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I started a dance company to make art happen, to make community, to make dances and make meaning.
I raised money, and the money made possible more dances. Gradually, my collaborators and I were able to pay ourselves. And then a company manager. And then a managing director. And then all of those people had children.
Incrementally, our budget conversations shifted. We had five people—five families—receiving salaries and health insurance. Looking at project budgets and grant applications, we began asking: How can we allocate more funds to cover these salaries? How can we use this revenue to pay for health insurance? We still made art and worked our asses off. But the incentives changed: Financially, the organization focused on funding five salary lines a year (no small feat for a small experimental dance company).
And we were an artist-led organization, about as grassroots as you can get. Imagine a museum with four layers of hierarchy, an annual budget in the millions, and hundreds of employees. Nearly every decision will be—must be—made through the lens of that huge annual salary number.
Quietly, over time, that becomes the norm. Because meanwhile, arts professionals meet up at conferences. They build professional networks, serve together on panels, trade jobs.
Along the way, a dubious assumption is normalized: We arts professionals are the key practitioners in this sector and thus deserve—and need—our salary lines.
Little of this is malicious or greedy. I think most arts organizations and arts professionals have generous intentions. My company certainly did. But in a massively underfunded environment, most scramble to fund salaries, so paying artists remains an afterthought.
The incentives do not align.
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What would it mean for the incentives to be aligned?
One example: I have a literary agent who earns a percentage of my advances and royalties. When I make money, she makes money, and vice versa. The better I do, the better she does. The incentives align.
In the nonprofit arts world, it is often the reverse. The more a curator pays my dance company to perform, the less that curator has to pay their own salary. Arts professionals are often forced to choose between paying artists well and paying their own staff. That’s a misaligned incentive.
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Could we align the incentives? Funders certainly could. Artists, if we organized, might.
The simplest way: Funders require arts organizations to devote a set percentage of their budgets to paying artists.
Arts organizations, like all organizations, are good at maximizing their own benefit. To maintain grant funding, they would quickly meet any target that was set. Simply requiring organizations to disclose how much of their budget goes to artists—and why don’t they disclose that?—would likely change some behavior.
You could make it more fun by saying: Arts professionals in Philadelphia will receive health insurance once 90% of Philadelphia artists have health insurance.
Watch the proportion of insured artists skyrocket as every museum, theater, and festival hosts Affordable Care Act workshops and end-of-year Obamacare signup drives.
Something you will never see, but a fun thought experiment: Philadelphia arts professionals may earn no more than 120% the average annual earnings of Philadelphia artists
That's all it means to align incentives:
They do better when we do better.
