs of making a dragon or the rising costs of gas.
This would all be great arguments about why we should fund artists.
But the title is different and the single reason why we shouldn’t fund artists is a simple one.
What do they all have in common? The answer is so easy that we regularly forget it.
They love what they do, it didn’t matter to me that I wasn’t getting paid as much as the Mrs. Cello. The dragoneers didn’t care about the pay, it’s just a bonus for them.
True creators create regardless of the result or the benefits that they will get from their creation, they just create and keep doing it. When they can’t create, they find ways to keep doing it.
If you fund that activity, you’ll just be stimulating fake creators. Creators who wouldn’t have been creating if they didn’t have the help.
From an economics point of view, you’re creating an abundance of supply in art and artists which lowers the price of art for all artists. Maybe even lowers it to the level of it being free.
The demand for art is already limited in so many ways. Where I live, artists compete for limited spots in government funded spaces that have lost most their budget to austerity or in private spaces that face increasing costs of operating their business.
Does this mean the end of art? Of course not, as I’m writing this, I look across the street and see some jugglers performing for stationary cars. They’re busking for some change, probably looking to fund some costly performance.
I’m sure that the dragoneers are preparing for their next show. Maybe it will be a unicorn? Or they might be doing something completely different.
Mrs Cello is probably refining and preparing another performance.
And me, before editing this article, I was practicing trombone because I want to record brass sounds for some songs I’d like to produce. And yes, I bought a trombone. If it was about the money, I would just use some midi samples and be done with it.
Artists will continue to create. Even with all the odds against them, they will continue to create. They’re the most creative people on earth. They don’t need our funding to create art.