Tough Financial Questions for America's Symphony Orchestras

The Philadelphia Orchestra
Almost every one of America's 1200 orchestras has seen the economic collapse of their endowment. Long range planning that took place a decade or two ago was based on the assumption that the stock market and other investment vehicles would continue to grow and throw off healthy dividends. That assumption proved correct for many years, but now lies in a deflated heap of devalued paper.

At the same time competition for the top name conductors, soloists, players and even administrators heated up, fed by the artist management companies, fickle public taste and opportunistic head hunters. Salaries escalated to meet the ability of large endowments to cover the shortfall between ticket sales, contributions and higher expenses. Here's an excerpt from a brilliant column you must read in the Philadelphia Inquirer written by their music critic, Peter Dobrin.
Los Angeles Philharmonic Music Director Esa-Pekka Salonen, left, poses with Venezuelan conductor Gustavo Dudamel, center, and Board of Director President Deborah Borda as they announced Salonen's 2009 departure and Dudamel's appointment.

"Is it really a good thing that Deborah Borda, president of the Los Angeles Philharmonic Association, made well over $1 million for the year that ended in September 2007? Or that a hornist in the New York Philharmonic made $300,000, an oboe player in the Philadelphia Orchestra $249,000?

How about a stagehand at Carnegie Hall who makes $425,911 - plus $107,041 in contributions to benefits plans and deferred compensation?

These are the kind of salaries you'd expect in a sector with more money than it knows what to do with, not one fretting about the future.

One of the most startling costs of running an orchestra is the guest roster, with pianists, violinists, cellists, and others making $30,000 to $70,000 for a single performance. Are they worth it?" - Peter Dobrin

We thank the always helpful Arts Journal for pointing us towards this timely story, filled with the kind of details that make for good reading. So does Peter Dobrin's blog.

We have already begun to see the top salaries for corporation executives, athletes, pop stars, and yes, nonprofit arts organizations begin to crumble. Just how far they will tumble remains to be seen, and we can't help thinking that the arts will take the severest beating.
Empty stages in our future?
The New York City Opera is desperately trying to shape a budget to support another season. They have approached their unions for concessions so that the company may begin performing again, and the unions have rebuffed the overture, saying the management is responsible for the problems and they won't give an inch. With this sort of myopic attitude there may well be no work at all for them. And that would be a tragedy.

Büchel - MoCA Redux - follow the money

Photo manipulations by Larry Murray with thanks to Charles Giuliano for the Joe Thompson photo.

The controversy over Christoph Büchel's Training Ground for Democracy is not likely to end anytime soon. I wrote about it on this blog last Summer, and the exhibit has since been deconstructed, demolished, and damned to the landfill.

First Buchel Story
Second Buchel Story
Recent Charles Giuliano article in Berkshire Fine Arts

But the paperwork lives on.


And the miracle of the multiplication of the loaves and fishes has nothing on what the artist and museum have been doing with the tons of paperwork created in the flurry of discovery requests leading up to the infamous trial. Both plaintiff and defendant got exactly what they wanted: a hook to hang fund raising and income producing efforts on.

Rather than suffering harm, the controversy is ultimately turning into a pot of gold for both of them.

Büchel has taken his boxes of legal documents and begun to show them at exhibits at his own gallery in New York, Maccarone, and at Art Basel Miami Beach. His increased notoriety no doubt helped him capture the $100,000 Hugo Bass prize. He has priced some of the documents from the trial at a quarter of a million dollars.
The artist as capitalist is an impressive thing to behold.

Meanwhile Joe Thompson, head of Mass MoCA and his development staff have turned the controversy into patron gold. At a fundraiser held in New York, the museum raised a million dollars, four times as much as the event generated before. It is also noteworthy that the previously unendowed museum has now raised some $12 million for its long range stability, one-third towards its goal of $35 million.

And though the museum lost ground in terms of attendance during the year the Büchel project tied up its main gallery, it has since racked up significant increases in visitation, some of which has to be attributed to the greater awareness the controversy brought.

The New York Times wrote about this today in their Sunday Arts Section complete with a slide show:

Times Feature

Accusations, Depositions: Just More Fodder for Art
By RANDY KENNEDY

The battle between Christoph Büchel and the Massachusetts Museum of Contemporary Art, one of the most publicized and minutely dissected the art world had ever seen, continues.
The legal documents as art - NY Times Photo

To me, the exhibition of legal papers is fairly dull, deserving the mundane setting of a classroom rather than that of a gallery. But even if these paper works end up in a museum somewhere, there is as message to be learned here. Celebrity sells.

It appears that both the museum and outraged artist have made a satisfying brew from their lemons.