Creating a sustainable artistic marketplace

[Tom Storer]

Came across this interesting blog post and this one at the end of some clicks that started on Do The Math.

Excerpts:

I’ve been doing some thinking on what “sustainability” means for the arts.

Certainly, the term has had buzzword status in the field for at least several years, especially at the philanthropy/grand strategy level. Yet this ubiquity obscures the fact that when people talk about sustainability, they usually mean one of two different things. The more common usage comes from the donor perspective and boils down to when can I stop pouring money into this thing? For these people, a “sustainable” business model essentially means one that generates money from people other than them on a consistent and reliable basis, preferably in direct exchange for goods and services to a large extent since business-minded people tend to inherently distrust any long-term reliance on charity. [...]

By contrast, when other people mention sustainability, they mean it in more of an ecological sense. This definition of sustainability boils down to a system that, once set in motion, can run effectively without further input from the outside. It’s a much broader conception of the issue and one much more ideally suited for policy discussions as they relate to the arts (or other fields). The arts can easily be conceptualized in this way: the most important elements of the ecosystem would include artists themselves, the organizations that help to bring their work before the public, the ticket-buyers and other beneficiaries of arts programming, and the government and private institutions that subsidize the cost of doing it all. Certainly there are many important details that the above picture leaves out, but most attempts I’ve seen to define the arts infrastructure have shared these elements in common. A sustainable system is one that is kept in balance by its various components, where resources passing out of one part of the system are replaced or reused in another part. Markets, when they work, are inherently sustainable because the value created through transactions can be recycled to create more value in the future. The arts have a problem there because their costs cannot, in some ways by definition, be supported by the market. Therefore, a marketplace model that relies on other levers (like peer respect) is needed [...]

I am beginning to suspect that the arts are suffering from a different kind of sustainability that is much more serious, in part because it is much trickier to deal with. This problem is the disappearing viability of the career as a professional artist for more than a tiny minority of A-list individuals.

Read the linked articles, which are quite long, and discuss.

[CraigP]

Sounds interesting, I'll read them; but for now, I have to go to work to improve my sustainability.