A recent blog post at the blog Arts Admin by Michael Rushton (the director of the Arts Administration programs at Indiana University at Bloomington) talks about scarcity in the arts market,

It’s a struggle to run a nonprofit performing arts organization and stay in the black. That goes for theatre companies as well as performing arts centres. Given the demand for theatre performances, and opportunities for fund-raising for theatre companies, there is only so much money to go around.

Through this long newspaper story, the only clear take-away is that a coalition of arts groups wants more of that scarce pool of money in their accounts, and less in the BAAC’s. And the BAAC doesn’t agree. Not a surprising conflict, and each side is trying to make their case publicly.

So, let’s turn to policy – how should rental prices be set?

Performing space is a scarce resource that costs money to provide. It is not clear to me, and is not made clear anywhere in this long article, why one arts organization ought to provide it at well-below cost to other organizations.

I commented that I have often wondered why more organizations don’t consider consolidating their operations as a way to take advantage of economies of scale, thereby sharing/cutting costs and increasing profits. This kind of talk is usually considered pretty dirty in the arts world. Collaboration, in particular for profit motive, can be seen as tainting the original goal, or perhaps the soul of the original work. Collaboration may require an expanded mission or re-thinking a season’s shows or a gallery’s offerings. However, I would argue this is likely seen more in individual artists or smaller arts organizations, where their focus many be a narrow niche.

I’m of the opposite mind. I believe that collaboration (and thereby, increased dissemination of art) enhances, strengthens, and preserves art.

The Financial Times recently discussed this issue as well,

One of the biggest operatic successes on the London stage in recent years has been the production of Madam Butterfly by the film director Anthony Minghella at English National Opera.

But the critically acclaimed show might never have made it to the stage had it not been for the company’s ground-breaking partnership with New York’s Metropolitan Opera, which enabled it to share production costs.

John Berry, artistic director of ENO, says the company’s emphasis on artistic collaboration over the past three years has enabled it to achieve its target of mounting up to 12 new productions a year. “The amount of public funding is simply not enough to sustain the amount of new work we are creating…What is important is that [the collaborations] are artistically driven. They don’t dilute the product; they strengthen it.”

I believe many artists fear sharing or opening their work to collaboration with other people/groups/countries/ethnicities because they feel there is something so special about what they are doing, that they and only they can preserve it.