You are reading an arts blog, so I am guessing you know who Rocco Landesman is. If not, no worries; here's some background. He's from St. Louis, the son of Jay and Fran Landesman, founders of The Crystal Palace in Gaslight Square. He was also a Broadway producer—he brought Angels in America to the stage—and two years ago, he was appointed chairman of the National Endowment for the Arts.
He's also a very straightforward guy, one who just sort of puts things out there. On Monday, he blogged about comments he made during a panel last week, about "the mismatch that currently exists in supply and demand for not-for-profit arts organizations in our country." (You can watch that speech here.) Lanesman's a theater guy, and he was talking to theater people, but these comments could potentially apply to all arts organizations, from museums to poetry journals to Morris dancing troupes. Landesman observed that "there are 5.7 million arts workers in this country and two million artists. Do we need three administrators for every artist? Resident theaters in this country began as collectives of artists. They have become collectives of arts administrators. Do we need to consider becoming more lightly institutionalized in order to get more creativity to more audiences more often? It might also allow us to pay artists more." I haven't watched the video of Landesman's comments, but I thought his blog post sounded measured and reasonable; how can you argue with increasing arts education, which is the only proven method of increasing audience over the long-term? I can't quite tell if the angry firestorm of comments he's evoked are in response to his original speech, the blog post, or both, but they do seem to originate mostly from people who work in theater and/or arts administration. (Not surprisingly, many artists, including this playwright, agree with Lanesman's stance.) Those who vehemently disagree seem to think Landesman is saying the problem is, as New York Times' Artsbeat blog put it,"too much theater." In fact, I was shocked to find two different posts using the charged term "death panel," as if Landesman was about to launch some kind of pogrom against small theater groups, which seems a bit hysterical. The Artful Manager took a pretty balanced position, acknowledging that Landesman has his points, but notes he comes with a natural bias with his for-profit theater background; measuring everything in market success would mean risking the loss of brilliant works like The Rite of Spring, which bombed when it opened. The conversation has definitely been thoughtful, if a bit overdramatic. You can follow the debate in real time via Twitter through the #SupplyDemand hashtag.
