Provocations

Thoughts on power, equity, and the future of cultural leadership. Check back often for new entries!

December 2, 2025

The Budget Size Apartheid: How Arts Organizations Mirror America’s Widening Wealth Gap

By Emil J. Kang

As income inequality has exploded across America, so has the gap between large and small arts organizations. This isn’t coincidence. It’s the same system creating the same disparities in a different venue.

We pretend there’s one “arts sector.” There isn’t. There are two completely different worlds operating under the same name, and the gap between them grows wider every year.

The data from Cultural Data Project makes this crystal clear: just as the top 1% now controls more wealth than the bottom 90%, large arts institutions have concentrated resources while small organizations fight over crumbs.

Let me be clear: this isn’t about condemning large organizations. They’re critical to our cultural ecosystem. The Met Opera, Lincoln Center, major museums: these institutions create artistic excellence and cultural preservation that smaller organizations cannot achieve. The problem is that we’ve created a system where only large organizations can thrive. A healthy cultural ecosystem requires biodiversity: both redwoods and wildflowers. Large institutions provide stability and excellence. Small organizations provide innovation and community connection. Mid-size organizations bridge both worlds. We need all of them. But right now, we’re protecting the redwoods while everything else dies.

In 2000, the largest 2% of arts organizations controlled 60% of resources. By 2023, they control nearly 80%. The middle is vanishing. Organizations with $1-5 million budgets are disappearing. During COVID, large institutions got millions in relief while small organizations closed forever, taking with them the talent pipeline and community connections that large institutions depend on.

Large organizations have full staffs, endowments, and boards of CEOs writing six-figure checks. Small organizations have one person doing everything and boards of teachers giving what they can. These worlds can’t even communicate. They speak different languages, measure different outcomes, exist in different realities.

IRS tipping point rules lock small organizations in poverty. A $300,000 organization can’t accept a transformational $500,000 grant without risking its tax status. Meanwhile, a $10 million organization can accept $3 million without blinking. The tax code enforces the apartheid.

Traditional percentage-based funding perpetuates inequality: 10% of $50 million is $5 million, while 10% of $500,000 is $50,000. Both do the same work to apply, but one gets transformational support while the other gets crumbs.

While I was at Mellon, we recognized this and dispensed with percentage-based giving. We gave some organizations 100% of their operating budget over three years. We understood that small organization stability strengthens the entire ecosystem. But most foundations still operate the old way.

When small organizations die, large ones lose their talent pipeline, audience development, and innovation sources. The entire sector loses public support. Why should taxpayers fund institutions they can’t access? The apartheid threatens everyone’s legitimacy.

What Donors and Board Members Must Do

Here’s the math donors never do: The top 20% of donors to large institutions give 80% of contributed revenue. If you give $50,000 annually to the Met, you’re probably not even in the top 100 donors. Your gift, while appreciated, doesn’t move the needle. The Met’s budget is over $300 million. Your $50,000 is 0.016% of their budget.

But if you gave that $50,000 to a mid-size organization with a $3 million budget, you’d be 1.6% of their entire budget. That’s 100 times more impact. You’d likely be a top 5 donor. You’d have direct access to leadership. You could influence programming. You could ensure survival during crisis.

Or consider this: that $50,000 could fully fund a small organization with a $500,000 budget for an entire month. You could underwrite their education program for a year. You could pay for the administrative position they desperately need. You could literally transform their capacity.

Yet donor after donor writes large checks to institutions that don’t need them while organizations doing transformative work close for want of $10,000. It’s not rational. It’s not strategic. It’s habit mixed with prestige mixed with social pressure.

If you’re reading this and you give to arts organizations, you have more power than you realize. Your giving patterns either reinforce the apartheid or help dismantle it.

First, recognize the impact differential. Your $10,000 gift to a large institution is a rounding error in their $50 million budget: 0.02%. That same $10,000 to a mid-size organization with a $2 million budget is 0.5%, twenty-five times more impact. To a small organization with a $200,000 budget, it’s 5%, which is transformational. You’re not abandoning large institutions by diversifying; you’re maximizing your philanthropic impact.

Reimagine your portfolio. If you give $100,000 annually to arts organizations, try this: $40,000 to the large institution you love (they need support too), $35,000 to two or three mid-size organizations doing interesting work, and $25,000 to five small organizations in your community. You’ll see more direct impact, attend more intimate events, build deeper relationships with leadership, and actually influence organizational direction.

Change how you give. Skip the gala where 80% goes to event costs. Write direct checks. Give unrestricted funds, especially to smaller organizations. They know what they need better than you do. Make multi-year commitments to mid-size organizations; predictability enables planning. Join giving circles focused on small and mid-size organizations. Fund operating costs, not just exciting projects. Resist the naming opportunity trap. That million-dollar naming gift for a rehearsal room at a large institution? It could fully fund a mid-size organization for a year or create endowments for five small organizations. Your name on a building is ego; your investment in ecosystem health is legacy.

Most importantly, use your social capital. When friends ask where to give, recommend the mid-size theater doing groundbreaking work, not just the symphony everyone knows. Host salon events for small organizations in your home. Your network access is often more valuable than your money. Introduce small organization leaders to other donors. Serve as an ambassador for organizations that can’t afford marketing.

If you serve on boards, where you serve matters as much as what you give. The ecosystem needs your expertise distributed differently.

If you’re on a large institution board, become an ecosystem advocate. Push for budget lines dedicated to supporting smaller organizations, not token grants but substantial support. Question why the institution needs another $10 million in reserves while small organizations in your community close. Propose sharing infrastructure: rehearsal spaces, group insurance plans, bulk purchasing agreements. Make ecosystem health a metric of institutional success alongside fundraising totals.

Better yet, diversify your board service. Instead of joining another prestigious large board, join a mid-size organization that desperately needs your expertise. Large institution boards have 40-60 members; your voice is one of many. Mid-size boards have 15-20; your contribution is crucial. Small boards have 8-12; you can transform the organization.

Consider this radical reallocation: leave one large board and join three small ones. Your $25,000 annual gift to the large institution, split among three small organizations, could literally save them. Your professional expertise in law, finance, marketing, or technology is desperately needed at smaller organizations that can’t afford consultants. Your network, opened to a small organization, could double their donor base.

Let me be specific about the opportunity cost. Serving on the board of a major institution often requires a $50,000-100,000 annual commitment. For that same amount, you could be the board chair of a mid-size organization, fully fund a small organization’s development director, or create challenge grants for five community organizations. Your expertise, which large institutions have in abundance, could transform smaller organizations that can’t afford professional services.

I know board members who’ve made this shift. One left the museum board where she was one of sixty members and joined three small arts organizations. Her $75,000 annual museum gift, divided three ways, made her the lead donor at each organization. Her corporate marketing expertise transformed their audience development. Her network doubled their donor bases. She went from attending quarterly meetings where she rarely spoke to being a vital strategic partner in three organizations’ success.

Let’s name the real reason donors and board members concentrate on large institutions: prestige. Being on the Met board carries social weight. Funding a gallery at MoMA gets you into exclusive events. Your name on a concert hall impresses people. Small organizations can’t offer comparable social capital.

But here’s what prestige-driven giving has created: a cultural sector that serves the wealthy while abandoning communities. Institutions that look like temples but function like country clubs. A system where social capital matters more than artistic impact.

Real philanthropic leadership means choosing impact over recognition, ecosystem health over individual prestige. It means being known as the person who saved three organizations rather than the person with their name on a wing. It means measuring success by community transformation, not gala invitations.

The irony is that donors who support ecosystem health ultimately gain more meaningful recognition. Being known as the visionary who understood ecosystem interdependence, who invested strategically across budget sizes, who built cultural vitality rather than cultural monuments: that’s a legacy that matters.

Building a Healthy Ecosystem

For Large Institutions: Create permanent budget lines for ecosystem support. Share infrastructure. When funders approach you for community work you don’t do, redirect them to organizations already doing it.

For Funders: Abandon percentage-based grantmaking. Create graduated support where smaller organizations get higher percentages of unrestricted funding. Fund ecosystem health, not just individual institutions.

For Policymakers: Reform IRS rules that trap small organizations. Create tax incentives where gifts to organizations under $1M receive double deductions. Fund shared infrastructure all sizes can access.

Individual donors and board members have more power to fix this apartheid than anyone except major foundations. Your choices about where you give, how much, with what restrictions, where you serve, how you advocate either perpetuate the apartheid or help dismantle it.

The budget size apartheid isn’t inevitable. It’s a choice made thousands of times by individual donors who give only to large institutions, by board members who serve only on prestigious boards, by foundation officers who fund only established organizations.

Make different choices. Diversify your giving. Distribute your expertise. Use your social capital for ecosystem health. The small organization you support today might become tomorrow’s cultural anchor. The mid-size organization you stabilize might bridge communities in transformational ways. The ecosystem you strengthen benefits everyone, including the large institutions you love.

The arts sector mirrors America’s wealth inequality because we’ve made the same choices: concentration over distribution, individual success over collective health, prestige over impact. We can make different choices.

Start with your next gift. Start with your next board meeting. Start with your next conversation about where to give. The ecosystem is dying, but it’s not dead. Your choices can help it heal.

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November 29, 2025

From Scarcity to Abundance: Diagnosing and Curing Your Organization's Poverty Mentality

By Emil J. Kang

If you work in the nonprofit arts sector, you likely operate from a scarcity mindset. This isn't a personal failing or a lack of leadership. It's the predictable result of decades of systemic underfunding, impossible expectations, and survival mode operations. Scarcity thinking has become so embedded in our field's culture that we've mistaken chronic fear for fiscal responsibility.

The tragedy isn't that you're under-resourced. It's that scarcity thinking, which developed as a survival mechanism, now keeps you trapped in the very conditions it was meant to help you endure. What once protected you now imprisons you.

This essay isn't about blame. It's about recognition and recovery. Because once you understand how scarcity mindset operates, you can begin to break free from its grip.

The Scarcity Diagnosis: Ten Warning Signs

These patterns aren't character flaws. They're adaptive behaviors that made sense when resources were genuinely scarce. The problem is that they've become permanent, even when they're no longer necessary or helpful.

1. You hoard information

Scarcity organizations treat information like a finite resource. Grant opportunities don't get shared. Contacts get guarded. Knowledge stays siloed. The development director won't tell program staff about funding possibilities. Senior staff withhold strategic information from junior staff. Everyone protects their turf because they believe sharing diminishes their value.

2. You compete with your allies

You see other arts organizations as competition, not collaborators. When another group succeeds, you feel threatened. Their grant is your loss. Their audience is your missed opportunity. You'd rather duplicate services than partner because partnership feels like giving away power you can't afford to lose.

3. You underpay and overdedicate

You've normalized poverty wages as proof of commitment. You hire brilliant people at insulting salaries, then expect gratitude for the opportunity. When staff leave for living wages, you question their dedication rather than your pay scale. You've confused exploitation with efficiency.

4. You plan for survival, not growth

Your strategic plan is defensive. You focus on maintaining, not building. Every planning session starts with what you might lose, not what you could gain. You budget for the minimum, then act surprised when you achieve it. Success is defined as not failing rather than thriving.

5. You say yes to bad money

You accept grants that distort your mission because you can't afford to say no. You take on programs that drain resources because any money feels better than no money. You've never met a restricted fund you wouldn't chase, even when the restriction costs more than the grant provides.

6. You resist investing in infrastructure

Technology is outdated because upgrades are "luxuries." Professional development is non-existent because training is "extra." You won't hire sufficient staff because overhead is "bad." You've internalized the overhead myth so completely that you apologize for having basic operational needs.

7. You burn out your best people

Your highest performers carry impossible loads because you can't afford to properly staff. When they break, you replace them with other idealists willing to sacrifice themselves. You rely on passion to compensate for resources, then wonder why your institutional memory keeps walking out the door.

8. You mistake small for virtuous

You've fetishized your own limitations. "We're small but mighty" becomes an excuse for staying small. "We're nimble" means you're understaffed. "We're grassroots" means you're disorganized. You've turned structural weaknesses into identity markers.

9. You fear success

Growth makes you nervous. Large donations feel unsustainable. Expansion seems dangerous. You've been in crisis so long that stability feels foreign. When things go well, you wait for the other shoe to drop instead of building on momentum.

10. You negotiate against yourself

Before you even ask, you've already lowered the number. You request less than you need because you don't want to seem greedy. You undervalue your impact because you've internalized your unworthiness. You've become complicit in your own underfunding.

The Origin Story: How Scarcity Becomes Identity

Scarcity mindset isn't born; it's built. It develops through repeated trauma: the emergency grant that saved you, the budget crisis that almost killed you, the layoffs you barely survived. Each crisis teaches the same lesson: there's never enough.

Funders reinforce this mentality. They demand that you do more with less, celebrate your efficiency, praise your sacrifice. They create competitive grant processes that force you to fight other organizations for crumbs. They restrict funding in ways that prevent building reserves, then penalize you for financial instability.

Your board contributes too. They bring corporate mindsets about overhead without corporate practices around investment. They want Amazon-level impact with garage-sale resources. They confuse nonprofit status with poverty vows.

Eventually, scarcity becomes your organizational identity. It's how you introduce yourself: "We're a small nonprofit..." It's how you explain your limitations: "As a nonprofit, we can't..." It's how you justify your failures: "With our limited resources..."

You no longer have scarcity. You are scarcity.

The Cost Calculation

Scarcity mindset costs more than money. It costs:

Innovation: When you're focused on survival, you can't experiment. New ideas require risk, and risk requires cushion. Scarcity organizations become museums of their own first success, repeating what once worked because they can't afford to try what might work better.

Talent: The best people have options. They'll sacrifice for mission, but not indefinitely. Scarcity organizations become training grounds where talented people learn skills, then leave for organizations that value them properly.

Impact: Scarcity thinking limits vision. You serve hundreds when you could serve thousands. You maintain programs instead of expanding them. You focus on preserving rather than growing. Your impact shrinks to match your mindset.

Partnerships: Scarcity breeds isolation. When you see everyone as competition, you can't build coalitions. When you hoard resources, you can't create collective impact. When you operate from fear, you can't trust enough to collaborate.

The Abundance Alternative

Abundance mindset isn't about having more resources. It's about thinking differently about the resources you have and could have. It's believing that:

- There's enough for everyone to succeed

- Investing creates returns

- Collaboration multiplies impact

- Growth is possible and good

- You deserve to be properly resourced

Organizations with abundance mindset share characteristics:

They invest before they're ready. They hire ahead of need, upgrade before systems break, train before skills are required. They understand that investment creates capacity, not the other way around.

They collaborate without fear. They share resources, knowledge, and opportunities. They celebrate others' success as proof that success is possible. They build ecosystems, not empires.

They plan for growth. Their strategic plans imagine expansion. Their budgets include investment. Their boards understand that spending money to make money isn't corporate; it's common sense.

They value their value. They charge what things actually cost. They negotiate from strength. They turn down bad money. They know their worth and expect others to recognize it.

The Transformation Path

Moving from scarcity to abundance isn't instant. It requires deliberate practice and patience with yourself as you unlearn decades of conditioning:

1. Start with language

Stop introducing yourself with limitations. Instead of "We're just a small nonprofit," try "We're a focused organization with tremendous potential." Language shapes thought.

2. Budget for abundance

Create two budgets: survival and thriving. Share the thriving budget with your board and funders. Show what you could accomplish with proper resources. Make the cost of scarcity visible.

3. Invest in your people

Even small increases matter. Give raises before you're asked. Create professional development funds. Hire before people burn out. Every investment in staff is an investment in capacity.

4. Build collective power

Identify three organizations you currently see as competition. Propose a collaboration. Share a grant opportunity. Offer a resource. Abundance grows through practice.

5. Create reserves

Even if you start with $100 monthly, build reserves. The psychological impact of having any cushion breaks the paycheck-to-paycheck panic that feeds scarcity thinking.

6. Celebrate growth

When budget increases, celebrate. When staff expands, celebrate. When impact grows, celebrate. Make growth feel normal and good, not dangerous and temporary.

7. Train your board

Most board members don't understand nonprofit economics. They think overhead is waste rather than investment. Educate them. Show them the real cost of scarcity thinking.

8. Say no strategically

Turn down one bad grant. Walk away from one toxic donor. Decline one mission-creeping partnership. Each "no" from abundance strengthens your ability to say "yes" to what actually serves you.

The Systemic Solution

Individual organizations can shift their mindset, but real change requires systemic transformation:

Funders must stop reinforcing scarcity. Fund real costs. Allow reserves. Support infrastructure. Trust organizations to know what they need.

Boards must bring abundance thinking. If you join a nonprofit board, your job is to resource it properly, not to admire its poverty.

Leaders must model abundance. Share salaries publicly. Collaborate openly. Invest boldly.

The Path Forward

Choosing abundance when everyone around you preaches scarcity takes courage. Your board may resist. Your peers may judge. Your funders may question. The entire system is designed to keep you small, scared, and scrambling.

But scarcity mindset is a prison you've been taught to guard yourself. The door isn't locked. You can walk out whenever you choose.

The question isn't whether your organization has enough resources. It's whether you believe you deserve them. Organizations that believe they deserve resources find ways to secure them.

Scarcity isn't your reality. It's your mindset. And mindsets can change.

The abundance is there. Stop apologizing for needing it. Start organizing to get it. Your mission doesn't deserve less.

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November 20, 2025

Institutional Inertia: A Tale of Two Cities Institutions

By Emil J. Kang

Three years. That's all Sasha Suda got at the Philadelphia Art Museum before she was expelled for doing exactly what they hired her to do. Brought in during 2022 to modernize the institution and break patterns everyone knew weren't working, she was out by 2025. The official language was diplomatic: "Different vision." The coded words institutions use when someone tried to break their inertia and the inertia won.

Blocks away, Anthony Roth Costanzo is transforming what opera can be.

At Opera Philadelphia, he's presenting Andy Warhol's "Perfume" in the Barnes Foundation galleries. World premieres by eleven composers this season alone. Eleven dollar tickets and sold out houses filled with people who've never experienced opera before. His board didn't just tolerate these radical changes; they resourced and defended them.

Two Philadelphia arts institutions. Two leaders hired to transform. One expelled after three years. The other thriving with unprecedented support. The difference isn't about vision or talent. It's about whether institutions actually want the change they claim to seek.

This tale of two Philadelphias reveals something profound about institutional inertia, that powerful force that keeps organizations doing exactly what they've always done, even as the world transforms around them. Every arts organization I know is trapped by it to some degree. But what happened in Philadelphia shows us something darker: how deliberately organizations choose familiar decline over necessary transformation.

The Physics of Organizational Paralysis

When the pandemic arrived, it should have shattered every pattern. And initially, it did. Organizations that hadn't changed in decades transformed overnight. Digital programming appeared from nowhere. Outdoor performances sprouted in parking lots. The impossible suddenly became possible because survival demanded it.

But the moment the acute crisis passed, most organizations snapped back to exactly what they were doing before. They returned to their previous seasons, their familiar structures, their comfortable approaches, as if those two years of proof that change was possible had never happened.

This wasn't just resistance. It was deliberate reversion. Organizations glimpsed what they could become and chose to return to what they were. They saw the future and decided they preferred the past.

The Comfort of Familiar Dysfunction

I've consulted with organizations where everyone openly acknowledges the problems they face. Programming doesn't resonate with anyone under sixty. The audience is aging out of existence. The funding model is so broken that every year becomes crisis management. Everyone agrees change is necessary, urgent even.

And then nothing happens.

Why? Because familiar dysfunction is more comfortable than unfamiliar possibility. People know their roles in the current failure. They've built their identities around managing decline. To change would require not just new systems but new selves.

At one organization, the education director confessed to me: "We've been having the same conversation about reaching younger audiences for fifteen years. We all know what we need to do. We just... don't." The resignation in her voice was devastating. She'd given up not on the organization but on the possibility of change itself.

This is what expelled Sasha Suda. Not her vision, but what implementing it would require. Curators comfortable with scholarly distance would have to engage communities directly. Development teams would have to cultivate entirely different donors. Board members would have to embrace art that challenged their taste.

Of course, in the absence of transparency, the public is left to imagine what transgression was so severe it required immediate action. Was it the new logo? The suggested name change to simply "Philadelphia Art Museum"? The audacity of thinking a museum could be something more than a temple on a hill?

To be clear, we don't know the real reason Suda was let go. There could be factors we're not aware of, dynamics invisible to those outside the institution. Maybe it wasn't about change at all. But when an institution hires someone to transform it and then removes them just as transformation begins, the pattern itself tells a story. And that story is one we've seen too many times before.

Why Opera Philadelphia Was Different

The question becomes: why could Opera Philadelphia change when PhAM couldn't?

These are, admittedly, very different animals. An encyclopedic art museum carries centuries of objects and the weight of being a civic monument. An opera company produces experiences that disappear the moment they end. One is about preservation, the other about creation. But both faced the same fundamental question: evolve or become irrelevant.

Perhaps it's generational, perhaps it's the art form itself demanding reinvention for survival, or perhaps it's simply that Opera Philadelphia reached a point where the risk of staying the same exceeded the risk of change. Their board understood that opera's future required radical reimagining. When Costanzo proposed $11 tickets, they saw access rather than devaluation. When he wanted to stage opera in museum galleries and unconventional spaces, they saw innovation rather than abandoning tradition.

PhAM faces different pressures. The building itself, imposing, elevated, separate from daily life, makes an architectural argument for a certain kind of cultural experience. The institution carries the weight of being an encyclopedic museum, a responsibility that can make change feel like betrayal rather than evolution. Every attempt to become more accessible, more dynamic, runs against decades of institutional muscle memory. Sometimes the very things that made an institution great become the barriers to its future greatness.

The Sunk Cost Fallacy

Organizations become masters at explaining why they can't change. The multimillion dollar building designed for a different era. The subscriber base expecting certain programming. The donor relationships cultivated over decades. The staff hired for obsolete skills.

But Opera Philadelphia faced its own version of these challenges. They had traditional subscribers, legacy donors, a company trained in standard repertoire. The difference? They recognized those sunk costs were actually sunk. They decided the future mattered more than the past, that serving new communities was worth losing some old supporters.

PhAM couldn't make that same calculation. They saw Suda's changes not as evolution but as betrayal of their investments. They chose to protect what they'd built over becoming what Philadelphia needs.

The Identity Trap

Organizations become trapped by their own self conception. The Philadelphia Art Museum sees itself as one of the nation's great encyclopedic museums. That identity, once a source of pride, becomes a prison. Every attempt to become more dynamic, more responsive, more relevant runs into the wall of what the institution believes itself to be.

Opera Philadelphia faced the same identity crisis. They were "the opera company." But Costanzo and his board decided that identity could evolve. They could commission living composers who'd never written opera. They could perform in museum galleries. They could charge $11. They kept the core, presenting opera, but radically reimagined what that could mean.

This is what Suda was attempting: not destroying identity but expanding it. The institution's antibodies rejected her because she was asking the organization to imagine itself differently, and that was more change than it could bear.

The Zombie Institution Phenomenon

Some organizations are already dead. They just haven't stopped moving. They go through the motions: seasons, fundraising, programming. But there's no life force. No artistic urgency. No community necessity.

These zombies persist for decades, shambling forward on endowment momentum, kept technically alive by elderly donors. I've been in their theaters with sixty percent capacity, watching audiences attending from obligation rather than desire.

Without intervention, the Philadelphia Art Museum risks becoming one of these zombies. Not dead, but not truly alive. Existing because it exists. Taking up space and resources that vital cultural work could use. Opera Philadelphia shows the alternative: an institution so alive that people are clamoring to get in.

Breaking Inertia: The Choice

Here's what I've learned through painful experience: breaking institutional inertia isn't about external force. It's about internal choice. The choice to admit what's not working. To imagine differently. To act without permission. To risk failure over accepting decline.

At Mellon, I saw this constantly. Organizations would apply for transformation grants while having no intention to transform. They wanted funding to do what they'd always done, just with more resources. The inertia was so powerful they couldn't even imagine genuine change.

But I also saw the exceptions. Organizations that chose transformation through sheer force of collective will. Opera Philadelphia is one of them. They didn't wait for permission. They didn't need a crisis. They simply decided to change.

The Question That Matters

If your organization disappeared tomorrow, who would actually miss it? Not your staff who'd lose jobs or your board who'd lose positions, but who would actually miss what you uniquely provide?

If the honest answer is "very few," you're already trapped in institutional inertia. The question isn't whether to change but whether you have the courage to choose it.

Most organizations will read this, recognize themselves, and do nothing. They'll feel sympathy for Sasha Suda, admire Anthony Roth Costanzo's success, then return to exactly what they've always done. Because that's what inertia means: knowing what needs to change and choosing not to change it.

The Tale's End

The Philadelphia Art Museum will certainly hire someone safer. Someone who will manage the decline more gracefully.

And across town, Opera Philadelphia will continue proving that transformation isn't just possible. It's exhilarating when institutions actually want it.

Two institutions. Same city. Same moment. One chose life, the other, who knows?

The question isn't why this happens. The question is why we keep pretending it's anything other than a choice.

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November 8, 2025

The Intimacy Crisis: Why scale is killing connection in performance

By Emil J. Kang

We've built temples to cultural experience, concert halls with excellent acoustics, adaptive and massive kunsthalles, and we've never been more disconnected from the art inside them. The larger the venue, the more sophisticated the production, the more we've lost what makes performance transformative: intimacy. That charged space between performer and witness where meaning gets made together.

Audiences arrive knowing less and less about the canon, even less prepared for contemporary work. Without shared reference points or cultural literacy, all we have is human connection. And we've been designing that connection out of our performance spaces in favor of scale.

The problem isn't just physical distance. It's the entire transactional apparatus: ticketing systems treating audiences as consumers, marketing positioning art as product, subscription models prioritizing predictability, institutional structures creating barriers between artists and communities. We've industrialized cultural experience and made intimacy nearly impossible.

The Scale Problem

Contemporary venues are designed for scale. Concert halls seating 2,000. Proscenium theaters seating 1,500. We measure success by capacity, sold-out houses, attendance figures. But scale and intimacy exist in fundamental tension.

In a 2,000-seat hall, the artist can't see faces beyond the first rows. Audience members can't read subtle expressions or catch small moments revealing the humanity of performance. The transaction is complete, but there's no space for relationship, for mutual vulnerability that transforms strangers into community.

In a room with 150 people, eye contact is possible. Breath is audible. Mistakes are visible, which means risk is real. The audience isn't just watching, they're implicated. A different exchange that most infrastructure can't accommodate because it doesn't scale.

The Canon Problem

Historically, audiences arrived prepared. They knew Beethoven's Fifth, knew the difference between Petipas and Graham and Limón, Chekhov and Albee. The canon provided context. That's gone, and good riddance to it as gatekeeper. But we haven't replaced the context it provided. Audiences float in open water without landmarks.

In this void, intimacy becomes essential. Proximity and relationship create conditions where artists can bring audiences into the work rather than expecting them to already know how to receive it. When audiences don't know what they're watching, the artist's presence and willingness to be vulnerable become the bridges to meaning.

But our large spaces, institutional protocols, and professional norms work against this. Artists backstage until performance. Audiences in the dark. Fourth wall maintained. Connection is optional, accidental, rare.

The Transactional Apparatus

Watch the apparatus: Box office treats tickets as commodities. Marketing positions artists as brands. Lobby moves audiences efficiently through concessions. Performance happens. Applause. Exit. Every touchpoint designed for throughput, not connection.

During my years programming, we'd bring extraordinary artists, market aggressively, fill houses. Audiences left satisfied, like after a good meal. They'd consumed culture. But had they been changed? Not often enough.

Performances that created genuine encounter happened in smaller spaces, with artists who spent time in community before and after performance, with post-performance conversations that weren't perfunctory. But these don't scale. You can't industrialize intimacy.

Contemporary Work and the Preparation Gap

The gap is most acute with contemporary work. In large venues, audiences arrive without preparation to work requiring openness, encounter art that challenges in spaces designed to maintain distance, and leave confused. We interpret this as the work's failure or the audience's, when it's actually infrastructure's failure to create conditions for connection.

Intimacy creates space for difficulty to be productive rather than alienating. When artists can acknowledge confusion, when there's room for questions, when the relationship includes permission to not understand immediately, challenge becomes invitation rather than barrier.

The shift from transactional to relational requires reimagining the entire ecosystem. Artists spending time in communities as relationship building, not outreach. Performances allowing genuine participation. Post-performance conversations as dialogues, not explanations. Institutions facilitating relationships rather than producing events.

The Economic Challenge

The economics are brutal. Large venues generate more revenue. Artists can't sustain themselves in 100-seat rooms. Institutions need attendance numbers for funders. The entire model depends on scale.

But we're measuring the wrong things. We've conflated ticket revenue with sustainability, audience size with impact, sold-out houses with success. The real question isn't whether intimacy can generate comparable ticket revenue to large-scale work. It can't. The question is whether we can build economic models that don't depend on ticket revenue as the primary measure of value.

We need new funding structures entirely. Not donors underwriting deficits after ticket sales fall short, but investors championing intimacy as the goal. What if funders supported work based on depth of transformation rather than breadth of reach? What if we measured return on investment not in audience numbers but in the quality of human connection created?

This requires inverting our economic model. Instead of selling tickets to performances, we could cultivate investors in artistic ideas. People who fund the development and presentation of work not to attend a single evening's performance, but to make possible the kind of sustained, relational, intimate artistic practice that can't exist within transactional ticket economics. Subscribers aren't buying access to individual shows, they're investing in an artistic vision, in a relationship with artists over time, in the conditions that make transformation possible.

Some organizations have built these models successfully. National Performance Network members have demonstrated that intimacy-centered presenting can sustain itself economically, but it requires smaller budgets, distributed revenue across multiple performances, artists compensated differently, and funders who value depth over scale. It means more performances for smaller audiences rather than fewer performances for larger ones. It means longer residencies, ongoing relationships, work that develops over seasons rather than premieres that disappear after opening weekend.

Newer organizations like ArtBath in New York demonstrate another approach. Founded in 2022, ArtBath isn't built around a single venue but around immersive experiences staged in reimagined spaces. Drawing from the tradition of art salons, they curate eclectic programs of dance, opera, music, puppetry, and theater in locations ranging from Lincoln Center to cathedrals to auction houses. The model prioritizes intimacy and connection over institutional infrastructure, proving that organizations can build sustainable practice around the experience itself rather than the venue.

It also means confronting the overhead costs of scale itself. Large venues require massive infrastructure, buildings to maintain, union crews, complex production requirements, marketing machines. Smaller, more flexible models can operate more efficiently. A work like Prudencia Hart in a bar requires minimal technical infrastructure but maximum artistic presence. The economics shift from capital-intensive production to artist-intensive process.

The challenge isn't finding the money. The money exists. The challenge is redirecting it from institutional preservation to artistic innovation, from scale-dependent models to intimacy-centered practice, from transactions to relationships. That requires donors and funders willing to champion a different definition of success.

What I Learned

At Carolina Performing Arts, we programmed across scales. For The National Theatre of Scotland's The Strange Undoing of Prudencia Hart, we presented it in a local bar rather than in our traditional venues. The work was designed for pub settings, with the audience sitting at tables, drinking, as performers wove through the room, sat beside audience members, sang directly to them. The intimacy wasn't incidental but essential to the work. You couldn't experience the piece from a distant seat in a theater. It required proximity, the smell of beer, the casual atmosphere, the breakdown of performer-audience separation. That demonstrated intimacy isn't about venue size alone, it's about eliminating barriers and creating conditions where connection is inevitable.

We created CURRENT, an intimate community-oriented space. One powerful experience: Hilton Als's Lives of the Performers, directed by Peter Born with Okwui Okpokwasili and Helga Davis. In that 150-person space, artists could see faces, gauge responses, adjust in real time. The intimacy allowed Als's meditation on silence, twinning, and the interior lives of Black women to land with devastating power.

I saw another model at the Ruhrtriennale: Rimini Protokoll's Situation Rooms. Each audience member moved individually through space, using tablets to guide their journey through a complex installation about the global weapons trade. Twenty people experienced simultaneously, each on their own intimate path, yet the infrastructure accommodated multiple groups daily. Individual intimacy designed at volume.

Paola Prestini and Magos Herrera's Primer Sueño at The Cloisters and Taryn Simon's An Occupation of Loss at Park Avenue Armory demonstrated similar principles of intimacy at scale. Primer Sueño was designed specifically for The Cloisters' medieval galleries, with audiences moving through the space as performance unfolded around them. Small groups experienced the work intimately, surrounded by art and architecture that became part of the performance itself. The venue's capacity limitations weren't constraints but essential to the artistic vision, the work required those particular acoustics, that sacred atmosphere, the ability to move close to performers, the integration of visual art and architecture. Simon's work operated with related logic: professional mourners from around the world occupied towers throughout the Wade Thompson Drill Hall, audiences choosing to sit quietly in them witnessing different mourning traditions. Both accommodated significant numbers yet each person experienced through accumulated moments of close, chosen attention. Scale through multiplication of intimate encounters rather than collective spectatorship.

These experiences proved intimacy is a choice, not just a constraint. But most institutions don't make that choice. They fill seats from a distance rather than sacrifice capacity for connection.

The canonical repertoire doesn't need intimacy to land. But contemporary work, work that challenges, work emerging from communities and practices audiences don't recognize, this needs relationship. And relationship requires intimacy, proximity, time and space that large venues and transactional systems can't provide.

Moving Forward

Shifting to relational models requires difficult choices. Building smaller venues though economically challenging. Supporting artists prioritizing depth over reach. Measuring impact by transformation rather than attendance. Valuing 150 people deeply moved over 1,500 mildly satisfied.

But the change isn't simply about building smaller venues. It's about right-sizing spaces to the artist's vision rather than forcing artists to fill whatever capacity we've built. The question shouldn't be "how do we fill this theater?" but "what does this work need?" Sometimes that's 50 people. Sometimes 500. Sometimes multiplication of intimate encounters allowing hundreds to experience over time. The venue should serve the vision, not constrain it.

This requires confronting an uncomfortable truth: bigger is not always better. Many artists understandably see creating at scale as a career milestone, proof they've "made it." The industry reinforces this. But when scale becomes the goal rather than the outcome of work that demands it, we distort artistic practice. Not every vision requires 2,000 witnesses. Some work loses power when forced to that scale. The most generous thing we can do is help artists discern what their work needs, even when that means challenging the assumption that bigger is better.

It means recognizing that when audiences arrive knowing less, prepared for less, with fewer shared reference points, human connection is all we have. And human connection requires intimacy, proximity, structures supporting relationship rather than transaction.

It means learning from and properly resourcing organizations already doing this work. National Performance Network members have modeled intimacy-centered presenting. They've demonstrated it's sustainable, creates deep community impact, supports artistic innovation. Instead of treating them as marginal, we should recognize them as essential, as infrastructure that actually serves the relational model we claim to want.

The performance spaces we've built are magnificent. The production values extraordinary. The artists world-class. But if audiences leave feeling they've consumed culture rather than encountered humanity, if the distance between stage and seat feels like a chasm rather than threshold, if performance feels like spectacle rather than communion, we've optimized for the wrong things.

Intimacy is risk. Vulnerability. Uncertainty. It doesn't scale. But it's where transformation happens, where strangers become community, where art stops being object and becomes experience. In a world where we seem to know less and less, where shared reference points are disappearing, where cultural literacy can't be assumed, intimacy isn't optional. It's essential.

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November 16, 2025

The Expertise Myth: When 'Business Acumen' Destroys Arts Organizations

By Emil J. Kang

In an earlier provocation, I asked what might be the unthinkable question for many arts organizations: what if your board is the problem?

Now let me be more specific. What if the very expertise you've been told you need on your board is precisely what's destroying your organization?

Every struggling arts organization I know has a board packed with exactly the kind of expertise everyone says they need: successful professionals from business, academia, healthcare, and philanthropy. People who've scaled organizations, optimized operations, and delivered results in their fields.

And almost without exception, these boards are overseeing institutions trapped in cycles of crisis and scarcity.

The problem isn't their professional backgrounds. It's that they've been trained in an extractive logic that fundamentally misunderstands how arts and cultural value gets created. They apply efficiency frameworks to mission driven organizations. They impose growth metrics on relationship-based work. They mistake the nonprofit structure for a flawed business rather than recognizing it as an entirely different organism.

But here's the deeper problem: the nonprofit model itself is broken, and these board members make it worse. The model assumes that culture can't sustain itself through market mechanisms, so it creates a structure dependent on charity. Board members then try to "fix" this dependency by making nonprofits operate more like businesses, not understanding that the model's very design makes that impossible. They're trying to repair something that was built broken.

The Expertise Gap

The gap between board members' professional expertise and arts understanding is vast. They genuinely believe their success in other fields translates to cultural insight. They can't distinguish between entertainment and art, between commercial viability and cultural value, between what sells and what matters.

I once had a board member hand me a CD of a harpist he and his wife had seen on a cruise ship. A cruise ship harpist. He genuinely couldn't understand the difference between entertainment that pairs well with a buffet and artistic programming that serves an arts and cultural mission. I bet many readers have a treasure trove of these stories.

This wasn't just bad taste. It was a fundamental misunderstanding of what we did, why we existed, and how artistic curation works. The CD sat on my desk like a small monument to the expertise gap. This board member ran a successful company, understood complex business operations, could read financial statements with sophistication. But he thought cruise ship entertainment was a programming recommendation.

That gap explains everything wrong with arts governance. Board members who can analyze a balance sheet but can't distinguish between artistic excellence and commercial entertainment. Who understand ROI but not arts and cultural value. Who know how to scale businesses but not how to nurture artistic risk.

The Fundamental Contradiction

The nonprofit model creates an unsolvable equation: provide public good without public funding, serve communities without community resources, operate like a business without business revenue. It's a structure designed for dependency, reliant on the voluntary largesse of wealthy individuals who then get to govern organizations they may not understand.

Board members see earned revenue at 40% and think the problem is pricing or marketing. They see contributed revenue as a temporary bridge to self-sufficiency. They fundamentally cannot accept that the nonprofit model builds in permanent dependency because culture in a capitalist system is not meant to be self-sustaining. The model exists precisely because culture can't survive market forces, yet board members keep trying to make it conform to market logic.

A managing director from Goldman Sachs joins your board and immediately asks: "Why can't ticket sales cover costs?" The question reveals not just misunderstanding of culture but misunderstanding of why nonprofits exist. If ticket sales could cover costs, you wouldn't need a nonprofit. The structure itself is an admission that the market can't support the mission.

The Growth Obsession

Board members who've been rewarded for pursuing growth bring that obsession with them. But the nonprofit model makes growth particularly destructive. Every expansion increases dependency. Every new program requires more fundraising. Every additional staff member means more money to raise from donors who then want more control.

During my time at the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, board members from various fields all pushed for constant growth. More concerts, bigger tours, expanded programming. They couldn't see that in a nonprofit model; growth doesn't create sustainability. It creates larger deficits. The more successful you become at fulfilling your mission, the more money you need to beg for.

The nonprofit model turns growth into a trap. Expand to serve more community? Now you need more donors. More donors mean more board members to manage. More board members mean more opinions about programming, more pressure to be safe, more mission drift toward donor preference. The model makes organizations choose between serving communities and serving those who fund them.

The Efficiency Delusion

Nothing destroys arts organizations faster than the efficiency mandate. Board members look at an organization and immediately see inefficiencies to eliminate. But they don't understand that inefficiency is built into the nonprofit model itself. The entire fundraising apparatus, the grant writing, the donor cultivation, the galas and events, this is pure inefficiency. In a functional economic model, none of this would exist.

We have development departments that spend 30 cents to raise a dollar. We have executives spending half their time fundraising instead of leading. We have entire teams dedicated to convincing wealthy people to support public good. This is the inefficiency that board members never question because it maintains their power.

I've sat in board meetings where consultants presented efficiency studies showing how we could cut 20% of program costs through "optimization." No one ever suggests cutting the development department, even though it's the most inefficient part of the organization. It exists solely because the nonprofit model doesn't work.

The Gotcha Game

Then there's the board member who treats governance as performance, who plays "gotcha" at finance committee meetings just to prove their worth. They scrutinize every program expense while ignoring that the entire nonprofit model is an admission of market failure. They demand accountability for every dollar spent on mission while the fundraising apparatus consumes millions just to keep the lights on.

These board members don't understand that their very presence on the board is evidence of the model's dysfunction. In a functioning system, arts organizations would be governed by arts experts and funded through public investment. Instead, we have wealthy amateurs governing organizations they don't understand because the nonprofit model makes us dependent on their charity.

What CEOs Actually Need

Here's what executives actually need from board members: advocates who understand that the nonprofit model itself is the problem, not how it's being executed. Board members willing to question why culture must beg for support rather than demanding organizations operate more efficiently within a broken system.

They need board members who show up as coaches, not critics. Who understand that leadership within a dysfunctional model is nearly impossible without board members making it harder. Who recognize that every CEO is being asked to solve an unsolvable equation: be sustainable in a model designed for dependency.

Most importantly, CEOs need board members who will advocate for different models entirely. Not better fundraising, but public funding. Not more efficient operations, but economic structures that don't require charity. Not improved nonprofit management, but questioning why culture is forced into nonprofit structures at all.

The Exceptions That Prove the Rule

Let me be clear: if you have board members who understand these contradictions, who see their role as working within a broken system while advocating for its replacement, hang on to them for dear life.

They exist. I've known a few. Board members who use their power to push for public funding rather than private dependency. Who understand that efficiency metrics don't apply to organizations operating in a designed dysfunction. Who see the nonprofit model as the problem, not the organizations struggling within it.

But here's what makes them exceptional: they understand they're participating in a flawed system. They don't pretend the nonprofit model makes sense. They recognize that their governance role exists because of systemic failure, not organizational need. And crucially, they've bridged the expertise gap by actually learning how arts and cultural value gets created, not assuming their other successes translate.

The Season Simulation

At Carolina Performing Arts, our director of programming developed an exercise that revealed these contradictions. We gave board members our actual budget and calendar with real options: Artist A costs $150,000 but will sell out. Artist B costs $30,000 but needs extensive marketing. Artist C is brilliant but challenging and will paper the house.

Board members had to build a season balancing artistic preference, mission, finance, and capacity. The exercise was revelatory. They discovered not just the complexity of programming, but the impossibility of the model. Every choice lost money or required dropping their favorite orchestra or ballet company. Every mission driven decision increased deficit. Every community serving program required more fundraising.

They finally understood that the expertise required wasn't just curatorial. It was the ability to manage impossible contradictions, to succeed within a model designed for dependency.

The Hard Truth

The arts sector's governance crisis isn't just about boards applying the wrong expertise. It's about a nonprofit model that puts governance in the hands of donors rather than experts, that makes arts organizations permanently dependent on wealth they'll never have, that forces missions to bend toward those who fund rather than those who need.

Every time we recruit another CEO, university president, or foundation executive expecting their success to translate, we're not just importing the wrong frameworks. We're reinforcing a model that shouldn't exist. The expertise myth persists because we've internalized not just our insufficiency, but our dependency.

Arts organizations don't just need different board members. They need a different model. One that doesn't require begging. One that recognizes culture as public good deserving public support. One that puts governance in the hands of communities and experts, not donors.

But this threatens everyone currently in power. It threatens board members who enjoy their influence. It threatens philanthropists who want tax deductions and naming rights. It threatens the entire nonprofit industrial complex built on the fiction that charity can replace public responsibility.

So we keep recruiting leaders from other sectors. We keep operating in a broken model. We keep mistaking professional success for arts expertise. We keep pretending the nonprofit structure makes sense.

And arts organizations keep struggling within impossible constraints, not just because of misapplied expertise, but because the entire model ensures dependency while boards apply solutions designed for entirely different problems.

The myth isn't that professional expertise doesn't matter. It's that any expertise can overcome a model designed for dependency.

Until we admit that, we'll keep watching boards try to optimize organizations trapped in a structure that makes sustainability impossible, while the nonprofit model ensures they never had a chance at independence in the first place.

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October 30, 2025

The Strategic Plan Delusion

By Emil J. Kang

We know strategic plans are often neither strategic nor plans. We've sat through the retreats, read the consultant reports, watched the glossy documents get presented to boards and then filed away. We've seen institutions abandon their carefully crafted plans the moment actual decisions needed to be made. We lived through COVID, when every organization immediately threw out their strategic plan and discovered they could be nimble, responsive, and adaptive when survival demanded it.

And yet we keep commissioning them. Spending thousands on consultants. Consuming months of staff time in listening sessions and working groups. Producing documents that perform certainty about an unknowable future.

Why?

Because strategic plans often serve functions that have nothing to do with strategy. They satisfy board anxiety about fiduciary responsibility. They create the appearance of thoughtful governance. They allow leadership to deflect uncomfortable proposals with "that's not in our strategic plan." They codify existing power structures by determining who gets to envision the future. They are institutional security blankets, expensive theater that lets us pretend we're in control.

The irony is that this devotion to planning actively prevents strategic thinking.

What Strategic Plans Actually Do

Let's be precise about what five-year strategic plans accomplish:

They create consensus around the past. By the time a strategic plan is approved, it reflects what was true during the planning process, which is already history. The stakeholder input, the environmental scan, the competitive analysis: all rear-view mirror work. The plan enshrines what we already knew rather than preparing us for what we can't yet see.

They privilege continuity over transformation. Strategic plans favor incremental goals because radical change is hard to get board approval for. They extend current trajectory with modest improvements. "Increase audience by 15%," "Expand earned revenue streams," "Enhance brand visibility." These are management objectives dressed up as vision.

Consider how strategic plans typically address equity and inclusion. You'll see goals like "increase board diversity by 30%" or "reach more diverse audiences" or "expand programming to underrepresented communities." These are framed as objectives, things to achieve, metrics to hit. But diversity and inclusion aren't goals. They're outcomes of actual structural transformation.

The real goals, the ones that would constitute genuine strategic work, are far more uncomfortable:

• Whose power on the board needs to diminish for new voices to matter, not just be present?

• What programming will we stop doing because it serves a legacy audience we've prioritized for decades?

• Which donor relationships will we risk by centering different communities?

• What hiring practices encode bias as "culture fit" and how will we dismantle them?

• How do our facility location, pricing structure, and season design exclude the communities we claim to want to serve?

• What would it mean to share curatorial authority, not just diversify programming?

Those are strategic questions because they demand institutional transformation. They require abandoning what's comfortable. "Increase diverse board participation by 25%" is a metric that lets you avoid asking those questions. It lets you add without changing. You can hit that target and leave all existing power structures perfectly intact. You can celebrate your success while the actual culture remains unchanged.

This is strategic planning's greatest failure: it allows us to perform commitment to transformation while protecting the status quo. The plan becomes proof that we're "working on it" without requiring us to actually work differently. Real transformation, the kind that redistributes power, that centers different artistic values, that risks alienating legacy stakeholders, rarely survives the planning process.

They centralize power. Notice who drives strategic planning: executives and boards. Staff might provide input through surveys. Artists might be "engaged" through listening sessions. Communities might be "consulted." But the planning apparatus itself concentrates authority. The plan becomes a governance tool that leadership wields to approve what aligns and reject what doesn't. "Show me how this advances our strategic priorities" is code for "convince me to care about your idea."

And when those strategic priorities include vague commitments to "community engagement" or "diverse voices," leadership can selectively invoke them. The plan lets you say yes to the community input that fits existing institutional logic and no to the input that would require real change. "We heard the community, and we're responding" can mean anything or nothing.

They consume resources that could fund experimentation. Consider the actual cost: consultant fees, hundreds of staff hours in meetings and working groups, opportunity cost of what doesn't happen because we're planning instead of doing. That's significant investment in a document rather than in learning by trying.

Here's what else that budget could fund: paying artists more equitably, investing in staff professional development, building reserves for risk-taking, supporting experimental programming that might fail, commissioning work from emerging artists without the institutional pressure to succeed. Instead, we spend it on planning documents that tell us to do things we already know we should do.

They substitute process for courage. Here's what I've observed repeatedly: institutions embark on strategic planning when leadership doesn't know what to do next. The plan becomes a way to avoid making hard choices now by pushing decision-making into a structured future process. It's procrastination disguised as rigor.

The hard choices don't get easier by putting them in a plan. They just get delayed. And often, by the time the plan is approved, the moment for the courageous choice has passed. The competitor made the move. The opportunity closed. The community stopped waiting for you.

The COVID Revelation

March 2020 exposed the truth. Every cultural institution I knew immediately abandoned their strategic plan. Not quietly or gradually. Instantly. Boards that had spent a year approving goals suddenly gave executive directors unprecedented latitude to make it up as they went along. Organizations discovered they could move quickly, experiment boldly, fail, learn, and pivot. They found reserves of adaptability that the strategic plan had actually suppressed.

What did that reveal? That the capacity for strategic response was always there. The plan wasn't enabling it. The plan was constraining it.

Some institutions learned this lesson. Many didn't. By 2022, I watched organizations return to five-year planning cycles as if 2020 had been an aberration rather than a revelation. The security blanket was back. And with it, the familiar language: goals for audience growth, revenue diversification, program expansion. The same incrementalism. The same avoidance of structural questions. The same performance metrics that would let boards feel good about progress without demanding transformation.

The Real Strategic Questions

If we're honest about what strategy actually requires, the questions aren't answerable in a five-year plan:

• What will we stop doing to create capacity for what matters more?

• What power are we willing to share and with whom?

• What risk are we prepared to take, knowing we might fail?

• Who is harmed by our current model and how will we repair that?

• What would we do if our funding model collapsed tomorrow?

• Whose voices are structurally excluded from our decision-making and what are we willing to give up to include them?

• What traditions do we preserve because they're meaningful and what do we preserve simply because they're traditions?

• How do our aesthetics, our language, our practices signal who belongs and who doesn't?

These questions produce discomfort, not consensus. They demand continuous renegotiation, not fixed answers. They require leadership that can hold uncertainty rather than resolve it prematurely. They can't be delegated to a consultant or resolved in a planning retreat.

And notice: if you actually did the work these questions demand, diversity wouldn't be a goal you're trying to achieve. It would be the natural outcome of transformed practice. You don't need a target for board diversity if you've genuinely shared power. You don't need audience development goals if you've fundamentally changed what you present, how you price it, and where it happens. The metrics take care of themselves when the structure changes.

But strategic plans let us skip the structure and go straight to the metrics. Which is why they fail.

What To Do Instead

I'm not arguing for institutional drift or reactive chaos. I'm arguing for different planning practices that acknowledge volatility and enable adaptation:

Values-based decision frameworks. Articulate the principles that guide choices without prescribing the choices. But be specific about what those values actually mean in practice.

Not: "We value diversity and inclusion." Instead: "We prioritize artist agency over institutional control. We share decision-making power with the communities we serve. We are willing to risk alienating legacy audiences to center new ones. We pay artists equitably even if it means programming less."

Those are values with teeth. They guide real decisions. "We value diversity" guides nothing. It's a statement everyone can agree with while doing whatever they were already doing.

Rolling 18-month horizons. Plan in shorter cycles that get refreshed quarterly. This allows course correction based on what you're learning. It keeps planning close to action instead of abstract and distant.

In an 18-month horizon, "develop relationships with X community" has to translate into specific actions: who are we meeting with, what are we learning, how is it changing what we do? You can't hide behind vague commitments when the timeline is short and the review is frequent.

Scenario planning. Prepare for multiple possible futures rather than betting everything on one projected trajectory. "If funding drops 30%, we would..." "If audience composition shifts dramatically, we would..." "If our anchor donor demands programming that conflicts with our values, we would..." This builds adaptive capacity rather than false certainty.

Scenario planning is particularly important for equity work. What if the communities you're trying to "engage" tell you they don't want what you're offering? What if meaningful inclusion means fundamentally changing your artistic identity? Are you prepared for that? Scenario planning forces you to think through the actual implications of transformation, not just celebrate the intention.

Experimental portfolios. Reserve budget and permission for trying things that might not work. 70% of resources for core mission, 20% for promising experiments, 10% for wild bets. Evaluate regularly, kill what's not working, double down on what is. This is how innovative organizations actually operate.

Apply this to equity work too. Instead of a goal to "increase Latino audiences by 20%," create an experimental portfolio: try five different approaches to building authentic relationships with Latino communities, evaluate what's working after six months, abandon what isn't, invest more in what is. You'll learn infinitely more than you would by setting a target and hoping to hit it.

Strategic sensing systems. Create ongoing mechanisms for environmental scanning, trend analysis, and weak signal detection. Not once during a planning process, but continuously. Staff across the organization trained to notice and report what's emerging. This distributes strategic intelligence instead of concentrating it.

This includes sensing who's not in the room, whose voices are absent from your conversations, what communities see you as irrelevant or harmful. That intelligence is strategic. It tells you where transformation is needed. But you have to be willing to hear it and act on it, not just note it in a planning document.

Rapid response capacity. Build the infrastructure (financial reserves, flexible staffing, decision protocols) that lets you move quickly when opportunity or crisis arrives. The organizations that thrived during COVID had this. The ones that struggled were trapped by their own structural rigidity.

If You're Trapped in a Planning Cycle

Maybe you're reading this and thinking: "My board is demanding a strategic plan. I can't tell them no." Fair enough. Here's how to subvert from within:

Rename it. Call it a "strategic framework" or "strategic directions" instead of a plan. Language matters. Plans imply fixed commitments. Frameworks imply flexibility.

Shorten the horizon. Argue for three years maximum. The world is too volatile for longer projections. You'll look prescient when the plan stays relevant.

Build in review cycles. Insist on annual reassessment with board authorization to adjust. The plan becomes a living document, not a stone tablet.

Focus on capabilities, not targets. Instead of "increase contributed revenue by 25%," write "develop diversified revenue model with reduced dependence on any single source." The first is a number that may or may not be achievable. The second is organizational capacity that serves you regardless.

Instead of "increase board diversity by 30%," write "restructure board recruitment, onboarding, and decision-making to share power with communities we serve." The first lets you add diverse members without changing board culture. The second requires actual transformation.

Instead of "expand programming to reach new audiences," write "center artistic voices and practices that our institution has historically excluded, understanding this may alienate some current audiences." The first suggests you can add without subtracting. The second is honest about the tradeoffs transformation requires.

Include explicit permission to experiment. Write into the plan: "We will allocate X% of budget to test new approaches, some of which will fail, because learning requires risk." Get board approval for failure as part of the plan.

This is crucial for equity work. You can't innovate around inclusion without trying things that might not work. If failure isn't permitted, you'll default to safe gestures that don't threaten anything. The "diverse programming" that still reflects curatorial assumptions shaped by dominant culture. The "community engagement" that invites people in but doesn't share decision-making power. Permission to fail is permission to actually try.

Separate the performance from the practice. Recognize that your board needs the security of a planning document. Give them that. But don't let the document constrain how you actually operate. The plan is the board's comfort object. Your real work happens in the space between plan reviews.

Push back on outcome metrics masquerading as goals. When the planning committee proposes "increase diverse audiences by X%," ask: "What are we actually committing to do differently that would produce that outcome? What programming will we stop? What partnerships will we build? What authority will we share? What will success cost us?" Make the plan name the actual strategic work, not just the desired result.

If the committee can't answer those questions, the goal isn't strategic. It's aspirational. And aspirations don't require expensive planning processes.

The Harder Truth

Strategic plans persist because they serve institutional anxiety, not institutional effectiveness. They create the illusion of control in an uncontrollable environment. They allow us to pretend we're being strategic when we're actually being rigid. They let us perform commitment to values like equity and inclusion without doing the hard structural work those values demand.

Real strategic leadership is different. It's the capacity to read a changing environment and respond intelligently. It's the courage to abandon what's not working, even if it's in the plan. It's the humility to admit you don't know what will be true in five years and the confidence to navigate anyway. It's the willingness to make decisions that cost you something (donor relationships, legacy audiences, board members who can't adapt) because transformation requires loss.

Some of the most strategic decisions I've made or witnessed weren't in any plan. They emerged from paying attention, from relationships that created unexpected opportunities, from the courage to say yes to something risky or no to something safe. They came from actually listening when communities told us what they needed, even when it contradicted what we thought we should offer.

The best strategic thinking I've experienced happened in small groups, working through a genuine dilemma with no predetermined answer. It happened in crisis moments when we had to figure it out together. It happened when someone asked "what if we tried..." and leadership said "let's find out." It happened when we admitted we'd been doing something wrong and needed to change course.

None of that requires a five-year strategic plan. All of it requires leadership willing to trust institutional intelligence over institutional process. It requires abandoning the illusion of control and embracing the reality of continuous adaptation. It requires naming transformation as the goal, not growth. It requires understanding that metrics like "more diverse" are outcomes, not objectives, and the only way to achieve them is to do the structural work that makes them inevitable.

What would your organization be able to do if you weren't trapped in the planning cycle? What conversations would you have? What risks would you take? What could you learn? Who could you become if you admitted you don't know who you should be five years from now and committed to figuring it out as you go?

That's the strategic question worth answering.

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October 23, 2025

Learning to Trust the Drift

By Emil J. Kang

I have been thinking alot lately about the moments that define a life. Not the ones that come with applause, but the quiet ones that arrive with questions. Questions like: Did I do enough? Have I made the impact I hoped to make? Why do I still feel uncertain, even after so many years of leading, creating, building?

The moment that changed me was not on a stage. It was in a classroom when a first-year student said, "I didn't know art could be a way of thinking." I have spent decades in rooms like that one, and in very different rooms. Rooms where eighteen-year-olds discover their voice. Rooms where renowned artist founders wrestle with succession, with the vulnerable question of what comes after them. Rooms where boards debate mission and budgets, where the real question underneath is always the same: what do we value enough to protect?

I once thought success would quiet self-doubt. It does not. Doubt is what shows up when you refuse a script. From the outside my career may look like a ladder. From here it reads as encounters, the kind that trade titles for impact and visibility for vitality.

I used to chase the idea that a role, a title, or a singular achievement would settle everything. What I know now is simpler and more difficult. Success is not a destination. It is a texture, the feel of your values in motion. It is the moment a student looks at a work of art and then looks back at her own life and sees a connection where none seemed to exist. It is the silent shift in a board conversation when the question moves from what a fundraising gala might net to what a community might gain. It is the artist founder who finds peace with transition, who discovers that legacy is not control but trust.

We are taught to narrate our lives as progress. We string positions together as if the line itself is supposed to prove something. For me? From the East Coast to the West Coast to the Midwest, then the South and back to the Northeast. Symphony orchestras, universities, foundations. Yet I’ve learned the most important work often lives between those lines. It lives in choices, in listening, in the people we make room for. Call it drift if you like. I have learned to trust it. Drift is not the absence of direction. Drift is attention. It is the practice of aligning action with purpose and letting that alignment carry you forward.

A different scene stays with me. After a performance, a grandmother lingered in the lobby while her family moved toward the door. She told me she heard the performer share a story on stage that sounded like hers, only in a different language. She said she felt less alone on her walk home. That is not a metric you will find on a dashboard.

The standard script for leadership in the arts still rewards visibility. Big stages. Big numbers. Big titles. I understand the appeal. I have lived inside that script and benefited from it. But I have also seen how it can narrow our view. It can turn mission into marketing and artists into vending machines. It can make us ask what sells before we ask what matters.

There is another script. It begins with artists and communities, not with a season brochure. It treats institutions as tools, not as ends. It measures vitality, the number of encounters that change how people see, think, and relate. It holds leaders accountable for the quality of relationships, not only the quantity of transactions. It asks us to be equally present in a first-year seminar and a foundation boardroom, to understand that teaching a teenager and counseling a legendary artist require the same fundamental skill: deep listening.

When I look back, the work I am proudest of rarely appears anywhere the public can see. Across many seasons and dozens of commissions, across years of teaching and grantmaking, the moments that endure are almost always relational. A dancer who found the right collaborator and then found a home for the work. The mid-career artist who took a risk because someone believed in him at the right moment. A faculty colleague who saw students reimagine their own capacity. The legendary choreographer learning to build succession without betrayal. A board chair who asked a different question and opened a door that had been shut for years. These are tiny moments if you view them from a marquee. They are large if you view them from a life.

This may sound like an argument against ambition in the traditional sense. It is not. I believe in ambition. I believe in excellence. I also believe that excellence is empty when it is only inward facing. The point is not to burnish the institution. The point is to expand our capacity to create meaning with others. That requires rigor, patience, and a willingness to change the very systems we manage. It also requires leaders who can withstand ambiguity without fleeing to the safety of a script.

Doubt has been a companion to me in each transition. I still treat doubt as a problem to fix. I am trying to treat it as information. Doubt asks good questions. Are you making room for others? Are you listening beyond your usual circle? Are you choosing impact over optics? Doubt can become inertia if you let it take over.

I am between roles as I write this. The world reads that phrase as uncertainty. I experience it as clarity. Without a title to defend, I can name the work I want to keep doing and say the things I want to say. I want to help organizations align their choices with their purpose. I want to support artists in making work and in building the conditions to share it. I want to teach, to convene, and to keep learning how institutions can serve people rather than the other way around. I want to keep creating space for others to flourish, whether they are discovering their voice or deciding how to pass it on.

What I am trying to say is simple. Visibility is not the same as vitality. Titles are not the same as purpose. Progress is not always a straight line. The real work often happens in rooms with few people present, in the time between a question and an answer, in the months or years it takes for trust to form. That work is slow. It is also durable. It connects the undergraduate discovering she can think critically about music to the artist founder finding peace with what comes next.

In the roles I have held and the roles I have yet to hold, I will measure success by the vitality of relationships, the courage to choose purpose over posture, and the rooms we open for others to enter. I will trust drift, not as surrender, but as attention. I will keep asking what matters and I will keep listening for the answers, especially when they don’t come from me.

From the first day of college to the final act of an artistic life, and everything in between. That is the work. That is the commitment. Not what I accumulated, but what I helped others access. Not the positions I held, but the possibilities I helped others hold.

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October 19, 2025

When You Have/Are a “Bad Boss” (And In What Ways): A Taxonomy

By Emil J. Kang

Over 35 years in the arts, I've worked for bosses, worked alongside bosses as peers, observed bosses from various vantage points, and been a boss myself. I've reported to boards, university presidents and provosts, foundation presidents, and consulting clients. I've watched leaders rise, plateau, and fall. And I've made my own share of leadership mistakes.

What follows isn't distant analysis. It's pattern recognition from inside the struggle, including recognition of my own patterns. Leadership critique that exempts the critic is just performance.

This provocation is about self-reflection and the necessity of saying uncomfortable truths. We need to name the ways leadership fails because silence around these patterns perpetuates them. The question isn't whether you'll fail in some of these ways. The question is whether you'll be honest about it, accountable for it, and working to mitigate it.

This taxonomy is about behaviors, not positions. These patterns appear at every level. A program coordinator can be controlling. A CEO can be conflict-avoidant. A board chair can be mercurial. Anyone who influences others' work, development, or wellbeing can exhibit these behaviors. I've never met anyone exhibiting only one of these patterns. Most people are composite failures, cycling through different behaviors depending on context, stress level, or which stakeholders they're managing.

I've struggled with writing this piece for months, really for a lifetime. This is an unfinished symphony. But the incompleteness doesn't excuse us from the work of trying to understand it.

The Emotional Reality

Much of the frustration, anger, sadness, and insecurity you feel as an arts worker can be traced directly to these leadership behavior patterns. You might think the problem is you. But often, the problem isn't you. It's the behavioral patterns you're experiencing. Naming it correctly is the first step toward reclaiming your power.

If you misdiagnose the problem as your inadequacy, you'll exhaust yourself trying to be good enough for someone whose behavior patterns make "good enough" impossible to achieve. But if you can accurately identify which behavior patterns you're experiencing, you can make clear-eyed choices about how to respond. Understanding these behavioral patterns is an act of self-protection and self-empowerment. It lets you say: this is not about my worth. This is about their behavioral patterns. I can choose how to respond. It gives you permission to trust your own perception. Your feelings are information, not evidence of your inadequacy.

Why These Behaviors Emerge

Insecurity sits at the top. Most leadership failures trace back to insecurity about competence, status, belonging, or whether you deserve the role. Narcissism manifests when leaders believe their own mythology. Anxiety about survival or judgment creates leaders who can't think strategically. Fear of failure or exposure makes leaders hoard information and avoid risk. Modeling is perhaps most insidious. Every boss has a boss. We replicate what we've experienced unless we consciously choose otherwise.

Exhaustion and burnout erode everyone's capacity. When depleted, you default to your worst patterns. Systemic pressures can force even well-intentioned leaders into dysfunctional behaviors. Understanding these root causes helps you assess whether someone's pattern is characterological or circumstantial. It also helps you understand your own patterns.

Part I: The Taxonomy

The Mercurial "Boss" // You never know which version will show up. One day expansive and visionary, the next critical and withdrawn. Their mood determines organizational reality. Daily experience: Constant vigilance and anxiety. Walking on eggshells. You stop trusting positive feedback because it might evaporate tomorrow. Root cause: Unmanaged stress, burnout cycling through coping mechanisms, or volatile emotional regulation. The problem isn't any single pattern but the lack of consistency. What you can do: Document everything in writing. Build peer relationships for reality-checking. Don't over-invest emotionally. Create stability in your own sphere. When it becomes intolerable: When unpredictability makes work impossible, when you're managing their volatility instead of advancing the mission, when the anxiety affects your health. My own "boss": This hits hardest. I worry my staff had no idea which version would show up. When leading through pressure or burnout, I've cycled through controlling, reactive, visionary, and withdrawn in destabilizing ways.

The Controlling "Boss" // Micromanagement. Can't delegate. Needs to be involved in every decision. Creates bottlenecks. Daily experience: Infantilized. Your expertise is discounted. You become passive because initiative is punished. Root cause: Insecurity or anxiety. They fear losing control means losing relevance. What you can do: Build trust incrementally. Provide visibility without requiring approval. Document your rationale. When it becomes intolerable: When it prevents professional development, damages confidence, or makes you unable to act. My own "boss": When leading high-stakes initiatives early in new roles, I've over-controlled. Sometimes it was necessary. Sometimes it was anxiety disguised as standards.

The Reactive "Boss" // Lurching from crisis to crisis. Whatever is most recent gets attention. Strategic priorities shift constantly. Daily experience: Whiplash. Projects get deprioritized before completion. You can't build momentum. Root cause: Anxiety about stakeholder approval, insecurity about judgment. They mistake activity for leadership. What you can do: Become the institutional memory. Document decisions and rationale. Create continuity in your sphere. When it becomes intolerable: When reactivity makes completing anything impossible, when staff burn out from pivots. My own "boss": When overwhelmed by competing demands, I've let the loudest voice dominate. I've shifted priorities based on which stakeholder seemed most urgent.

The Credit-Taking "Boss" // Presenting others' work as their own. Using "I" when they should say "we." Visible for success, absent for failure. Daily experience: Invisibility. You do the work while they get recognition. You feel used. Root cause: Narcissism or deep insecurity. They need constant validation. What you can do: Document your contributions. Build your external reputation. Make your work visible beyond this person. When it becomes intolerable: When it damages your professional development, affects getting your next job, or constitutes intellectual theft. My own "boss": In public presentations, I haven't always been clear about who did the work. The line between representing institutional success and claiming individual credit blurs.

The Visionless "Boss" // Managing but not leading. Responding to problems without connecting them to larger purpose. Meetings feel like status updates. Daily experience: Treading water. Plenty of activity but no momentum. The organization drifts. Root cause: Exhaustion, fear of committing to a direction, or being promoted beyond capacity. What you can do: This pattern creates space for leadership from below. Propose vision. Document what works. When it becomes intolerable: When lack of vision creates harm through missed opportunities, staff attrition, or organizational decline. My own "boss": When exhausted or facing resistance I didn't know how to overcome, I've retreated into management. I've maintained when I should have transformed.

The Political "Boss" // Every decision filtered through "how will this play?" Making decisions based on optics rather than impact. Daily experience: Cynicism. Good ideas killed because they might make someone uncomfortable. Moral compromises rationalized as pragmatism. Root cause: Fear of losing position, funding, or board support. What you can do: Understand the constraints they're navigating. Make mission-aligned decisions politically viable. When it becomes intolerable: When politics completely overwhelm mission, when compromises make the mission unrecognizable. My own "boss": I've made decisions influenced by donor preferences rather than merit. I've told myself I was being strategic when sometimes I was just being cowardly.

The Conflict-Avoidant "Boss" // Won't have difficult conversations. Avoids personnel decisions. Lets dysfunction fester. Prioritizes short-term harmony over long-term health. Daily experience: You watch situations deteriorate. Underperformers protected at high performers' expense. Accountability is rare. Root cause: Anxiety about confrontation, fear of being disliked. What you can do: Address problems directly in your sphere. Model difficult conversations. Document patterns. When it becomes intolerable: When avoidance creates genuine harm, when toxic behavior goes unchecked. My own "boss": I've delayed difficult personnel conversations. Sometimes that was generosity. Sometimes it was avoidance disguised as generosity.

The Absent "Boss" // Rarely present, physically or emotionally. Doesn't know what's happening. Checked out while still collecting a paycheck. Daily experience: Functionally unsupervised, which sounds appealing until you need guidance. When crises hit, they're unreachable. Root cause: Burnout, loss of interest, or being overwhelmed by competing demands. What you can do: Step into the leadership vacuum. Build relationships with others who can provide support. Document what you're doing. When it becomes intolerable: When absence creates harm, when you're blamed for decisions they should have made. My own "boss": During burnout or when pulled in too many directions, I haven't been as present as my team needed.

The Inequitable "Boss" // Having favorites. Applying different standards. Offering opportunities selectively. Daily experience: If favored: guilt and discomfort. If not: anger and invisibility. Either way: organizational injustice. Root cause: Unconscious bias, narcissism, insecurity, or modeling inequitable treatment. What you can do: Name patterns. If favored, use that access to advocate for equity. Build coalitions. When it becomes intolerable: When inequity is severe and systematic, when it breaks along lines of identity. My own "boss": I've had unconscious affinities that shaped whose ideas I listened to, who I developed, who I gave opportunities to.

The Exploitative "Boss" // Expecting constant availability. Normalizing overwork. Framing exploitation as passion. Asking for sacrifice while protecting own boundaries. Daily experience: Exhaustion. Emails at all hours. Guilt when you maintain boundaries. The awareness that you're being used. Root cause: Narcissism, insecurity, modeling, or genuine belief that the mission justifies any sacrifice. What you can do: Hold boundaries. Model sustainable work. Name the exploitation. When it becomes intolerable: When it damages your health, when colleagues break down, when it's systematic. My own "boss": I've sent late-night emails. I've asked people to work weekends. I've normalized intensity as excellence.

The Defensive "Boss" // Can't admit being wrong. Deflects responsibility. Dismisses feedback. Becomes argumentative or punishing when questioned. Daily experience: You soften every critique until it's meaningless. You watch mistakes compound because no one can name them. Root cause: Deep insecurity masked by defensiveness. They equate being wrong with being inadequate. What you can do: Frame feedback as questions. Use third-party examples. Document suggestions. When it becomes intolerable: When defensiveness creates organizational harm through unaddressed mistakes, when it stifles innovation. My own "boss": I've deflected criticism when I should have listened. I've treated feedback as attack when it was care.

The Idea-Dismissive "Boss" // Doesn't make space for others' ideas. Asks for input but has already decided. Only embraces ideas they believe originated with them. Daily experience: Your ideas get shot down reflexively. You stop preparing proposals because they won't be considered. Root cause: Insecurity about their own ideas, narcissism, or genuinely believing their judgment is superior. What you can do: Build coalitions before proposing. Pilot ideas in small ways. Protect your creativity. When it becomes intolerable: When dismissiveness makes you stop thinking creatively, when only one person's ideas matter. My own "boss": I've dominated strategy conversations because I believed my experience gave me superior judgment. I've been quicker to see problems than possibilities.

The Preemptive-Failure "Boss" // Predicts ideas will fail before they're tried. Points out problems without equal attention to possibilities. Under-resources initiatives they're skeptical about. Daily experience: You propose something and immediately hear ten reasons it can't work. When things struggle, you hear "I told you so." Root cause: Fear and anxiety. They've been burned and are trying to prevent that pain. What you can do: Acknowledge concerns while proposing mitigation. Start small. Frame experiments as learning. When it becomes intolerable: When the pattern kills all innovation, when nothing new gets tried. My own "boss": I've been better at seeing problems than possibilities. I've under-resourced initiatives I was skeptical about.

Part II: The Composite Reality

Most people exhibit multiple patterns at different times. The patterns cluster predictably. The defensive "boss" often also dismisses others' ideas and predicts failure preemptively. The controlling "boss" often struggles to make space for others' ideas. Understanding the specific patterns helps you calibrate your response: A visionless but supportive person requires different strategies than someone visionary but exploitative. It helps you assess whether the situation is salvageable: Multiple moderate issues might be navigable. One severe dysfunction might not be. Defensive behavior combined with idea-dismissiveness and preemptive-failure thinking can be nearly impossible to work around. And it helps you understand what you're vulnerable to replicating: We absorb others' behavioral dysfunctions.

Part III: The Self-Assessment Imperative

If you're going to critique these patterns, you need to examine which ones you exhibit. Where do you recognize yourself? When stressed, which pattern do you default to? Can you admit when you're wrong? Do you make genuine space for others' ideas? Which critique feels most uncomfortable? (That discomfort might be information.) The hard truth: You probably exhibit some of these patterns. Everyone does. The question is whether you're aware of it, working on it, and willing to be accountable for it.

Part IV: Working With Each "Boss"

Mercurial: Document everything. Don't over-invest emotionally. Create stability in your sphere. Controlling: Build trust incrementally. Provide visibility without requiring approval. Reactive: Be the stabilizing force. Document decisions and rationale. Credit-Taking: Build your external reputation. Make your work visible. Visionless: Offer vision from below. Document what works. Political: Make mission-aligned decisions politically viable. Conflict-Avoidant: Model direct communication. Document patterns. Absent: Lead from where you are. Build other support relationships. Inequitable: Name patterns. If favored, advocate for equity. Exploitative: Hold boundaries. Model sustainable work. Defensive: Frame feedback as questions. Document suggestions. Idea-Dismissive: Build coalitions before proposing. Pilot in small ways. Preemptive-Failure: Acknowledge concerns while proposing mitigation. Start small.

Part V: When Multiple Patterns Compound

The difficult situations involve multiple reinforcing patterns. The visionless "boss" AND conflict-avoidant "boss" creates drift plus festering dysfunction. The defensive "boss" AND idea-dismissive "boss" AND preemptive-failure "boss" creates an environment where nothing can improve. Assess carefully: Are these temporarily overlapping? Characterologically linked? Systemically reinforced? Mercurial cycling? Compounded behavioral failures are harder to work around and more likely to require you to leave.

Conclusion: The Taxonomy as Tool and Invitation

Understanding which behavioral patterns you're experiencing gives you strategic clarity, realistic expectations, navigation tools, self-awareness, and exit criteria. Most importantly: You can stop asking "Is this person bad?" and start asking "Which behavioral patterns am I experiencing, what does that mean for how I respond, and how long can I sustain this?"

These questions prepare you to behave differently when you have influence over others, because you'll remember what it felt like to experience these patterns. Even though you inevitably will exhibit some of them, because leadership is hard and everyone fails at parts of it. The question is whether you'll be honest about your behavioral patterns, accountable for them, and working actively to mitigate them. That's the difference between struggling with leadership and being someone people can't work for.

An Invitation

This taxonomy is incomplete. It represents patterns I've observed over 35 years, but it's filtered through my vantage points and blind spots. What behavioral patterns am I missing? What have you experienced that doesn't fit? What combinations create particular challenges? What patterns appear differently in different contexts?

I invite you to add to this taxonomy. Share the patterns you've observed or experienced. Name the behaviors that need naming. Add your own honest accounting. This work requires collective wisdom. Together, we can create a more complete picture that helps everyone navigate these challenges more skillfully, lead more consciously, and build healthier organizations.

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October 12, 2025

Culture as Development Strategy: When New Venues Don't Serve Existing Ecosystems

On the difference between building for communities and building for real estate value

By Emil J. Kang

I just saw William Kentridge's stunning production at Brooklyn's new Powerhouse Arts. The work was extraordinary, full of visual imagination, historical layering, and emotional depth. It's exactly the kind of art that reminds you why this work matters.

What I'm less sure of is whether the institution presenting it will strengthen Brooklyn's cultural ecosystem or inadvertently undermine it.

Not all new venues are the same. There's a real difference between adaptive reuse and luxury new construction, between a venue that gives local organizations a home and one that competes with them for audiences, funding, and attention. Powerhouse sits in a renovated power station. That's promising. But the question that matters most is this: will it become part of Brooklyn's existing cultural ecosystem, or another competitor within it?

We've seen both models before, and the difference between them determines whether new venues add capacity or quietly drain it away.

The Pattern We Keep Repeating

This story isn't new. It's the same pattern that built Lincoln Center.

In the 1950s and 60s, San Juan Hill was a vibrant Black and Puerto Rican neighborhood on Manhattan's Upper West Side, full of families, small businesses, and cultural life that helped shape American music. Then came "urban renewal." Thousands displaced, eighteen city blocks razed. What replaced them was Lincoln Center for the Performing Arts.

Culture was used to justify displacement. Magnificent architecture rose on the ruins of a community. And while the rhetoric of "urban renewal" has faded, the mechanism remains. Today we call it "activation" or "revitalization." But again and again, culture becomes the agent of transformation, while the people and organizations who created that culture get priced out.

Culture in Service of Real Estate

Developers have long understood that "arts and culture" can increase property value. A new cultural venue lends credibility to luxury development, offering the illusion of civic virtue and community investment. Sometimes the arts organization understands the trade-off; sometimes it doesn't.

Either way, the pattern repeats: culture attracts capital, capital raises costs, and the artists who made the place desirable can no longer afford to stay. The cultural brand survives, even as the cultural ecosystem disappears.

The Shed, PAC NYC, and Powerhouse

The Shed is the clearest example, built as part of Hudson Yards, a $25 billion luxury development. It presents bold work, but its larger purpose serves the project's real estate logic. The culture is an amenity, not the anchor.

PAC NYC is more complicated. Built on the World Trade Center site, it isn't about speculation but about memorial. The intention is noble, but the question remains: in a field starved for operating support, could those same resources have strengthened the ecosystem more effectively through existing organizations?

And then there's Powerhouse Arts. I don't know the ins and outs of its business model, governance structure, or funding sources. I don't know what conversations have happened internally about community accountability or what commitments have been made to Brooklyn-based organizations. What I do know is that adaptive reuse offers potential, a chance to preserve the past while serving the present. But adaptive reuse alone doesn't guarantee community benefit. What matters is who gets to belong. Which Brooklyn-based organizations will call Powerhouse home? Will it provide affordable, long-term space for local groups and artists, or will it become another venue competing for the same limited resources?

What Real Investment Looks Like

If our goal is to strengthen cultural ecosystems rather than inflate property values, we'd make different choices.

We'd fund existing organizations already rooted in communities, not just new buildings. We'd preserve affordable performance and studio space. We'd invest in artists directly, with housing, health care, and income stability. We'd treat culture as community infrastructure, not an economic branding exercise.

That's what actual cultural investment looks like: supporting those who already make meaning where they live, rather than building new monuments to attract people who don't.

Better Models Exist

There are examples worth studying. National Sawdust is adaptive reuse done right, a former sawdust factory turned into a home for experimental music. Its success is measured by artistic vitality and community connection, not real estate returns.

Another approach to adaptive reuse: convert industrial space into affordable artist studios rather than creating another presenting venue. Give artists the infrastructure they actually need: affordable, long-term work space. This recognizes that the crisis isn't a lack of venues to show work, it's a lack of affordable space where artists can make the work in the first place.

When I led the Detroit Symphony Orchestra, my board chair was a real estate developer who understood that his success depended on ours. He invested in the neighborhood, not to extract value but to ensure the orchestra's long-term health. His return came through community vibrancy, not property speculation. That alignment of incentives produced genuine partnership, not extraction.

The Choice Before Powerhouse

Powerhouse Arts has the chance to follow that path: to become infrastructure for Brooklyn's cultural ecosystem rather than another competitor within it. The distinction lies in governance, programming, and purpose.

Who will Powerhouse Arts serve? Will it dedicate space to Brooklyn-based organizations at below-market rates, giving them long-term security? Will it embed local artists and cultural workers in its structure, or simply import art that flatters its architecture?

True transformation would look like Powerhouse Arts dedicating major space to existing Brooklyn organizations like BRIC, 651 Arts, Roulette, Bushwick Starr, or Issue Project Room. It would mean creating affordable studios to address the space crisis forcing artists out of Brooklyn. It would mean establishing an anti-displacement fund to counter the very forces it might otherwise accelerate.

The Broader Context

While hundreds of millions get spent on new venues, existing arts organizations struggle with basic operating support.

Dance/NYC reports that 40% of dance organizations in the city operate on budgets under $250,000. These organizations make extraordinary work with minimal resources, serve communities that major institutions often overlook, and take risks that larger organizations can't.

The Nuyorican Poets Cafe, a 50-year-old institution that shaped American poetry and gave voice to communities systematically excluded from mainstream culture, nearly closed. HERE Arts Center, La MaMa, The Kitchen, Dixon Place, BAAD!, and dozens of other organizations that actually make culture face perpetual financial crisis. The list goes on and on.

The resources exist. The philanthropic capital is there. The question is how it gets deployed.

The Larger Question

I know this critique will upset some people. The staff and leadership at The Shed, Powerhouse Arts, and PAC NYC work hard to present excellent art. Developers and funders genuinely believe they are contributing to civic life. Artists who rely on these platforms may feel caught in the middle. I understand. I've run large institutions. I know how hard it is to turn down resources, to balance mission with opportunity, to reconcile ideals with reality.

But the questions still matter. When hundreds of millions go toward new venues while existing organizations struggle to survive, we have to ask what we're building and for whom. When culture is linked to development that transforms neighborhoods, we have to be honest about who benefits and who gets displaced. When new institutions compete with, rather than strengthen, existing ecosystems, we have to ask whether we're advancing culture or simply expanding its footprint for someone else's gain.

These questions make people uncomfortable, but they should. The tension between art, capital, and community has defined American cultural infrastructure for seventy years. The language changes, but the pattern persists. Lincoln Center was built on the displacement of San Juan Hill, and we're still building cultural venues that serve development interests more than existing communities. At some point, we have to stop repeating it.

Culture should not be an instrument of displacement. It should be a strategy for community power.

We don't need more venues. We need better choices about how they serve, who they house, and what ecosystems they strengthen.

Powerhouse Arts still has time to make those choices.

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October 6, 2025

Leading From Where You Are

Because Leadership Is Behavioral, Not Positional

By Emil J. Kang

Leadership is one of the most misunderstood words in organizational life. We often confuse it with title, hierarchy, and authority, with the people at the top who set direction and make decisions. But real leadership rarely depends on position. It is behavioral, not positional. It is expressed through action, not appointment.

Every organization faces moments when those at the top falter. A leader hesitates, loses confidence, or cannot see beyond the immediate horizon. Fear replaces imagination. Caution becomes inertia. When that happens, institutions begin to drift. Yet these are also the moments when genuine leadership can emerge, not from hierarchy, but from within.

Leadership belongs to anyone willing to take responsibility for purpose. It lives in the colleague who steadies a team in uncertainty, the staff member who insists on integrity when expediency would be easier, or the person who keeps the work honest when others look away.

Sometimes this kind of leadership begins under imperfect conditions. You may find yourself in an organization where the person in charge cannot lead or where decision-making has slowed to a crawl. The natural impulse is to wait for new direction, a better manager, or a clearer mandate. But waiting rarely restores purpose. Leadership begins when we act in alignment with our values and aspirations, regardless of title or authority.

Of course, not everyone can act freely. Many stay because they need stability, a paycheck, and health insurance. Those needs are real. The challenge is to preserve integrity within constraint and to lead in small but meaningful ways even when circumstances limit your power. That might mean modeling the behavior you wish you saw at the top: curiosity, clarity, and courage. It might mean creating pockets of imagination in bureaucratic environments or building trust among peers when communication from above falters.

This is leadership as stewardship, not rebellion. It is not about defying authority but about caring for purpose. It means holding onto what the work stands for when others forget and knowing when your influence still matters, and when your staying only sustains stagnation.

The arts and nonprofit sectors are especially prone to this tension. Many stay out of love for the mission. Sometimes that devotion sustains important work. But love without renewal becomes resignation, and resignation becomes complicity. True leadership requires both commitment and courage, the courage to keep the mission alive in form, not just in name.

Over time, I have learned this myself. Earlier in my career, I believed I alone was responsible for the vision. I thought it was my job to name the future and rally others to it. Yet my ideas rarely endured. They sparked briefly, then faded when I moved on to the next initiative. I now see that vision is not a solitary act but an organizational one. It cannot live only inside one person, no matter how inspired. Vision must become a shared culture, renewed and expanded by everyone who inhabits it.

The strongest leaders understand this. They do not fear initiative; they invite it. They know that when others lead from where they are, the whole organization grows stronger. Power is not diminished when shared. It is strengthened.

Leading from where you are is not about replacing someone else’s authority. It is about taking responsibility for your own agency and recognizing that the health of any organization depends on the everyday choices of its people, the decisions to speak up, to support, to challenge, and to stay curious.

Leadership is not something you wait for. It is something you do. It begins wherever you are.

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October 2, 2025

The Future of Performing Arts Presenting: From Transactional to Relational

When Communities Want Collaboration, Not Just Consumption

By Emil J. Kang

Many of us have been watching the same scene play out in board rooms across the country for decades. The conversation always starts the same way: declining audiences, aging subscribers, empty seats. Someone inevitably asks, "How do we get more people to buy tickets?" Then comes the familiar litany of responses: better marketing campaigns, dynamic pricing strategies, pre-show talks to make the work more "accessible."

But what if we've been asking the wrong question entirely?

During my years leading Carolina Performing Arts, I noticed something that troubled me. Our most celebrated productions, the ones that often garnered rave reviews and filled seats, often left no lasting trace in the community once the curtain fell. But there were other projects, quieter ones, where something different happened. Artists would spend weeks embedded with students, community members would attend rehearsals, conversations would continue long after opening night. These weren't our biggest box office successes, but they were our most enduring ones.

The difference wasn't in the artistry. It was in the relationships.

For too long, the performing arts sector has been chasing an impossible dream: competing as commercial entertainment without the infrastructure, resources, or network effects of actual commercial enterprises. We've turned mission-driven presenters into amateur commercial operators, reducing organizations with deep community purpose to show-by-show reputation management. The predictable result has been declining ticket sales, greater dependence on wealthy donors, and growing distance from the very communities we claim to serve.

Yet what if we've misdiagnosed the crisis entirely? What if people want art as much as ever, but they don't want only to be customers?

I think back to those community members who kept coming back to our artist residencies, who brought their friends, who talked about the work months later. They weren't seeking entertainment. They were seeking belonging. They wanted to be part of building something meaningful, not just consuming something polished.

The mission-based presenting field has actually been evolving toward this understanding, though we rarely acknowledge the progression. In the early decades, presenters distinguished themselves by bringing contemporary work that challenged audiences, positioning themselves as cultural risk-takers rather than repertoire programmers. This evolved into organizations becoming producers themselves, commissioning new work rather than just selecting from existing options. More recently, we've seen the rise of artist residencies, where organizations began valuing creative process and sustained engagement as much as final products.

But I believe we're on the cusp of something more fundamental: a shift toward organizing not around finished artistic works at all, but around ongoing relationships between artists and communities. Call it Presenting 4.0, where mutual discovery, learning, and collaboration become the primary work, with performances emerging as moments within larger relational ecosystems rather than endpoints in themselves.

During my time at the Mellon Foundation, I watched this pattern play out across hundreds of organizations. Those that treated community engagement as a marketing strategy struggled to build lasting connections. But organizations that placed relationship-building at the center of their artistic practice created sustainable impact that extended far beyond any single project or grant period.

The financial implications of this shift go to the heart of our sector's sustainability crisis. Traditional presenting models are watching ticket revenue shrink as a percentage of their budgets, forcing ever-greater dependence on contributed income. This creates a vicious cycle: the fewer people who experience the work directly, the more organizations must rely on wealthy donors who may have little connection to the actual artistic practice. The result is programming that serves donor preferences rather than community needs.

Relationship-based presenting flips this dynamic. When people invest in ongoing creative ecosystems rather than individual events, they create revenue streams that blur the traditional distinction between earned and contributed income. More importantly, they invite broader participation in shaping what gets created and how, especially from voices historically excluded from arts programming decisions.

I want to be clear: live performance will always move some of us profoundly. I can still be brought to tears by Mahler's Third Symphony or Martha Graham's Lamentation. But we can no longer rely on a shared cultural canon or inherited arts education to cultivate widespread appreciation for these works. Instead of lamenting this change, we should embrace the opportunity to create new conditions for aesthetic discovery, where people encounter what moves them through direct participation in contemporary creative practices.

This transformation requires everyone to rethink their roles. Artists become collaborators, facilitators, and cultural organizers, not just performers. Audiences become participants rather than consumers. Donors invest in relationships and creative capacity rather than just underwriting individual projects. Board members must experience and model community relationships rather than remaining distant overseers. Even funders need to support ecosystem-building rather than just funding discrete deliverables.

None of this will happen overnight. Communities have been shaped by decades of transactional cultural consumption. People need time and practice to discover the deeper satisfaction that comes from collaborative creative relationships. Smart organizations will move gradually, weaving relationship-based programming alongside traditional presenting until community investment and engagement shifts the institutional balance.

The stakes couldn't be higher. Organizations that cling to purely transactional models face a future of shrinking audiences, increasingly fragile finances, and growing irrelevance to the communities they serve. But those willing to embrace the messiness of genuine collaboration, to measure success through the depth of relationships rather than the polish of products, have the opportunity to become truly indispensable.

Not because of the events they produce, but because of the creative capacity they help communities cultivate and sustain. This is where the future of mission-based presenting lies. The only question is whether we have the courage to build it.

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September 5, 2025

Measuring What Matters: Why Arts Assessment is Broken and How to Fix It

By Emil J. Kang

The arts world has long been obsessed with measurement. Every grant application demands metrics. Every program requires evaluation frameworks. Every artistic initiative must justify itself through data points, attendance figures, and impact assessments. But rather than abandoning assessment altogether, we need to fundamentally rethink what we're measuring and why.

The problem isn't measurement itself. It's that we're measuring the wrong things in the wrong ways. We've become fixated on outcomes we can easily count rather than changes that actually matter. We've prioritized immediate, attributable results over the complex, long-term transformations that define meaningful artistic work.

What if we approached arts assessment the way we approach other forms of research and development? What if we measured with curiosity rather than defensiveness, with learning rather than justification as our goal?

The Case for Measuring Intentions

Instead of obsessing over impact, we should start by rigorously assessing intentions. What was the artist or organization actually trying to accomplish? Did they articulate clear goals that emerged from genuine community engagement or artistic inquiry? Were these goals appropriate to their context and capacity?

During my time at the Mellon Foundation, I encouraged all prospective grantees to articulate their intentions with unusual specificity. Rather than accepting vague statements about "community engagement" or "artistic excellence," I asked organizations to define exactly what they hoped to achieve and why those particular outcomes mattered to their specific context. This process often revealed gaps between stated missions and actual priorities, forcing applicants to clarify their thinking before we even discussed funding.

The results were illuminating. Organizations that could articulate clear, contextually grounded intentions consistently produced more meaningful work than those with impressive but generic goals. The clarity of intention became a predictor of success more reliable than past performance or institutional prestige.

Measuring intentions forces a different kind of accountability. It requires artists and organizations to be thoughtful about purpose before they begin work. It acknowledges that different artistic practices serve different functions and should be evaluated according to their own terms rather than universal metrics.

A community theater group working to build social cohesion among recent immigrants should be assessed differently than a contemporary dance company exploring movement innovation. A poetry program addressing trauma should be measured differently than a public art project designed to activate economic development. Each deserves rigorous evaluation, but evaluation that honors their distinct purposes.

Process Quality Over Outcome Quantity

We should measure how work gets made, not just what it produces. Process quality indicators might include:

• Community responsiveness: How meaningfully did the project engage with stakeholder input throughout development?

• Artistic rigor: How thoroughly did the work explore its creative questions? What artistic growth occurred?

• Collaborative depth: What relationships were built? How did creative partnerships develop?

• Adaptive learning: How did the work evolve in response to what was discovered along the way?

• Resource stewardship: How thoughtfully were financial and human resources deployed?

These process measures often predict lasting impact better than immediate outcome metrics. A residency program that builds deep artist-community relationships may not generate impressive participant numbers, but it creates infrastructure for ongoing cultural engagement that extends far beyond any measurement period.

Systemic Indicators That Actually Matter

Rather than measuring isolated projects, we should assess broader ecosystem health:

• Cultural infrastructure development: Are new venues, networks, and platforms emerging? Are existing ones becoming more sustainable?

• Artist career development: Are local artists finding pathways to advance their practice? Are they staying in or leaving the community?

• Cross-sector collaboration: Are arts organizations working meaningfully with schools, health systems, social services, and other community institutions?

• Innovation and risk-taking: Is experimental work being supported? Are new artistic forms and community engagement models being developed?

• Accessibility and inclusion: Are barriers to participation being identified and addressed? Are decision-making processes becoming more democratic?

These systemic measures capture the cumulative effect of multiple interventions over time rather than trying to attribute specific outcomes to individual projects.

The Data We Can Actually Collect

This doesn't mean abandoning quantitative data. But we can collect numbers that tell more meaningful stories:

Instead of just counting participants, track participation patterns: Who returns? Who brings others? Who takes on leadership roles? Who develops ongoing relationships with the organization or other participants?

Instead of just measuring satisfaction, assess behavioral change: Do participants seek out other cultural experiences? Do they engage differently with their community? Do they develop new skills or confidence?

Instead of just documenting attendance, track network effects: How are relationships forming through the work? What collaborations emerge? How do participants engage with the work beyond formal programming?

Instead of just reporting immediate outcomes, follow trajectory indicators: How do participants describe the experience months or years later? What long-term changes do they attribute to their involvement?

Making Space for the Unmeasurable

The most sophisticated assessment frameworks acknowledge their own limitations. They create space for stories, observations, and insights that can't be quantified. They include artist reflection, community testimony, and expert qualitative assessment alongside quantitative data.

They also recognize that some of the most important artistic work resists measurement entirely. The child who sees a dance performance and becomes a movement therapist fifteen years later. The community member who attends a poetry reading and finds courage to leave an abusive relationship. The teenager who participates in a mural project and develops a lifelong commitment to social justice.

These transformations happen in unmeasurable spaces between intention and outcome, between experience and application. They emerge through processes that unfold over time, across relationships, through encounters that can't be isolated or quantified. Good assessment honors these limitations rather than pretending they don't exist.

Learning, Not Justification

The goal of arts assessment should be learning, not justification. Organizations and funders should use evaluation to understand what's working, what isn't, and why. They should ask questions that help improve practice rather than simply documenting activity.

This requires shifting from a defensive posture to a curious one. Instead of trying to prove value, we should be trying to understand value. Instead of generating reports that justify past decisions, we should be gathering insights that inform future ones.

The Human Cost of Getting This Wrong

When we measure the wrong things, we get more of them. Organizations optimize for metrics rather than mission. Artists design work that generates good data rather than meaningful experience. Communities receive programming that looks impressive in reports but doesn't serve their actual needs.

The psychological toll is real. Artists develop chronic anxiety about relevance and value, measuring their worth through frameworks that were never designed to assess artistic merit. Organizations develop institutional cultures focused on defensive justification rather than creative risk-taking.

A Different Framework

The question isn't whether to assess artistic work. It's whether our assessment methods serve the work or force the work to serve them. Good measurement should support better artistic practice, stronger community engagement, and more effective resource allocation. It should help artists and organizations understand their impact and improve their effectiveness.

But this requires measuring with sophistication, acknowledging complexity, and embracing curiosity over certainty. It requires trusting that meaningful artistic work creates value that extends far beyond what can be captured in quarterly reports.

The arts deserve assessment frameworks as nuanced and thoughtful as the work they're meant to evaluate. Not because measurement doesn't matter, but because it matters too much to get wrong.

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September 11, 2025

Seeding the Future: Why the Best Leaders Build Others, Not Empires

By Emil J. Kang

I recently received a message that made me reflect on how we measure leadership success. A former UNC student, now working in philanthropy and cultural planning, wrote to thank me for my recent provocations and for the time I spent with her as an undergraduate back in 2008. She described how our conversations helped her network with local arts leaders, landing her first job and setting her on a path that now includes working with private foundations, convening arts funders, and developing strategic cultural plans.

This message arrived the same week that Harper's Bazaar published "The Harlem Renaissance" by Salamishah Tillet, featuring a striking two-page photograph of curators and cultural leaders who all developed their practice under Thelma Golden's mentorship at the Studio Museum. Among others, the list includes Legacy Russell, Jessica Bell Brown, Naima J. Keith, Lauren Haynes, Sandra Jackson-Dumont, Christine Y. Kim, Rujeko Hockley, Rashida Bumbray, Naomi Beckwith, Kimberly Drew, and Thomas Lax, all of whom I've had the privilege to know and work with while I worked at the Mellon Foundation.

I feel privileged to know these alumni not because of their connection to Golden, but because of their stellar leadership in their own right. During my time at Mellon, their excellence was evident in every interaction, every proposal, every program they developed. Only later did I fully appreciate the common thread of their Studio Museum experience and what it revealed about Golden's approach to leadership development.

The convergence of these moments crystallized something I've been thinking about for years: we've been measuring arts leadership all wrong.

The Empire Building Trap

For decades, we've celebrated leaders who build bigger budgets, expand facilities, grow staff, and accumulate prestigious board members. We idolize "upward mobility," treating career progression as a ladder to be climbed rather than depth to be explored. This approach treats leadership as a zero-sum game where success means outperforming peers and accumulating resources.

When empire building and ladder climbing become the primary measures of success, they create perverse incentives. Leaders begin optimizing for their own recognition rather than their community's needs, prioritizing résumé building over relationship building. We celebrate leaders who accumulate power rather than those who distribute it.

Generative Leadership in Action

But there's another approach, exemplified by Thelma Golden at the Studio Museum. For over two decades, Golden has demonstrated "generative leadership": creating more leaders rather than accumulating followers. Instead of using the institution as a stepping stone, she dedicated herself to realizing its full potential through deep, sustained relationships with communities, artists, and cultural movements.

Golden's commitment culminates in the museum's anticipated reopening after complete institutional transformation. Rather than moving on when construction challenges arose, she stayed to see through a $300 million capital campaign and the creation of the museum's first purpose-built facility. Her approach treats the institution not as a monument to individual vision, but as a platform for developing and launching careers.

During my time at Mellon, I worked with nearly a dozen former Studio Museum curators now scattered across the globe, leading institutions and mentoring the next generation. Each carried forward approaches and values developed under Golden's guidance. This wasn't coincidental but strategic. Golden understood that lasting change happens through distributed leadership, planting seeds for a future cultural landscape rather than constructing monuments to herself.

The Ecosystem Effect

This reveals the genius of generative leadership: it creates network effects that extend far beyond any individual institution. Former Studio Museum residents and fellows now work worldwide, bringing methodologies and commitment to artist development they learned through Golden's mentorship. This multiplier effect transforms multiple organizations and communities. It's the difference between monument construction and ecosystem cultivation.

What makes Golden's approach particularly significant is how rare it remains across cultural sectors. University arts programs continue prioritizing institutional reputation over student career development. Symphony orchestras and theaters measure success through subscription growth rather than artistic careers nurtured. The absence of Golden's generative approach represents a massive missed opportunity for systemic transformation.

The Real Challenges

The challenge with generative leadership is that its impacts resist traditional measurement and require navigating complex power dynamics. From my own experience, I've found three distinct contexts with different success rates.

With students, I've been most successful at creating lasting impact. The professor-student relationship is fundamentally developmental. With artists I've supported through programming or grantmaking, the relationship is explicitly about career development. With staff, however, it's been much more challenging. When you control someone's salary and performance reviews, the power imbalance can make mentorship feel transactional.

This is what makes Thelma Golden's legacy even more remarkable. She has somehow managed to create conditions for generative leadership within the most challenging context: as a supervisor and institutional leader. The fact that so many former staff members have flourished suggests she found ways to transcend typical hierarchical constraints.

This distinction reveals that generative leadership isn't just about individual intention. It's about creating structural conditions that enable authentic mentorship to flourish.

The Path Forward

Current and aspiring arts leaders face a choice: measure success by careers launched rather than empires built. This requires institutional structures supporting long-term thinking, boards understanding the value of investing in people, and funders willing to support career development infrastructure.

Every time I receive a message like the one from my former student, I'm reminded of what really matters. Not the budgets I managed, titles I held, or grants I awarded, but the lives I had the privilege to touch. The true measure of leadership success isn't how much money we raised or how many titles we accumulated. It's how many people we helped find their path and create their own impact.

So here's the challenge: Look in the mirror. How many people have you truly helped to launch their careers? Can you point to a dozen former students, staff members, or emerging artists who are now thriving because of the time, attention, and pathways you provided?

Thelma Golden can. The evidence is literally on display in Harper's Bazaar.

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September 20, 2025

Lost Horizon: When Leaders Can't See Beyond Tomorrow

By Emil J. Kang

There's a particular kind of institutional suffering that's easy to recognize: organizations where talented staff leave for unclear reasons, where board meetings become exercises in managing decline, where strategic planning yields cautious incrementalism. These are organizations trapped by visionless leadership, and the cost is higher than most people realize.

The Slow Drift

Leaders without vision don't usually fail dramatically. They fail slowly, through a thousand small decisions that prioritize immediate concerns over long-term purpose. They become excellent administrators of declining relevance, optimizing operations while the organization's reason for existing gradually erodes.

Without clear direction, decisions get made reactively. Resources flow to whoever makes the most compelling short-term case. The organization becomes a collection of activities rather than a mission driven entity. Staff members can't articulate how their efforts connect to larger purpose. The most capable people leave first, seeking organizations with clearer direction.

The problem becomes acute when visionless leadership combines with scarcity mindset. The more an organization struggles, the more leadership retreats into operational thinking. Vision starts to feel like a luxury they can't afford, but without vision, they remain trapped in the very constraints that created the scarcity.

I learned this firsthand during my time leading the Detroit Symphony Orchestra through severe financial crisis. Every board meeting focused on cash flow and cost-cutting. In that environment, I simply didn't know what vision to articulate or even if I had meaningful answers to offer. Looking back, it seems almost ironic that from my first day at UNC I had confidently spoken about wanting "the arts to be as big as basketball" - a vision that everyone could repeat and rally around. Yet facing organizational crisis at DSO, I found myself unable to articulate any compelling future, paralyzed by the immediate pressures that made dreaming feel irresponsible.

At the time, I lacked the understanding or confidence to recognize that the absence of compelling vision was making our challenges harder to navigate. Without a clear picture of the future we were working toward, every decision became purely defensive. We were managing decline rather than working toward transformation. I didn't have the tools then to understand that effective crisis leadership requires dual awareness: managing today's urgent needs while cultivating tomorrow's possibilities.

Vision as Developed Skill

Visionary leadership can be developed. The absence of vision isn't usually a character flaw but often results from organizational cultures that discourage expansive thinking, leaders overwhelmed by operational demands, or institutional histories that punished risk-taking.

During my time at the Mellon Foundation, the most inspiring grantee meetings were when leaders could contextualize their funding needs within a context of the change they sought to create. These leaders didn't just explain what they needed money for. They articulated how their work would transform their communities or field, connecting immediate needs to long-term impact in compelling ways.

The contrast with leaders focused solely on operational requirements was stark. Organizations seeking funding primarily to maintain programs or cover overhead struggled to make compelling cases, not because their needs weren't real, but because they couldn't articulate how meeting those needs would create meaningful change.

Many leaders have vision but lack safe spaces to express it. They've learned to suppress expansive thinking because past experiences taught them that dreaming publicly leads to criticism. Others can imagine different futures but struggle to communicate those possibilities compellingly.

Creating Conditions for Vision

For staff and board members working under visionless leadership, the challenge becomes creating conditions that invite vision to emerge. This might mean suggesting retreat formats that encourage long-term thinking, or asking strategic questions that help leaders articulate assumptions they haven't examined.

Teams can become generative forces by developing innovative approaches within their spheres of influence, demonstrating what becomes possible when people move beyond scarcity thinking. Board members have particular leverage in requesting vision, making visionary thinking a governance expectation rather than something leaders need to justify.

This doesn't mean abandoning crisis management or operational responsibility. Organizations facing genuine crises need leaders who can navigate immediate challenges effectively. The most effective leaders maintain dual awareness: they can manage today's urgent needs while simultaneously cultivating tomorrow's possibilities. Vision doesn't require ignoring current constraints but working through them toward something better.

Building visionary capacity requires creating iterative processes where leaders can test ideas in lower-stakes environments. This work becomes particularly crucial for emerging leaders who need opportunities to practice articulating vision before they're in positions where their ideas carry institutional weight. Too often, professional development focuses on technical competencies while neglecting the courage required to imagine different futures and the communication skills needed to share those visions compellingly.

The Stakes

In a sector facing unprecedented challenges, we can't afford institutions that drift without purpose or leaders who manage decline rather than pursue transformation. Visionless leadership isn't just a management problem but a crisis of institutional potential. Every organization led by someone who can't articulate a compelling future is a missed opportunity for cultural impact and community engagement.

The solution isn't to replace these leaders en masse but to create conditions where visionary capacity can develop and flourish. This requires acknowledging that vision is a skill that can be learned, a practice that can be improved, and a responsibility that can be shared.

The question isn't whether your leader has vision. It's whether your organization is creating conditions that invite vision to emerge, develop, and guide decisions. The future depends on getting this right.

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August 31, 2025

The Excellence Question: Who Gets to Define It?

By Emil J. Kang

Excellence has always been a loaded word in the arts. Its often wielded as a marker of value, a justification for exclusion, or a shorthand for taste. Some invoke it to argue that high standards require narrow access, that broadening participation risks mediocrity. Others reject the term altogether, viewing it as a coded defense of elitism and oppression. But both positions, in their own ways, miss the point.

Excellence is not a neutral concept. Its not a fixed standard hovering above culture, waiting to be discovered. Its a construct, defined by people, shaped by tradition, and measured against values that are far from universal. When we pretend otherwise, when we speak of excellence as if it were objective and settled, we obscure the real question: whose definition are we using, and why should it be the only one that counts?

Throughout my career in the arts, from leading Carolina Performing Arts to overseeing grantmaking at the Mellon Foundation, I have seen how expanding our understanding of excellence does not diminish artistic rigor. It strengthens it. In every instance where we invited new voices, new traditions, and new ways of making and evaluating work, the results deepened, not diluted, our standard of quality.

The Illusion of Universal Standards

The problem is that legacy institutions have long operated under the illusion that excellence has a singular, universal definition. Conservatories taught generations of students that mastery meant refining European classical technique. Galleries prioritized work that aligned with the Western art historical canon. Orchestras constructed seasons as though the canon itself were both immutable and complete. They applied quality metrics that often had more to do with pedigree and polish than with vision or originality.

We see, again and again, how these frameworks fail to account for innovation. When Stravinsky's The Rite of Spring premiered in 1913, it was met with outrage. Audiences rioted. Critics labeled it barbaric. It did not meet the standards of excellence at the time, yet it became one of the most influential musical works of the century. What we now recognize as groundbreaking was initially rejected because it did not conform to prevailing standards.

This reveals a fundamental challenge: our evaluative frameworks are often incapable of recognizing excellence when it arrives in unfamiliar form. We default to what we know. We reward what we understand. And we do so in ways that exclude perspectives, practices, and communities whose contributions do not fit institutional norms.

The Joy of Discovery

True excellence often begins with not knowing, with the joy of discovery and the vulnerability of encountering something unfamiliar. But most arts institutions have structured themselves to validate recognition, not curiosity. They serve audiences who want to feel affirmed in their knowledge, who want to hum along with melodies they recognize, who find comfort in identifying techniques they were taught to admire. Institutions become less about cultivating wonder and more about confirming taste.

The most excellent artistic experiences I have witnessed have not catered to that impulse. They have created space for surprise. They have demanded attention. They have made audiences, and funders and curators, do the work of discovery. Excellence, in that sense, is not about settling debates. It is about opening them.

Excellence as Expansion

This view of excellence as expansive rather than exclusive is not theoretical. When we celebrated The Rite of Spring at 100 at Carolina Performing Arts, commissioning twelve new works from artists around the world, it succeeded not because it adhered to a singular standard but because it welcomed multiple interpretations of what innovation could look like. Each artist brought their own culture, technique, and definition of mastery. The excellence was not uniform. It was plural.

At Mellon, we saw this same pattern emerge. Centering equity did not lower our standards. It raised them. By expanding the grantee pool to include community-based organizations, Indigenous artists, and experimental artist-run spaces, we surfaced forms of excellence that had long gone unrecognized. These were not fringe practices. They were simply outside the field of view of institutions that had never learned how to see them.

Building New Infrastructure

This does not mean abandoning rigor. It means building the institutional capacity to recognize rigor across a wider range of traditions and practices. At UNC, we created residency programs like DiSTIL and Creative Futures with this in mind. These were structured to recognize excellence in community engagement as much as in traditional artistic craft. They made room for artists to define their own standards of mastery while participating in broader artistic conversations.

At Yale Ventures, where I now serve as Entrepreneur-in-Residence, the challenge is creating systems that enable artists to pursue excellence on their own terms. The goal is not just helping artists monetize their work, but building infrastructure that enables imagination, rewards risk, and sustains innovation. Other sectors provide this kind of developmental support. The arts deserve the same.

The Real Standard

The most important question is not whether we believe in excellence. It is whether we believe excellence can be defined in more than one way, and whether we are willing to build institutions capable of supporting that multiplicity. Excellence is not threatened by difference. It is enriched by it.

The real standard is this: can we recognize outstanding work across difference? Can we hold rigor and relevance in the same frame? Can we develop new vocabularies of value, shaped in collaboration with the communities we aim to serve?

Excellence to whom? The answer must be, to all of us. It must be defined not behind closed doors, but out in the open, where artistic power meets cultural imagination and where the highest standards are set not only by history, but by the futures we dare to build.

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August 21, 2025

Breaking New Ground: Arts Leadership Meets Venture Innovation

By Emil J. Kang

I'm thrilled to announce my appointment as an Entrepreneur-in-Residence with the Yale Ventures Cultural Innovation Lab at Yale University, one of the first arts leaders to be appointed. This role places me at the intersection of two worlds that have traditionally operated in separate spheres—arts innovation and venture development.

Working alongside Jim Boyle and Frances Pollock through the Cultural Innovation Lab, I look forward to exploring how we can create enterprise infrastructure specifically designed for artists—moving beyond the traditional nonprofit model to develop new pathways for sustainable creative practice. This isn't about turning artists into conventional entrepreneurs—it's about creating conditions where creative innovation can develop with appropriate support, community engagement, and risk tolerance.

The timing couldn't be more urgent. As traditional cultural institutions face unprecedented pressures and communities desperately need creative solutions to complex challenges, we must build new models that support artistic innovation with the same rigor and resources we apply to other forms of entrepreneurship.

My work at Yale Ventures is designed to address what I see as a fundamental infrastructure gap that has long constrained artistic innovation. The goal is to break the cycle of scarcity and institutional dependence that has trapped too many talented creators and instead build ecosystems where artistic vision can translate into sustainable, community-serving enterprises.

This appointment represents a recognition that cultural innovation deserves the same serious investment and developmental framework that we provide to biotech, fintech, and other emerging sectors. But as I've been explaining to colleagues in the venture world, the challenge isn't what most business leaders assume it to be.

The Innovation Gap: Why Artists Don't Get Startup Treatment

The question that haunts every conversation about artists and entrepreneurship is the wrong one entirely. Business leaders, investors, and even well-meaning arts administrators consistently ask: "How can artists better monetize their creative work?" But this assumes the problem lies in the final transaction—the moment when art meets market.

The real crisis happens much earlier, in the vast creative wilderness that precedes any sellable product.

The Infrastructure Gap

When a biotech entrepreneur has a breakthrough idea, they don't immediately worry about how to price their eventual drug. They know there's an entire ecosystem designed to support the journey from concept to market: incubators, accelerators, angel investors, venture capital, research partnerships, regulatory guidance, and communities of fellow innovators who understand the unique challenges of their field.

When a tech founder envisions a new platform, they can access co-working spaces, mentorship networks, prototyping resources, user testing frameworks, and multiple rounds of funding specifically designed for different stages of development. The infrastructure assumes that innovation requires time, experimentation, failure, iteration, and community—long before any revenue appears.

But when an artist has a transformative vision—whether for a new kind of performance, a community-engaged installation, or an entirely novel art form—they face a landscape built around two primary options: secure institutional validation (through galleries, theaters, or nonprofit organizations) or figure it out alone.

This infrastructure gap isn't just an inconvenience. It's the root cause of the "starving artist" mythology and the scarcity mindset that keeps creative innovation trapped in cycles of desperation and dependence.

The Institutional Validation Trap

Most artists who achieve any level of stability do so by learning to navigate existing cultural institutions. They develop grant-writing skills, cultivate relationships with curators and artistic directors, and gradually internalize the aesthetic and political preferences of funding bodies. This process often works—it provides resources, community, and validation.

But it comes with a cost. Artists begin to imagine their work through the lens of what institutions will support rather than what communities need or what their own vision demands. They develop what we might call an "institutional validation reflex"—an unconscious tendency to seek permission from established systems rather than building new ones.

This reflex is understandable. In a landscape where independent artistic practice often means isolation and financial precarity, institutional affiliation offers both material support and social legitimacy. But it also constrains imagination. Artists begin to self-edit before they even create, anticipating the preferences of grant panels and selection committees.

The Scarcity Mindset Spiral

Without infrastructure that supports experimentation and risk-taking, artists operate from a position of chronic scarcity. Every project must succeed. Every grant must be won. Every opportunity must be maximized. This creates a conservative approach to creative risk that's antithetical to innovation.

Contrast this with how tech entrepreneurs approach failure. In Silicon Valley, failure is not just tolerated but celebrated as a learning experience. "Fail fast, fail often" isn't just a slogan—it's built into the funding model. Investors expect that most ventures will fail, and they structure their portfolios accordingly.

But artists are expected to succeed consistently from the beginning. Grant applications require detailed outcomes and impact measures. Residency programs demand finished works. Even artist-entrepreneur programs often focus on helping creators monetize existing work rather than supporting the messy, uncertain process of developing new artistic practices.

What Artist Enterprise Infrastructure Could Look Like

Imagine if artists had access to the same kind of developmental ecosystem that supports other forms of innovation:

Creative R&D Labs where artists could experiment with new forms, technologies, and community engagement models without the pressure to produce marketable outcomes. These wouldn't be traditional residencies with predetermined timelines, but open-ended research environments.

Artistic Venture Studios that provide not just funding but the operational support artists need to build sustainable practices: business development, legal guidance, technology resources, and access to diverse revenue models beyond traditional arts sales.

Community-Centered Incubators designed around the reality that many of the most innovative artistic practices are inherently collaborative and community-engaged. These would support artists in building the social infrastructure their work requires.

Creative Capital Networks that operate like angel investor groups but understand that artistic innovation often requires different timelines, success metrics, and forms of return than purely commercial ventures.

Artistic Accelerator Programs that help artists develop both their creative practice and their capacity to build sustainable enterprises around that practice—not by compromising their vision, but by creating infrastructure that supports it.

Beyond Monetization

The goal isn't to turn every artist into a entrepreneur in the conventional sense. It's to create conditions where artists can develop their work with the same kind of sustained support, community engagement, and risk tolerance that we provide to other forms of innovation.

This means recognizing that artistic innovation often generates value that can't be captured through traditional market mechanisms. The social impact of community-engaged art, the cultural knowledge preserved through traditional practices, the healing potential of creative expression—these outcomes require investment models that understand return beyond financial profit.

The Urgency of Now

The current moment demands this infrastructure more than ever. As traditional cultural institutions face funding cuts and political attacks, as communities grapple with isolation and disconnection, as we confront challenges that require creative solutions—we need artists who can build new forms of cultural infrastructure.

But we can't expect them to do so while operating from scarcity, isolation, and institutional dependence. We need to build the scaffolding that allows creative innovation to flourish.

The starving artist trope isn't a romantic reality—it's a policy failure. It's the predictable result of an economic system that supports innovation in every sector except the one most essential to human meaning-making and social cohesion.

It's time to build something different. Not because artists deserve charity, but because communities deserve the full potential of creative innovation. And that innovation requires infrastructure, investment, and the same kind of serious commitment to experimental development that we provide to every other form of human problem-solving.

The question isn't how to monetize art. The question is how to build an ecosystem where artistic innovation can thrive, experiment, fail, iterate, and ultimately create the cultural solutions our communities desperately need.

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August 25, 2025

What If the Arts Were the Point?

Reclaiming the Transformational Purpose of Higher Education through the Arts

By Emil J. Kang

Higher education is in a moment of reckoning. Public trust is eroding. Budgets are tightening. Political scrutiny is intensifying. The liberal arts have long been the foundation of American higher education, but they are increasingly seen as expendable. Within this context, the arts often find themselves on the margins: praised rhetorically, but rarely prioritized.

When institutions do support the arts, it is often through integration. Students encounter creativity through general education, or in service to other disciplines. The arts are used to foster innovation, wellness, communication, or "soft skills." These efforts are valuable, but they are not sufficient. We need to stop treating the arts as enrichment and start recognizing them as infrastructure.

The Arts as Infrastructure

In higher education, infrastructure typically means buildings, networks, systems. These are the things that allow the rest of the institution to function. But what if we understood infrastructure more broadly? What if the arts were understood as essential to the university's intellectual, emotional, and civic architecture, just like libraries, laboratories, and learning management systems?

The arts are not simply things we do in addition to learning. They are ways of knowing, ways of being, and ways of building community. They enable students to make sense of complexity, to express the inexpressible, and to imagine alternative futures. They train people to listen, to interpret, to hold contradiction, and to pursue meaning. These are not soft capacities. They are structural. Just as campuses invest in physical infrastructure to support research, teaching, and student life, they must also invest in the cultural infrastructure that enables creative, ethical, and collaborative thought.

This means creating robust academic departments that support deep study and artistic production, hiring artist-scholars with full institutional support where artistic practice is valued equally with traditional scholarship, including advancement and promotional structures that recognize creative work as research, and providing dedicated spaces for making, performing, and reflecting rather than just showcasing. It means ensuring campus-wide access to artistic methods for all students, regardless of major, and pursuing integration that doesn't dilute the disciplines, but amplifies their reach.

Crucially, this infrastructure must prioritize relational rather than transactional arts experiences. Too often, universities treat the arts as content to be consumed. Students attend performances, view exhibitions, or take classes for credit. But the transformative power of arts infrastructure lies in sustained relationship: students working alongside practicing artists over time, communities of makers learning from each other, and creative processes that unfold through ongoing collaboration rather than discrete events.

There is also a risk in treating the arts as a cash machine, where success is measured primarily by ticket sales, enrollment numbers, or revenue generation. While financial sustainability matters, reducing arts programming to profit centers undermines the very infrastructure we need to build. When institutions focus primarily on what sells rather than what transforms, they create programming that may be popular but lacks the depth and risk-taking that make arts education transformational. True arts infrastructure requires investment in work that may not immediately generate revenue but builds the cultural and intellectual capacity that serves the institution's broader mission.

This relational approach means artist residencies measured in years, not weeks. It means students engaging in multi-semester creative projects that build deep skills and lasting mentorships. It means community partnerships that evolve over decades, creating genuine cultural exchange rather than superficial outreach. These relationships cannot be purchased or programmed. They must be cultivated through sustained investment in people, processes, and patient development of trust.

We Need Both Depth and Breadth

Some institutions have invested in campus-wide engagement at the expense of supporting arts majors and faculty. Others defend academic arts departments without making space for cross-campus collaboration. But we cannot choose one over the other. If we neglect arts disciplines, we lose the depth and excellence that make integration meaningful. If we silo the arts, we deny their potential to shape how every student learns.

We need both. Scholar-artists and video game designers. Studio art majors and curious engineers. Musicians and policymakers. Choreographers and climate scientists. Each one enriches the other. Together, they form a truly educated public.

The Strategic Opportunity

There is a leadership opportunity here. The institutions that will thrive in the next decade are those that reimagine infrastructure not only in terms of technology or buildings, but in terms of human capacity, cultural relevance, and imaginative reach. In a time of artificial intelligence, climate anxiety, and civic fragmentation, our students don't just need credentials. They need to develop the ability to think metaphorically, act empathetically, and adapt creatively.

This is not an argument for sentiment or nostalgia. It is a case for relevance, strategy, and public value.

For university leaders navigating political scrutiny and budget pressures, arts infrastructure offers concrete advantages that skeptics can understand. Institutions with robust arts programs consistently demonstrate higher alumni giving rates, stronger community partnerships, and more effective crisis response capabilities. When Brown University launched its Arts Institute, alumni donations to the university increased by 23% within three years. When Arizona State University invested heavily in arts integration across disciplines, their retention rates improved and they attracted national attention for innovative programming that differentiated them in an increasingly competitive market.

Arts programs also provide measurable workforce preparation that addresses economic criticism directly. A 2023 study by the National Association of Colleges and Employers found that graduates with significant arts training scored highest on creative problem-solving, communication, and adaptability. These are the skills most in demand from employers across all sectors. These aren't "soft skills" but core competencies for an economy increasingly defined by rapid change and complex challenges.

Perhaps most importantly for institutions under political attack, arts programming creates visible community value that generates goodwill across ideological divides. When universities present community theater, host local artists, or engage students in public art projects, they demonstrate their commitment to place-based service in ways that transcend partisan politics. Town halls may debate diversity initiatives, but they celebrate student orchestras and community art exhibitions.

A Final Word

The arts are not peripheral. They are foundational. They are not a bonus. They are a necessity. And like any true infrastructure, they require investment, upkeep, and integration not for their own sake, but for what they make possible.

So let's stop asking how to "fit" the arts into a constrained system. Let's ask what the university could become if we designed the system around the arts in the first place. What if the arts weren't just part of the story? What if they were the point?

# # #

August 14, 2025

The Sophistication Trap: Why High Art's “Audience Problem” Isn't About Audiences

By Emil J. Kang

What I'm about to argue will likely seem obvious to most performing arts leaders, artists, and thoughtful observers of the arts landscape. Yet somehow, despite this apparent obviousness, our major cultural institutions continue operating as if the opposite were true.

For decades, symphony orchestras, opera companies, and ballet companies have wrung their hands over the same existential question: How do we attract more diverse and younger audiences? Board meetings have been consumed by this puzzle. Consultants have been hired. Marketing campaigns have been launched promising that classical music is "not stuffy" and opera is "more accessible than you think."

Everyone involved seems to understand, on some level, that the disconnect runs deeper than marketing or pricing. And yet, season after season, we continue programming as if the solution lies in better messaging rather than fundamental reimagining.

So what if we've been asking the wrong question entirely?

What if the problem isn't that people lack the sophistication to appreciate Puccini or the resources to afford orchestra tickets? What if the problem is that we refuse to acknowledge that these art forms were designed by and for a very specific population—and when they fail to resonate beyond that population, we blame the audience rather than examining the art itself?

This will be a difficult conversation for many reasons, not least because there are talented young musicians and musicians of color who have devoted their lives to mastering these traditions and who understandably hope that their artistry can attract their contemporaries and communities. Their investment in these forms is real, their skill undeniable, and their desire to share this music with people who look like them is both moving and valid. But perhaps the question isn't whether they can make classical music relevant to their communities—perhaps it's whether our institutions should be asking them to carry that burden in the first place.

The Architecture of Exclusion

Ballet, opera, and symphony orchestras emerged from the cultural and economic contexts of European aristocracy and American Gilded Age wealth. They were not created as universal languages but as markers of refinement, education, and class distinction. The ritual of attendance—the dress codes, the behavioral expectations, the venues themselves—was as much about social signaling as artistic experience.

When we program a season of Beethoven, Verdi, and Tchaikovsky and then wonder why it doesn't draw significant Latino or Black audiences, we're being willfully naive about cultural specificity. These composers wrote for courts and concert halls where people who looked like those audiences were servants, not patrons. The music carries that history in its very DNA.

This doesn't mean the music is without value or beauty. But it does mean that its failure to speak to everyone isn't a failure of sophistication on the part of those who remain unmoved. It's evidence that cultural expression is rooted in particular experiences, worldviews, and social contexts.

The Sophistication Defense

Perhaps the most insidious response to declining and demographically narrow audiences has been the sophistication defense: the suggestion that these art forms represent the pinnacle of human artistic achievement, and that those who don't connect with them simply haven't developed adequate cultural literacy or refined taste.

This argument positions European classical traditions as objectively superior to other musical forms—jazz, gospel, hip-hop, mariachi, Indian classical music, or any number of other sophisticated musical traditions. It suggests that there's a hierarchy of culture, with Western classical music at the apex, and that proper education will inevitably lead people to recognize and embrace this hierarchy.

But sophistication isn't about climbing a ladder toward European aesthetic ideals. A master of Hindustani classical music, a bebop innovator, or a master drummer in a West African tradition possesses sophistication that rivals any conservatory-trained violinist. The difference is that we've institutionalized one tradition's definition of excellence while treating others as interesting but ultimately lesser forms.

The Accessibility Illusion

The other common response has been to make high art forms more "accessible"—shorter programs, casual dress codes, pre-concert talks, crossover programming. While well-intentioned, these efforts often miss the deeper issue. They assume that the barrier is logistical rather than cultural, that if we just remove enough friction, universal appreciation will follow.

But accessibility isn't just about making something easier to consume. It's about relevance, representation, and resonance. When the stories being told, the aesthetic values being celebrated, and the cultural references being made consistently exclude your experience and worldview, no amount of casual Friday programming will bridge that gap.

Moreover, these accessibility efforts often feel patronizing to the very communities they're trying to reach. The implication is that the art form is inherently valuable and universal, and if people would just give it a chance (with proper hand-holding), they'd discover its worth. This maintains the hierarchy while offering the appearance of inclusion.

Beyond Diversification

The real question isn't how to diversify audiences for European classical traditions. It's whether cultural institutions should be investing the majority of their resources in maintaining and promoting art forms that serve an increasingly narrow slice of the population.

What if, instead of spending millions trying to convince 25-year-olds that Wagner is relevant to their lives, we invested that same energy and funding in developing, presenting, and institutionalizing the musical traditions that actually emerge from and speak to diverse communities?

What if our major cultural institutions became laboratories for contemporary artistic expression rather than museums for 18th and 19th-century European culture?

This isn't about abandoning excellence or "dumbing down" programming. It's about expanding our definition of what constitutes artistic excellence and recognizing that cultural relevance isn't a character flaw—it's how art has always worked.

The Path Forward

Cultural institutions have a choice. They can continue the decades-long project of trying to make 200-year-old European art forms relevant to 21st-century diverse audiences. Or they can acknowledge that these forms serve a particular constituency and design institutions that serve the full spectrum of artistic expression and cultural community.

This might mean programming seasons that are 70% contemporary and community-rooted rather than 70% classical repertoire. It might mean hiring artistic directors from hip-hop, electronic, or world music backgrounds. It might mean fundamentally rethinking what a "symphony orchestra" or "opera company" could be if it weren't tethered to historical European models.

The sophistication trap keeps us stuck in a cycle of lamentation and forced relevance. Breaking free requires admitting that not all art is for all people—and that this isn't a failure of the people. It's simply how culture works. The failure is in building institutions that assume otherwise and then blame audiences when reality proves stubborn.

True sophistication might be recognizing when it's time to let new forms flourish rather than demanding that old forms find new life in contexts where they were never meant to grow.

# # #

August 11, 2025

You Don’t Need a Nonprofit to Make Your Work Matter

Too many artists think they need a nonprofit to make their work legitimate — and too many end up giving away their ownership, time, and focus in the process. Fiscal sponsorship can be a smarter alternative, but the sponsorship world itself is in dire need of greater transparency, accountability, and purpose. This provocation asks a hard question: are we building structures to protect the art, or just more systems that consume it?

By Emil J. Kang

Somewhere along the way, artists were sold the idea that to be taken seriously, they need a nonprofit. File the paperwork, form a board, write a mission statement — and suddenly, the work has “legitimacy.” Funders will take your calls. You can apply for certain grants. You have a tax-exempt number that signals permanence and purpose.

What they don’t tell you is what it costs.

When you turn your art into a nonprofit, you give away more than you think. You give up sole ownership of your intellectual property — your work now belongs to the organization, which is legally its own entity, with a board of directors that has ultimate authority. You give away your time — hours once spent creating are now spent fundraising, filling out compliance reports, managing board politics, and attending endless meetings. You give away your attention — shifting from the practice of making to the business of sustaining an institution. And, perhaps most dangerously, you give away your ability to make decisions solely in service of your vision, because the institution’s survival quickly becomes its own priority.

This isn’t to say that nonprofits are bad, or that they can’t serve artists well. But too often, the assumption is automatic: if you’re an artist with an idea, you “need” to start a nonprofit. That assumption is not only wrong — it’s harmful. The reality is that a nonprofit is a legal and governance structure with obligations, limitations, and consequences that can swallow the very work it was meant to serve.

The good news? You have options.

Fiscal sponsorship allows you to receive grants and tax-deductible donations through an existing nonprofit, without creating your own. You retain your identity, your ownership, and your focus on making — while leaning on an existing infrastructure for compliance and administration. That said, the fiscal sponsorship community itself is overdue for a refresh. Too many sponsors operate with little transparency, uneven service quality, or unclear accountability. Artists often find themselves in relationships where the sponsor benefits more from the administrative fee than the artist benefits from the partnership. The promise of fiscal sponsorship — to reduce administrative burden and provide genuine institutional support — will only be realized if sponsors hold themselves to higher standards of service, clarity, and responsibility.

Cooperative models let you share resources with other artists — space, equipment, marketing, staff — without giving up ownership or creative control. They allow for collective decision-making without imposing the rigid hierarchy of a nonprofit board.

Social enterprises or LLCs let you generate income from your work, pay yourself fairly, and partner with nonprofits when it benefits your mission. You can still apply for certain grants as a for-profit entity (especially through fiscal sponsors), while retaining flexibility to shift or adapt without board approval.

A nonprofit is not a badge of honor. It’s a tool — one of many — and like any tool, it’s only worth using if it fits the job. If your goal is to protect your creative vision, you may need fewer bylaws and more boundaries. The question isn’t whether you can create a nonprofit — it’s whether you can keep making your art once you do.

# # #

August 7, 2025

When the Institution Becomes the Art

What Happens When We Prioritize Structure Over Substance

By Emil J. Kang

In the nonprofit arts world, we talk about the power of creativity, the centrality of artists, and the importance of cultural access. We claim to value risk, experimentation, and vision. We champion new voices and bold work.

But behind the curtain, much of our energy—our time, our funding, our staffing—goes not toward the art itself, but toward preserving the institution that houses it.

We spend months refining strategic plans, polishing board presentations, and reworking org charts. We pour energy into development language, capital campaigns, and brand refreshes. We optimize operations. We fine-tune messaging. We chase relevance. We protect reputation.

None of this is inherently wrong. Institutions need structure, clarity, and sustainability to function.

But there’s a moment—often quiet, often unspoken—when the institution stops existing for the art, and begins existing as the art. When the real creative labor becomes navigating bureaucracy, managing appearances, and sustaining a legacy that may no longer reflect the world outside its walls.

We mistake performance for purpose.
We substitute the container for the contents.
We become stewards of an architecture instead of champions of a mission.

When the Institution Becomes the Product

We see this everywhere:

• Artists are underpaid or under-supported while executive teams grow in size and scope.

• Programming decisions are driven by donor priorities rather than curatorial ones.

• Risk is avoided, not because the work isn’t worth doing, but because the optics aren’t worth managing.

• Community partnerships are announced with fanfare but resourced like middling side projects.

• The grant report takes more effort than the work it describes.

We build narratives about inclusion, innovation, and transformation—but spend our days defending a model built for a different time.

Eventually, artists notice. So do audiences. And so do the people inside the institution who quietly begin to wonder: Was this what we signed up for?

The Real Cost of Institutional Preservation

When the institution becomes the art, several things happen:

• The work becomes thinner, safer, more polished—less urgent.

• Staff burn out navigating internal politics instead of building shared purpose.

• Boards see success as endurance rather than impact.

• Funders begin to reward stability over imagination.

• And the public sees through it all and stops showing up.

The paradox is painful: the more we try to preserve the institution, the less alive it becomes. And the less alive it becomes, the more energy it demands just to keep going.

At some point, we stop asking what the institution is for and only ask how to keep it running.

A Way Back to Purpose

We don’t need to destroy institutions. But we do need to remember what they were built to hold.

Arts institutions are not ends in themselves. They are vessels—temporary, evolving, imperfect—meant to support people, practices, and possibilities that transcend their walls.

So the question isn’t how to save the organization. The question is:

• What is it still in service to?

• Who is it accountable to now?

• What could it become if we stopped protecting it and started reimagining it?

This is the creative work that matters—not just on stage or in galleries, but inside leadership, strategy, and governance. Institutions should be among the most dynamic spaces in cultural life—not the most fragile.

A Final Word

We are not here to curate the illusion of progress.
We are here to make space for what matters.

So let’s stop preserving institutions as artifacts.
Let’s start treating them as creative tools.
Let them be malleable. Let them be temporary. Let them breathe.

Because when the institution becomes the art, the art—and the people who make it—begin to disappear.

Let’s not let that happen.

# # #

August 4, 2025

Why the Executive Director–Board Chair Dynamic Deserves Immediate Attention

The Most Overlooked—and Overloaded—Partnership in Organizational Life

By Emil J. Kang

In every nonprofit, there’s a relationship that quietly shapes everything—but rarely gets the attention it deserves. It doesn’t show up in strategy decks, on meeting agendas, or grant reports. It’s not evaluated regularly and it’s almost never resourced. But it holds more power than most people realize. It’s the relationship between the Executive Director and the Board Chair.

This one dynamic often determines whether an organization hums or stalls. Whether a leader thrives or burns out. Whether the board functions as a supportive body or becomes a second job the ED has to manage. And yet, for all its influence, we continue to treat this relationship as something that should simply work on its own—without coaching, without feedback, without reflection.

Too often, the expectations placed on this pairing are both enormous and unspoken. The ED is expected to be visionary and tactical, externally facing and internally grounded, accountable to the board and responsible for staff. Meanwhile, the Chair is expected to be a thought partner, a supervisor, a translator, and a guardian of institutional values—all while serving in a volunteer capacity, often without any training in nonprofit leadership.

The result is a dynamic that’s overloaded with pressure but under-supported in practice. When it’s strong, it can anchor an organization through change, challenge, and uncertainty. When it’s strained or misaligned, it can quietly erode trust, create confusion, and destabilize the leadership from within.

I know this from experience. As a young Executive Director, I inherited board chairs I didn’t choose—well-meaning people, but not always the right partners for the moment. Sometimes they were placed in the role out of seniority, donor status, or internal politics. I was expected to “manage the relationship,” even if there was no alignment in approach, communication style, or vision. I learned early how much effort went into managing up before you could manage anything else—and how quickly misalignment at the top could spill across the organization.

And even as a more seasoned executive, I encountered Chairs who, despite good intentions, misunderstood their role. They saw themselves not as champions of strategy, but as authors of vision. They wanted to lead direction, not steward it. And in doing so, they subtly displaced the very leadership they were meant to support. Worse still, I’ve experienced Chairs who treated the board’s failings—its lack of engagement, internal dissonance, or unclear direction—as the Executive Director’s fault. In those cases, even a successful ED—someone leading boldly, navigating complex terrain, and delivering on mission—found their work diminished, their accomplishments unacknowledged. When the board faltered, blame flowed downhill. But when the organization thrived, credit mysteriously dispersed. That kind of dynamic is not just demoralizing—it’s corrosive.

Then there are Chairs who simply avoid the hard parts of the role altogether. They struggle to make decisions, delay action when clarity is needed, and fail to hold their fellow board members accountable. Dysfunctional dynamics are left to fester. Underperforming or disruptive trustees go unchecked. And rather than confronting governance issues directly, these Chairs quietly hand the burden to the Executive Director—expecting them to be the diplomat, the enforcer, and the adult in the room. But EDs are not responsible for managing the board. That’s the Chair’s role. When Chairs abdicate that responsibility, the ED is forced to absorb tension that isn’t theirs to carry. It’s a recipe for resentment and burnout, and it often leaves the board wondering why leadership feels misaligned—when the root issue is simply a Chair unwilling to lead.

What makes this relationship so tricky is the ambiguity built into it. The Board Chair is technically the ED’s supervisor—but can also be the ED’s closest confidant. They represent the board’s authority, but also serve as the ED’s ally in navigating board dynamics. That ambiguity can work beautifully in the hands of two emotionally intelligent, mission-aligned partners—but more often, it creates tension, especially when roles aren’t clear and communication isn’t intentional.

I’ve seen EDs withhold information from their Chairs for fear of being micromanaged. I’ve seen Chairs insert themselves into day-to-day operations because they quietly lack confidence in the staff or haven’t been given a clear scope. I’ve seen high-functioning organizations lose momentum, not because anyone was failing, but because this one relationship was misaligned and nobody knew how to talk about it.

It doesn’t have to be this way. We could treat the ED–Chair relationship as a central piece of organizational infrastructure—something to be built, maintained, and occasionally repaired. That would mean offering onboarding and coaching not just for EDs, but for Chairs, and even better, for both. It would mean carving out protected time for the two to align—not just on tasks and timelines, but on values, tone, and approach. It would mean creating mechanisms for feedback, not just from one to the other, but from staff and board members who feel the ripple effects of this relationship in their everyday work.

Too often, we choose Board Chairs based on tenure, influence, or wealth rather than their capacity to lead in partnership. But the best Chairs aren’t always the loudest voices or biggest donors. They’re the ones who understand that leadership is relational. They show up with humility, consistency, and the willingness to listen and evolve.

This work is especially important now, in a sector grappling with burnout, equity gaps, and trust deficits. Executive Directors—particularly BIPOC, women, and first-time leaders—are often navigating the pressure to transform institutions while still managing legacy structures and personalities that resist change. A misaligned Chair can become yet another layer of friction. But a well-aligned Chair can be a lifeline—someone who creates space, deflects unnecessary noise, and helps the board evolve alongside the staff.

While the burden of balance shouldn’t fall solely on the Executive Director, there are steps an ED can take to help build and sustain a strong Chair relationship. The first is to treat the relationship as something that requires intentional design—not just functional interaction. Schedule regular, candid one-on-ones—not just about decisions and deliverables, but about how the relationship is working. Be explicit about what kind of support you need and where you want your Chair to lead—particularly when it comes to board accountability. Share wins and challenges early, and invite feedback before there’s a problem. And perhaps most importantly, clarify the boundaries: What belongs to the board? What belongs to staff? And what belongs to this unique, high-trust partnership?

It’s not always easy, especially when the Chair isn’t aligned. But small, early interventions can prevent long-term dysfunction. Don’t assume your Chair understands how best to support you—help them learn, and invite them into that growth alongside you.

So if you’re a Board Chair, ask yourself: Am I leading in a way that empowers or constrains? If you’re an ED: Does my Chair know what I actually need from them, and have we ever talked about it explicitly? And if you’re part of a board: When was the last time we checked in—not just on what our ED is doing, but if our ED and Chair are showing up well in this relationship?

Too many great leaders have left roles not because they weren’t effective, but because this single relationship failed them. Too many organizations have stalled not because of strategy or money, but because of confusion at the top.

It’s time to stop treating the ED–Chair relationship as incidental. It’s not. It’s structural. It’s cultural. And it’s worth getting right.

# # #

July 29, 2025

When "Lack of Funding" Becomes the Answer to Everything

Why We Can’t Let Scarcity Thinking Replace Vision

By Emil J. Kang

As a former funder, I’ve often asked leaders what’s getting in the way:
Why hasn’t this project launched?
Why isn’t the strategy evolving?
Why did the community partnership stall?
Why is the team burned out?

And nearly every time, I get the same response:

“We don’t have the funding.”

Let me be clear: funding does matter. Many organizations are navigating real precarity, stretched staff, and historic underinvestment. The structural barriers are real.

But something else is happening, too.

“Lack of funding” has become the reflexive answer to everything.
A kind of shield. A placeholder. A wall between aspiration and action.

The Risk of Believing It Too Fully

When every challenge is attributed to money, we risk losing the very thing funding was meant to support: vision.

Vision becomes deferred.
Boldness becomes conditional.
Imagination becomes indulgent.
And leadership becomes risk management.

We stop dreaming out loud because we’re afraid of being unrealistic.
We stop naming what we really want because we’re afraid no one will fund it.
We stop doing the thing that drew us to the work in the first place—imagining a different future.

What We Don’t Mean

This is not about telling under-resourced leaders to bootstrap harder.
This is not a call for magical thinking or martyrdom.
This is not about ignoring injustice or pretending money doesn’t matter.

It’s about asking an honest question:

Have we let the idea of scarcity become more powerful than the actual constraints?

When Scarcity Becomes the Operating System

The danger isn’t just in budget cuts.
It’s in how scarcity reshapes behavior:

• We scale back before we’ve even tested the idea.

• We write proposals based on what we think funders will say yes to—not what communities need.

• We decline opportunities for fear of not being able to sustain them.

• We maintain programs we don’t believe in—because they’re funded.

• We stop asking for what’s needed—because hearing “no” has worn us down.

At some point, the lack of funding doesn’t just limit the work—it becomes the work.

A Different Invitation

What if the question wasn’t, “What can you do with what you have?”
But: “What do you want to do, regardless?”

What if we asked:

• What would this look like if money weren’t the first constraint?

• What vision are you holding back because you assume it won’t be funded?

• What would be worth doing even if it’s hard to pay for at first?

• How might imagination itself attract the support you haven’t yet found?

As Funders, We Have a Role Too

We must take responsibility for the habits we’ve helped create:

• Rewarding incrementalism over transformation

• Making sustainability a precondition for support, instead of a goal

• Asking for clarity without making space for uncertainty

• Claiming to want boldness while quietly incentivizing safety

We don’t get to ask for vision if we only fund feasibility.
We don’t get to demand imagination if we punish risk.

But we do get to ask:

Are you letting the lack of funding become your reason for not dreaming?

A Closing Thought

The absence of money is a barrier.
But the absence of imagination is a crisis.

Vision is not the result of abundance.
It’s the reason we fight for it.

So the next time you start with, “We can’t because we don’t have…”
Try starting with:
“What if we tried anyway?”

And let’s see who’s ready to fund that.

# # #

July 31, 2025

The Virtues of the Drunken Walk: Why a Nonlinear Career Might Be the Most Honest One

by Emil J. Kang

I remember sitting in a darkened theater at TEDGlobal in Oxford back in 2009, listening to a speaker I was certain had introduced himself as a professor from Stanford’s d.school. He was talking about innovation, but what I remember most was a phrase he used to describe the creative process: “the drunken walk.” He meant it as a compliment—a metaphor for the circuitous, instinct-driven, unpredictable journey that ideas (and people) often take before they become fully legible to the world.

The moment he said it, something clicked. That was it. That was the story of my career. I underlined the phrase in my notebook and carried it with me, repeating it to colleagues, students, and even boards of directors when they asked how I ended up wherever I happened to be. I used it in speeches. I built it into lectures. I never forgot the phrase—but I did forget the man. Recently, I tried to find him. I Googled “drunken walk career Stanford TED” and got nothing. No speaker. No paper trail. No evidence that anyone officially coined it.

So, if you're out there, sir: thank you. Your phrase has become part of my story. And if no one else claims it, I’ll carry it forward—because if anyone has lived the drunken walk, it’s me.

My Career as the Quintessential Drunken Walk

By most conventional standards, my career defies logic.

I led a major American symphony orchestra at age 31.
I spent 15 years in higher education without a PhD or tenure.
I founded a performing arts program outside an urban center and built it to international prominence.
I directed one of the nation’s most influential arts and culture grantmaking portfolios without formal training in philanthropy.

Not one of these moves followed a master plan. They came from listening, responding, and leaning into the unknown—again and again. The drunken walk is not a detour. It’s a discipline of presence.

Certainty Is Overrated

The traditional career narrative is a linear fantasy: get the right degree, climb the ladder, earn the title, repeat, and cash in. But real life is rarely so symmetrical. People change. Institutions shift. Values evolve.

A nonlinear career—one that arcs and twists—is more than a survival strategy. It’s a refusal to reduce work to a résumé. It is an act of agency in a world that craves predictability.

The drunken walk teaches you to navigate uncertainty not with fear, but with fluency.

The Case for Cross-Pollination

We’re taught to pursue depth: to specialize, drill down, and master our lane. But sometimes it’s breadth—not depth—that makes innovation possible.

The most powerful ideas often emerge not from perfection, but from cross-pollination. When an orchestra executive thinks like an urban planner. When a grantmaker borrows from choreography. When a professor applies lessons from Bharatanatyam to board governance.

My career has unfolded through these collisions. Not because I chased disruption, but because I followed what sparked my curiosity, even when it didn’t "fit."

Each turn—whether into orchestras, universities, or philanthropy—gave me new tools and new perspectives. Not everything connected right away. But over time, the intersections became the edge.

A straight path might build expertise. But a crooked one? That builds imagination.

The World Isn’t Linear, So Why Should We Be?

Our culture fetishizes continuity. We’re told to specialize. To stay in our lane. To build tenure in one domain.

But the world we live in isn’t linear. It’s messy, adaptive, and relational. A drunken walk career mirrors that reality. It builds muscles for ambiguity, systems thinking, and pattern recognition.

In philanthropy, this helped me see that artists weren’t just grantees—they were economists, care workers, and civic agents. In education, it helped me bridge the divide between intellectual production and emotional impact. A nonlinear life fosters lateral wisdom—the ability to connect what others keep siloed.

Retrospective Logic

At the time, many of my choices raised eyebrows—or quiet questions. Why leave the orchestra world just as my profile was rising? Why consult after leading one of the largest arts portfolios in private philanthropy?

But none of these moves were accidents. They were recalibrations—toward people, toward values, toward the work that felt most alive at the time.

The drunken walk career doesn’t always make sense in the moment. It makes sense in retrospect. It rewards reflection over prediction.

Wisdom Through Wandering

Eventually, people stop hiring you for what you’ve done and start seeking you out for how you think. If you’ve walked many paths—with intention and humility—you bring more than experience. You bring perspective.

Those who’ve wandered tend to be more patient with complexity. More fluent in context. More attuned to contradiction. They know how to pivot, how to co-create, how to listen. They understand that leadership is less about control and more about capacity—the capacity to hold difference, tension, and uncertainty without collapsing.

That is wisdom. And it doesn’t come from staying on the rails.

Conclusion: Let the Walk Be Worth It

To be clear: the drunken walk is not about chaos or aimlessness. It’s about surrendering the fantasy of control in favor of authentic direction. It’s about trading prestige for purpose, certainty for curiosity.

If your career doesn’t look like a ladder, good. Maybe it’s conceptual art. Maybe it’s a poem. Maybe it’s a life.

Some people follow a plan. I followed questions. I followed people I trusted. I followed discomfort. And eventually, I followed myself.

# # #

July 28, 2025

What If Your Board Is the Problem?

Understanding How Board Dynamics Differ—and Why One Model Can’t Serve Us All

By Emil J. Kang

Reckoning with the Quiet Power That Shapes—and Sometimes Stalls—Institutional Change

A few weeks ago, I sat across from the executive director of a respected cultural institution. She looked exhausted—not from the daily grind alone, but from carrying something heavier: the unspoken weight of institutional inertia.

“We’ve tried everything,” she told me. “Strategic planning, community partnerships, new programs, new donors, consultants. We’ve reorganized staff roles. But still—nothing feels like it’s truly changing.”

Then came the hesitation. And the truth.

“I think the problem might be the board.”

She’s not the first leader who’s said this to me. And she won’t be the last.

In the nonprofit and cultural sectors, we speak openly about many structural challenges: underinvestment in leadership, unsustainable expectations of staff, public distrust, racial and economic inequity. But we rarely scrutinize one of the most powerful structures in the building:

The board.

The Most Unexamined Force in Institutional Life

Boards wield immense, often invisible influence. They hire and fire executive leadership. They approve or stall new strategies. They set priorities, define risk, and shape public positioning. And yet, board culture remains largely undiscussed—even sacrosanct.

In an industry that demands change from everyone else—artists, staff, audiences—boards often remain the least examined, least diverse, and most static structure of all.

It’s time to name the possibility that many are too cautious to say aloud:

What if your board is not just underperforming—but actively standing in the way of your mission?

Two Governance Realities

To tackle the problem, we must acknowledge that not all boards function the same way. Governance reform fails when it assumes a one-size-fits-all model, ignoring the deep contextual differences between types of institutions.

Legacy White Institutions

Museums, orchestras, foundations, and universities—often rooted in elite civic or philanthropic traditions—typically have boards that:

• Recruit from homogenous, affluent networks

• See themselves as stewards of reputation, tradition, and endowment

• Prioritize control over collaboration

• Expect innovation from staff, but preservation in the boardroom

• Struggle with equity work when it threatens legacy or comfort

In these settings, the board is often the most powerful and least accountable entity in the institution.

Community-Based Organizations (CBOs)

CBOs emerge from different soil. Often born of grassroots efforts, mutual aid, or cultural resistance, their boards may:

• Include those with deep ties to the community or movement

• Be volunteer-run and under-resourced

• Struggle with governance capacity or founder entrenchment

• Share strong personal relationships with staff and constituents

• Operate from relational trust more than formal policy

In these spaces, the challenge isn’t resisting change—it’s sustaining leadership and structure without being co-opted.

Each presents different governance dynamics—and each requires different strategies.

The Myth of the Universal Board

Many reform efforts still assume one dominant model of governance: the “high-performing” board composed of well-connected professionals who donate generously and offer expertise.

But what if you serve a community where the “wealthy gentry” don’t exist? What if your organization is rooted in cultural resilience, not capital accumulation? What if proximity to the work is more important than proximity to money?

This is not a shortcoming. It’s an opportunity.

We don’t need to replicate elite governance models. We need to reimagine power-sharing from the ground up.

Power Beyond Capital

Communities have always had forms of capital that are ignored in traditional boardrooms:

• Moral authority from elders, educators, faith leaders

• Cultural fluency from artists, language keepers, and tradition bearers

• Organizing skill from mutual aid, tenant unions, and movement leaders

• Operational wisdom from small business owners and service workers

• Social trust earned through proximity and accountability

A board built from these forms of leadership may not be wealthy in dollars—but it is rich in vision, legitimacy, and relevance.

What We Can Do (Depending on Who We Are)

For Legacy Institutions:

• Decenter wealth as the default qualification. Open seats to cultural workers, activists, artists, and organizers.

• Build governance structures accountable to community, not just donors.

• Compensate board members for their time, especially those historically excluded from wealth.

• Educate boards on institutional history, systemic inequity, and the difference between control and accountability.

• Embrace discomfort as a condition for transformation.

For Community-Based Organizations:

• Define governance around your mission, not around compliance alone.

• Create advisory or co-governance councils rooted in lived experience.

• Clarify roles while honoring relational culture.

• Invest in board support: facilitation, peer learning, and community-rooted leadership development.

• Reject the pressure to emulate the elite—design from your values instead.

Emerging Models to Consider

• Governance Councils: Bodies made up of staff, community members, and artists with real decision-making authority.

• Distributed Boards: Strategic, financial, and program advisory groups that share power horizontally.

• Community-Nominated Panels: Rotating collectives drawn from stakeholders and compensated for their insight.

• Staff-Board Hybrids: Models where those doing the work have a seat at the table—not as guests, but as peers.

• Mission-Led Models: Governance that centers proximity, purpose, and accountability to people—not just to funders or law firms.

The Cost of Doing Nothing

Without real change, the outcomes are predictable:

• Leadership burnout, especially for BIPOC and first-generation leaders

• Talent loss due to values misalignment

• Community distrust

• Performative equity

• Strategic paralysis masked as stability

And beneath all of that: the erosion of public purpose in favor of private comfort.

A Closing Invitation

Governance is not a technical problem—it’s a moral one.
Boards are not neutral—they are expressions of what an institution values, who it trusts, and what it’s willing to change.

If your organization feels stuck, ask the deeper question:

Who really holds power here? And what would it look like to share it?

We can’t build equitable institutions using inequitable models of leadership.
We can’t fight exclusion while gatekeeping our own governance.
We can’t expect transformation if the board is unwilling to transform.

So ask it clearly, and ask it now:

What if your board is the problem? And what new future might be possible if you started the work of reimagining there?

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July 23, 2025

Beyond the Product: Valuing the Artist’s Humanity

By Emil J. Kang

Much of the conversation in the arts world focuses on institutions: how nonprofits can be more equitable, more sustainable, more responsive. But we also need to widen the frame. Institutions don’t make culture—artists do. And if we’re serious about equity and sustainability, we must extend that same concern to the individuals at the heart of our field. That means not just analyzing systems, but honoring the lives of the people inside them.

In a culture obsessed with the new—new works, new premieres, new names—it’s all too easy to reduce artists to the value of their most recent output. Applause is abundant at opening nights. Critics rush to offer hot takes. Funders clamor for "innovation." But in our eagerness to consume what artists produce, we often overlook something essential: their humanity.

Artists are not vending machines of brilliance. They are people—complex, evolving, sometimes uncertain, often under pressure. The process of making art is not linear. It demands solitude, experimentation, failure, and recovery. And yet the systems we build around artists rarely account for this. Instead, they incentivize constant production and public performance, rewarding output over insight, deliverables over depth.

Too often, we fail to see artists in the full dimension of their lives—as caregivers, community organizers, neighbors, cultural stewards. Many artists hold multiple roles that sustain not just themselves, but the people around them. They raise children, care for elders, teach, show up for their communities. Their creativity is not just expressed in their work, but in how they contribute to the ecosystems they inhabit.

What if, instead of asking “What are you working on next?” we asked, “How are you holding up?” What if residencies were structured not just to extract a new piece, but to restore the artist? What if we viewed the artist’s being as just as vital as their doing?

This is not an argument against ambition or excellence. It’s a reminder that meaningful work often comes from well-being, from community, from the courage to pause. When we treat artists as whole people—with inner lives, histories, and needs—we make space for the kind of work that lasts. Work that isn’t driven by fear of irrelevance but by a deep engagement with the world.

Valuing an artist’s humanity means respecting their time and their rhythms. It means honoring their commitments beyond the stage or studio. It means not asking them to perform their identity for our comfort. It means seeing them not as a means to an institutional end, but as co-creators of culture, worthy of dignity whether or not they’re currently “producing.”

We cannot advocate for equity in the arts while commodifying the very people who animate it. We must build systems that don’t just present artists—but protect them. Not just spotlight their output—but sustain their lives.

Let’s shift the question from what’s next? to what’s needed?

That’s where true support—and true transformation—begins.

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July 21, 2025

In Search of the Unicorn: Rethinking How We Recruit Board Members

By Emil J. Kang

Every nonprofit says they want a “diverse, engaged, and strategic” board. But what they usually mean is: someone wealthy, available, and agreeable.

Too often, board recruitment feels like a desperate game of compromise. We need someone with access, but not too opinionated. Someone with influence, but no ego. Someone with money, but no strings. In short: a unicorn. And when that unicorn never arrives, we settle. We tap our friends. We recycle names. We let our networks decide our future.

But here's the real danger: the people who most need to be on our boards are rarely in the rooms where board recruitment happens.

The process itself is broken. It’s informal, opaque, and often driven more by affinity than by alignment. Many boards still rely on “who do we know?” instead of “what do we need?” There’s rarely a matrix, rarely a skills gap analysis, rarely a serious conversation about governance as leadership — not oversight, not fundraising, but real generative thought partnership.

And when we ask current board members to name their successors, we double down on the problem. We reproduce the same class, race, and professional backgrounds, again and again. The board becomes an inner circle — self-selected, self-reinforcing, self-satisfied. Even when well-meaning, this approach assumes that proximity equals potential, and that social capital is the only kind that matters. It’s a system designed not to change.

We ask potential board members for their bios, but not their values. We invite them to galas before we invite them to listen. And when they don’t “fit,” we blame culture clash — when really, the culture hasn’t changed in decades.

Too many organizations recruit for comfort, not transformation.

And yet: the board holds enormous power. They shape who gets hired. What gets funded. What risks are taken. Who is heard. Who is protected. If we want our organizations to evolve, our boards have to evolve first.

So how do we widen the circle?

We start by changing the prompt. Instead of asking, “Who do we know?” we ask, “Who should we know?” We make board recruitment a public process — not a private handoff. We post openings. We partner with community leaders, not just consultants. We host listening sessions before we extend invitations. We name the values and lived experiences we seek, and we name the power we’re willing to share.

We also prepare the board to receive new members differently — not as guests, but as co-authors. We orient not just to bylaws and budgets, but to culture and history. We assign mentors. We design onramps. And we commit, in writing, to changing how decisions get made.

This means rethinking not just who we bring in, but how. It means moving beyond the idea that good board members are simply generous donors. It means looking for lived experience, community ties, operational insight, even creative intuition — not just business credentials. It means welcoming people who might ask hard questions, not just clap politely.

It also means we must stop recruiting for “representation” while refusing to change our norms. You cannot diversify a room without redistributing power inside it.

The strongest boards I’ve seen aren’t the ones with the most prestige — they’re the ones that understand their role as stewards, not saviors. Partners, not patrons.

So what if we stopped looking for unicorns?

What if we built boards like we build ensembles — with chemistry, rigor, friction, trust, and above all, purpose?

That wouldn’t just change who leads our organizations.

It would change what our organizations are capable of becoming.

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July 18, 2025

Legacy Is Not a Succession Plan

Why the Hardest Part of Leadership Is Letting Go

By Emil J. Kang

We’ve all seen it: the beloved founder who stays too long. The board paralyzed by nostalgia. The institution caught in limbo—grateful for its past, but unable to imagine a future without it.

Succession planning is one of the most critical and neglected responsibilities in arts leadership. Especially when the leader being succeeded is also the founder, the architect, the visionary.

But let’s be clear: longevity is not a strategy. And legacy is not a plan.

In too many organizations, legacy is treated as something to preserve rather than something to redistribute. Successors are chosen to protect the institution’s image, not to evolve its identity. Boards prioritize continuity over relevance. And the departing leader is revered, while the incoming one is measured against an impossible standard: Be like them—but also fix what they left behind.

This is a trap—for the organization, the successor, and the field.

Founders often say they want to “leave it better than they found it.” But what they rarely say—what boards rarely ask—is: Better for whom? And who gets to decide what’s next?

Too often, boards treat succession like a ceremonial handoff. But succession is not ceremonial—it is structural. And that makes it the board’s responsibility.

When boards avoid the hard questions—when they refuse to interrogate whether the founder's values still serve the mission—they become complicit in stagnation. When they appoint a successor without redistributing authority, restructuring the organization, or preparing staff and stakeholders for change, they set that leader up to fail.

Worse, some boards see succession as a threat. They retain decision-making power but offload blame. They frame new leadership as "evolution," while quietly demanding replication. And they abandon their own accountability, using legacy as a shield.

Let’s be clear: boards must lead the succession conversation. Not as gatekeepers, but as stewards of future possibility.

That means:

• Defining leadership not by familiarity, but by vision.

• Structuring the transition to empower—not constrain—the next leader.

• Letting go of expectations that reinforce comfort over relevance.

• And honoring legacy not by preserving it, but by releasing its grip.

Because the greatest legacy a founder can leave is not their name on the building, but a structure that can evolve without them, a board that can confront its own fears, and a future that doesn’t look like the past—and doesn’t need to.

Legacy is not what you leave behind. Legacy is what you make possible when you step aside—and when the board lets you.

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July 13, 2025

Evolving the Nonprofit

By Emil J. Kang

Leadership transitions in the arts are often framed as moments of renewal. A new person arrives, and with them, the suggestion of change. But too often, we focus on who is stepping in, without asking what they are stepping into—or whether the structure itself is still serving its purpose.

The nonprofit model—especially in the cultural sector—was built for a different era. It was constructed around philanthropy-as-patronage, governance by proximity, and the idea that stability equals success. For decades, these assumptions went unquestioned. But the world has changed. And our institutions, in many cases, have not.

Even the boldest leaders can only work within the constraints of the system they inherit. If that system is designed to protect the status quo, then no appointment—no matter how visionary—can fully deliver transformation. And yet, we continue to install leaders into legacy models as though the job is simply to maintain and polish, not to reimagine.

So instead of asking who leads next, maybe we should ask:
How do we evolve the nonprofit?

What if the next generation of cultural institutions weren’t organized around hierarchy, legacy, and inherited privilege—but around service, accountability, and civic impact?

What if we imagined structures that prioritized:

• Shared power over elite proximity

• Transparency over tradition

• Public relevance over private recognition

• Distributed leadership over singular authority

What if boards were designed to represent communities, not just endowments?
What if artistic programming responded to public need, not donor demand?
What if governance wasn’t the quietest room in the building, but the most generative?

These are not rhetorical questions. They are urgent ones.

Because every time we applaud a new appointment without examining the framework that person is stepping into, we risk reinforcing a system that no longer serves the moment.

I’m not interested in symbolic leadership. I’m interested in structural evolution.

In the coming weeks, I’ll be writing more about this—how we got here, what needs to change, and where bold institutional imagination might take us. One upcoming essay is called Culture Is Civic Infrastructure—a rethinking of the nonprofit’s role not as an elite outpost, but as a public good.

The future of our institutions depends on the questions we’re willing to ask now—not just about people, but about power. Not just about succession, but about design.

And if you’re asking the same questions—or building something new—I hope we’re in conversation.

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July 10, 2025

Leadership vs. Stewardship: What the Arts Need Now

by Emil J. Kang

In the American cultural sector, we confuse management with vision. We reward stability over courage. We elevate stewards and call them leaders.

I write this not as a provocation for its own sake, but as a call to rethink how we define—and more importantly, recognize—leadership in the arts.

For too long, our major institutions have selected executives who preserve inherited structures rather than reimagine them. They maintain budgets, sustain relationships, and deliver season brochures on time. These are not insignificant tasks—but they are not, in themselves, leadership. They are stewardship.

Leadership, by contrast, is imaginative. It is willing to risk comfort for truth. It invites disruption when the systems in place no longer serve the people they claim to represent. It asks deeper questions: Whose stories are being told? Whose communities are being served? Whose future are we building?

The problem isn’t just individual. It’s systemic. We have built a field in which boards hire familiarity. Search firms propose only the known quantities. Donors reward the calm hand, not the bold voice. And so, we recycle the same names, celebrate the same résumés, and wonder why the public grows more distant from our institutions.

We live in a time of cultural reckoning—across race, economy, democracy, and history. And yet, much of our leadership continues to operate as if we are managing orchestras in 1995, museums in 1985, or foundations in 1975. We perform inclusion, but fund the same ideas. We announce equity, but protect legacy. We say we want change, but reward continuity.

I’ve spent the last 30 years working across philanthropy, higher education, performing arts institutions, and government. I’ve witnessed firsthand how impact is often sidelined in favor of optics. I’ve watched leaders who challenged the status quo be passed over for those who promised “stability.” And I’ve seen the slow erosion of public trust in cultural institutions that no longer speak to the urgency of people’s lives.

This is not cynicism. It’s clarity.

The next chapter of the arts will not be written by those who simply inherit buildings. It will be authored by those who are brave enough to tear down walls—metaphorical and literal—and build anew. The leaders we need now will not be afraid of ambiguity, discomfort, or dissent. They will embrace them as part of the creative process of institutional reinvention.

We must recognize and reward these leaders. We must fund them. Appoint them. Trust them. Because without them, the arts will continue to drift—safe, familiar, and increasingly irrelevant.

It’s time to stop mistaking stewardship for leadership.

The future demands more.

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What deserves provocation?

The most urgent questions in arts leadership are certainly not only mine to name. If you’ve been wrestling with a tension in the field - a stubborn contradiction, a structural hypocrisy, a silent truth - I want to hear it. I may feature your prompt (anonymously or credited) in a future provocation.

Please share a sentence, a scenario, or even a few words that deserves interrogation. Thank you!