Amen

Michael Kaiser, of the Kennedy Center, on diversity:

"I have been spending a great deal of time thinking about the issue of diversity in the arts, specifically, the drive to diversify the programming and constituents of all arts organizations.

The more I consider this thorny issue, the less I am convinced that the arts world has worked hard enough to dissect the true costs, benefits and implications of recent diversity efforts.

(snip)

Having spent a great deal of my career working with arts organizations of color, I am as committed as anyone to the diversity of our arts ecology. I do not believe that we can have a truly great artistic community if all segments of our society are not represented well.

But I do not think I believe anymore in forcing Eurocentric arts organizations to do diverse works or to put one minority on a board." (emphasis added)

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If I ever see Kaiser I'm going to kiss him just for saying that . . . and I don't care how he feels about said kiss . . . he deserves it.

I touched on this in my "Gravity" post but Kaiser says it better then I ever could.

Part of embracing diversity is accepting people's choice not to be diverse.

Many people, myself included, believe that for the arts to thrive now you should probably build an organization that attracts a wide range of people.

But if someone doesn't want to do that, for whatever reason, we have to be mature enough as an industry to go "that's ok."

Few things are more painful then watching an organization try to jam an African-American or Latina artist into their lineup in a transparent attempt to be diverse.

It's bad for them, bad for the artist and insulting to audiences of all colors.

They shouldn't have to engage in such measures if they don't want to.

Now let me be clear, I think refusing to embrace the diverse and interesting world we live in is just dumb.

But if they do, it's their choice and we should respect that.

Embrace the ones that want to reflect the world.  Let the other ones work things out on their own.

 

 

 

Comments

[isaac]

Adam,

This is an interesting post and it gets right at the heart of some things I feel deeply conflicted about, so I hope to have something of my own to say responding to this sometime soon.

In the meantime... this, I think, is the question I have:
What are we do with the fact that Eurocentric arts organizations frequently have already gobbled up all of the funding and other resources in their areas? This is particularly true in theatre, and it's super-duper true in regional areas (not really chicago here but go with me on this one) that are centered around one large theater started in the 60's or 70's.

It seems to me that if your goal is to get diverse work out there, I could understand being wary of Kaiser's POV because in the real world where there's a funding climate that overly privileges people who already get grants and are already established, the end result will mean *less* not *more* non-eurocentric work.

that's my fear, anyway.

the other side of me feels basically in agreement with you and Kaiser and pretty much feels the same way about this that I did in my post about young people. if you want black people to come to your theater, put black people on stage and do plays written by black people not in february. if you don't want to do that, fine, don't do it. you're killing yourself over the long term, but it's your grave to dig etc. and so forth..

[Tony Adams]

Yeah, I'd agree with both you and Isaac. I'm actually okay with smaller companies doing euro-centric work. (Not so okay with 250 eurocentric companies to 10 that represent what our city actually looks like, but that's a different argument, I suppose.) I think Tuta is just as important to the Chicago landscape as Teatro Luna is.

However, the one big old asterisk is with the funding climate. If a LORT house is getting millions of dollars over the years to represent their community, they damn well better do that.

But we're in a weird time in our field where a lot of people don't think it is okay for institutions to not be diverse in terms of race or culture, but perfectly okay to ignore women.