“Pay-to-Play” Now on the Increase in the Arts

The marketing world has long been familiar with the “pay-to-play” style of doing business. There are many websites and publications where articles are published or institutions are listed in rankings only when money changes hands. For instance, many magazines that cover issues of interest to lawyers charge contributors hundreds of dollars to publish an article, since authors displaying their expertise is a form of advertising their services to potential clients.

In the art world, people don’t like to talk about the growth of “pay-to-play.” Spending money to have your work reach the public smacks of self-promotion and vanity. But increasingly, and quietly, arts organizations are charging artists to present their work. Many literary publishers are asking writers to buy a certain number of books in order to cover their costs; more and more literary magazines, presses, and contests are charging ever-larger fees for submissions; many theaters are requiring playwrights and performers to pay for expenses such as space rental, tech services, and marketing; and some galleries are charging artists to show their work.

I don’t blame arts organizations for passing some costs along to artists. It’s not as if nonprofit theaters, publishers, and galleries are raking in big bucks that they’re hiding from artists. The arts organizations are under enormous financial pressures that have forced them to adopt the “pay-to-play” model, often against their own inclinations. I do think it’s worth discussing the “pay-to-play” phenomenon in the arts, though, because it has implications for whose work is presented, and how and when artists attempt to reach the public.

There was a time in the not-so-distant past when the arts were often supported by wealthy patrons. I recently visited the Peggy Guggenheim Collection in Venice, for example, and was reminded that Peggy Guggenheim supported a number of artists and writers in the mid-twentieth century, including the painter Jackson Pollock and the writer Djuna Barnes. 

Peggy Guggenheim

If you read the letters of the poet Rainer Maria Rilke, you can see that he diligently corresponded with his numerous patrons, updating them on his artistic progress and requesting funds or places to work.

One cause of the current “pay-to-play” situation may be the increasing number of artists competing for funds and a public. For example, the annual conference of the Association of Writers & Writing Programs in North America began in 1972 with a couple of hundred attendees. The most recent conferences have all averaged well above 10,000 attendees. With so many artists vying for attention and venues to present their work, arts organizations have also proliferated. The funding sources for these organizations have not kept pace, and government support for the arts in the United States, for one, has declined or remained mostly flat for many years.

Another reason that arts organizations are asking artists for support is that the wealthiest philanthropists currently are finding other outlets for their gifts. In the San Francisco Bay Area, where I live, for instance, we have recently seen a wave of hospital construction and rebuilding, including the stunning Lucile Packard Children’s Hospital in Palo Alto; and UCSF Benioff Children’s Hospital and the Zuckerberg San Francisco General Hospital renovation, both in San Francisco. Those are wonderful additions to our communities, and my own family has benefited from the fantastic care at one of these institutions. But where is the tech philanthropist who is going to support independent theaters or literary publishing? You don’t have to be in the arts to fund the arts. The Guggenheims didn’t make their fortune as surrealist painters, but Peggy Guggenheim helped surrealist painters by buying their work.

The downside of the current regimen in the arts is that many artists can’t afford to “pay-to-play.” Their work is at risk of being lost in today's art economy. Even those who can occasionally afford to fund-raise and use personal resources to launch a project in the arts may find that their ability to generate funds through crowdsourcing campaigns is not as great as their creative output, forcing them to limit the number and ambition of their projects.

I would like to see more discussion of “pay-to-play” in the arts, not to point fingers at nonprofit arts organizations, but to explore the implications of this phenomenon and to try to brainstorm alternatives.

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry

How to Be an American Writer, Part 3: U.S. Expatriate Writers (continued)

The roster of U.S. expatriate writers is a distinguished one. It includes Gertrude Stein, Edith Wharton, Paul Bowles, Jane Bowles, Natalie Barney, Djuna Barnes, T.S. Eliot, Ezra Pound, James Baldwin, and Chester Himes. In the 1920s and 30s, almost the entire U.S. literary world decamped to Paris and the French Riviera, where F. Scott Fitzgerald, Ernest Hemingway, and many others spent a good part of those decades. Of course, part of their interest in the urbane, sophistication of Europe might have had to do with the fact that one could drink alcohol legally there, which was not true in the U.S after the passage of the Twenty-first Amendment in 1920, the beginning of the Prohibition era. Another reason behind the expatriate lifestyle may have been the fact that it was much cheaper to live as an artist in Europe than in the U.S. in the 1920s.

Djuna Barnes

One interesting undercurrent in expatriate writing is the high percentage of gays and lesbians among the authors who left the U.S. Western Europe has long been ahead of our country in its embrace, or at least tolerance, of gay and lesbian lifestyles, and of LGB subject matter in literature. A majority of the expatriate writers I’ve mentioned have been gay or lesbian or bisexual, including Gertrude Stein, James Baldwin, Natalie Barney, and Henry James.

Even though the U.S. has become somewhat more sophisticated, the expatriate strain in American writing continues to this day. The author David Sedaris is a contemporary expatriate writer. Sedaris, who is openly gay, has purchased and renovated a cottage in Sussex in the U.K. and often writes critically of American naiveté, comparing it unfavorably with English and continental sophistication. All of this might start to sound familiar to those who read my last blog, which discussed Henry James.  

David Sedaris

Here’s David Sedaris’s critique of the attire of American travelers, from his essay “Standing By,” which appeared in The New Yorker, and which you can hear him read in his audiobook, Let’s Explore Diabetes with Owls:

“…everywhere I go, someone in an eight-dollar T-shirt is whipping out a cell phone and delivering the fine print of his or her delay. One can’t help but listen in, but then my focus shifts and I find myself staring. I should be used to the way Americans dress when travelling, yet still it manages to amaze me. It’s as if the person next to you had been washing shoe polish off a pig, then suddenly threw down his sponge, saying, ‘Fuck this. I’m going to Los Angeles!’”

I’m always reminded when I take an airplane about how we Americans look when we travel. To be frank, it’s often not a pretty sight. Compared to U.S. citizens, Europeans and other nationalities are much better dressed and show much more respect for others in the way they present themselves, both in airports and in general. That European savoir faire is hard to find in the United States, and it’s not just a question of wardrobe. It’s also an outlook on life, an appreciation of beauty and elegance. I think the hunger for those qualities is part of the motivation of the expatriate American writer.

How to Be an American Writer

Part 1: Introduction

Part 2—Henry James and the Expatriates

Part 4:  Populists and Walt Whitman

Part 5: Thornton Wilder as a Populist

Part 6: Populist Writers: The Beat Generation, Women Fiction Writers, and African American Writers

Part 7: Internal Exiles

Part 8: Satirists and Critics

Part 9: Conclusion

Zack’s most recent book of poems, Irreverent Litanies
Zack’s most recent translation, Bérénice 1934–44: An Actress in Occupied Paris by Isabelle Stibbe

Other recent posts about writing topics: 
How to Get Published
Getting the Most from Your Writing Workshop
How Not to Become a Literary Dropout
Putting Together a Book Manuscript
Working with a Writing Mentor
How to Deliver Your Message
Does the Muse Have a Cell Phone?
Why Write Poetry? 
Poetic Forms: Introduction; The Sonnet, The Sestina, The Ghazal, The Tanka, The Villanelle
Praise and Lament
How to Be an American Writer
Writers and Collaboration
Types of Closure in Poetry