Richard Stein

My first full-time job after finishing grad school was as executive director of the Oswego County Council on the Arts in upstate New York.

Three and a half years ago, I returned to arts council management after more than 25 years as a theatre producer and director, when I was appointed executive director of Arts Orange County.

I don’t know which is worse, running an arts council or running a theatre in times like these, but one thing I’m sure of: I owe my success to breaking the rules.

There are plenty of people who’ve attempted to dissuade me from that path or criticized me for failing to adhere to the conventional wisdom of the field. Conventional wisdom may have contributed to the growth of America’s arts organizations in decades past, but it sure isn’t helping them much today.

I see this every day—and not just in the reforms I’ve been instituting at Arts Orange County, but among the many constituent organizations we serve.

Most of the large arts institutions have been slow to respond to societal and demographic changes occurring for more than ten years. The smart ones are playing catch-up as quickly as they possibly can, as they know their survival depends upon it.

A few remain in denial about it, and are being dragged kicking and screaming in new directions by what they consider to be meddling funders, like The James Irvine Foundation, which has been ardently (and almost single-handedly) trying to save California’s arts community after the near-demise of the California Arts Council ten years ago. They take Irvine’s money but are privately skeptical of the outcome.

Hopefully, these organizations will earnestly explore new ways of audience engagement, the focus of Irvine’s arts funding, backed up by several years of research by Alan Brown of Wolf Brown (Be sure and read their recently released study Getting In On the Act).

Arts Orange County contributed to this discussion, too, when it commissioned a modest study by two students in Claremont Graduate University’s Arts Management program last year entitled, Professional-Amateur Engagement: A Balancing Act in Arts Organizations.

To be sure, there’s no magic bullet for what ails the arts community.

But chucking the conventional wisdom is a step in the right direction.