What is the biggest threat to arts institutions today?
It's not racism, sexism, money, politics or even NFTs. It's moral philosophy, and it's hard to argue with.
Consider the following: you’re a successful business owner or professional of early-middle age. Perhaps your money came from options in a tech startup that was acquired by a unicorn company, or from a jump up the corporate ladder that led to a seven-figure salary, or perhaps you’ve been smart about your real-estate holdings and other investments and can now live comfortably on the passive income.
You are also well educated. Your college degree is from an elite university. If you have one, your graduate degree, in business, or law, or engineering, is from an even more elite university. The people in your social circles are similarly situated, and so tend to gather in elite enclaves, and get involved in each others “causes” — because that is what you have when you are a member of the elite.
The arts for you aren’t exactly a cause, at least they have not been until now. Before this point in your life the arts were something you learned about, perhaps from your parents, likely in school, and then from your peers or romantic partners (like languages, interests in the arts are often sexually transmitted). You went to some galleries and museums. Being able to speak intelligently about the newest “novel of ideas” got you a bit of status. It didn’t hurt that, once you could afford it, the benefit gala was beneficial to business and making new friends (being seen doing so didn’t hurt either). And let’s face it, ballet dancers are objectively beautiful.
So though you began as a consumer, you became a supporter, perhaps even a patron. Consumption became a cause, or at least could be rationalized that way. You bought “hard art” to decorate your home (or homes), to “live” with art, and to enliven your mind through conversations with artists and the things they make. Ticket purchases became memberships, and memberships became invitations to join “councils” and “circles” and perhaps even boards.
You eventually got the idea — never uttered outright — that consuming art, even supporting artists, wasn’t enough. Causes require infrastructure and administration and professionals — they require institutions. Missions, after all, are expensive. But philanthropy is the thing that elites do, and what could be a more deserving cause than the good, the true, and the beautiful? — especially today, when nothing is more good, more true, and more beautiful than justice.
It’s never been easier to write that check to the museum or music center, has it?
But hold up. Ours is also an age of optimization. From our selves to our services, one of the main tenets of our time is to do more with what we have got, and to demand more of others too.
At times this has been called “venture philanthropy” and more recently “impact investing” — the idea now is that what one gives must show returns as much as purpose. What is this money going to? How is it going to be spent? On what and whom? And what exactly are the outcomes?— and when we say “exactly” we mean numbers, not narratives.
When you write that check to the museum or music center, it’s no longer out of a sense of duty to a cause (one doesn’t question one’s duty) but it is with these returns very much in mind. If you’re dedicated to, and so paying for, a cause, you want to know that your money is being put to the best use it can. For many in the game of giving to the arts, this has meant big capital projects (more square footage) and programming (more bodies through turnstiles or butts in seats).
Now you begin to ask yourself, how much of my check is going directly to the mission, and how much of it is going to “operations”? It’s not that you don’t respect the operation. Of course you do. Without it, there would be no institution. It’s just that you’d like those operations to be as lean as possible (without going full Protestant Reformation of course). There’s no harm in asking one’s institutions to optimize, to do the most they can with the money they have been given. Why wouldn’t one optimize for the most good one can do?
This is the whole idea behind resources such as Charity Navigator, where thousands of nonprofit charities are categorized by “cause” and ranked by a “Give with Confidence” score that runs from zero to 100. (Only two museums on the site get a perfect score: the Imagine Children’s Museum in Everett, WA, and the Timken Museum of Art in San Diego, CA. But these are not exactly your metaphorical or literal areas of interest.) Getting good returns requires doing good research.
And so that’s what you do.
Very quickly, however, you come across people — mostly young people, younger than you at least — talking and writing about something called “EA” — Effective Altruism. You come across a site called Give Well, which was founded by some former hedge-funders from Bridgewater Associates. It applies to charities the same rigorous cost-benefit analyses that made Bridgewater one of the most successful asset managers in the world.1 You read stories about Sam Bankman-Fried, the founder of the crypto-exchange FTX and quantitative trading firm Alameda research, who was (and still is) interested in animal-rights causes but realized that he could scale his interest and impact by funding others’ salaries (he is now worth billions) rather than just doing the mission-driven work himself (“handing out leaflets,” as he described it).
Perhaps you read work by and about William MacAskill, the young Oxford moral philosopher and driving force behind EA as a “movement.” And what strikes you about EA is how, within its logic, the arts really don’t matter, or rather, matter very little in comparison to what you could (or should) be giving money to (let alone doing with your life2).
You listen, perhaps, to a recent podcast between MacAskill and the inimitable Tyler Cowen, in which MacAskill labels donations to the opera (which is really just a stand in for the “arts” in general) as “enormously ineffective.” Cowen, who has written one of the better books on the funding landscape for the arts in the United States (which he concludes is not at all bad), pushes back on MacAskill’s logic and asks why we shouldn’t be funding “monuments” to “our greatest and most profound creations.” Cowen acknowledges that, yes, “It’s a kind of elitism, but nonetheless, isn’t it important to keep those traditions alive and highly visible?” To which MacAskill cooly responds, “Is it going to pass the benefit-costs test? You’ve got to show me the numbers.” He then continues:
…you can still at least say, “At best, this message [by which he means these arts and their values] will reach this many people. At best, this message reaching people will, let’s say, increase the impact of their lives by a certain percentage.” Then you could at least get an upper bound, where you think, “With the most optimistic assumptions, how much benefit would be created by this extra run of the opera?” My strong guess would be that, even with those optimistic assumptions, it would not look comparable to other good things that one could be doing [emphasis added].
Your research might even bring you back to something I myself wrote in ArtReview magazine in 2015 on the occasion of the great moral philosopher Peter Singer’s publication of The Most Good You Can Do (Yale):
In the chapter titled “Are Some Causes Objectively Better than Others?” Singer poses the following thought experiment: you have $100,000 to donate. Your local museum wants to build a new wing which will cost $50 million, will last for 50 years, and will serve one million people a year. At 1/500th of the cost of the expansion, your $100k will serve to “enhance” (Singer’s word) 100,000 visitors’ museum experience. However, it takes only $100 to “prevent one to thirty years of blindness” in someone suffering from trachoma, one of the most easily treated causes of blindness in impoverished countries. Therefore your $100k could also prevent 1000 cases of blindness for on average 15 years. So what’s better? 100,000 enhanced museum visits or giving 1000 people the gift of sight?
Faced with this direct of a decision, most if not all of us would donate to cure the trachoma. But here is where Singer pushes the cost-benefit reasoning one step further so as to avoid a kind of ethical authoritarianism, in which some causes are simply always better than others. Suppose that the new wing of the museum is built, but because of some strange force (Singer calls it an “evil demon”), one in every 1000 visitors is struck blind for 15 years. Would you visit the new wing? Would anyone? Likely not. Here’s Singer: “If you agree, then you are saying, in effect, that the harm of one person’s becoming blind outweighs the benefits received by one thousand people visiting the new wing. Therefore a donation that saves one person from becoming blind would be better value than a donation that enables one thousand people to visit the new wing… you are, in effect, agreeing that a donation to prevent or cure blindness offers at least ten times the value of giving to the museum.” When would you visit the museum? When it’s only one in 10,000 chances of going blind? One in 50,000? Change your risk aversion and you change the relative value of your donation, but at any value, you have made a cost-benefit decision as to which cause is better.
At the end of that passage I wrote parenthetically “It still ain’t the museum.”
The fact is, the more you consider the logic of it, the more that logic appears pretty unassailable. And if one needed even more convincing, in 2019, no one less than Cass Sunstein, the one-time Obama administration regulatory “czar,” published The Cost-Benefit Revolution (MIT), which demonstrated how this type of thinking was essential not just in philanthropy but across the entirety of the public policy spectrum (where there is a real intersection of money and causes).
Switching gears here from you to us, perhaps it’s no mystery today that no one — and really, no one — in the art and cultural community, which is so dependent upon philanthropic dollars, is talking about EA. The conversation around museums and arts institutions today is still dominated by stories about their “identity crisis” and what they are doing about it. Which makes sense, given that pulling skeletons out of institutional closets and resetting presentational priorities in the name of social justice is well aligned with the newly revised missions of many major grant-making organizations, including those that fund the arts. Everyone is following the money; they have to, if they are going to serve their missions.
The real question that EA asks though is how do those missions measure up? And that’s not a measure that anyone in the arts really wants to start making, because next to the most impactful organizations out there — the ones that are really solving the inequities in the world when it comes to human well-being — most arts institutions, especially the ones that get the big new buildings and put on the flashy galas, don’t really rate.
At least at present. One can imagine a future when most of the major inequities that many of the people of this planet face on a daily basis have been ameliorated. Yes, this can be imagined — in fact, it’s what much of William MacAskill’s most recent book, What We Owe the Future asks us to consider. It’s a positive vision to hold on to and work towards, or at least donate to.
So what of the arts? We need to be careful here to distinguish the “arts” in general from the “institutions” that make it their mission to support it and patronize it. The question Do the arts need supporting? is a trickier one than it might seem. We have come to believe that the answer to it is a knee-jerk “Yes!” But when support looks like endless grant administration with time-sucking reporting requirements and endless follow-on fundraising “asks,” one can be forgiven for feeling like the philanthropy on offer is lacking some of its namesake “love.” In comparison, negotiated fees for service and straight-forward cash transactions, what often gets dismissed as mere “commerce,” can feel a lot more honest and morally defensible.
That may be too consumerist for some. It certainly remains problematic in the context of EA’s unforgiving logic. But at least it undoes the wrapper of moral rectitude that many in the arts philanthropy industry bind themselves in to get through the day. It also puts agency back where it belongs, with the creators, and the artists, and the people who care about the work that they do enough to value it in terms other than “charitable.”
For example, one of Give Well’s top charities, the Against Malaria Foundation, provides insecticide-coated mosquito nets to communities affected by malaria, which kills about 400,000 people a year, many of them children in sub-saharan Africa. The cost to purchase and distribute a net to a household in need is about $5. The cost-savings of this live-saving intervention is about $5,500. See Give Well’s Impact Estimates for more.
MacAskill founded 80,000 Hours, a Y Combinator-backed nonprofit that advises young people on pursuing the most impactful careers.