The Seattle Arts Scene Today: Full of Hopes and Full of Fears

Good people making strained decisions because they keep thinking it’s about HOW they produce art, not WHY

Seattle Rep is laying off 12% of its workforce.

ACT (A Contemporary Theatre) and Seattle Shakespeare are working out a merger.

Bellevue Art Museum (Bellevue is a wealthy, somewhat conservative, mostly White and Asian suburb of Seattle – sometimes referred to as the Orange County (CA) of Seattle) is in constant danger of closing, and has embarked on an old Seattle campaign favorite, the Oral Roberts School of Fundraising Emergency Funding Campaign.

Taproot Theatre Company in North Seattle is also following that path.

Book-It Repertory Theatre already closed.

All because of money.

And dependence on ticket sales. For money.

And dependence on the same donors. For money.

And dependence on a system of art for art’s sake, wherein the artists in charge of the companies (as opposed to the artists who live in the community – or, frankly, anyone who lives in the community) produce work that proves something to them. For money.

Or, if you ask some of the red-ballcap or foil-fedora folks, it’s because somehow, Seattle has become an urban cesspool that nobody wants to live in anymore. It’s empty! To them, Seattle’s arts-mosphere suffers from a love of DEI (whatever that is) and all the political correctness and kowtowing to the educated elite and whatever other defecatory detritus tends to float to the surface of an urban cesspool. It’s become a place for danger, homelessness, and the desperately poor, not for families or Puritan White folks, you know, the ones that built this country.

Or, if you ask the folks on the other side of that political line (which is nearly everyone else), it’s because somehow, Seattle has become a plutocratic playground where only the richest people can afford to live. They’re right-wing loving, conservative religious nuts, supporting elitist, out-of-touch institutions. This is an arts-mosphere filled with nonprofits that only serve the rich who donate to the nonprofits that only serve the rich who donate to the nonprofits that only serve the rich, ad infinitum. It’s become a place for capitalistic freak shows, continual tromping on the rights of people of color, and billionaire bullying, not for anyone but the Puritan White folks, you know, the ones who take undeserved credit for building this country with free labor provided by poor people, especially those whose skin is not toilet-porcelain hued.

Truth is meaningless to both ends of the discussion. Appearances are everything. To us holding the popcorn, we see two sides that have their crania foisted so far northward within their respective alimentary canals that both appear intransigently intolerant. Both sides embrace cancel culture. There are terrible people on both sides, trying to serve themselves.

As far as Seattle being “empty,” well, that’s just a lie. Median home prices just passed $1 million. Empty towns don’t have expensive real estate. That’s just not how that works.

So are Seattle arts organizations just run by bungling executives wearing huge boutonnieres that squirt water, giant floppy shoes, and hex color #fe0002 proboscises?

No. Most of the executive leaders of Seattle arts organizations are capable, inventive, and often innovative people looking for new methods to make their organizations work. The question for them is neither “How?” nor “What?” The questions I consistently ask them are, “Why?” and “To what end?”

As long as the answer to that question doesn’t change from some version of “because art” and evolve (as the rest of the nonprofit sector has) into some version of “because community,” or better yet, “because impact” — and not just impact in the spectator sense, but in the real sense of tangibly helping those who need it, rather than just entertaining those who want it — these wonderful leaders will burn out, seek newer and more fulfilling experiences, or just plain quit and go work at some job job for the money. Some already have, to their credit.

Board members are a key to the problem and the answer to the problem, but they’re not skilled enough to understand the problem (for the most part). And many are led by toxic leaders who are in it for the parties and self-gratification, for the “being-thanked” instead of the “thanking,” for the vicarious kudos for something that is not worthy of them.

Seattle Rep is a good example, and as a note, I should mention that I worked there for several years, several years ago. When they announced their recent cuts, Jeffrey Herrmann, the managing director and among the smartest in the business (no joke – he’s terrific) has been forced to talk about reduced revenues as a pandemic problem.

It is not. The pandemic may have rushed things along, but this has been coming for a couple of decades now.

This is a commentary, of course, but the problem is not with the executives. It’s not with the Seattle theater artists, who undoubtedly will become more marginalized than ever. It’s not even that arts organizations are closing or in danger of doing so. One of the biggest problems lay at the feet of the city’s movers and shakers during past “booms that weren’t booms at all” at ArtsFund, the Kreielsheimer Foundation, Seattle Center, the City of Seattle, and in some way, all of the other arts-funding mechanisms in the region for funding buildings over impact. The amount of money spent on buildings for arts organizations during a specific 25-year period, from 1976-2001, was staggeringly exorbitant, propping up venerable (aka old) organizations and ultimately destroying newer, more innovative ones. Rather than creating a nonprofit arts community, the buildings divided it, creating an ever-widening chasm between the elite, large organizations and the lifeblood of the arts community, the nimble, small ones. Arts columnists who were staunch, old-guard arbiters of production value (and anything else that had nothing to do with the charitable work provided by the company) celebrated the spending and the results, not because the nonprofits were doing exemplary work, but because they were able to gain some reflected glory from sitting in suddenly straining, brand-new, wider seats.

That has begotten a local industry dependent on humongous funding sprees (instead of impact sprees), which makes the whole industry appear to exist at the whim of the billionaire class, regardless of their nonprofit designations.

In upcoming articles, I’ll provide you some research I discovered to support this theory, but know that the dollar figures are there as well as the cronyism-based, quasi-nepotistic funding methods. They’re extremely complex and I’m covering a certain 25-year “boom” period that grossly miscalculated the needs of the arts organizations vis-à-vis the needs of their varied communities. But, and this should come as no surprise, the same people gave to the same people in instance after instance. And, shockingly, sometimes a member of the board of the donor organization served as either a board member of the receiving organization, or in one case, was the CEO of the receiving organization. I’m sure there are conflict-of-interest issues involved with that but make no assumptions…yet.