What’s real? What’s nonsense?

What do arts executives need to know?

We’ve tried to find out.

From May to December 2025, our team at the DeVos Institute of Arts and Nonprofit Management worked with sixteen arts and culture organizations of vastly different sizes and disciplines—from two employees to more than seven hundred—to separate mirage from reality and define where and how AI can actually help the field.

What emerged from this program is a 55-page roadmap for nonprofit arts and culture executives. We’ve released this Practical Roadmap today, free of charge, as a resource for the field of nonprofit arts and culture.

It addresses how to build ethical, effective policy and strategy. It outlines eight essential AI “capabilities” we believe will outlive tool “churn” and are worthy of executive attention. It provides a framework for selecting specific AI applications, applied to specific needs, aligned with organiztional policy, to integrate limited, potent AI usage into everyday workflows. It provides executives with an 8-step guide on how to start. And it grounds learning in 14 case studies developed by the inaugural cohort.

Why’d we bother?

As a field, we’re drowning in generic AI advice.

But our field deserves better: guidance grounded in the reality of running an arts business. So that’s what we’ve tried to deliver here.

Download the Roadmap Now

Our sector has its own economics, values, risks, and obligations to artists, audiences, donors, and communities.

It also has serious concerns. Poorly used AI can dilute voice, undermine trust, mishandle data, generate confident nonsense, and threaten livelihoods. In a field built on authenticity, care, and credibility, these are critical traps to avoid.

But the technology’s promise is hard to ignor. Our sector is supplied by a brilliant, competent, but capacity-strained workforce. We over-rely on sweat equity. We face perennial and growing resource constraints. And AI, properly used, provides a once in a generation - perhaps once in a career - opportunity to engineer productivity gains that just might provide some relief.

So, while getting AI right is essential, we believe it is both possible and necessary to develop safe, ethical, limited uses of AI that expand the sector’s capacity for good.

This Roadmap is our best advice on how to thread this needle.

We’re so grateful to our partners in this effort, many of whom have donated their wisdom and experience to this guide: AILEY, American Ballet Theatre, American Repertory Theater, Frederik Meijer Gardens & Sculpture Park, Women Make Movies, Memphis Music Initiative, Opera Baltimore, Jacob Burns Film Center, New Museum of Contemporary Art, National Museum of Mexican Art, Interlochen Center for the Arts, MACLA, Mark Morris Dance Group, Miami Book Fair, Guthrie Theater, and Denver Center for the Performing Arts.

Good AI for the arts is possible and, we think, important. This Roadmap is our contribution to that effort.

Download the Roadmap Now

Louise Nevelson, Bicentennial Dawn, 1976, in the lobby interior of the James A. Byrne U.S. Courthouse, Philadelphia, Pennsylvania (Photographs in the Carol M. Highsmith Archive, Library of Congress, Prints and Photographs Division)

We are grateful for the effort you’ve made to be here, though we know that you have responded less to our invitation than to a calling of conscience we all share – to advance, each in our own way, and hopefully stronger together, critical dialogues at a moment of great consequence for our field and nation. A calling to participate in just one dialogue – amongst many, both prior to and following today – that may strengthen and support our capacity to imagine, together, potential futures for our field and people.

We gather today under conditions in our field that are unsettled, uncertain, and, urgent. Political decisions, including infringements on speech and action, have reshaped pillars of the landscape. Economic pressure has grown acute – for organizations and individual practitioners alike. Audience behavior has changed, forcing tough questions about relevance, content, and the role of our work. Many worry that artificial intelligence is advancing faster than our frameworks to use it for the greater good. Thus, the instinct in moments like this is to focus almost exclusively on triage—and that instinct is understandable.

However, one of the suggestions we put forth in this meeting is that while we seek to address immediate and for many, existential, concerns about survival, we should not allow the urgency of the moment to crowd out the necessity for long-term thinking and bold re-imagining of potential futures, including futures we might achieve together. I suggest that we need strategies to address immediate needs, yes—but we also need to set aside some time to envision, plan for, and begin to build toward a future that can only be achieved through sustained, long-term, and collective work. Otherwise, we may reach only a fraction of our potential, and, even worse, resign our future to others who do dedicate time, energy and capacity to long-term, systems-level and structural thinking, or who will simply move through raw power to foreclose our futures altogether. Today is about holding both of those realities at once.

Many feel, as do I, that there is little time to waste in this effort. I have argued that it is time to acknowledge that the current administration has, through a series of actions and decisions, enacted a de facto national arts policy—piecemeal, yes, but impactful nonetheless, and one defined by clearly identifiable shifts in funding, leadership, aesthetics, and ideology.

Many sense, and I count myself amongst them, that our sector has struggled to respond in kind –not for lack of seriousness, talent or commitment but for the absence of a shared framework, strategy, and even agreement on what terms we can, and cannot use, and what those terms mean. Understandably, our sector has shied from consolidating decision-making or representative authority in any single institution, and there is considerable wisdom in this. Our sector’s diversity of thought, practice, geography, and experience is inarguably one of its most beautiful, powerful, and sustaining features. Our sector is, in this way, a near perfect proxy for the original promise of our precious democracy.

But, this admirable complexity has also limited our ability to develop shared visions or frameworks for what our sector might, in the collective, aspire to achieve, what it needs to do so, and how it might act collectively at a scale that matches the forces shaping it.

In today’s context – where our sector faces gale force threat and opportunity –that absence raises a difficult question: what might be required to move through and then beyond dialogue, to begin to formulate a response – perhaps through enhanced collective action of a scale equal to the challenges and opportunities faced? Do we agree that we can achieve outcomes of greater scale and impact together than alone? And if so, how could some level of agreement be achieved in defining that response—and what form might that agremeent take?

The conveners – Alan, Gary, myself – have thus put forward a hypothesis, which we expect you to critique, test, improve, agree with, or provide surrogates for: that any adequate response to today’s challenges and opportunities will require deeper cooperation across the traditional axes of power in our field—foundations, advocates, major academic and cultural institutions—but also, and just as critically, cooperation with and among the grassroots of our sector: the millions of creative workers, organizations, collectives, and local advocates who give the arts their vitality.

These are, in a sense, essential problematics facing any democratic process. I am aware of the work of many in this room, and in our communities beyond, on these very questions. For my part, I suggest these are some of the questions we must grapple with together as colleagues in the days, months and years ahead. And thus, these are some of the questions we have invited into this room today.

At the same time we have tried to accept the limits of any four-hour block, and have sought to articulate certain areas this convening would not seek to cover, important as they are to our futures. Namely, while a firm understanding of our challenges is a necessary precondition for strategy, we did not gather you here to rehash those challenges as an end in itself.

Instead, we chose to frame today as a platform to begin articulating responses—to move from diagnosis toward direction. We understand that this asks a lot of you, and explicitly, we do not suggest these that today’s challenges can be elided, thrown under the rug, or diminished. In fact, they are the entire rationale for this effort.

Additionally, we recognize that we may not all share the same language. Terms like sector, artist, vision, or strategy can mean different things to different people, shaped by discipline, geography, power, and lived experience. Many, including some of you gathered here today, have written and spoken with great precision and eloquence on these issues. But today’s format will not allow us to resolve them fully. In the time we have today, we ask you to do your best to accept that exact definitions may remain elusive and to hold that tension while you seek to make progress on the topics we have suggested as focuses for today’s discussion.

That brings me to the framework guiding today’s discussions.

First, we invite you to step beyond today’s immediate challenges, even for a moment, to begin to envision possible futures for your practice, your community, your discipline, or your sector. We are asking the necessary, but near-impossible – to think twenty years out —not to predict the future, but to begin to provide imagery, even in draft form, of what a more just, equitable, vibrant, and resilient field might resemble. Here, we ask you, as much as possible, to translate today’s challenges into possible visions for the future – in other words, to imagine a world where those challenges have been in part, or in full, met with strategy, capital, and capacity sufficient to invert them into pillars of a more just, equitable, vibrant, and resilient sector. If some of today’s challenges include inequity in access and capital; a lack of coherent, sequential arts education; impingements on creative expression; or technological disruption, what would it mean to say, in twenty years, that we responded well? What would be different in people’s lives, communities, and cultural ecosystems? What kinds of public commitments, private commitments, and community commitments would exist that do not today?

Second, we are asking you about what work would need to be done to move in the direction of these possible futures. If our first question is “what is your vision for the future”, the second question is “what work needs to happen, to move in that direction, independently and perhaps together”? In our field, we have excellent examples of what such long-term, focused workflows make possible. For instance, the NEA’s Our Town program, in coordination with independent efforts like ArtPlace, demonstrated how creative practice could be integrated into cross-sector, community-based development with measurable outcomes. Backed by rigorous research and evaluation, and in partnership with public and private agencies nationwide, the initiative transformed the way creative practice operates as civic infrastructure. I imagine some of you may wish to place focus on other columns of necessary investment, such as in arts education, art and health, questions of accessibility, ability, and equity. These are just a few examples of workflows that might be imagined together. A great outcome from this part of the discussion would be an inventory of your ideas on the scope of work that could be envisioned as necessary to make progress as a field.

Third, organization and mobilization. Here we struggle with perhaps the most difficult, and exciting, part of our discussion. How might this work be stewarded? Alan is going to provide you with the exact prompt for this part of the discussion, but here we are asking you to both identify collective action already underway – ways of organizing that have inspired you – as well as to ideate ways to strengthen collective action moving forward. For instance, the recent announcement by several leading foundations in the formation of the Humanity AI initiative and its associated $500 million dollar fund offer a model for steering powerful technology toward social good. There are a dozen examples of current organizing taking place – from the Future Film Coalition to the Creative States Coalition – and we want to hear from you who is inspiring you through their collective action pursuit. But we also want to crack this wide open and ask you: what other kinds of structures—networks, coordinating bodies, funding collectives, or other forms—could hold that work, attract capital, ensure accountability, maximize diverse participation, and hold that work to account? We are not looking for a single model today, but for a clearer map of possibilities.

Finally, before I hand this over to Alan who will take you through today’s prompts, I want to be explicit about a few commitments and ground rules.

This convening does not assume to be representative of the field. We understand it as one point in an arc of discussion, and we do not presume to propose a definitive position on any issue. We are not aiming for closure or consensus today. We are inviting your thinking in draft form, as is ours. The goal is to surface and articulate a plurality of visions and ideas for how the sector might move forward.

These sessions will follow the Chatham House Rule. Participants are free to use the information they receive, but ideas and remarks should not be attributed to a specific source. While this meeting is not confidential, we are requesting that the names of participants not be shared outside of this convening. If you are curious as to who is in the room, that list was provided to you in yesterday’s email correspondence from the organizers.

All sessions will be recorded. Anonymized, lightly edited transcriptions of these sessions will be shared with you to enable further reflection, additional ideas, and continued discussion. Then, we plan to share the same body of material with the field as an open resource—to encourage additional dialogue, additional interpretation, and, ideally, additional efforts that dramatically widen the circle of those invovled.

We know this agenda is ambitious. We also know it is incomplete. That’s precisely why we are approaching today as a data-gathering exercise: to assemble a usable body of perspectives that others can learn from, critique, build upon, and carry forward in the months ahead.

Finally, I want to underscore that this is just one point in a longer journey. This work stands on the shoulders of many who have been thinking, organizing, and advocating long before this convening—and it will only matter if others, like you, continue this discussion in the weeks and months ahead.

Two hundred and fifty years ago this week, Thomas Paine wrote in Common Sense that “we have it in our power to begin the world over again.” We don’t claim ambitions of that scale – today, or through our work. But we do summon the energy to think today about new, bold, and potentially disruptive paths forward. I am very grateful to have been recently introduced to the work of Arlene Goldbard, who also joins us today, and who reminds us in her seminal 2006 work, New Creative Community: The Art of Cultural Development that “No matter how steep and slow the uphill climb, postponing the start will only further delay the ascent, and believing the ascent is unattainable will make it so.”

With that, thank you again for making time for this conversation, and for bringing both urgency, goodwill, patience, and imagination to it. With that, it is my pleasure to introduce my accidental co-convener in this effort, a man who needs little introduction, Alan Brown.

In December, I joined Elizabeth Bowman at the Scene Room for a talk. Below are highlights from the transcript of that discussion.

The full podcast is available on Apple Podcasts.

The full discussion is also available on Elizabeth’s site (The Scene Room) and YouTube.

The talk covers a number of topics:

• The rise of AI is clarifying, not eroding, the relevance of the humanities.

• The current Administration has placed an unprecedented focus on Arts and Culture — and the Sector has yet to forcefully respond

• An historical lens for this Administration’s push to dismantle federal arts funding

• A crisis of collective leadership and the need for a collective response to the challenges faced

• How an independent sector collective strategy could be organized

• It’s Time to Widen the Aperture on Advocacy

• It’s time for a new, nonpartisan, national public fund for the arts

• The need for a strengthened framework for Sector Strategy

• And, whose job is all this?

• Both Governmental and Nonprofit Sector Organizing efforts are needed

• Some Important Capacities of Future Arts Leadership

• Responding to The Trump Administration’s National Arts Agenda

After some biography, we get in to it:

The rise of AI is clarifying, not eroding, the relevance of the humanities.

Elizabeth Bowman: 3:26

With such a varied experience with all those different organizations and peppering in the current, I guess, political situation. What do you believe arts organizations are getting fundamentally right right now?

Brett Egan: 3:40

I think there’s a lot to be optimistic about, Elizabeth, even though we are living through difficult times, not just politically, but also environmentally.

People have proven time and again they need and want art and creativity in their lives. I don’t think that’s changed. In fact, I think with the advent of AI, that’s going to become even more obvious to more people.

I think that AI can help us in our administration (of arts organizations). In fact, our organization has been running for the last seven months what we’ve been calling an exploratory sprint, thinking about the ways in which AI can be utilized in administrative functions.

But as I’ve given that a lot more thought, as the world overall becomes more, let’s say, integrated with AI, I think people are going to be asking deeper questions about what is human. I think many of the things that fill our days today are likely to be automated in the future. I expect that we’ll have more spare time, or some of us will have more spare time to be thinking about the big questions. I think that this is likely to lead to productive boredom and grappling with some of the most significant challenges and factors facing us as a species.

I think this is good for the humanities. I’m optimistic actually that this next 30 years is going to give birth to a new awareness about the role of arts and culture and the way in which it can help interpret and manage the human experience. And I think there are a lot of organizations and administrators that are awake to this. I think that people are really pressing into how to utilize the arts and culture institution or the creative practice as an interpretive tool to help other humans make sense of the change around them. And I think that there are plenty of organizations that have been at that forefront and continue to be at that forefront as really critical interpreters of the change around us.

We all ask big questions. All humans ask big questions. Some institutions have failed humans in interpreting those questions. Arts and culture has a unique ability to facilitate that discussion and also give people or provide people the tools to make sense of a increasingly complex world around them. For that, Elizabeth, I’m really optimistic, actually, about the relevance of arts and culture institutions moving into the next generation.

The current Administration has placed an unprecedented focus on Arts and Culture — and the Sector has yet to forcefully respond

Elizabeth Bowman: 5:49

With the current situation in the United States, in particular, with all of the cuts that have been made and you’ve been pretty vocal about what’s your take on what is happening from the current administration? What’s their intention, do you think?

Brett Egan: 6:04

Well, let me back out of the current administration for a minute and think about this through a more historical lens and then come back to the current administration.

I think, you know, there has been for centuries a debate in our country about the role of government in art and culture. And for the first 180 years or so, the verdict was the government probably at the federal level should play very little or no role. In the 1960s, that conversation changed. Well, I should say there were obviously moments prior to that, the WPA in particular … but really the institutionalization of arts funding as a mainstay practice of the federal government in the 1960s with the national endowments and with IMLS really was a watershed moment in the relationship between government and the arts in the U.S. And that conversation has been in contest since that time.

There have been many attempts over the course of the last 60 years to reframe the relationship between government and arts funding. To that extent, what’s happening now is not new. Reagan, in fact, was the first president that called for the elimination of the National Endowment for the Arts and the Humanities. He was unsuccessful, obviously, and did not try again. And then there were a number of efforts over successive, mostly Republican administrations, which is in obvious keeping with conservative viewpoint on the role of government in American society to reduce or eliminate the agencies. Trump, of course, in his first administration, called for the elimination of the endowments in several of his budgets, I think all four, at least several. And so it really is no surprise that this time around, the Trump administration has again called for the elimination of these agencies, especially within the context of all of the cuts that have been made and moves that have been made in other areas of the federal infrastructure.

This is obviously a point which is vociferously contested, especially by defendants of public investment in the arts, of which I’m one. I do think that there is a role for government in supporting arts and culture in America. I don’t think that the balance is settled.

I think it makes sense that it would continue to be debated, but I think that we can say that there’s nothing surprising about the current discussion, even though the speed and the tactics that have been employed are a departure. I think when you look at the focus that the current administration, that I would even distinguish the current administration from the first Trump administration in this manner, that there has been a unprecedented focus on arts and culture as a device of the federal government in this administration. It may come as a surprise or even a shock to some people that this administration named a nominee for chair of the National Endowment for the Arts more quickly than any modern presidency. You go back to Reagan, there is no president that has sought to create a change at the head of the national agencies as quickly as this administration has.

This administration, obviously, through executive orders, has attempted to influence the way in which federal funding through the agencies is deployed and somewhat successfully. This administration has exercised contested right to rescind grants. In fact, just last week, there’s a landmark ruling in a case of the IMLS, where the court has said that the administration moved unlawfully to rescind grants that were lawfully appropriated by Congress in the case of IMLS.

There has been a full frontal approach, might be the polite way of discussing it, to reordering the relationship between federal government and arts and culture in the context of this administration. I think the speed, the tactics, the comprehensiveness of it is, I think we can certainly say it’s unprecedented.

I think for many of us it’s also unsettling at the very least, arguably unlawful, as several of the court actions have indicated, obviously pressing the boundaries of executive power in the way in which the administration is in virtually all aspects of civil society.

So, you know, I think that’s the context in which we sit. I don’t think that’s news to anybody who’s listening. I think the bigger question is how the arts and culture sector will respond. And here, Elizabeth, I’ve been spending some time thinking, and many colleagues around the country have been spending time thinking about as these actions have been taken, what has that exposed about how prepared or unprepared independent sector, private sector, let’s say nonprofit sector in the United States, arts and culture has been to respond to this cascade of actions that have had very unsettling, at least, impacts on the sector since February of this year.

An historical lens to this Administration’s push to dismantle federal arts funding

Elizabeth Bowman: 10:36

When I think about dismantling the investment in the arts, I just can’t understand it from a government standpoint because the return on investment is so strong and highly documented. So I don’t understand why.

Brett Egan: 10:56

But what I would say is I think the argument has been well established. You know, it is not surprising that conservative voices in American government would argue that government should not have a role in certain areas that government has taken a role. I think, personally, we see that playing out unfortunately, at the very least, and to put it mildly, across many aspects of the American social safety net, health infrastructure, protection of environment, even the economy.

I’ve been listening to Walter Isaacson talking about the most beautiful sentence ever written, the book that he published last week or just the week before…which talks about the second sentence in the Declaration of Independence — the fact that we have rights that are inalienable, that have been prescribed by a creator, that all men are created equal, and the fact that the country hasn’t achieved this standard. Even the Founding Fathers understood that this was an aspirational clause that they were not themselves able to achieve, given the fact that many of them, for instance, were slave owners.

Walter Isaacson, I think, provides a really intriguing and very useful tool in thinking about this centuries-long contest that we see unfolding precisely today and in the conversation about federal arts funding, about the balance between what a government can do and what a government should do. One of the things that I find to be sort of optimistic about the premise is that he gives us the tool of saying, you know, the debate with our fellow citizens about the role of government ideally is one that is understood as a contest over that balance, over the balance of what role government can play and should play, and what areas of society government should not play a role in. And you and I may share perspective in certain areas, and you and I may disagree in certain areas, but that is really the premise of the argument.

And right now, of course, we’re seeing, I think for many of us in arts and culture, a viewpoint expressed through the actions of this administration that many would say that’s not that’s not the viewpoint that I have. In fact, that again is a pretty mild way of putting it. I think many of people feel, myself included, that there have been steps that have been taken that we vehemently disagree with. We have serious questions about the legality of them, we have serious questions about the intelligence of them.

I mean, as you say, Elizabeth, arts and culture is a an amazing investment. It always has been for the United States. It is arguably one of the great tools not only of economic prosperity, but also soft power for the U.S. That has drawn people to very well promoted ideals with very high production value — through media and Hollywood in particular, but also through the live arts — to the United States as a beacon of free expression and of sort of an optimistic viewpoint on what humans can do. I think it’s really poor judgment, personally, to de-invest.

But I think we do need to get back to a place where we can have a conversation with people who have different political viewpoints about balance and to be able to make the argument for our vision of what the proper balance is, and do our best to listen, if we can, to reasonable and thoughtful arguments about that balance from other sides.

I don’t think this contest ends with this administration. I think that this is a perennial American question. I think it has been unfolding at least for the last 60 years. And one of the things that I think we really also have to think about, Elizabeth, which is the subject of a piece that I’ve recently written for ArtNet, is what the arts and culture sector can and needs to be thinking about independent of its relationship with government. The government, in my view, is part of the ecosystem. It has never been a primary part of the ecosystem for funding for arts and culture in America.

The vast majority of arts and culture organizations receive from the federal government 3% or less of their annual budget, and many of them receive virtually nothing or nothing from the federal government. So I think if we’re truthful, we can acknowledge that federal funding for the arts is an incredibly important symbol. It is a statement of faith, it is a statement of investment, but it is all things considered infinitesimal in respect to private and foundation funding for the arts and state and local funding for the arts.

The question I think that this really raises is what is the arts and culture sector going to do about this in response? Does it use this moment of unprecedented focus on arts and culture to try to break open a new conversation with the American public and with itself about how to proceed in light of the fact that the federal government has become an increasingly unstable partner in the sustainability of national arts and culture?

A crisis of collective leadership and the need for a collective response to the challenges faced

Elizabeth Bowman: 15:38

Do you think that arts leaders, arts organization leaders have enough conversation with other arts organization leaders?

Brett Egan: 15:47

I think there’s a crisis of collective action and collective leadership in our country, Elizabeth, as pertains to arts and culture. A crisis of collective action and leadership. There are so many brilliant people in this field. So many. Really thoughtful strategists, both at the organizational level, at the community level, at the statewide level, at the regional level, and at the federal level. But we are woefully underorganized. And I think that that’s understandable to an extent. The sector hasn’t faced, at least in recent memory, at least in the last generation (a challenge like this) — I mean, the only thing that comes close to maybe is the culture wars of the 1980s, but I think that’s only one slice of the ecosystem of challenge that we’re facing today. Our sector has never really faced the confluence of very substantial political change, rapid technological change that has an impact not only on operations, but on audience behavior and interest in our work, and very significant impacts from a global pandemic.

And those three forces, and the pandemic nobody likes to talk about, and I realize it in some ways it’s old news, and nobody wants to say, oh, well, that’s the result. There is a lot that still permeates our sector as a result of both infrastructural change, economic change, and also behavioral change that either solidified or took root en masse during the pandemic, and our sector simply hasn’t recovered.

And it forces deep questions about why. It forces deep questions about the resilience of the sector in many ways.

Of course, there are many organizations that are actually doing fine and in some cases doing better than they were before the pandemic, but that’s not the majority case. The majority case is that most museums, most symphonies, most opera companies, most dance companies, most theater companies are still struggling to get back to where they were in 2019.

So this confluence of factors, Elizabeth, which includes the political but is not exclusive to the political, I think we can say it’s unprecedented in working memory.

And what it is exposed is while there are many dozens of thoughtful, insightful philanthropies working on these issues, while there are many hundreds of organizers at the local, state, and national levels that spend time and energy and soul power grappling with these issues within the context of their locality or within their region. There really is not a collective conversation taking place at the national level that would begin to approach the scale and the severity of the challenges that are being faced.

It’s not that there isn’t organizing take place. It’s not that there aren’t brilliant people. There is not the infrastructure in place to organize and aggregate these efforts in a way that will collectively approach, meet, much less surmount the challenges that are being faced.

It’s virtually unthinkable that one would put on the shoulders of any individual organization a direct challenge to the policy changes and the actions that have been taken by the federal government since March. That’s it. There have been truly courageous rebuttals that have, to certain measure, been effective. You know, the theaters that come together in March, together with the ACLU, to challenge the executive order addressing speech pertinent to gender identity, was effective in getting legal recourse in place to respond to what was determined and it’s still being contested to an extent in court to be arguably unlawful restriction of free speech. And that did come down to the collective action of a group of theaters together with the ACLU when you have people like Secretary Bunch at the Smithsonian saying, I hear you, Trump administration, that you want us to review and perhaps excise some of the content in the Smithsonian Institution. We hear that. Our response to that is that we’re going to conduct our own internal autonomous review, taking your input under advisement. But this really is our responsibility. This is our purview. It is our right. It is not the role of the federal government to prescribe the content of the Smithsonian institution.

These are good examples. And there are others — a hundred foundations locking arms, to say, you know what, we really vehemently disagree with the characterization of the nonprofit foundation sector as aiding and abetting domestic terrorism. We’re really not going to stand for that, and we are going to speak up. These are instances of response that I find to be courageous and really encouraging.

The challenge is that the volume and cadence and scale and swiftness of the changes that are taking place at the federal level, in the broader environment, with technology, with the economy, need repeated, coherent, massive, I think, collective response backed by real capital, probably frameworked by something that looks like a national arts strategy that would not dictate the action of any institution, but would invite the tens of thousands of institutions around the country to join in efforts that they felt were right for them, for their community, for their institution to advance, let’s say, critical pillars of what a successful and flourishing national arts ecosystem might look like in 10, 15, 20 years. I think we’re missing that, Elizabeth. And I think it’s, in the words of my colleague Alan Brown, an underimagining of the sector. I think that there’s so much good in this sector, and we could use a bit more framework to think about how we can work together to achieve that good.

How an independent sector collective strategy could be organized

Elizabeth Bowman: 20:53

So we need a dedicated organization to look at the policy shifts and look at where advocacy is needed specifically.

Brett Egan: 21:02

That’s a great question, Elizabeth. And there’s actually a big debate about that.

Do we need an organization to do this, or do we need a more decentralized way of thinking about this?

I think, you know, our sector is astonishing for its diversity. By that I mean racial and ethnic, of course, socioeconomic, geographic, discipline, philosophy, approach.

And that pluralism, that radical pluralism, is arguably one of its most beautiful elements insofar as it’s a proxy for American democracy and the evolution of a encyclopedic American identity. It really is, I think, one of the marvels of human civilization, the way in which our sector has evolved.

On the other hand, that diversity has led to some skepticism about the ability for anyone to lead. And in fact, there have been important moments, even in the last 20 years of national arts policy thinking and organizing that have contributed to the idea that it might not be a great idea for the sector to put too much stock in any individual or any individual organization as a titular leader for the sector.

And I think a lot of people would argue, and I would join that group, that there has been considerable wisdom in the history of our sector to not go after something like the formation of the Ministry of Culture that you see in many European nations. And that there is something authentically American about the resistance to that, and that there’s a lot of wisdom in that.

Because obviously, that type of aggregated or consolidated power, if you happen to agree with it, well: happy days! But if you happen to see it differently, or if it gets into what we might think of as the wrong hands, there’s outcomes that a lot of us would look at and say, that’s dystopian, that’s not what we would want. So when you say that there’s a need for an institution, I think that a lot of people would look at that question and and and say, I’m not, I’m not so sure that an institution is the right solution, although there are some people who might argue that that’s the case.

Personally, I think that what would be really helpful would be something that looks like a flexible national arts constitution, something that states a series of principles and goals…a vision for a more fully realized arts and culture sector. This should and would necessarily continue to be debated frequently at conferences and online and in living rooms and in town halls. But that would be a collective discussion about, let’s say, 10, 12, 15 major columns of work or enterprises that the sector could undertake over the course of the next 10, 15, 20 years that would lead to outcomes that would be desirable.

So, for instance, a number of foundations have recently come together, just three weeks ago, four weeks ago, to form an effort called Humanity AI. You may be familiar with it. Humanity AI is a $500 million fund that has been put together by a series of foundations that say AI should be for everybody, not just for the tech giants. We need to put a lot of money and thinking into how to make AI a social good. And at present, the contours of it remain a little bit undefined, at least in the public eye. But the principle of it is that it will fund initiatives to ensure that AI is deployed as a public good. And in my mind, a $500 million fund with a vision for the beneficial application of a technology that invites, not demands, invites participation, invites participation from nonprofits and from community organizations and from maybe institutions of faith and maybe universities to contribute to this vision for a thoughtful, humane application of AI as a social good?

I look at that, Elizabeth, and I say, well, what if we had a similar fund for and a similar theory of change for community arts practice, for artist workers’ rights, for art as a tool to serve people of all abilities, of art as a tool for education?

What if there were a national arts constitution or a national arts framework or national arts strategy that doesn’t say exactly how you, Elizabeth, have to approach it or how I have to approach it, but says here are 10, 12, 15 aspects of a healthy arts ecology and that invites people to contribute in some sort of collective and coherent and — I’m not gonna say entirely coordinated, that’s never gonna happen, that’s not even ideal — but a way where the sum is greater than the parts to help achieve an outcome?

And it might invite collective philanthropy to support that as well. I think that’s what’s really impressive about the Humanity AI effort. I don’t know exactly how it came together, but I’m gonna assume somewhat organically, a group of serious thinkers at the head of major foundations said, we should do something together to ensure that AI serves the commonweal. And I think that we can do something like that, centered around, let’s say, a dozen campaigns over the course of the next 15 years that do not demand that any individual creative practitioner or arts institution does anything, but invites everybody to do something if they wish.

In my view, that’s Elizabeth sort of how this would unfold. And then there are many dozens, let’s say even hundreds, of existing advocacy organizations in the country. I’m not sure we need a new entity, but I do think we need a, let’s call it a Congress of Institutions that could come together and talk about this framework and then make sure that the information reaches their constituents. And that would also include local arts agencies and state arts agencies and regional arts agencies inviting institutions to participate in collective action over the course of the next 10, 12, 15 years.

In my view, Elizabeth, that’s one framework that could work. I’m sure there are others, I’m sure there are better options for how this might proceed. But I do think that there is a gap of collective leadership and collective action that is failing as yet to meet the scale and the speed of the change that is taking place.

It’s Time to Widen the Aperture on Advocacy

Elizabeth Bowman: 26:57

Yeah, I guess that’s the question. It’s like the speed of the change that’s happening, and then the fact that a a lot of arts organizations don’t necessarily have manpower dedicated to advocacy. So these changes come into the news, and then they don’t have any time to digest them, and then there’s no advocacy, so we’re steamrolled.

Brett Egan: 27:21

Yeah. Well, I I think that, you know, Elizabeth, there are vociferous advocates working very hard right now to protect, in particular, the agencies. And that’s important work. I think it’s a fraction of the work that needs to be done. But that is important work that’s taking place, and these are real professionals who are doing this.

I mean, they are on the hill constantly seeking bipartisan support for broadly popular programs. Part of the genius of the endowments is that they fund in every congressional district around the country. And that’s how they were set up by design. And that was an ingenious conceit on the part of the Johnson administration, those who came together to pull together the original legislation, to try to insulate them from exactly this type of political moment where the concept of arts funding may become politicized to the extent that one side feels that it isn’t relevant, necessary, or appropriate anymore. I mean, this money is in every American congressional district. That’s smart. And there are very serious professional advocates arguing for the continuation of these.

My argument is that it’s just not enough. You know, the National Endowment for the Arts, well, it’s not enough, and that the agencies, largely because of the actions of this administration, have become so overtly politicized. And actually the ingredients or the matrix through which they are making grant-making decisions has changed and has become partisan, not exclusively, but a lot of it has become partisan, that the agencies have been damaged.

It’s not to say that they’re damaged beyond repair. And I think there’s a lot of people who would argue that they’re not damaged beyond repair, and I would agree that they’re not damaged beyond repair. But I think that they have been damaged. I think that it’s gonna take years, it might take more than years, to repair them to this sort of noble principle of a nonpartisan entity that can make egalitarian decisions about the distribution of public funding in a fair way across every congressional district without overt politics laid on top of them. I think that’s gonna take a lot of time.

And my concern is is that arts administrators and managers and institutions need stable partnership. While it’s also true that many organizations, the money that they’ve received from the agencies has been small compared to their total budget, that’s not universally true. There are certain organizations, especially smaller rural organizations, many organizations of color. Some of the grants that come out of the National Endowment for the Humanities, IMLS, are significant six-figure grants that help really move museums forward and libraries forward. This is important funding for a lot of these organizations. And it’s just not stable anymore.

My view is that continuing to focus in heavy measure on the preservation of the agencies at the national advocacy level is totally understandable. It’s necessary work, but we need a lot more. We need a lot more force that is diversified across many other issues. We need, I think, a fund for legal defense of creative expression within arts and culture. I think we can use substantial additional support, in addition to the current advocates that are already thinking about this, about how to ensure that arts education remains a vital and universal function in every American public school. I think we need additional protections and enhancements for artists with disabilities. I think we could use importantly additional thinking and enhancements for how we can make living and working as an artist in America more sustainable and humane. You know, there are several fronts that need attention.

And the current advocacy infrastructure has been largely focused on preserving the agencies, which is totally understandable. It’s just insufficient.

It’s time for a new, nonpartisan, national public fund for the arts

And the reason why I’ve called for, for instance, thinking about the possible development of a new national nonpartisan public fund for the arts, where the sector would be in direct conversation with the American people as different than in a conversation with the American people through the vehicle of their tax return for funding of arts and culture in America, is that the amount of money that goes to arts and culture in America is at its lowest point against GDP since the formation of the national endowments in 1965.

This (data point is based on) the allocated budget from the Biden administration; this is not a Trump administration issue. Of course, the Trump administration is calling for the elimination of the agencies, but the Biden administration’s allocation for the National Endowment for the Arts was at the lowest percent of GDP since 1965, the year after the legislation.

And that’s not because the Biden administration wasn’t pro-arts, it’s because the vehicle of the national agencies is as a funding entity is not at the level of potency that most arts people would say ison par with the quality of work that we do, with the return that we provide for the investment, with the value that we provide for American communities.

I think many of us believe that, and many of us believe that more is possible. Is more possible through the vehicle of the government? Maybe. That’s a conversation that’s been going since the beginning of our nation. It’s been accelerated since 1960 in the last 60 years. The answer has been probably not. I think that’s a tough pill to swallow.

I don’t know if there’s political will across both parties to dramatically increase the allocation for the endowments. That certainly has not been the case in recent memory. And in fact, we’re at the nadir, the very bottom point of the relationship between arts funding and GDP since the inception of the agencies. It’s not where I’m going to put my stock.

I’m looking for areas where we have a little bit more control over our destiny. And that’s why I’m calling for a conversation about an independent national arts fund where we can take the conversation directly to the American people.

The need for a strengthened framework for Sector Strategy

Look, this is all really fast-moving terrain, Elizabeth. And, you know, I’ve been in a number of conversations recently where we’ve been working on these topics and sort of look at each other and say, isn’t it sort of astounding that here we are 250 years into the development of this nation, and we don’t have a framework for this discussion?

The endowments understandably and nobly took up that leadership position over the course of the last 60 years. But as they have been dramatically challenged, in many ways reconfigured, some would argue damaged — I would — over the course of the last six months, there’s been a hard, bright light shown on the fact that there has been an underorganization of the sector outside of the agencies. I’m not saying there aren’t unbelievable organizers in the sector. There are, but not of a scale on par with the challenge that we’re facing.

And I would say that the future of our sector will rely in no small part on how the sector responds to these challenges today.

Will we come together and say: here is an imperfect— even contested — vision for what we together can achieve as a sector over the course of the next 20 years? And let’s keep talking about it, even if it’s not perfect and it needs to continue to be debated?

Or are we going to remain in a relative quagmire of indecision about how to respond together?

And that’s really the question I feel personally drawn to struggle with. And I think a lot of our colleagues are struggling with. And I think there’s not one answer. There’s probably several. I think that’s the debate that I would like to see take on a lot of energy over the course of the next several months.

And, whose job is all this?

Elizabeth Bowman: 34:46

Do you think that has anything to do with the burnout problem in our industry? You know, how people are obviously just focused on getting their operational funding and the audiences back.

Brett Egan: 34:59

Yeah, I mean, to an extent, Elizabeth, this is all extracurricular. I’m not sure. There are a few people maybe in the country whose job this is, right? But only a few in respect to the aggregate volume of the sector.

For most people, this feels existential. Like many of these issues feel that they will have a profound impact on the health of my organization. But the energy, the power, the bandwidth that I have as an individual to respond to these feels so insignificant to the measure of the challenge that I think very understandably, part of the response is “I get it. These are the issues. There’s not much I can do. I don’t know what to do. I have to stay focused on my job and on my people and making payroll this week.”

And when you multiply that across tens of thousands of really accomplished, brilliant arts administrators who face that immediate reality, in the absence of a framework that people can tap into, yeah, I think you’re going to get less effective response to this than you would if there were more organization and a little bit more articulated vision at the national level.

And yet I want to be really clear, this is not a critique or an indictment of the advocacy organizations that exist today. These are, they’re not new issues, but the confluence and the scale of the issues is new. It’s unprecedented. And the, I think, perceived lack of stability of partnership within the federal agencies.

It has exposed the fact that there is not an infrastructure that’s equal in stature to what the agencies have represented that has the ability to respond to the issues at a scale and with a force and with the money that’s likely needed in order to provide real relief to the sector.

It’s not a critique of the existing advocacy organizations. It’s a question whether this is an opportunity to think about the evolution of those advocacy organizations — is there a way for the existing advocacy organizations at the national and local and regional levels to come together through a new vehicle or a new type of conversation, maybe around a new sort of collective framework or strategy that would produce real results for administrators working at the local level.

Yes. Overwhelm is part of it. The fact that it’s extracurricular in many regards is part of it. The fact that these are theoretically existential concerns, but in comparison to making payroll on Friday, they’re just not gonna get the attention that they might otherwise get because everyone’s busy making sure that their own house is in order.

These are tough times.

Elizabeth Bowman: 37:47

Yeah. I mean, a lot of large-scale arts organizations do have at least one person dedicated to government relations or, you know, at least when I was working at the Canadian opera company, there was somebody whose role was government liaison. And I guess this whip might fall under that person, maybe.

Brett Egan: 38:08

Maybe the very largest organizations. I think the vast majority of organizations in the States would love to have somebody whose focus would be relationships with local and state government. I think a lot of people rely on their local and state arts agencies to be that proxy and their advocates at the local and state levels.

The other issue here is that this is really new terrain for most people. In many ways, new terrain for me. I’m not a policy expert. I haven’t spent my time in those circles for the most part. I’d like to think I’m a good student. I’d like to think I read enough to be a competent conversant, but there aren’t so many people who have made their livelihood focusing exclusively on these issues.

There are brilliant people in the academy who have focused on this. The translation of what happens in the academy to what happens on the ground is another workflow that I think could use improved blood flow. How can we avail of that data and research in a real-time way, in a practical way, to equip advocates and organizers and strategists with information and thought that has been developed that can really help tackle some of these challenges?

But, you know, that’s not the job of most orchestra administrators. It’s not the job of most people running a small opera company. It’s not the job of people running community arts organizations. Do they have thoughts? Do they have passion? Do they have emotion? Are they impacted by it? Of course.

But, I would argue, there is an underformed response to the scale of the challenge that’s being faced. And the professional workforce that’s in place to respond to that challenge, I think, is hustling and doing the best that they can. I just think we need a much broader tent for a national conversation about how in the collective we can address some of these issues together. I think that piece is missing.

Both Governmental and Nonprofit Sector Organizing efforts are needed

Elizabeth Bowman: 39:59

Yeah. I feel like if major organizations all did have this type of role, they would also potentially find avenues for revenue as well. Because you would find, for instance, like policy shifts that are announced and then there are grants that are formed based on those policy shifts. So I mean it might result in in more income as well. I mean, I’m not saying that that’s the primary use of that, but it it it could potentially.

Brett Egan: 40:30

I think that that’s right. And I think we have good examples of that. For instance, the work that was done by the National Endowment for the Arts during the Obama administration to develop the Our Town program. That program was looking at cross-sector applications of creative practice, and the development of healthy communities. All of a sudden [arts organizations were] able to have conversations with the Department of Agriculture and Department of Health and Human Services and Department of Transportation. And yes, some of those departments said, yeah, we could actually use innovative solutions to some of the challenges that we face. Yeah, artists or cultural organizations could be partners in that. Yes, we’re willing to make an allocation for cultural organizations or creative practitioners to be part of the teams, at least, if not also the implementers of some of these solutions, and new money flows from those agencies in the direction of arts and culture organizations.

Yes, I think we have good examples of the way in which that work has been successfully executed that I would say, Elizabeth, we should continue to pursue [within government].

I’m not holding my breath for that, though. And I’m not suggesting that you are. I think right now, and at least for the next three years, if not longer, we’re 100% in a climate where that’s not likely to happen. You know, I wouldn’t argue to any of my colleagues, put 60% of your energy in that direction.

There will be some that will continue to press for it, and that’s because that’s their job. And I’m so glad that they’re there. And they’re really smart people. For instance, the folks at the Cultural Advocacy Group that think about how to have really thoughtful discussions with partners in government and not just in arts-related parts of the government, but across federal agencies to try to get more opportunity for artists and cultural organizations throughout the federal infrastructure. And I’m so glad that that work is taking place.

I just think it’s meeting with unprecedented headwinds as we speak, because throughout the federal government, there is a major effort to downsize, consolidate, defund, de-platform. So as an administrator … it’s not the bet I’m making. I’m not making the bet that over the course of the next three, four, five years, the major advances are going to come from breakthroughs in partnership with government, at least as it pertains to arts and culture.

Will that change moving forward? I would like to think that there might be administrations in the future that will be substantially more sympathetic, both to direct arts funding and to the role that arts and culture can play. But it feels very distant to me. You know, it feels impractical to me to say that’s where I’m going to put most of my focus.

So I think it’s a both and, but I think the balance of focus and balance of energy right now, this moment invites a really close scrutiny of what we can do independent of government. Because while that conversation continues to unfold, it’s a pretty unstable environment. And from a managerial standpoint, it just doesn’t seem like the most strategic use of energy and focus from my perspective in the immediate. I think it’s a good opportunity for us to be thinking about what strides and development can we make outside of government.

Elizabeth Bowman: 43:33

Definitely, definitely 100% agree. And I hope to those listening. It’s Walter Isaacson’s debate, right?

Brett Egan: 43:42

I mean, it’s a question of balance. And I don’t know if I have the right balance. And I’m sure there will be people who disagree with things that I’ve said.

The thing that would be ideal is if, as we have these debates, we can presume goodwill. You know, I think that’s another thing that our sector has done to an extent, but not always. I think our sector has done a pretty good job on occasion of quelling or marginalizing certain perspectives and voices. In some cases, I think that there’s very understandable reasons why it has, including trauma, including bad behavior, including a sense of urgency to create more opportunity for more people.

But I think we have to be careful with each other moving forward. I think we should be careful with each other and caring moving forward. Not to be too ooey-gooey about all of this, Elizabeth, but I think that these next couple of years, as these ideas about what a new future might look like are beginning to meet the public sphere, I think to the extent that we can, showing grace towards each other is important. We’re not going to agree with each other all the time. We may vigorously disagree with each other some of the time. I think if we presume good faith and that all of us, or the vast majority of us, care about largely the same thing — which is the role of creativity and art and culture in democracy and the role that it can play in practical ways of making our communities more healthy and just, but also in less tactical ways — in making life more beautiful and fuller and richer and more self-aware and more rewarding.

I think we all pretty much believe in those things. How we get there should be the focus of vigorous debate. But I would like to suggest that we do need to be really mindful of how that debate takes place. And it’s hard because there’s a lot of emotion in it and there’s some trauma that informs some of the discussion. And I think we can acknowledge that at the same time as saying if we’re going to make progress, we’re going to do it together. And this needs to be a big tent. And we should be as gracious towards each other as possible.

Some Important Capacities of Future Arts Leadership

Elizabeth Bowman: 45:39

Agreed. I will wrap this up with two sort of more general questions for you. With all of your vast experience, I wanted to ask, what do you think are the qualities of a great leader?

Brett Egan: 45:52

Maybe unsurprisingly, Elizabeth, I’ve given this some thought!

I think we’re entering into a phase where we need to be developing what I would call “hybrid” leaders. And by that I mean we need people who are really good at the essentials of arts administration, but … I’m also thinking about how do we develop the next generation of arts leaders who are able to grapple with some of these big social and technological changes that are taking place around us.

I think our arts administration curriculum needs to include — and I know many of them already do because there are really smart people who have put together these curriculums — not just curriculum on how do you develop a cultural product, market it, fundraise around it, build effective boards, organize within community, but we’re gonna need people who understand how AI is likely to affect human beings, not just as it pertains to art, but broadly speaking, because that is a vector that all of us are gonna be contending with at a greatly accelerated pace and depth over the course of the next year, three years, five years. And arts administrators need to understand that. And they need to understand how to prepare their organizations for that and how to talk with artists and other human beings within this new age.

I think we do need more administrators who have a sense of what role they can play as advocates locally and at the statewide level, and they need tools to be equipped in that manner.

I think we probably need additional and continued training on how the arts can intersect and contribute to the success of other sectors, whether that be transportation or agriculture or health.

Of course, there are great practitioners in these areas. I think that needs to be laid into the fundamental training of arts administrators.

Elizabeth, I think we could use more debate and dialogue and visioning around what it means to support hybridic thinking within the arts administrative context without getting too fanciful or philosophical about it. This is this is really just about how arts administrators are prepared to take stock of and adapt to the changing environment in ways that operates outside of the four walls of the theater or the museum.

And a lot of this also has to do with the way in which human beings are changing and have changed.

You know, I think many people at the start of their careers understand this intuitively, but they don’t understand how dramatic the change has been because they weren’t alive in the 70s and 80s, like some of us! And some of us who were alive in the 70s and 80s understand that something’s changed, but haven’t really accepted how profound the change is, and want to believe that the ways in which we operated 30 or 40 years ago are going to continue to be competitive over the course of the next 30 or 40 years. And I’m not sure that that’s the case.

And so these are some of the factors that in my mind influence what I might call hybridic training for arts administrators and the types of things that are going to be needed for leadership.

Elizabeth Bowman: 48:47

Great. You answered my second question in that question, since I was going to ask you about what it should be taught in these arts administrator programs that are out there right now.

Brett Egan: 48:57

Well, Elizabeth, when I was in I was in school in the late 90s, I actually had the opportunity to create my own major. I was one of the weirdos, because I was like one of the couple dozen kids in my class who was like, I’m not sure anything that’s being offered fits my needs exactly. So I just go create my own thing, probably some folly and maybe some wisdom in that.

I ended up putting together a concentration in what I called cultural theory and performance studies. It was exactly the curriculum and thinking that the political right in this country today has said has completely corrupted an entire generation of Americans! A lot of Foucault and a lot of the structuralists and post-structuralists. And, by the way, a lot of the classics — I mean, I studied a lot of Shakespeare and Greek tragedy, and you know, it was a pretty broad mix.

For about 10 years after I was in school, I said, geez, I had a great time at school, but I’m not sure it really set me up for success. I didn’t come out of school with one of the degrees where, you know, you get shot straight into one of the industries, like consulting or law or business or finance. Wasn’t really my interest anyway. But if I had gotten a degree along those lines, I might have been more equipped to put together a sustainable livelihood! And it took me like three years to learn how to speak like a regular human being again, Elizabeth, after having read way too much Judith Butler. Like every sentence that came out of my mouth was a full page long. Maybe I’m still struggling with that!

But what I’ve realized in retrospect is that that education, in particular for me, and this may sound super nerdy, but I think of myself as sort of a recovering structuralist. To be able to look at the way in which a text is put together to say, how did the author create the effects on me that the author did, whether it’s a film or an advertisement or a book or a poem or a play? Like, how did they do that structurally? How did the pieces go together to create that effect?

You know, I think that a structuralist education, where 21, 22, 23-year-olds are able to look at the world and say, I understand the surface of what the author is trying to convey. I understand the image. Do I understand the intent behind the image? Do I understand how the image was constructed? Do I understand how it seeks to develop or reify or cement certain established ideas or challenge certain established ideas? That structuralist education I find to be really helpful now because what we’re having to do is look at a political terrain.

Responding to the Trump Administration’s National Arts Agenda

And this is what, you know, not to try to sound too fancy, what I was trying to do in the ArtNet piece was to say, hey, look, it feels chaotic, but actually, if we can think about this structurally, there are actual pretty clear elements of a cultural policy that have been developed and is being implemented by this administration. And there are at least three sleeves. I’m arguing there’s an economic sleeve, an ideological sleeve, and an aesthetic sleeve.

I think that administrators, insofar as they are looking at their own organizations, obviously benefit from that type of training. But I think also as individuals looking out at the world, that type of training can also be helpful.

I’m not saying that every arts administrator should be reading Althusser and semiotics, Elizabeth! But, I think the structuralists helped us understand how power is put together, how you can take it apart, how you could put it back together in a way that meets the ends that you have in mind. So that’s one more arrow I might put in the quiver for the arts administrator education is read up on the structuralists and the deconstructivists a bit, understand how they see the world, it might help us moving forward.

It’s a very nerdy way to end our interview, Elizabeth! But it has crossed my mind a few times over the course of the last 20 years of or 25 or 30 years of professional life following my rather chaotic undergraduate education.

Elizabeth Bowman: 53:00

Well, there are a lot of moving parts in arts organizations. So it does make complete sense. I mean, especially if you’re looking at a performing arts space where you’ve got production with hundreds of people involved. Yeah. And then that administration behind it, you’ve got to have a really analytical mind on just understanding them. Thank you so much for being in the scene room today. I really appreciate it.

Brett Egan: 53:25

Well, thanks for inviting me, Elizabeth. This was fun. Hopefully, it’s of some use to your listeners, and I hope hope to hear from some of them. And thanks for the honor of the invitation.

President Lyndon B. Johnson presents American dancer and choreographer Agnes DeMille with a bill signing pen at the ceremony commemorating the signing of the National Foundation on the Arts and Humanities Act, 9/29/1965.

It’s time U.S. arts leadership acknowledges that Russell Vought and President Trump have initiated a national arts strategy of seismic consequence, and to decide: will it answer with a collective strategy of its own? If so, authored by whom? Implemented how, and when?

The Administration’s arts strategy parrots tactics deployed in other arenas: a cascade of executive orders, grant recissions, terminations, and threats designed to “flood the zone”, disorient leadership, sow division, compel self-censorship, and halt effective response.

This salvo has been largely successful. In fact, merely nine months in, the Trump administration is poised to become the most consequential, effective arts presidency in American history – peerless in impact since at least Johnson, whose pillars this administration has toppled with surgical efficiency.

It’s tempting to view the administration’s approach as haphazard. But careful analysis reveals a coherent, if unspoken, national arts policy – one defined by values; mechanized through institutions; backed by capital; enforced by savvy loyalists.

The Vought/Trump policy is discernible in three sleeves:

• Aesthetic. The administration has quickly sought to exert clear aesthetic preferences throughout the public realm. In August, Executive Order 14344 directed the GSA to not only favor “traditional and classical” styles in federal building architecture, but to actively shun modernist, “contemporary”, and brutalist themes. As Chair of the Kennedy Center, the President has argued, in some detail, the merits of specific Broadway productions; sought a curatorial role in the Center’s mainstage programming; and personally selected this year’s honorees, dismissing “plenty” of otherwise qualified candidates who were “too woke”. The administration has initiated the largest federal art program in recent memory, the National Garden of American Heroes, commissioning 250 statues for $200,000 each, but not of any design: only those “life-sized” statues proposed in marble, granite, bronze, copper or brass were considered. The Oval Office has been embroidered in gold, and the incipient White House Ballroom promises an equally florid, “golden ballroom” vibe. These actions are but a few of numerous, forthright actions taken by the administration to advance an explicitly Eurocentric, classical, realist aesthetic.

• Ideological. The administration has swiftly realigned federal arts agency decision-making to its social ideology, with broad downstream impacts on the independent sector. EOs 14151, 14168, and 14173 were interpreted by Endowment leadership to justify elimination of federally-funded speech on issues including diversity, equity, inclusion and gender “ideology”. While the constitutionality of these actions is debated in court, grantmaking priorities have been rewritten, and a virus of self-censorship has infiltrated America’s philanthropies and cultural institutions. Interim Kennedy Center management has moved to eliminate woke attractions and introduce religious (specifically, Christian) programming. And, in August, the administration’s detailed critique of specific Smithsonian exhibits joined demands for their removal, and similar directions targeted national park signage addressing topics such as climate change and slavery, citing their “improper partisan ideology.” Broadly speaking, an ideology skeptical, or openly hostile, to the principles of equity, inclusion, diversity, gender identity and critical historiography has taken root throughout the federal arts infrastructure.

• Economic. The administration has enforced its aesthetic and ideological preferences through correlating economic policy. It quickly rescinded billions from the arts, public media, libraries and museums and redoubled proposals to eliminate the NEA, NEH and IMLS. It simultaneously redirected some funding to preferred projects, including the Garden of American Heroes, initiatives that celebrate military history, and projects “that explore the role of the United States as a leader in global affairs, emphasizing themes of American exceptionalism, moral leadership and America’s national interest”. Through the One Big Beautiful Bill, the administration ushered the largest Kennedy Center appropriation in history – not to correct for collapsing ticket sales since its takeover, but to refashion its grand halls in alignment with the administration’s preferences. Significant tax code changes have emboldened lower-dollar donors, while disincentivizing larger donors and corporations, with most estimates projecting a net negative impact on the nonprofit sector. Broadly speaking, the administration’s economic policy will weaken the nonprofit arts sector’s ability to function – including in its historical role as a potent critic of official narratives regarding national identity.

The administration’s swift appointment of loyalists to key positions illustrates a level of priority on arts and culture unprecedented in the modern era. Just twenty-three days into his term, Mr. Trump and Richard Grennell replaced Chair David M. Rubenstein and President Deborah F. Rutter at the helm of the Kennedy Center. On day 51, Michael McDonald was named acting chair of the National Endowment for the Humanities. On day 59, Keith E. Sonderling was named Acting Director of IMLS. And, on day 106, Mary Ann Carter was nominated Chair of the National Endowment for the Arts, a move that took Biden 258 days; G.W. Bush, 719; Obama, 142; Clinton, 199; Reagan, 267; and Mr. Trump, in his first administration, 726 days. Under these appointees, Mr. Trump’s priorities have been executed with pace, while the professional staffs of all three agencies and the Kennedy Center have been hollowed. It is an open Beltway secret that final consolidation of the agencies is likely via merger – assuming they survive the budget season intact.

These actions have stunned our diverse sector, whose diffuse leadership remains undecided on how to respond.

The inertia is understandable: our sector – historically circumspect of consolidated leadership – remains all spoke and no hub, with little precedent need to organize policy and action. However, we must now acknowledge that its noble commitments to grassroots inclusion, diversity of thought and representation have limited its ability to quickly mobilize with coequal force to the administration’s agenda. While our sector debates organizing methodology, leadership structure and a shared platform, the administration implements a uniform vision with searing force.

To be sure, flashes of courageous resistance and important, if nascent, efforts at collective response are afoot. In September, Smithsonian Secretary Lonnie G. Bunch III sidestepped White House demands for curatorial changes by launching an autonomous internal review. In October, 100 plus philanthropies locked arms to rebut the administration’s claim they support domestic terrorism. Rhode Island Latino Arts v. NEA persuaded Senior U.S. District Judge William E. Smith that the NEA’s move to penalize projects for “promoting gender ideology” constitutes illegal viewpoint discrimination. The Future Film Coalition is organizing filmmakers, exhibitors, and distributors to defend independent cinema; Jane Fonda has revived the Committee for the First Amendment; organizations such as the Japanese American National Museum have taken a bold stance against self-censorship; national advocates have issued principled statements; and following Elizabeth Larison’s clarion call, the National Coalition Against Censorship’s Arts and Culture Advocacy Program issued “Cultural Freedom Demands Collective Courage”, which has gained some traction.

In truth, however, the lion’s share of sector advocacy has focused less on today’s frontline crises than on yesteryear’s Maginot Line: federal funding for the national endowments and IMLS. Preserving the agencies and their appropriation matters; and the National Assembly of State Arts Agencies, Americans for the Arts, and American Alliance of Museums have each organized maximum effort to secure their survival. But as I argued in July, even if the agencies are preserved, they are no longer the noble investments envisioned by the Great Society but, rather, diminished, increasingly partisan instruments. Future-year funding is likely to remain meagre (this year marks the NEA’s lowest allocation vs. GDP since its inception) and, at least for the next several years, advance Mr. Trump’s priorities. At the very least, I suggest we must develop means aside from the tax return to engage Americans in a discussion about nonpartisan, national support for the arts (and libraries and public media). And ultimately, arts funding, while crucial, is just one front in this contest; while the administration plays the board, we’re focused on a single square.

What’s needed now is an independent, nonpartisan, national arts policy of a sweep and potency on par with Mr. Trump’s. In this effort, four difficult but attainable tasks are urgent:

1. Author an independent sector National Arts Policy, by and for the American People
A plain-language platform is needed to articulate the importance of arts, culture, and creativity to democracy, economy, and healthy society; commitments to free expression, universal access and equal representation; future roles for the arts in education, health, and urban renewal; pathways for artificial intelligence to become an ally, not adversary, to the arts and artists; and optimal roles for government, the private sector and the people in the advancement of these goals.

2. Form an effective Leadership Entity
   Representatives from the aforementioned institutions can form a hub entity, or “congress”, with a mandate from their memberships to forge, then operationalize this policy through collective action. This congress would encourage – but not compel – its memberships to support national policy objectives. Semi-annual meetings would function as a platform to organize, initiate new campaigns, promote new voices, and debate policy amendments.

3. Define Messaging
   Concise, comprehensive, compelling messaging on the value of the arts in America – to a thriving democracy – should be defined and distributed through all willing vehicles aligned with this congress.

4. Stand up an independent, nonpartisan national arts fund
   The congress can appeal to national foundations, corporations, and individuals to develop a nonpartisan nonprofit to supplement (not replace) public funding, perhaps as defined by my July proposal, through a vehicle such as that proposed by Alan Brown, a combination of the two, or another, better model.

In such an effort, there would surely be vigorous contest over the nature of leadership, particulars of policy, and who speaks for whom. But we must be candid about the alternative: without a shared policy, backed by capital, implemented at scale and en masse, Mr. Trump’s policy will deliver, effectively unchecked, the most consequential arts presidency in American history.

It is hard but now necessary to accept that Mr. Trump’s unprecedented focus on arts and culture presents sector leadership with a once-in-a-century opportunity to meet the moment with its own, synchronized vision for the future of art in America.

Come with me for a few minutes on a journey back to 1987 – or, whatever year it was when you were ten. Go ahead, do the math, settle in, close your eyes if you wish. If you’ve already had too much coffee to close your eyes, or if you haven’t had enough and there’s a chance you might nod off, keep them open please. Am I an ancient to you? Or a child? Doesn’t matter – go to your age ten, the exercise will still work.

It’s Saturday afternoon, right around this time of year, let’s call it October. I’m in Long Beach, California, at that moment in history, home to the Long Beach Civic Light Opera, where I cut my stage teeth as General Bullmoose in a youth production of Lil’ Abner. And Avery in Charlotte’s Web and Sid in Pajama Game and Curly in Oklahoma. Somewhere in there, I took an understudy role with a promise to appear alongside Charles Durning and Hope Lange in On Golden Pond. But, over a 27-performance run I never once got a shot to take the stage. And that heartbreak is why I stand before you here today as a consultant, not an actor.

Ok, so where are you? What show were you in that summer, that summer you were ten?

For this next part of the journey, you’re going to have to get on your bike to come with me, so go ahead – what was it? A pink Schwinn with a banana seat and golden tassles? Go ahead, brush her off. We’re going on a ride.

We head out, ratty backpack over the shoulder as Mom waves us off because, what could possibly happen to a ten-year-old alone on a bike in the middle of California’s fifth most populous city? This was before helicopter moms – we were free range. Plus, she’s happy we’re on our way – finally out of the house, on a very specific mission.

Twenty minutes later, we find our way inside. We flash our card at the front desk, hustle through the turnstile, eyes adjusting under the fluorescent glow, the tender quiet all around. A quick stop at the fountain and then over to the card catalogue where we begin our thumbing through a thousand dogeared cards to find, is that the one? Ok, yeah that’s the one. Let’s do this. Jot down that number carefully now.

45 minutes into our journey, we’ve made it to the librarian. She’s been waiting for this number, and boy have we been waiting to get it to her. We begin our final leg, one last long walk to the stacks, around this corner, over this kid’s legs in the aisle, down this one, around the corner to an aisle with a light out overhead until…well here we are, we’ve arrived. Scanning, now scanning, slowly until yes, there it is, the World Book Encyclopedia, volume 14, “N and O”.

Finally with the goal in sight, we’re proud of our hard-fought conquest, here nearly an hour later, sweaty, exhausted, exhilarated as we arrive at our data, the data we need to ace our first major fifth grade assignment, the gross domestic product of New Jersey in, what year was this published? 1980? Seven years ago? Well, we’ll work with what we’ve got, that will have to do. 81.3 billion is the number we’ve been looking for. At least, that’s best answer we can get today, after seventy minutes of grimy adventure and exhaustion. We did it.

###

This is the world into which most of us were born, were raised – the world that set our expectations for the relationship between work, energy, risk and reward. This world, the world of working those rabbit ears on the Zenith to dial in those precious eight stations. Of showing up just on time to catch the Huxtables or to figure out who shot J.R. This world, where to escape boredom, to retrieve the GDP of New Jersey, to have your mind blown – you had to leave home. Where, to have a life, you had to go out —to theaters, concerts, libraries, churches, the circus—because that’s where the world lived. And you weren’t going to get it unless you got off the couch and mustered your way into the action.

This way of living, of thinking, of striving and of consuming dominated until, for practical purposes, it began to crack in 2001, just twenty some years ago, when, for the first time, a majority of Americans had some dial-up internet service in their homes. In 2007 it changed again, when over 50% of Americans had broadband in their homes. And, once again, in perhaps the most important moment in the history of our profession, in 2013, when smartphone ownership passed the 50% mark according to the Pew Research Center.

What’s transpired since then is a tidal wave of change in human behavior and consumer sentiment that I believe we still struggle to grasp, or accept, and that I believe remains the fundamental stressor in our field, a stressor which will accelerate dramatically in the next three years as AI proceeds to finally pulverize any remaining gap between human desire for stimulation and information, and the satisfaction of that desire.

As AI advances it will create insatiable expectations society-wide for god-level customer service and consumer experience, and our sector will not be immune. In fact, in many ways, our sector will be the canary in the coalmine for this paradigm shift – we have a lot to lose, and an even greater amount to gain – and our outcome in this next ten years will rely upon our ability to understand, anticipate and manage what is to come.

When the Buggles’ “Video Killed the Radio Star” became the very first music video played on MTV on August 1, 1981, they may have somewhat overstated the case – though not for poor Christopher Cross, who never topped the charts again. But they did not overstate the paradigm shift underway. “Pictures came and broke your heart” they sang “put the blame on VCR”; “In my mind and in my car, we can’t rewind we’ve gone too far”. Their tune tried to put a shape on something just forming, still somewhat ineffable, but nonetheless concretely real – that the world we knew was changing, that something new had come along that would displace and diminish, if not replace, its predecessor. That a true paradigm shift was underway.

Today, we know there are equally profound shifts underfoot. For me, three paradigm shifts – consumer expectation, AI, and the Trump two era – inform most everything we do together in this work: the way we produce, plan, educate, and engage. Today, I want to define these shifts, outline what they mean for the arts — especially theater — highlight where our peers are meeting these challenges head-on, and suggest ways we might work together through collective strategies powerful enough to turn these shifts to our advantage.

1. Consumer Expectation

Let’s start with a look at the American Time Use Survey, which talks with us about how Americans use their time today as different than forty years ago. We’re going to focus on four trends:

Live Arts Attendance – This category has remained almost flat—hovering at an average of about 1 to 2 minutes a day, or 6-12 hours per year—for forty years. In percentage terms, there’s been a small uptick, but the overall level is so minimal that it’s dwarfed by every other leisure activity.

In-person Socializing—this is the dark brown bar declining from left to right. In 1985, Americans spent about 50 minutes, each day socializing face-to-face. By 2024, it had dropped nearly 30% to just 35 minutes, revealing a steady and substantial reduction in in-person connection.

Reading—find the yellow bar. Time spent reading for pleasure has decreased from about 23 minutes a day in 1985 down to just 16 minutes in 2024. That’s a decline of more than 30%.

Finally Total Device Time is in, you guessed it, Green. In 1985, nearly no time was spent on digital screens—just one minute a day. Fast forward to 2024, and that red bar soars to 4.5 hours per day—a staggering increase of more than 4000%.

Today the average American spends most of their discretionary time at home, on screen, and alone. In an unnerving development, just yesterday, Colleen Dilenschneider and her team at Know Your Own Bone reported that what she calls high-propensity visitors, or people who are inclined to visit and actually do visit cultural organizations report yet another uptick in preference this year to stay home, rather than go out, with an increase amongst this cohort of 79% since 2011. Whereas we once left home to find a life, the opposite is now true for most Americans, even for those inclined to attend.

The National Endowment for the Arts’ Survey of Public Participation in the Arts (SPPA) helps us focus in on theater, and, as you well know, the trends broadly mirror those in the Time Use Survey. In 1985, 17 percent of American adults attended a non-musical play and 12 percent attended a straight play in the previous year. By 2017, attendance at musicals had remained fairly steady, at 16.5 percent, but straight play attendance had fallen to 9.4 percent. In 2022, figures affected by the pandemic convey a drop to 10.3 percent for musical attendance and 4.5 percent for straight play attendance. Sunil Iyengar of the NEA has suggested that these figures are likely to rebound to closer to their 2017 levels when the Endowment conducts its next reading in 2027.

The American Academy of Arts and Sciences’ Humanities Indicators, published just this year, also echo this finding: 65% of US Adults report no engagement with theater during the period studied, 64% report no engagement with visual arts, while participation in dance was somewhat higher, with just 58% reporting no engagement.

SMU DataArts’ September 2025 report tells us what that means financially. Even adjusting for inflation, earned revenue across the nonprofit arts sector remains far below pre-pandemic levels. Attendance has not recovered.

And we know that 2025 has been hard for new Broadway productions, with none of last year’s 18 productions yet reaching profitability, versus an average of approximately 20%.

It is difficult to look at this data and suggest that any of this is anomalous, or that it might get better on its own. It is tough to swallow.

So, I think most of us are asking, what the hell has been going on? What’s caused this?

But even if we understand and accept that it has happened, it’s not enough. We need to know, are we able to fight this? If so, doing what, for how long? Should we fight it? Or do we need to get with it, manage it, and find a way to leverage it?

Mind Change and Meaning

Perhaps the most compelling theory I’ve come across for how to grapple with this change is what Oxford-based Baroness Susan Greenfield calls “mind change.” Greenfield argues that just as climate change has reshaped the planet’s weather systems, the rise of digital technology – and specifically its tidal wave of information and visual stimulus – has physically reshaped our neurological climate. Greenfield’s science suggests that our brains actually respond differently to stimulus today than they did twenty years ago, and that they require ever more stimulus to generate the same level of excitement. Constant connectivity and screen exposure has physically rewired the brain’s capacity for sustained attention, empathy, and reflection. In his recent book titled “The Anxious Generation: How the great Rewiring of Childhood is Causing an Epidemic of Mental Illness”, Jonathan Haidt continues this thinking to show how this has especially affected young people—how the “phone-based childhood” has led to crises in mental health, social connection, and creativity.

These theorists argue that these shifts are not abstract. They are literal, biological transformations. I am arguing that our audiences are not exempt. Not today’s audiences, and certainly not tomorrow’s audiences.

So, where does this leave us? How should we approach these broad, sociological changes – changes which can often feel overwhelming?

I’m thinking about this in two ways – one is about product, and the other is about experience.

First, on product, I think we need to be as clear as possible about who is walking through our door, who is not, and what they want from us. I think this has implications both for artistic directors and for executive directors.

As I’m working through this question with our peers nationwide, I’m focusing with them on content strategies for three segments of our audience, segments I expect some of you also think of as the core, the inclined non-attender, and the initiate.

The core are our true believers, our subscribers, our long-time donors. Many of them are older and had their wiring set before this technological transformation. Some of them are younger but, like me and many of you, I suspect, were raised in the theater. Even though they are equally subsumed by this technology tsunami, we likely do not need to significantly modify our product or the experience we offer them. They are likely to continue buying what we’ve been selling, as is, until they’re no longer able to come to the theater. We need this group of stalwarts to bring their friends. We need this group to come more next season than last season – if they came twice last year and we can get them to come three times this year – for bottom line purposes, that is as good as finding a new patron altogether.

The challenge is that we know that we lost some of this group during the pandemic, and that they are likely never coming back. And we know that a generation of individuals we’d hope would replace them has had little to no arts education, and, most likely, parents who took them to the theater less and less over that period of decline. I suspect this has left us with a dwindling base upon which to call for support of our historical product.

The initiates are those Americans – the vast majority of Americans – who rarely, if ever, engage with the theater at all. I think most of us have considered this segment the holy grail – if we could just negotiate our way into their lives, not only would we fill our houses but we’d fulfill our mission to develop new audiences for theater as well.

We’ve tried a lot to get this group to pay attention to what we have to offer. They’ve been sought through celebrity-driven spectacle. They are often the focus of our educational and community-engaged programming. We build promotions and partnerships with people and organizations they like and trust in an effort to get them to try us out.

Many of our peers have designed new forms of programming for them, and have experimented with what I would call programming ritual. Here I might create a bucket that, broadly speaking, contains immersive theater; attractions like the Donkey Show; Sleep no More; Then She Fell; the work of Blume Studios at Blumenthal Arts; aspects of Armory and Shed programming; productions like Here Lies Love; Long Wharf’s site specific productions; Meow Wolf and Cirque-style attractions – really any theatrical experience that presses the boundaries of ritual, location, and engagement that clearly seek to exploit the experience economy and that do not fight but go with the flow toward highly mediated, super saturated, digitally enriched environment that has a truly spectacular, “cannot get this at home or anywhere else” appeal.

The rapid rise in popularity of this type of narrative driven engagement would suggest that the majority of initiates – that 60% plus of Americans over 18 who rarely if ever go to the theater – may be looking to engage with something theatrical, but that they’re looking for a largely new form of product.

New World Symphony in South Beach undertook a series of experiments about a decade ago aimed at understanding this phenomenon. They mounted 20-minute concerts and charged not $50, or $25 but $2.50; they built orchestral experiences lasting from 9pm to 1am, combining them with electronic dance music, dancing and booze; they backstopped chamber music concerts with electrifying video and visual content; they combined yoga classes with streaming concerts outside on the wall of their Frank Gehry Palace. What our colleagues found was that they did indeed attract audiences that had never given the traditional orchestra experience much attention, and that these audiences were in fact first time visitors, younger and more racially diverse. They were initiates. Management also ultimately conceded that no matter how they tried, they could not get many from this group to buy regular season tickets for Brahms, Beethoven and Bruckner. The analysis suggested reconciliation to the idea that to attract a substantially new audience – lets’ say digital natives, with a different orientation toward attention, toward digital media, and interaction – a new product would need to be built, but that chances were low that audience would easily, if ever, migrate to the core product. That the future of the orchestra may be the work of presenting multiple products for multiple different audiences. I think if a well-funded study were conducted in the experiential theater, we’d be likely to find much the same result – that audiences for Punch Drunk are not the same audiences for straight Chekhov.

The third group is the Inclined Non-Attender: those who go to other theaters, the museum, the symphony—but are just not yet coming to see us. It’s on this group that I place the most focus for the most growth for most theaters. Whereas to reach initiates we may need new forms of programming, with inclined non-attenders, who are more in nature like our core, I think our marketing and engagement teams have a great shot of building the promotions, partnerships, and collaborations to draw these future core audiences to our fold. This group doesn’t need to be reprogrammed – it needs to be seduced. When we look at the reach of most small and midsized theaters and their current capture of audiences inclined toward theater in their market, they are only reaching a small percentage of that inclined base, many in the 3 to 7 percent range. So, after getting our core to increase their attendance this year over last, focusing on the inclined buyer represents the clearest path toward increased audience numbers in the shortest period of time. For this group, it’s less about converting new people to the theater than converting more theater people to our theater. Looking at it this way, in the near term, many theaters have a ways to go in converting the arts people in their communities to their product, before worrying about initiates. When thinking like a marketer, this is always my first focus for audience acquisition; this does not entirely fulfill our mission, but it does help fill seats.

While I think audience growth in the next ten years, in most markets, can focus on deepening relationships with the core and inclined non-attenders, when I look at these collapsing trendlines I’m haunted by the notion that the number of inclined buyers for our traditional experience is shrinking. I think that is a reality we need to address as we look ahead.

I for one am not certain that a revival of traditional arts education is the answer to the audience problem. I do think that arts education is critical, but I am troubled by the notion that it will not be as powerful and pervasive as the role digital devices now play in the lives of our children. I think we may need to concede that over time, our core product will need to adapt along with the way in which digital technologies are rewiring the human brain – that our future likely looks like new products for new audiences, alongside our core product for true believers. I think the balance of this mix, a hybrid between core experience and initiate digital native programming and ritual, will vary depending on many factors unique to each organization and its environment, but I think this is the only reasonable assumption of where we are headed, based on the data.

The second area upon which I’m vigorously focused is enriching the total theater-going experience, and specifically how to increase positive friction and reduce negative friction for all three segments. In other words, how to make going out to the theater as exhilarating and rewarding as possible. Here I am focusing on things that we can do throughout the consumer pathway to reduce inconvenience and discomfort, and to increase value and comfort, as levers in our relationship with expectation.

At the start I want to address digital streaming, because this is one way our sector has contemplated reaching new audiences and reducing the effort required to consume our experience, and I know that some are placing increased attention on live streaming technology. I know I may earn some scorn in the room, but I remain skeptical that digital distribution, of nearly any kind, will be serious part of our future. At least not digital distribution of the product we create today. I think most of us would agree that our product does not, by and large, translate well via video to a home screen, and we also know we cannot compete with Hollywood production values. Admirable even necessary efforts during the pandemic did not turn into lasting and profitable programs; in fact, most of them lost serious money. There are a few exceptions, but even the most well capitalized, longest-running efforts in this experiment have failed to produce convincing results.

I know I am not alone in this room in stating that the essential value of the experience we offer is the physical immediacy of our product. We all believe this intuitively but the science here is also pretty compelling. A 2017 study at University College London found that during a live performance of Dreamgirls on the West End, audience members exhibited synchronized heart rates, noting that their pulses sped up and slowed down at the same rate. Another 2022 study used EEG technology to identify that brainwave synchrony among audience members was greater when they experienced strong musical pleasure, and, importantly when they were physically close together. The report states and I quote “The closer the people were physically the more similar their emotional reports were. More importantly the closer they were the higher was the cerebral synchrony when they were reporting high levels of pleasure related to the music.” Yet another study of 132 concertgoers in Berlin found that audience members’ breathing rates, heart rates and sweat levels synchronized during a classical music concert. Research published in the National Communication Association Journal established the concept of mirror-neuron theory, which explains that observing another’s bodily action activates similar neural systems in the observer, in other words that “when we observe someone performing an action, there is a concurrent activation of motor circuits by the mirror neurons that are also used by us when we perform similar actions.” And additional studies in 2025 have illustrated that oxytoxin – the bonding chemical – increases and cortisol levels decrease when individuals engage in group singing. We all know intuitively that the live encounter with performance produces a unique human experience and that this is our unique value proposition. This doesn’t happen when we watch a livestream at home, and the science backs it up.

I’m a father of three Disney-aged girls, and so I’ve had the opportunity to visit the Magic Kingdom a few times in the last several years. If you haven’t been recently, let me talk with you about how Disney – in the context of a lot of bad press about ticket pricing and becoming unaffordable for most families – is dealing with positive and negative friction. Using AI, Disney has created an in-app experience called the Genie. As you prepare from home for your monumentally expensive visit, The Genie asks you questions about which rides and experiences are most important to you. Then it works to develop an itinerary for you that maps your desired experiences to the layout of the park to ensure your dreams come true. Throughout, they suggest places you might want to eat, opportunities you hadn’t considered – such as meet and greets with characters if you are taking little ones with you – and even locations of restrooms. For an upcharge, you can load all your tech onto a Genie Band that makes scanning tickets and making purchases. Disney has begun taking pictures of you, whether you like it or not, in circumstances you cannot take a picture of yourself, like screaming down Space Mountain At the end of the day, the Genie allows you to download these photographs – for $75. The Lightning Pass also comes at an upcharge, allowing you to reserve your place in line for the most in-demand rides, saving a half hour or more several times throughout the day. These items are expensive – like several hundred dollars, and appeal to families who want to decrease negative friction at any cost. And people are paying for them.

There are a dozen other ways in which Disney is decreasing negative friction and increasing positive friction. I think we need to be thinking in exactly the same way when it comes to engaging with our audiences, especially initiates who have a very low tolerance for inconvenience and a very high threshold for expected experience. I will not forget my years working at the Kennedy Center, and the experience of going to the opera in those once-grand halls. While I often benefitted from comps I also could not avoid practicing the expense math around me. At the center, one could quite easily spend $750 and six hours of one’s life on an evening out. Two tickets at $250 including fees; a nice dinner; parking; concessions. While the marketing and executive teams at the center during my time there were without peer, I was always haunted by what I felt was an underwhelming positive friction. The only human contact was quite anonymous and cold – rushed box office personnel, cool ticket scanners and harried concessionaires. At a moment in human history when we’ve come to expect extremely high return on investment from each expenditure, after six hours out and $750 later, all I had, if I were lucky, was a memory. There were very few opportunities for positive friction within that consumer journey.

This inspired me to begin thinking about how more positive friction could be achieved in every consumer journey. I dreamed of a genius bar in the lobby, where one could pull up a stool or a bean bag and chat with the dramaturg or associate music director about the evening’s concert. I wondered – for those who’d already paid $40 to park their car, would they pay another $40 to have it washed while they enjoyed their evening? A Whole Foods had recently opened up in Foggy Bottom. Would it make sense to allow patrons to have groceries delivered to their car while they enjoyed Tosca? How could we make the evening out not only entertaining but useful? How could we build in three or four moments of positive friction – above and beyond the performance itself – that would load the journey with reward and celebrate the fact that you are physically present for our work?

This is why restaurants are adding bowling lanes and axe throwing. It’s why our hotel here has a LP record player in each room, and ambiguously credible novels on each shelf. They’re reminding you there’s more here than a bed here, there’s an experience.

I am convinced that to compete with an increasingly sophisticated experience economy, to turn inclined into core, and to attract and retain the initiate, we are going to have to focus intently on decreasing negative friction – any bug in the user experience that disincentivizes participation – and increasing negative friction – adding value throughout the consumer journey. Or, in some cases like the Groundlings experience at Shakespeare’s Globe, perhaps some of you will find ways to combine positive and negative friction and create value from it.

We can’t turn back time, and we shouldn’t turn our back on what makes us special. Consumers expect more from their time and energy than we did in 1987. Yet, most consumer pathways, and a lot of content, looks and feels very much like it did in 1987. I think this framework is the way to approach this question. How can we distinguish between the needs of our core and initiate audiences, and what will our customer journey offer in a year, in five? In ten?

2: AI and a New Humanism

I’d like to turn to the second major paradigm shift I see underway. It’s almost passe to discuss AI at this point as it has become ubiquitous in our sector and in society at large. But we should resist that urge; the ubiquity is for a reason, and our sector has yet to address the good, bad and ugly head on. While early adopters in the corporate sector are announcing huge productivity gains resulting from dedicated AI training and resources a recent Unite.AI study found that while 89% of nonprofits express interest in AI, only 28% have implemented it, with most citing lack of training and strategy as the primary barrier. Our own research suggests that discomfort with change; general overwhelm (not sure where to start); and concerns regarding environmental impact are also important barriers to adoption amongst nonprofit administrators.

This is why, in May of this year our team at the DeVos Institute launched A³: Arts x Admin x AI, a national program designed to help arts, culture, and humanities nonprofits forge a path to use AI in safe, ethical, and efficient ways, focused on back-office operations, and in alignment with their values. We wanted to demystify AI for the arts and help build a pathway to safe, genuinely impactful uses that teams of two and two hundred could adopt.

We are under no illusions that AI is a panacea. Further, we know full well it presents many ethical issues we need to work to sort out, specifically as regards our people, our donors, and the artists we employ onstage and offstage.

But, we also work every day with teams for whom vision and ambition exists in spades, but for whom capacity to execute presents a stubborn constraint. How many of us in this room believe that what stands between us and success in fundraising or marketing or education is one or two more full-time employees? I’d wager that’s most of us in this room. And it’s that phenomenon we wanted to deal with head on through A³.

There are now spades of studies that illustrate gains of up to 40% productivity each the entry-, mid- and executive levels in the corporate context. The question we asked the sector was, what could you do with 40% increased productivity? If you do the math, that means that if three employees were to utilize AI in this way, the yield would be approximate to a fourth employee, without the additional salary.

Before you conclude I’m arguing for a reduction in workforce, let me clarify that point. I am skeptical that AI will present opportunity to reduce our current workforce, at least in the near future, if ever. I think this is different than the corporate sector, and somewhat unique to the arts and culture sector, as we have on average, done so much more than would be reasonably expected from an individual for so long, that what we’re really talking about here is moving back in the direction of a more sustainable workplace for most nonprofit arts employees – focusing less on reducing workforce than decreasing current individual workload on redundant or automatable tasks by four or six or ten hours a week. If what this means is that certain of our team members are able to rebalance in a way that they truly enjoy their time at work, and that some find they have more time available for more substantive work – and specifically the work of building relationships with our public, of thinking through and implementing ways to increase positive friction in the lobby, in the community, on the path from the garage to the box office – that’s the win I’m looking for.

In the future I expect that AI will limit our need for additional entry-level and even some mid-level administrative functions and personnel. Even as our operation grows, we will not need as many people to clean growing data sets, meet patron expectations for segmented communication and customer service, do manual research on donor background, and manually evaluate audience sentiment. Need for personnel to perform entry-level, repetitive functions will definitely shrink. As a result, I’d like to believe that our perennial capacity crunch will lessen somewhat and that we’ll have more time to spend, on balance, doing the things that only humans can do.

That’s why our focus has been on the development of ethical uses of AI, merged with arts insight. Technically, what we’re trying to address is what many of you will understand as cost disease, the structural issue at the heart of all live performance industries. In their landmark 1966 study titled Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, William Baumol and William Bowen observed that while most industries achieve productivity gains through technology—one worker using new technology to produce ten times the output this year than a year before—need for artistic labor in the performing arts – our largest expense – remains essentially constant, no matter how technology improves.

Baumol and Bowen observed that we still need the same number of rehearsals, the same number of actors and musicians, and the same amount of time to stage Hamlet or HMS Pinafore as we did a hundred years ago. But since we only have so many seats in the house, and since we only have so many tickets to sell, earned revenue from ticket sales has failed to keep up with rising expenses, which, in our industry are driven in the majority by salary expense and specifically salaries and fees related to artistic production. In recent years, these increases have been especially profound for many producing organizations nationwide. That means that every year, we need to raise more money just to keep producing the same amount of inventory.

This is the principle at the heart of cost disease, a phenomenon all of us know well and we know this challenge is accelerating.

Through A³, we have sought to test one simple proposition: could AI cut the time it takes to complete essential administrative tasks by 40 percent without sacrificing quality or accuracy? The answer is proving yes — and then some.

While we don’t have time today to unpack all of what we’ve learned through the first five months of this seven-month sprint, here are a few headlines:

- Use of AI should start with the development of a policy for use within your organization that is tied to your values and that protects your data, and that of your patrons in ways mandated by the law, and by your promises to them. We began our program by providing participants with principles and frameworks for developing a values-aligned policy for use of data, and to help them address serious questions such as:

1. How will we remain transparent with staff, artists, audiences, and donors about where and how we are using AI?

2. How will we ensure that use of AI will abide our commitments to equity, diversity, and access in our organization and field?

3. How will we ensure that we are using AI in a way that protects data, respects intellectual property, and safeguards the privacy of artists, audiences, and funders?

4. How will we use AI in adherence with our commitment to environmental sustainability in our production practices?

- Second, the number of ways to use AI are overwhelming. We should pick two or three and master them, and these two or three should attack specific pain points in the arts management “cycle”. For those of you with whom I’ve had the chance to work, you may recognize this Cycle. The way we’ve approached AI is to think about how we can attack specific pain points that repeat time and again. These include daily tasks such as donor research, grant reporting, data entry and analysis, e-comm segmentation, routine customer service inquiries, financial analysis, and social media production. We’ve learned that adopting just one or two AI solutions in each of these areas, and working to integrate them across your staff, can have enormous impacts.

- Lastly, we are grappling with what creative tasks may be accelerated by the use of AI and we are thinking through the ethical considerations surrounding use of AI in creative functions. We are not talking about how to replace composers, actors, directors, or playwrights with AI, but we are looking at how AI can substantially reduce costs around certain forms of media production such as video trailer content production, and ways in which automated audience sentiment analysis may suggest new methods for creative teams to better understand what is hitting the mark with audiences and what is not, and why. As we move forward, we’ll be looking at means to shorten production timeframe, decrease production costs, and increase efficiency in areas that that have historically been impervious to automation.

AI will not solve every problem, and there are certain areas it should not and cannot touch. But I do believe it can finally begin to bend the Baumol curve — allowing us to increase output without proportionate increases in cost. Our sector’s key differentiator is our ability to build relationships, trust, and connection – biological connection – between humans in a room. If AI can reduce the burden of repetition, it can refocus us on the work of connection.

I think this means that the arts workforce of tomorrow will rely more heavily, across an increased proportion of staff, upon the skills of human connection, of humor, of affability, of charisma, and of sincere interest and curiosity about others. I think that more arts professionals will be spending more time engaging with more members of the public, even if that has not historically been their job. I think that this means that a majority of our employees in ten years, relieved of some or all mundane administrative tasks, will be in the value creation business, and in the relationship development business.

For this reason, we should not mourn the loss of perfunctory roles; we should prepare for the rise of a relationship-based workforce. In an AI economy, the most valuable workers will not be the fastest typists, but the most empathetic communicators.

And I think this is likely to be true across many industries, positioning theater educators for a resurgence. We know from social science research that Gen Z is experiencing a measurable decline in face-to-face social skills and interpersonal comfort. A 2022 Pew Research Center survey found that nearly 65% of Gen Z employees reported needing to re-learn social skills after the pandemic, and a 2025 Report by Freeman found that 82% of Gen Z say they need help expressing themselves and being with others in person. Similarly, the American Psychological Association has documented rising rates of social anxiety and loneliness among young people, with Surgeon General Vivek Murthy declaring a “loneliness epidemic” in 2023. These trends are attributed in part to the dominance of digital communication and social media in Gen Z’s formative years.

Theater education, in this context, takes on new meaning. Unlike most classroom settings, theater training forces participants to make eye contact, listen deeply, collaborate, and remain present in their bodies—all of which counteract the disembodied habits of screen-based interaction.

The theater educators in the room will know that students entering theater programs with limited social confidence, most often leave with sharpened empathy and heightened ability to connect with peers.

This is why employers across industries continue to prize “soft skills” such as communication, teamwork, and adaptability as top hiring priorities, even in highly technical fields. In fact, LinkedIn’s 2024 Workplace Learning Report ranked communication, leadership, and collaboration as three of the five most in-demand skills worldwide.

Taken together, these trends suggest that theater education is poised for a renaissance, if we can name and measure our outputs in these areas. As more sectors grapple with how to preserve human connection in an AI-driven workplace, the tools of theater—presence, empathy, storytelling, and embodied collaboration—will only become more valuable, not less.

I think we need a national effort in the arts to understand what is going on here and to produce practical, well-funded responses. And I think this work is urgent. We tend to talk about AI as though its transformations will unfold over decades. But credible voices argue that the next five years will see more change than the past fifty and some argue that we could reach a pivotal turning point as soon as next year. Late last year, Dario Amodei, the CEO of AI juggernaut Anthropic, wrote a startling treatise titled “Machines of Loving Grace”, which attempted to provide a framework for the rest of us to think about how AI will transform society. In his piece Amodei projects that the power of modern AI will not only reshape what humans do, but also how we know. He argues that generative AI systems, with their ability to produce text, images, and even reasoning chains at scale, represent a step-change in our epistemology and that they will quickly help with everything from curing all known diseases – which he posits will take place in the next ten years – to eliminating need for humans to be involved in virtually any repetitive task by combining agentic AI with humanoid robotics– essentially arguing that anything a human can do today, AI will be able to do better in a matter of years, and in some cases, months. In fact, he argues that we will reach what is commonly referred to as “the singularity” – the moment when artificial intelligence will surpass the capacity of the most intelligent, most capable human – as soon as 2026.

This isn’t just a shift in productivity — it’s a wholesale redefinition of how information is created and stored. One area to focus upon within this mind-bending projection is education. When all intelligence is available, synthesized, and tailored to the individual calling for it, in a millisecond, what will become the role of traditional education? What will our elementary and high schools have left to teach? What will universities have left to teach?

I think the answer is that our education system is likely to become less a venue for the creation and transfer of knowledge but a location where individuals are taught to make sense of what artificial intelligence produces. And this is where I grow optimistic about our future in the arts. If this transpires, I suggest that it will present a once in a century inflection point for the humanities. It ushers forth the possibility that art, theater, and the humanities can reclaim their role as society’s most trusted guides to sense-making, coherence, and meaning in a landscape where those qualities are under siege.

I would go so far as to suggest that if, as Amodei and others project, one of seven Americans has an agentic humanoid robot in their home by 2050, undertaking tasks that today consume tens of hours per week, and if AI has reached the point where it is able to synthesize all available information with the press of a button – if we no longer need to learn medicine or economics or architecture because AI will have made such learning unnecessary – humans may need the humanities more than ever. Why?

Harvard Business School professor Arthur C. Brooks is pushing the narrative that we find ourselves in a spiritual malaise as a people not because we lack religion but because we’re not bored often enough. He argues that boredom is “the Cadillac of feelings” and that only when we are bored do we have the bandwidth and the inclination to wrestle with the biggest questions facing us as a species, or as he puts it the “big questions of meaning”. As AI begins to transform society, I suspect many people will find themselves with more time on their hands, and they will have more time to focus on the meaning of life. When this happens – when humans find themselves suddenly bored again, as well as asking new questions about what is human and what is machine – I wager we will see a superbloom of relevance for the humanities. We all wonder about the big questions. We in this room know that there is nothing more helpful than art, than theater, to help us name, and perhaps begin to resolve those questions. When all we have left to sort out are the most important questions facing us as a species, I believe humans will turn to the tools art provides – to understand themselves, others, what is truly human, and how to handle what is not. I think the age of AI will also be a golden age for the arts.

This is why I’m working toward the formation of a think tank on the role of the ats in the age of AI – to provide a focal point for how the arts can leverage AI for administrative gain; understand AI’s likely impacts on the industry in the near and mid-terms; and prepare artists and arts managers to leverage the broad sociological transformation underway for the benefit of the arts. I would suggest that if we position the arts as tools to understand an increasingly overwhelming, spectacular, and automated world, our value as interpreters will not diminish but rather rise with each new AI breakthrough. The question is whether we will be ready for this opportunity when it comes.

3: Toward a National Arts Policy

The third and last paradigm shift I’d like to discuss brings me no pleasure.

We are living through the most consequential, effective and influential arts presidency in American history, one which has fundamentally transformed the relationship between the people’s proxy, the federal government, and our sector.

I hasten to add: not the “most beneficial” presidency, but certainly the most “consequential”, at least since Johnson: characterized by sweeping, impactful actions that have, in a matter of months, reshaped the federal role in culture and begun to instate a new, potent, de facto national arts policy.

This policy is, as yet, undeclared and piecemeal. But pillars of an emergent policy have been forcefully delivered and have introduced serious, widespread implications for our nation’s creative sector.

This room is well-versed in this topic, but to quickly recap some of its least charming developments:

• In August, Executive Order 14344 directed the GSA to favor traditional and classical styles in federal buildings—an explicit aesthetic policy with concrete downstream implications for the public realm, and cultural representation and memory.

• That same month, the White House issued a detailed review of Smithsonian exhibitions and materials, demanding curatorial changes in alignment with the administration’s view of history and cultural values. Correlative action was taken to remove or revise national park signage addressing issues such as climate change and slavery, under the logic of eliminating “improper partisan ideology.” In yet another, similar effort, the Department of Education has announced new preferences for “patriotic education” in discretionary grants, part of a wider effort to realign civics education to the administration’s worldview.

• The FY 26 White House budget proposal again recommends the elimination of the NEA, NEH, and IMLS. While Congress debates their fate, the administration has rewritten their funding criteria; hollowed their staffs; and terminated hundreds of confirmed grants. Executive Orders have been interpreted by the agencies to justify restrictions on speech on specific topics including diversity, equity, inclusion and gender. Regardless of their budgetary fate, the agencies have been reframed as explicitly partisan instruments and their grantmaking is unlikely to look the same for years to come, if ever again.

• Agency funding has in part been redirected toward a revamped National Garden of American Heroes. The $34 million investment will fund 250 life-size statues to memorialize the nation’s political, scientific, athletic, and cultural history. Participating artists will win quite alluring commissions estimated at up to $200,000, and an opportunity to help rewrite the American story for posterity.

• And, to cap this incomplete summary, in February, the Kennedy Center’s board was overhauled through direct intervention by the President, who was, of course, quickly instated as Chairman. Simultaneously the center’s esteemed, visionary, and professional management was replaced by individuals with no professional background in the arts, and for whom administering the national cultural center remains but one of several assignments. The nation’s cultural center is now the backdrop for consequential press conferences; its board meetings, helmed by the President of the United States, make the evening news. Its furnishings and decor are the subject of Presidential comment and are the beneficiary of unprecedented capital investment as prioritized by the President and Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill. The most powerful office in the world publicly ruminates upon particulars of Broadway history and the Center’s mainstage programming. The leader of the free world will not only select this year’s Kennedy Center honorees but will host the ceremony presenting the most celebrated award in American arts and culture.

When we look at these actions as a whole, I suggest that we must begin to think of them as increasingly articulate, comprehensive effort to define our nation’s official relationship with arts, culture and creativity — in other words, as a nascent national cultural policy, written by Russell Vought and implemented by the President, backed by the full force of the executive branch and a largely complicit, or neutered, Congress. The administration has, albeit in piecemeal, advanced an increasingly clear statement of values, defined those values through policy and program, ensured their implementation by faithful administrators, and backed them with the power of the purse.

In the meantime, our decentralized and diverse sector, two characteristics we value as strengths, has yet to develop a response of a scale, speed, or potency on par with the administration’s efforts. The dissolution of the National Endowments has brought into stark relief the disparate, autonomous and only loosely affiliated nature of our national advocacy organizations, a cluster of national advocates such as AFTA, AAM, TCG, the League of American Orchestras, Opera America, Dance USA, APAP, LORT and others – that formed as a constellation around the Endowments, proudly decentralized and audibly wary, throughout its history, of concentrating too much power in any single entity.

That paradigm’s effectiveness in protecting the best interests of the sector has crumbled before our eyes. And as we debate how to organize, the administration continues to take action to unravel decades of progress in our field.

Several courageous offices have illustrated how resistance can repel some of the administration’s most striking advances, especially those pertaining to free speech.

Critically, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie G. Bunch has countered the administration’s demands for curatorial changes in seven Smithsonian museums by announcing an autonomous internal review. Last month, 100 philanthropies locked arms to rebut the Administration’s efforts to characterize the nonprofit foundation sector as a left-leaning supporter, or perpetrator, of domestic terrorism and political violence. And late last month, in the case of Rhode Island Latino Arts v. National Endowment for the Arts, Federal Judge William Smith found the NEA’s move to penalize projects because that promote “gender ideology” in violation of the First Amendment, because it constitutes viewpoint discrimination. Outside of our sector, the Future Film Coalition is actively working to unite and organize filmmakers, exhibitors, and distributors to defend independent cinema. Universities have begun to organize in collective action to rebuff the administration’s demands to control admissions, faculty choice and curriculum. And in August the National Coalition Against Censorship, along with the New School’s Vera List Center for Art and Politics, published a statement called “Cultural Freedom Demands Collective Courage: A Nationwide Statement of Values and Principles for the Field of Arts and Culture.” The document has been signed by over 800 individuals and 250 arts organizations.

History shows what’s possible when loosely affiliated movements find structure. Between 1957 and 1961, a constellation of churches, student groups, and advocacy organizations began to coalesce under the Southern Christian Leadership Conference and Martin Luther King, Jr. By 1963, the Civil Rights Movement had a recognizable architecture, a shared mission, and begun to execute a disciplined set of campaigns. Within years, the Civil Rights Act was law.

I am not comparing our cause to the gravity of the civil rights or anti-poverty struggles. But, the arts sector today is at a similar inflection point—fragmented, disaggregated, yet brimming with unrealized collective power. Movements that repel authoritarianism and change the future of a cause have structure. They organize behind leadership. They adopt a clearly stated platform, and they are implemented through collective action organized through defined campaigns.

Our sector does not yet have any of these, yet we need all of them.

Without question, a high-stakes contest over the formation of a national arts policy is well underway, one in which we find our sector seeking means for coordinated, commensurate response to the swift action of a consolidated and focused power.

The fundamental question of our moment is this: Will the arts in America define their own national policy—or have it defined for them?

Conclusion: The Hybrid Manager

If part one of this talk named the sociology behind our current circumstances, part two argued that AI and the arts can and must find a path forward together, and part three argued for a collective response equal to the moment, this final chapter is what this asks of us.

These three paradigm shifts require that we begin to recharacterize the role of the arts manager in today’s environment. The next generation of leaders must be what I would think of as hybrid managers – working producers and visionary public intellectuals and in the same body. Someone who can manage a board, a budget and a production schedule, but who also can contemplate how AI will change their organization, their city and their sector. Someone who is as adept at discussing the impacts of theater on health and social cohesion as they are finalizing a budget for executive committee review. Someone who is equally at home defending the role of arts in society as they are explaining their mission to a prospect.

This room represents some of the most visionary thinkers in the field. But we won’t stumble into the next generation of leaders. We have to grow it.

This is why I believe we must focus on developing arts leaders with hybrid skill in four areas:

1) Technology and Consumer Expectation – our future leaders need to understand how time‑use has changed, and what this means for program and audience development in the generation ahead. They need to be able to speak with their board members, donors, funders and audiences about these trends and why their institution is uniquely positioned to address them.

2) The Age of AI – our future leaders need to understand AI-infused workflows, policy, ethics, and measurement. They also need to be able to grapple with the changes AI is likely to usher in their organizations and society, and to form a perspective and an effective response to those changes.

3) Deepening connections between the arts and society – our future leaders need to be adept at finding increased connections between our work and other sectors – specifically health, education, and urban development.

And

4) Local and National Arts Policy — our future leaders need frameworks to understand the implications of today’s de facto, if unspoken, national arts policy; how movements take root; effective means of collective action; and steps they can take to protect artists and organizations from encroachments on our civil liberties.

I believe that, while weighty, navigation of this agenda is within our reach. Our sector is no stranger to adversity. In fact, its story is one of remarkable resilience, creativity, and courage. Facing headwinds, for years, many of you have adapted with breathtaking speed, addressing our nation’s most intractable challenges with startling innovation, affirming that the arts are vital civic infrastructure. Today, as we speak our colleagues around the country transcend the tasks of quiet administration to assume their role as visionary, bold futurists creating new value, opportunities for economic growth, and social cohesion.

Let’s close where we began. When I was ten, if I needed a data point, or want to have my mind blown, I knew that significant time, energy, and even some sweat would be involved. Today, almost all human intelligence amassed since the dawn of time has been synthesized by Chat GPT, and is available to anyone, anytime, anywhere, at the price of a simple prompt. Mind blowing, personalized, on-demand entertainment – the likes of which we can hardly conceive of today – will soon arrive, with the same speed and at the same price – which is to say, no cost at all.

Our radio stars lying in state, every where we look.

But I am actually optimistic, perhaps more now than at any time in my career, about our sector and its future.

This week MTV announced that it would discontinue virtually all of its programming in the UK, South America, most of Europe and Australia. At the same time, at the height of music streaming, vinyl record sales have posted their 17th straight year of revenue growth in the U.S., up 10% in 2023 to $1.4 billion. According to the recording industry association of America, RIAA, LP sales increased by 10.3% from 2022 to 2023 alone, growing faster than streaming by 25%.

What’s going on here? Many argue that this surge is due to listeners craving the tangibility of the vinyl experience (the sleeve, the weight); the ritual of loading it into the platform and dropping the needle; the provenance and specifically the liner notes and the artwork; and the sense of community to which they connect via vinyl – the record stores, the listening parties—a series of phenomena that emphasize the human author behind the music and the ecosystem of people who enjoy the music as a community

Vinyl didn’t beat streaming by being more convenient; it thrives alongside streaming by being more human—more curated, more communal, more tangible, more collectible, and more real.

How might we adopt some of vinyl’s lessons? Amidst a sea of infinite digital surrogates, might we begin to think of each production as a limited pressing, bringing back liner notes, celebrating the ritual of concertgoing, creating positive friction throughout our lobbies and common spaces and converting them into hangouts like the record store?

I’d like to think today’s three paradigm shifts provide us means to introduce both our core and new audiences to the pleasures of positive friction only we can provide. Perhaps, as AI makes our lives in some ways simpler and in others more complex, we can usher a new golden age for the humanities, inviting our neighbors to ask and answer the big questions with us. And perhaps, these troubling days for our nation will be a catalyst for our sector to come together like never before, bound not by obligation or distress, but by exciting new frameworks for collective action.

Long live the radio star and the American Theater.

Thank you.

I was joined onstage by Deborah Rutter, former President of the Kennedy Center and incoming Vice Provost for the Arts at Duke University; Erin Harkey, President & CEO of Americans for the Arts; Jennifer Dorning, President of the Department for Professional Employees at the AFL–CIO; Stephanie Ybarra, Program Officer at The Mellon Foundation; and Aaron Myers, Executive Director of the DC Commission on the Arts and Humanities.

The video of their remarks and the ensuing discussion will be published by event hosts DC Jazz and the Doris Duke Foundation at a later date.

Photo Credit: Ariel Elizabeth Shelton

Good morning.

I want to thank DC Jazz and the Doris Duke Foundation Creative Labor, Creative Conditions initiative for convening us to celebrate the strength of our sector and confront with urgency the mounting headwinds for free speech and creativity facing our nation.

Our job in the next hour is not to luxuriate in our challenges, but to name them and quickly move on to discuss actionable, concrete, fundable proposals that can safeguard, at least – and accelerate, at best – creative freedom in the decade to come.

It’s an especially bold challenge from our organizers, but fortunately I have five of the brightest visionaries in the field on stage with me today to do all the heavy lifting.

Before I turn to my accomplished colleagues for their proposals, I will attempt to frame our discussion by quickly summarizing three fronts in our current struggle: political, sociological, and technological.

First, the political.

I would propose that to move forward with impact, we must accept that we are now in the midst of the most consequential, effective arts presidency in American history.

I hasten to add: not the “most beneficial” but the most “consequential”: characterized by sweeping, impactful actions that have, in a matter of months, reshaped the federal role in culture and begun to instate a new, potent, de facto national arts policy.

This policy is, as yet, undeclared and piecemeal. But pillars of an emergent policy have been forcefully delivered and have introduced serious, widespread implications for our nation’s creative sector.

This room is well-versed in this topic, but to quickly orient and energize our conversation, I will highlight just a few:

• In August, Executive Order 14344 directed the GSA to favor traditional and classical styles in federal buildings—an explicit aesthetic policy with concrete downstream implications for the public realm, and cultural representation and memory.

• That same month, the White House issued a detailed review of Smithsonian exhibitions and materials, demanding curatorial changes in alignment with the administration’s view of history and cultural values. Correlative action was taken to remove or revise national park signage addressing issues such as climate change and slavery, under the logic of eliminating “improper partisan ideology.” In yet another, similar effort, the Department of Education has announced new preferences for “patriotic education” in discretionary grants, part of a wider effort to realign civics education to the administration’s worldview.

• The FY 26 White House budget proposal again recommends the elimination of the NEA, NEH, and IMLS. While Congress debates their fate, the administration has rewritten their funding criteria; hollowed their staffs; rewritten their funding priorities; and terminated hundreds of confirmed grants. Executive Orders have been interpreted by the agencies to restrict funded speech on specific topics including diversity, equity, inclusion and gender. Regardless of their budgetary fate, the agencies have been reframed as explicitly partisan instruments.

• Agency funding has in part been redirected toward a revamped National Garden of American Heroes. The $34 million investment will fund 250 life-size statues to memorialize the nation’s political, scientific, athletic, and cultural history. Participating artists will win quite alluring commissions estimated at up to $200,000, and an opportunity to help rewrite the American story for posterity.

• And, to cap this incomplete summary, in February, the Kennedy Center’s board was overhauled through direct intervention by the President, who was, of course, quickly instated as Chairman. Simultaneously the center’s esteemed, visionary, and professional management was replaced by individuals with no professional background in the arts, and for whom administering the national cultural center remains but one of several assignments. The nation’s cultural center is now the backdrop for consequential press conferences; its board meetings, helmed by the President of the United States, make the evening news. Its furnishings and decor are the subject of Presidential comment and are the beneficiary of unprecedented capital investment as prioritized by the President and Congress in the One Big Beautiful Bill. The most powerful office in the world publicly ruminates upon particulars of Broadway history and the Center’s mainstage programming. The leader of the free world will not only select this year’s Kennedy Center honorees, but will host the ceremony presenting the most celebrated award in American arts and culture.

When we look at these actions as a whole, I suggest that we must begin to think of them as increasingly articulate, comprehensive effort to define our nation’s official relationship with arts, culture and creativity — in other words, as a nascent national cultural policy backed by the full force of the executive branch. The administration has, albeit in piecemeal, advanced an increasingly clear statement of values, defined those values through policy and program, ensured their implementation by faithful administrators, and backed them with the power of the purse.

In the meantime, our decentralized and diverse sector, two characteristics we value as strengths, has yet to develop a response of a scale, speed, or potency on par with the administration’s efforts.

Even so, several courageous offices have moved to repel some of the administration’s most striking advances, especially those pertaining to free speech.

Critically, Secretary of the Smithsonian Institution Lonnie G. Bunch has countered the administration’s demands for curatorial changes in seven Smithsonian museums by announcing an autonomous internal review. Last week, 100 philanthropies locked arms to rebut the Administration’s efforts to characterize the nonprofit foundation sector as a left-leaning supporter, or perpetrator, of domestic terrorism and political violence. And just Friday, in the case of Rhode Island Latino Arts v. National Endowment for the Arts, Federal Judge William Smith found the NEA’s move to penalize projects because that promote “gender ideology” in violation of the First Amendment, because it constitutes viewpoint discrimination.

Without question, a high-stakes contest over the formation of a national arts policy is well underway, one in which we find our sector seeking means for coordinated, commensurate response to the swift action of a consolidated and focused power.

Meanwhile, new reporting highlights continuing sociological challenges at the core of the sector’s business sustainability. SMU DataArts’ National Trends 2025 shows that from 2023 to 2024 the average arts nonprofit experienced a 25% decline in total revenue, with contributed revenue down 30% and earned revenue down 18%. Two other recent reports – the NEA’s 2024 Household Pulse Survey and the American Academy of Arts & Sciences’ 2024 Humanities Indicators survey – corroborate the view that the sector has yet to repair to pre-pandemic attendance levels. These data force a painful debate about whether, three years on, we must come to terms with a new normal regarding adult participation in formal arts and culture activities and the essential relevance of our work to the American public.

Finally, we continue a generational contest with hyperscale technologies for public attention, as entertainment technologies as pervasive as the iPhone and as singular as the Sphere continue to reshape audience economics and expectations in ways most nonprofit arts organizations are not built to withstand. We know generative AI will expand these technological pressures. While we champion its ability to increase administrative efficiency, we know AI will also usher unprecedented disruption within creative labor markets, raising thorny new questions about intellectual property, consent, pay, and freedom. Today, without question, we find ourselves on the doorstep of an AI disruption as significant for artists as was globalization for the rust belt manufacturing economy.

This sector is no stranger to adversity. In fact, its story is one of remarkable resilience, creativity, and courage. Facing these headwinds, many of you in this room have adapted with breathtaking speed, ingenuity, and courage. Our artists have accelerated efforts to address urgent social issues, often with fewer resources and at greater personal risk. Nationwide, artists and managers address with our nation’s most intractable challenges with startling innovation, affirming that the arts are vital civic infrastructure. Today, as we speak, arts managers around the country transcend the tasks of quiet administration to assume their role as visionary, bold futurists creating new value, opportunities for economic growth, and social cohesion. The persistence of these efforts demonstrates our sector’s readiness, despite the headwinds we face, to chart a sustainable, vibrant future.

And that brings me back to how I hope we’ll use the hour ahead. I propose that this room has the opportunity, through bold, coordinated action, supported by equally visionary philanthropy, to address these headwinds, and, in fact, to make progress in areas of its own choosing — but only if it recognizes the need for collaborative, collective action of a scale, swiftness, and focus comparable to the potency of the challenges it faces.

So, to kick us off, a question for each of you—“What one investment—in policy, funding, program or alliance—will strengthen creative freedom over the next decade?” To the extent you can, please define your proposal, the coalition needed, necessary investments, and, if you can get there, how we’ll know it worked.

Following each of your proposals, I will ask you to reflect upon how your proposal may be able to support, embed within, or otherwise coordinate with another on this stage – looking for opportunities, even here, even now, to move forward in collaboration together, and to inform this room on how philanthropy might take action on these ideas.

Thank you—and let’s get to work.

On July 22 in the Chronicle of Philanthropy, I made the case for a citizen-driven model to complement federal arts funding—not replace it.

A herculean task that would require unprecedented partnership and stamina. But if not now, when?

Link to the Article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy.

Join me in conversation about the topic on LinkedIn.

The piece discusses:

• Why, following actions by the Trump Administration, the National Endowment for the Arts, National Endowment for the Humanities, and Institute of Library and Museum Services will never be the same.

• How, even if they are restored by future administrations, they will be subject to political gamesmanship for a generation to come.

• Why it’s imperative that arts and culture leadership accepts this reality and initiates a bold new conversation with the American public about its support for the arts.

• What we can do about it and why now is the time to do it.

An excerpt of the article is below.

Link here to the full article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy or join me in conversation about the topic on LinkedIn.

The Chronicle of Philanthropy

July 22, 2025

Brett Egan

Is fighting to preserve the National Endowment for the Arts still the best path toward sustainable, national support for America’s creative sector? For advocates like me who value federal arts funding, and have long viewed the agency as sacrosanct, the question stings.

But it’s unavoidable. The NEA’s budget as a percentage of GDP is at its lowest level since its founding in 1965. In May, the Trump administration clawed back approved NEA grants with shocking ease while its 2026 budget proposes to eliminate the agency entirely. Previous congresses ignored such proposals, but it’s unlikely that this one will keep NEA funding intact.

Other pillars of federal arts funding, such as the National Endowment for the Humanities and the Institute of Museum and Library Services, face a similar fate.

Even if preserved, these agencies will be reshaped to serve a revised agenda under new funding guidelines. Future administrations may restore them to pre-Trump form, but their missions and programs will still likely see-saw between polarized administrations for generations to come.

The Rubicon has been crossed. As others have argued, in almost any scenario these agencies will cease to function as they have since their founding. Yet much of the arts and culture sector continue to focus almost solely on their preservation, ignoring the obvious truth that they can no longer be counted on as stable partners.

It’s time to accept this new reality, and the sooner the better. Only then is it possible to initiate a bold conversation with the American people about a new, complementary model for public support of the arts — one that might serve as a playbook for other nonprofit sectors rattled by today’s increasingly uncertain funding environment.

To continue reading, link here to the full article in the Chronicle of Philanthropy or join me in conversation about the topic on LinkedIn.

The revised mission — issued in a slew of late night grant recissions — lists specific (and, note its specificity) presidential funding "priorities" including: to "elevate the Nation's HBCUs and Hispanic Serving Institutions"; "foster AI competency"; "empower houses of worship to serve communities"; "make America healthy again"; and "make the District of Columbia safe and beautiful".

Absent from this list is reference to the noble, yet ineffable (and note its ineffability), founding mission of the NEA: to promote "artistic excellence" and "artistic merit".

I make my living assisting colleagues in drafting compelling, enduring mission statements that compel belief, support, credibility, investment and action. Not for the sake of a pretty statement. But for the sake of a statement that will function as a muscular decision-making tool, focusing action and galvanizing community toward necessary, difficult ends. The most durable mission statements pass four tests:

1) Clarity - a second-grader can understand them.

2) Differentiation – they clearly define what only we can do, better than any other in our market.

3) Coherence – their components form a logic, e.g. "We do this, believing this, to achieve this".

4) Comprehensiveness – they state who is served, through which services, where.

This new mission passes two of these tests, and it fails two. Where it fails, it presents opportunity for those who oppose Friday’s change to fight it in the court of public opinion – to preserve, or reinstate, the agencies’ historical mission, and to encourage the agencies’ very survival.

Those who do not agree with the President’s new mission for the NEA must now explain to the American public – through a lobby to its Congress – why this new mission fails on two fronts, and propose a more compelling, alternative surrogate for the two it passes.

Here is where it passes:

1. It is clear. One may not agree with the priorities, but the priorities are crystalline. A response to this mission must be equally clear. The ineffable axioms “artistic excellence” and “artistic merit” passed muster in a different America. While most arts people (including myself) believe in these principles of art’s inherent value, times have changed. They are not clear principles to many Americans.

2. It is differentiated. The historical mandate of “artistic excellence”, while noble, was not differentiated sufficiently from the goals of private philanthropy or, in cases, the market. The president’s priorities do not overlap in all cases with the aims of private philanthropy or the market, at least pertaining to the role of art –at least not as much as the mission to promote “artistic excellence”.

Here is where it fails:

3. It is incoherent: its parts consist of no interior logic. They could be considered whimsical, subjective, personal, and, at best, loosely tangential to the function of most artistic expression. Together, they form no coherent throughline saying, “we do this, believing this, to accomplish this.” For this reason, the proposed mission lacks credibility.

4. They are not comprehensive: they do not speak to the full form and function of the arts. Art is big. It can produce useful, social or economic outcomes. It can also be, in itself, an inherent good. A durable mission for a national agency of the arts must encapsulate both these functions. Failing this, it will not be credible.

The coming legislative season presents arts advocates an opportunity to explain to the American public why the President’s proposed mission statement is incoherent and incomplete. It can also put forward a more compelling, durable, and credible argument for the NEA’s differentiated role in clear terms a second-grader can understand. This is the mandate if we are to salvage the agency and a mission that will stand the test of time.

As a seasoned strategic planning consultant, I can recognize a planning "bully" from a mile away. From the first half hour of any planning process the individual (in today’s case the Executive) will attempt to run rough-shod over the committee (in this case, Congress) to cram his/her vision down the throat of everyone else (in this case, the American people).

It must be noted, this is not how sustainable missions are written. Missions are never durable when passed through brute force. Nor is this how the founding legislation of the NEA and NEH was written.

The founding legislation of the NEA and the NEH clearly states that it is Congress, not the President, that will direct the activities and funding of the Endowments.

It reads: "Public funds provided by the Federal Government must ultimately serve public purposes the Congress defines." Instead, the recission letters issued Friday state the agency will hereafter fund "projects that reflect the nation's rich artistic heritage and creativity as prioritized by the President."

Serious, concrete questions now face our sector and our nation:

1) Will Congress fight a legally-dubious redirection of congressionally-appropriated funding?

2) Will Congress accede to the bully's proposed mission statement?

3) Will Congress instead adopt an alternative mission statement, put forward by the advocates for arts and culture in America? One that defines with clarity a differentiated, coherent, and comprehensive role for a federal agency for the arts and humanities in today’s United States of America?

4) Or, will Congress, failing to be moved by either mission, defund entirely the agencies and fulfill the president’s most skeptical vision of the value of the arts in Ameirca?

Any strategic planner recognizes this turn of events as a battle over the heart, or mission, of the NEA and one that will be fought, and won, on these four points: clarity, differentiation, coherence, and comprehensiveness.

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