Lessons (Over/Shares #1)
During my masters at Yale, I spent a lot of time with my professors and colleagues asking questions about money and labor in the field of arts and entertainment.
Questions like,
“How is it that an artist can survive off of a freelance lifestyle in the expensive metropolitan areas that act as cultural centers?”
“What do artists do about retirement?”
“How can someone who doesn’t come from generational wealth get a foothold in this unstable field?”
And my professors (particularly Martin Bresnick) took time to patiently talk through my concerns about the industry. My professors pointed me to Bertolt Brecht and Phillip Glass as examples of self starters who paved their way regardless of institutional support. They talked me through industry status quo, explaining the way contracts are structured and what I should expect in my career as a freelance musician. They showed me examples of how they managed their own careers and how they created their own opportunities by assembling consortium productions, to starting touring ensembles, to creating annual festivals—some of which have become the industry standard today.
The lessons my professors taught me highlighted two important things about our field.
Artists are some of the most innovative, most driven, most committed workers in our workforce and
That work is often not adequately compensated.
And I had felt that on a personal level. I came to Yale angry about how much I have struggled as an artist and how difficult I found the career to be. Before I came to Yale, I spent periods of time in New York City living off of $40 a week for food, paying $800 a month in student loan payments, spending $1200 on rent (honestly a bargain in these times) all while juggling 4-5 part time jobs. And this was while I was following everyone’s advice about climbing the career ladder in a manner that slowly led me to more and more opportunities. I could see the endgame—the commissions with opera houses that would sustain me for 1-2 years, the portfolio of symphony commissions, and the teaching job that would finally provide me sustainable income. But at the same time, I also couldn’t see how I would financially last that long at the rate I was going. $40 a week affords you just enough for your essential groceries—never mind that ever-so-important beer that you are expected to have with colleagues that allows you to network your way to your next gig. I wasn’t saving any money for retirement and I certainly wasn’t anywhere close to buying a house or thinking about having children. All I was thinking about is how do I survive this month so I can continue to march towards the financial sustainability on the horizon.
Getting into Yale afforded me the opportunity to leave the city for a little while and figure out how to build some sustainability into my life. But the transition didn’t come without bumps. I spent the first couple of years at Yale railing against all types of institutional structures, vacillating from being openly angry at the nonprofits who I saw underpay their performers, to student loans who charged students upwards of $200k with barely any career upside, to conservatories who taught towards outdated funding models, and to commercial investors who take the lion share of the production profit for themselves. But every time I got angry at one of these institutions, I’d take my anger to my peers and colleagues and they’d always sympathetically answer my anger with the same response, “That’s just how it is.” But over the pandemic, when “just how it is” just wasn’t enough, I started exploring alternatives to the funding models that we often find ourselves tied to.
During the pandemic, a friend told me, "stuck people criticize, productive people analyze." While I think life has a little more nuance than that 160 character tweet, I also am tired of being angry. So rather than falling back into a cycle of anger, I've spent my pandemic analyzing.
“Stuck people criticize, productive people analyze.”
What resulted has been a project that has become all consuming. I wrote my thesis about the economic realities for artists in today, diving into theater production in the United States as a starting point for reimagining the creative economy. I found mentors outside of the School of Music who walked me through alternative financing options for projects, focusing particularly on Venture Capital and cooperative economics. I began working with Tsai Center for Innovative Thinking at Yale through whom I found networks for collaborators, advisors, and co-founders all who were eager to talk through cultural production disruption in a manner that gave agency back to artists. And most importantly, I found other artists who, like myself, have been frustrated at the systems of arts production and who are tired of not being adequately compensated for their work.
All of this experience has culminated in founding Midnight Oil Collective with eight of my extraordinary artists colleagues. I can go into the details of how it works but suffice to say at the core of what we are doing is dreaming up alternative systems that allows artists freedom—freedom to scale their work, freedom to stay in control of their projects, and freedom to get paid all along the way. It sounds like such a simple idea. I mean, after all, artists in the United States alone are responsible for creating a market worth hundred of billions of dollars across film, TV, music, and theater. Surely we can reimagine a system in which the backbone of the industry (the artists) are paid well for their labor.
Before I ramble too far off the beaten path, I would like to reintroduce myself as someone who, over the last two years, has amassed a toolbox of amusing anecdotes, bits of useful information, and a vocabulary of terms that aren’t generally heard when artists talk about art. I have been feeling like I would like to share these bits and bobs as a way of sharing language that I personally have found incredibly empowering. I thought I’d explore topics such as “the myth of genius from an economic perspective,” and “does the word equity mean fairness or does equity mean ownership?” And while I know I don’t need permission to write little posts or share little stories, I would also like to engage with other folks that like to think about these topics. If you are one such folk, please feel free to engage.
This is Part 1 of CEO Frances Pollock’s ongoing series, “OVER/SHARES”: essays examining the intersection of arts and business. It originally appeared on her personal Facebook.
