Playwriting and Tulips

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It seemed to be so close to being added as an afterthought that I almost skipped over it, but in his Field Letter this month, Theatre Communication Group Executive Director Ben Cameron touches on the fact that people are staging readings of plays without negotiating royalties.

“Please understand that this represents a grave misunderstanding of legal obligations – any public reading of a play, whether admission is charged or not, requires negotiated rights and payments of royalties to writers.”

I worked for a play publisher once upon a time so I know the details of this requirement. Often I had to point out to people that it was their decision not to charge people and that had no bearing on the cost of producing the play. You paid the hardware store for wood and paint and the theatrical supply place for costumes and gels even though you aren’t charging admission. With a little creativity you can do the play without any of these things and yet the person you don’t want to pay is the person whose vision provided the outline for what to build, paint and light.

Intellectual property theft is really big in the news and I can’t help but wonder if in 20 years or less we will have an entirely different view of intellectual property rights. Despite all the high profile cases about music piracy, I don’t know if stricter laws and aggressive prosecution will ultimately prevail. I suspect this will become even truer as the media and formats in which property stored becomes less and less tangible.

Around the same time I read Cameron’s letter, I read an article about tulips on Slate. Before you ask what tulips have to do with IP rights, let me assure you, quite a lot in both a literal and allegorical way. The article mentioned a memoir by a professor at Wesleyan University who saw a student picking tulips from her flower garden. She chased after the student and challenged the act.

You don’t own them,” one student said to her, “they’re nature. God made them.”

“God made them?” said Rose. “You think God made them? Did God call White Flower Farm and order the bulbs? Did God put it on his credit card? Did God dig holes for the bulbs in the fall and mix bone meal in the dirt to feed them and cover them with mulch in the winter? If you think God did that, you’re an idiot!”

The student told Rose to “chill.” Then, she writes, they spent “several vivacious minutes, engaging in what the Wesleyan Bulletin calls education outside the classroom.”

(And just as an aside, if you read the article you will realize God never intended tulips to be in North America. The lengths to which the Dutch go to simulate the conditions of eastern Turkey’s mountains where the flower originates are astounding.)

If this is the attitude of some about tangible objects, just imagine how they might view material that exists digitally and is easily transferred to other people or copied. It is much more difficult to conceive of the effort that went into creating a book these days than it was when monks painstakenly copied tomes.

This is not to say that people have no concept of the value of labor invested to create digital media. There is a multi-user game called Medievia that has long been the target of derision by members of the online gaming community for using a widely available code base called DIKU to create their game and then removing the credits required by the license. Medievia made the claim that the game was completely re-written but an investigation showed the changes were superficial. The length of debate on the legality and enforceability of the DIKU license is quite amazing and mind boggling. But it goes to show that there is some healthy respect for the effort people put in to creating works.

It should be noted that the creators of DIKU didn’t make much, if any, money on their creation. People are allowed to use the software for free if they don’t charge for the product either. The esteem people have for the rights of intellectual property creators may be indirectly proportional to the amount of money they make off the product. If Microsoft had created DIKU, you probably wouldn’t hear a peep.

The whole subject of IP rights is so fraught with complex issues it is impossible to try to address in one night’s entry. My purpose in posting tonight is to posit this idea–If we assume that in future years protection of artistic expression as we know it today will be nonexistent in practice if not in fact, what can artists do to shape the new situation?

Since the creations of people who don’t profit from their work seems to enjoy some protection among online society, artists seem to already be in a position to take advantage of the new world order.
Though between an opportunity to reap millions off your creation and having people jump to your defense online, I figure artists will still dream of money.

In a world where the open source model is creating operating systems like Linux and reference “books” like Wikipedia and popular music is often comprised of borrowed bits of other people’s music, can an artist hope to be much more than first and most honored among many contributors?

I surely don’t know. If anyone comes across a person or group who seem to be providing a model for the future on how to assert your identity and retain credit for your labor without resorting to ultimately futile stopgap measures, I would love to hear about it.

Leading From the Top

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As many of you know, I live in Hawaii. Yesterday was a state holiday celebrating the birthday of Prince Jonah Kuhio who was an heir to the Hawaiian throne when Queen Lili`uokalani was overthrown by American businessmen.

It got me to thinking about Liliuokalani and her predecessor, King Kalakaua and their relationship with the arts. Even in captivity Lili`uokalani, who was an accomplished songwriter and writer, had a profound effect on Hawaiian culture. Many of her compositions, including Aloha `Oe, are still sung or used today.

King Kalakaua had an even greater impact on the arts. He is known as the “Merrie Monarch” for his patronage of the arts. He is especially known for his revival of many Hawaiian cultural traditions, including hula which had been banned because missionaries viewed it as obscene. Today, the Merrie Monarch Festival is an annual hula event held in his honor.

As I think about these things, I can’t help but wonder if the United States has lost something by not having the example of monarchy that patronized the arts as a strong element of its cultural heritage.

Certainly foundations spread funding around to more organizations than any noble patron could ever do. There is also no arguing that the Medici, Vatican and Elizabethean support of the arts was predicated on the works matching their agendas and validating their power. As I read the historical influences of the arts in the United States in Joli Jensen’s Is Art Good For Us?, I can see some benefits to the way things developed here.

However, the example of a national leader supporting the arts can go a long way. The proud anti-intellectualism of the current administration aside, with a few exceptions, it is difficult for me to think of any time a president attended an arts event or sponsored one in the White House. This is not to say that they didn’t, it is only that there wasn’t much ado made of it in the media. On the other hand, I can easily recall stories about trips to Camp David and Crawford, Texas and what the places generally looked it.

The few exceptions I mentioned earlier don’t bode well for presidents. The first examples that pop in to my mind when I think of presidential support for the arts are Lincoln at the Ford Theatre and Kennedy’s tribute to Robert Frost at Amherst College which is viewed as the impeteus for the creation of the National Endowment for the Arts. (Though it was President Johnson who signed the act creating the NEA.) President Clinton also comes to mind with his sax. He might have been a good proponent for arts funding if he had a better relationship with Congress. Unfortunately, things didn’t turn out well for any of these gentlemen.

The presidency has many traditions that it engages in from tree lighting, egg hunts and turkey pardoning. It would be great if someone could influence a president to begin the precendent of making an annual donation to some arts fund or foundation (to prevent the appearance of favoritism to any group or genre) with great fanfare. Actually, it would be great to see the president attending an event with great fanfare as well. However, as busy as the president can tend to be, it might not be a good message to send if some crisis continually leads to cancelling attendance.

When Artists Get Old

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By way of a weekly newsletter from NYFA, I learned about the start of a continuing study by the Research Center for Arts and Culture at Columbia University that looks at the needs of aging artists. They had conducted earlier research on New York artists (along with those in other cities) in 1988 and 1997. According to the executive summary, there is an urgency to this study based on the impeding retirement of baby boomer artists.

While foundations and other funders have long directed their largesse to emerging and even mid-career artists, notably few have concerned themselves with the artist as s/he matures into old age- artistically, emotionally, financially and chronologically. Special attention to aging artists is important for material support and policy-making and is made more urgent in a time of scarce resources when the baby boomer generation is about to enter the ranks of the retired.

Among the problems faced by the Research Center is actually finding artists. “Past evidence shows that as people age, they often become more isolated from each other, making it difficult for organizations to serve them as a group as well as posing many individual problems.” The Research Center uses a methodology developed by sociologist Douglas Heckathorn previous employed to conduct a survey for the NEA that required them to seek aged jazz musicians.

I heard a series of interviews on NPR last year about the jazz survey which really underscored the plight of these jazz musicians now that they had retired. It was the recollection of these stories that made me notice the call for study participants on the NYFA newsletter.

If you read this blog and are an aging artist (62+) living in the five boroughs or know someone who is, contact the Research Center for Arts and Culture at 212.678.8184 or email rcac@columbia.edu. There is also a meeting on March 27, 2006 from 6-8 pm about the study.

Are You Worth Your Age?

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Last week Slate had a short article about how young people are underpaid in relation to their productivity whereas older folks are overpaid in proportion to what they produce.

At the same time, Adaptistration cited an article in San Francisco Classical Voice that revealed the salaries of musicians and administrators in the Bay area.

As I look at the fact that the SF Opera’s Musical Director makes $600,000 and the concert master makes $126,000, I first have to wonder if he is really about five times more productive each year than she is. I don’t know their respective ages or education and experience levels, but I can’t believe that the difference is in direct proportion to the gap in their salaries.

It leads to the question of what it is that is valued in the arts. I know Drew McManus has bemoaned the disparity between executive compensation and musician salaries so I won’t tread upon that ground.

It is easy as a person not earning that much to cast aspersions upon those who do. I can’t say that by some strange twist of fate I won’t end up making a large amount of money before the end of my career. I can honestly say that I have a hard time believing I will ever be worth that much to an organization.

I certainly feel that my value will grow as I become wiser about addressing challenges and planning prudently, but I don’t know that I will become so adept I will be worth $600,000. (This is coming back to haunt me at some future salary negotiation. I can feel it.)

Now in comparison with some corporate CEO salaries and benefit packages, this sort of pay scale is downright parsimonious. Those guys may be brokering billion dollar deals, but it is the masses who are responsible for that sort of valuation. In this context, it seems only right that the leadership of a large non-profit be well-compensated.

But what about the mission of a non-profit? Is the community well served by a senior person making that much money? If the opera had hired someone as music director who would accept $200,000, would the quality suffered significantly? Perhaps the fundraising would be more difficult with a lesser name at the helm and instead of saving $400,000, there would only be a $100-$200,000 surplus. But if that money could be sunk into the productions, outreach programs or low cost ticketing, wouldn’t the organization mission be better served?

It is very easy to spend other people’s money to be sure. The opera’s business is its own and it seems to be doing fairly well. If the board and the community is happy and feels the opera is fulfilling its role, more power to them and more money to their administrators. (Don’t want to burn any potential bridges 😉 )

This isn’t really about the opera, but about the industry at large. I just want to send a question or two rattling around people’s minds about whether there is a point where people are too well compensated to the detriment of the organization’s mission.

And harkening back to the Slate article, are they being paid out of proportion to what they produce for the organization. It could be argued that if someone attracts $1 million in donations to the organization, they are worth a percentage of that. In theory, the money was solicited to benefit the mission of the organization so the percentage granted as a bonus in one form or another really needs to be scrutinized.

It is the high percentage of a donation that goes to administrative costs that tends to be the main point of criticism for charities like the United Way. Arts groups don’t need that to become the story for them.