This is the first of two columns that will examine the ideas of “cultural triage.”
These are all things Loevner was thinking about before last March. “The impetus for this has been around for longer than the pandemic,” he says. “Over the last few years, I’ve been watching theater companies sort of explode or implode and leave the scene in really awful ways—deeply in debt or under, you know, significant scandal of some kind. It’s always upset me that the moment of implosion is what people remember about it.” He adds, “Back before the pandemic, I had thought about this. But there was limited interest in talking about organizations shutting down at that point, and then the pandemic hit, and it really became clear that we were going to see a pretty significant shift in the cultural ecology.”
The first part of the paper focuses on what they’re calling “mutual transfusion,” which is a fancy way of saying “merger.” It seems like a good idea for arts groups (especially those with similar missions or audience bases) to think about combining their resources into one entity in order to survive, but “Cultural Triage” identifies a couple of things standing in the way: “1) what we’re calling the Fallacy of Singularity, an entrenched notion that each performing arts organization, despite its many evident similarities to many other such organizations, is somehow inherently unique, and 2) artistic and/or intellectual pride.”
“Might it not be worth developing a set of strategies and best practices to help organizations recognize when they have approached the end of their operational lives?” Loevner and Belknap ask. “Might it not be helpful and necessary to begin reframing the proposition of an organization’s dissolution from its current one of exhaustion and defeat, to one that emphasizes the orderly settling of a company’s affairs, discharging its outstanding obligations, creating a robust archive of its artistic output, and affording its artists, staff, and supporters the chance to say goodbye in an unhurried fashion?”
