Paradise Lost: Can We Keep Nonprofits From Failing?

On my first day in the nonprofit world, I was introduced as “the new suit.” Short shrift indeed for the years I'd spent undergoing rigorous formal musical training. My decades of hard-won success in the for-profit sector, it seemed, had marked me with a sort taint in certain corners of the art world — had made me seem somehow less artistically chaste than I had been considered in my younger days. After all, I must have sold out by choosing to create companies rather than compositions over the intervening span of years. And now here I was suggesting we, as artists, ought to figure out a better way to pay for what we do.

What nerve. What gall. Here were my instructions, the day I arrived: “You are to pursue a group of well-heeled funders — patrons as they're called in the art world — and hope they give us bundles of cash so we can do our thing.” That was pretty much it. That was, in essence, the sum total of the business plan with which I was presented. And this little arrangement presumably would remain hunky-dory so long as we took pains never to alienate our sugar daddies. But under this regime, I speculated, one is not really in the art business anymore, is one? No, the beggar ultimately acts primarily upon the impulse to satisfy his patrons — or better yet, has a staff to do that for him. And so, I wondered, what are we all going to do when we eventually recognize we've constructed a gilded trap for ourselves by this practice?