An article on budget cuts, layoffs, and salary cutbacks in Portland, Oregon’s arts scene this past weekend was a sad, if unsurprising, thing to read. This is happening all over, including here in Minnesota, of course, and while those of us here like to talk a good game about how much worse things could be if we weren’t lucky enough to live in a place where so many people care deeply about what we do, the frightening reality is that, based on everything we know from past downturns, the arts will be one of the last sectors to fully recover.

So yeah, we’re cutting, they’re cutting, everyone’s cutting. But hang on. There’s this guy Michael Kaiser – runs the Kennedy Center in Washington, D.C., became a legend in the arts biz by dragging orchestras and dance companies  back from the brink and making them solvent again – who’s running around the country telling everyone that we’re doing this exactly wrong:

You can’t save your way to health. You don’t get healthy by getting smaller, by doing less… [Also,] focus on today and tomorrow not yesterday. There’s no time for blame. When things are bad many people sit around talking about where it went wrong. That’s not healthy.

Hm, okay. I guess that’s more or less what Joe Dowling was saying last week when he told MPR that it had been a mistake to cut the Guthrie’s rehearsal schedule to save money this past season.  Still, that kind of broad pronouncement is easy to make in a speech, but harder to implement in the real world. If you’re not supposed to cut your way back to fiscal stability, but you have 33% less in your endowment than you did last year (and everyone else is in the same boat,) how can you possibly survive as an organization?

You have to plan your art. Most organizations plan their art too close to event. You need to plan four and five years out. First, you can make art better if you take more time. Second, you can do a better job fundraising. “I listen to the funder, find out what do they like to fund. I have a menu of five years of projects, so I can choose best event for funder.” Finally, “It helps me to educate my audience to want to see something that is not so accessible. I’m excited about projects that are transformational. But this requires some education of the audience. And with time, you can educate in advance. Creativity has been beaten out of so many arts organizations. Planning ambitious work four years out, creating big vision is what’s needed.”

Now, that makes very good sense, and it’s also demonstrably true – Kaiser will be happy to reel off the evidence for you. But that doesn’t mean it’s easy. What he’s talking about is a wholesale shift in how we run our industry, and a much higher level of competence than a lot of arts leaders currently have, quite frankly. (Please note that I’m not talking about a lack of passion, or commitment. But the sad truth is that far too many American arts managers are thrown into the deep end of a very big pool without ever having been taught anything more sophisticated than the dog paddle.)

Another hard truth is that, when arts leaders who are competent and do have new ideas start talking about massive systemic change, a lot of the people who work under them (orchestra musicians, say) get very, very nervous, and even angry. Because change is scary, and to be perfectly honest, it’s very hard without the benefit of hindsight to tell the difference between a leader who’s genuinely trying to do something fantastic and new that will benefit everyone in the long run, and one who’s just in way over his/her head and has started babbling about “unsustainable business models” when what s/he really means is “My job is way too hard, so you’re all going to have take massive salary cuts to make it less hard.” (The orchestra world is littered with the carcasses of ensembles that cut and cut and cut in the name of some sort of ill-defined “transformation,” then discovered too late that they’d cut themselves out of relevance in their community and ceased to have a reason to exist.)

Throw in the additional wrinkle that most large non-profit arts boards are made up of very wealthy and generous people from the decidedly for-profit world, and you have a recipe for combustion when times get tough. Since for-profit companies exist to make money, and to preserve capital, it can be very difficult for people used to that world to remember that cultural groups exist for entirely different reasons, and that they therefore need different strategies to weather fiscal storms. Likewise, it’s easy for those on the receiving end of a board’s largess to forget that we quite literally wouldn’t have careers without their continuing generosity. It’s a very understandable disconnect, but it does lead to a lot of frustration on all sides.

Chaos is frequently the enemy of progress, and my take on why so many orchestras, in particular, flounder in tough times is that too many of us don’t find a way to pull on the oars together when we need to most. Faced with a crisis, some musicians dig in their heels and insist everything will work itself out, some managers see an excuse to make the massive cuts they’ve been wanting to impose for years, and some board members feel caught in the middle of it all and eventually do what they would do at their for-profit firms – find the route with the least apparent risk and set a course down it.

But if Michael Kaiser and an increasingly audible chorus of others are to be believed, that less risky route might actually keep us with our heads barely above water for far longer than we can afford.

This post was written by Sam Bergman and published on Inside the Classics.