I decided to address Adam’s and Michael’s critiques together since there is some degree of overlap. Below, I’ll distill each man’s arguments into bullet-point form and number them so they can be addressed more clearly.

Adam thinks that I am overstating my case and “foster[ing] false hope in a bogus alternative.” He claims:

• My example of the Costner memorabilia auction is undermined because the dotty old rich guy does not realize what he’s buying, and thus does not have perfect information. (1)
• The goods cited in the examples given are “luxury goods” (goods in limited supply that have high demand), and thus do not typify markets in general (though Adam allows that the normal rules of supply and demand do not apply to luxury goods). (2)
• I’m missing the point of Baumol and Bowen’s argument; the real point is that producers should have the option of claiming the full value generated by their product, and they do not have the option to do so if prices are regulated. (3)
• Anyway, instituting a lottery system for ticket distribution just randomizes wealth, it doesn’t equalize it. (4)

Michael says that I’m too mean to economists and that most of them do have a heart. He writes:

• Libertarians’ arguments don’t deserve to be taken seriously, so why am I even bothering? (5)
• He doesn’t know “serious” non-libertarian economists who disagree with a vision of good policy that includes (among other things) a progressive income tax, publicly-provided health care and dental services, and public pre-school, along with most other things that the U.S. government currently provides. (6)
• Most goods in a marketplace are run-of-the-mill products that are regulated by supply and demand, and that’s okay; the things I’ve mentioned are exceptions. (2)
• “Efficiency” is a separate concept from “justice” in economics. (7)
• Instituting a lottery system for ticket distribution just randomizes wealth, it doesn’t equalize it. (4)

OK, let’s see, taking these in order from least salient to most:

First, the appropriateness of using lotteries to distribute expensive tickets to arts events (arguments #3 and 4). Adam & M-Rush’s point that lottery systems randomize wealth rather than equalize it is fair enough – I didn’t necessarily mean to hold lotteries up as the be-all and end-all, but only mentioned them since Baumol & Bowen specifically seemed to think their solution (let the free market decide) was fairer than the lottery. To Adam’s point about commercial operators having the opportunity to claim their own value, I am more sympathetic, though even in the case of some commercial entities the question may not be as easy as all that (e.g., the Red Sox employ a lottery system for distributing hot-ticket items like Yankees games; one might argue that this would be justified as an enforced policy because baseball enjoys an antitrust exemption from the government which allows the Red Sox to have the grip on Bostonians’ identity that they do). And in an environment where nonprofit arts administrators across the country are tearing their hair out trying to understand how to reach new, younger, and more diverse audiences, a lottery system is perhaps a fairer way to distribute scarce resources than relying on market forces to distribute them according to society’s existing unfairnesses.

But I don’t want to let the lottery issue distract from what I see as the bigger fish. The real question here is how well what Adam calls the price =value equation (aka neoclassical pricing theory) describes the real world and how much it influences mainstream economic thought. So let’s begin.

Regarding argument #1, I thought about the issue of perfect information, but I could just as easily have made it a situation where he was buying the memorabilia as a gift for his wife, who divorced him a year later and threw out everything he had ever given to her; or if that’s not good enough, just that it pleased him in the moment to own this item and that he bought it for no real reason other than that he could. Either way, the point still stands, if not quite as dramatically. But this is supposed to be an extreme case for purposes of illustration. The price = value equation is challenged in much subtler ways all the time.

Which brings us to #2: I’m not convinced that these “luxury goods,” and the attendant supply-and-demand weirdnesses that go along with them, are such edge cases after all. Adam goes so far as to say, “while Price = Value in the aggregate, the formula doesn’t necessarily hold for any individual purchaser.” Huh? If the formula doesn’t hold for any individual purchaser, why would we assume that it holds in the aggregate? I’m open to the possibility that it could, if confronted with irrefutable empirical evidence, but I have a hard time believing a priori that the disconnect between utility and willingness-to-pay for individual market players doesn’t bias and shape the market in specific, systematic ways. And if anything, this seems like it would be especially true in the arts. After all, the original discussion that led to all this was about whether unpaid internships were a threat to diversity in the arts because low-income individuals could not afford to take them (and thus were at risk to remove themselves from contention at the front end for an important career stepping-stone towards more potential income later on). One might think of this “willingness-to-accept” problem as a kind of corollary to the “willingness-to-pay” issue that I pointed out with my post. We also looked recently at the possibility of pernicious effects on the socioeconomic diversity of artists that compete for recognition through competitions if entry fees were raised to nontrivial prices. And it doesn’t end there, certainly. Think about what kinds of investments are needed or helpful to jumpstart an artistic career: training, documentation (e.g., recording), production values, marketing, travel, living expenses in expensive cities, time not spent earning income. If anything, in many of these situations willingness-to-pay may be inversely correlated with utility/personal value, not one and the same–not even close.

Do economists understand this? Here’s where Michael Rushton and I just don’t see eye-to-eye (arguments #5, 6, and 7). I applaud his list of policy recommendations–clearly, he is living proof that not all economists are heartless bastards. And surely there are others – Paul Krugman, for one, and the fact that the latter won the Nobel Prize speaks volumes. Perhaps the kinds of economists I want to see are more in evidence in the international community. But here in the US, I wish I could believe they were as mainstream as he says. I mean, really? No serious economists would dispute that we need government-provided universal health care and a no-fucking-around progressive income tax? Has Michael Rushton not heard of the Chicago School? Are these people not mainstream? Have they not had a tremendous formative impact on public policy in this country over the past 30 years? The foundation of their philosophy is the very libertarian principles that Michael is so quick to reject as not being worthy of debate. Yet the shadow they cast over the national discussion of economics is tremendous.

Interestingly, my two contenders reserve their strongest criticism for things I didn’t even say.

Adam, for example, concludes:

Ultimately my concern with your line of reasoning here is that I can’t see how it leads to anything but trouble. Markets are deeply imperfect, but they’re the best tool we have. To the extent that they result in undesirable outcomes, then we should seek to tweak their functioning, not abolish them in favor of some kind of centralized arbiter of happiness.

OK, so I never suggested that we abolish markets. That would be pretty nonsensical of me–after all, markets are there whether we like it or not; they happen. I think of marketplaces like biological ecosystems. Sometimes, depending on what’s going on inside of them, they work extraordinarily well, with everything going according to Nature’s plan in a sustainable, virtuous cycle. Other times, though, again depending on what’s going on a the micro level, they get out of balance; portions flourish while others flounder, leading to displacement or the loss of biodiversity or even wholesale collapse. To fix the imbalance, one must help the system to function again. Whether we call it a market or not doesn’t really matter; it is what it is.

Meanwhile, Michael thinks that I want to achieve utopia through micro-manipulation of the prices of everyday goods.

My problem with IDM is that he wants to achieve income equality through a lottery of opera tickets, where poor winners could keep them or sell them, and the rich could still obtain them. But that’s…well, goofy. This just randomizes wealth, handing out valuable tickets to a lucky few and letting them trade them. I have a better idea…

Of course a lottery of tickets isn’t going to achieve income equality. At best these measures are a small band-aid on a much larger problem, and I’m planning to address that problem in a future post. In the meantime, though, a band-aid is better than salt, is it not?

If anything, in the last two years, my orientation towards markets has become more positive, not less; I now believe that markets are one of the most efficient and effective ways of advancing the social good, when they work. So I think Adam, Michael, and I are actually in quite similar places here after all, broadly speaking. It’s just that I think of markets as systems that occasionally bear a resemblance to the idealized marketplace seen in economics textbooks, but much more often don’t.

*

Here’s the point in all of this.

I have all the respect for Adam in the world (love ya too, boss!), but I remain convinced (or at any rate, I strongly suspect) that it’s the neoclassical model that’s the edge case, not luxury goods. How common is it, really, for people to have full and relevant information on what they’re getting? How common is it that their preferences are really rational? Just because your mind works that way doesn’t mean most people’s do. Likewise, I think Michael Rushton is a smart, smart cookie, but his campaign to limit the discussion to (what seems to me) a relatively narrow group of middle-of-the-road, professional academic economists does a disservice by ignoring the vastly disproportionate impact that the free-market purists have on the national conversation. Dude, if you want to call yourself an economist and be proud of it, you need to take some responsibility for the damage your crazy-ass colleagues are doing to the credibility of your profession.

Rushton thinks it’s unfair that I implied that William Baumol and William Bowen don’t care about poor people, when clearly they do. I agree that it’s an unfair characterization. But I need to explain something about that quote in my last post. For those who have not had the opportunity to read Performing Arts: The Economic Dilemma, the book is through most of its pages a model of “telling it like it is” understatement: the authors clearly identify the limits of their knowledge and analysis, every assertion is thoroughly documented, a host of alternative explanations are examined at every turn, and issues of class, race, and gender are given fairly enlightened treatment by 1966 standards. In short, they approach the issues at hand exactly in the way I would ask.

The outburst I quoted on page 286 is not an offhand remark taken out of context; it is part of an impassioned five-page rant that is completely at odds with the tone seen in the rest of the book. The authors offer no empirical evidence for their claims in this section, only a few quotes from historians and their own very obvious frustration (some of it perhaps justified) at overzealous regulation of ticket prices. Clearly, one if not both of the authors felt very strongly about this issue, strongly enough to break with decorum and tone to take a stand. That they did it while disparaging the notion of “public virtue” and ignoring the very obvious benefits to access for lower-income people (remember, it’s not like these were considered and dismissed, they weren’t even discussed) from one of the suggested solutions, a lottery system, is telling to me. It’s like even Baumol and Bowen suffered from a temporary bout with Econ 101 disease.

*

I’ve used the words “sickness” and “disease” before to describe what I feel is wrong with the economics profession. I do not use these terms lightly. I use them because, though I am ready to believe that the field has no shortage of thoughtful, level-headed, and compassionate people working diligently within it, I truly believe that as a field itself its foundations are rotten at the core. The neoclassical pricing model is not just some important but outdated anachronism in the history of intellectual thought, like Freud’s Oedipal complex or Marx’s proletariat. It is the active basis of the majority of economists’ working lives. It is the foundation of all economists’, and a lot of non-economists’, first instruction in the field. This conversation, again, was prompted by a debate about the minimum wage. If Wikipedia is to be believed, the empirical evidence that a minimum wage is even marginally detrimental to employment totals is inconclusive at best. Yet according to the same source, nearly all economics textbooks have a nice, neat graph that explains exactly why a minimum wage is detrimental to employment totals. It generally looks something like this:

That graph is in my textbook, too, Pindyck and Rubinfeld 5th Edition, right on page 299. I believe that practices like this foster an anti-scientific a priori mindset in the economics profession that hamstrings progress. It empowers those with libertarian leanings to pollute and distract the conversation with theorems proving the supposed moral righteousness of their views, and forces even economists who stray from the neoclassical model to define themselves in opposition to it, to acknowledge its primacy in the face of competing evidence. Assuming for the moment that textbooks are a reflection of what a field thinks about itself, if the textbooks started from the premise of, “this is how markets might work in a laboratory, but we recognize that real life is much more complicated than that,” I would be satisfied. If the textbooks started out by asking questions rather than providing answers, I would be satisfied. If textbooks treated micro and macro as the same thing on different scales rather than two totally separate disciplines, I would be satisfied. If textbooks addressed the issue of externalities and public goods sooner than page 621 (which is where they first pop up in mine), I would be satisfied. If every graph in an economics textbook was taken from an empirical study with true causal implications rather than from a calculus problem set, I would be satisfied. But so long as these things remain the way they are, no, I will not be satisfied with the economics profession.

• Behavioral economics
• Economists Don’t Care About Poor People
• Value generators

• late-April update
• NEA Cultural Workforce Forum wrap
• Fictional Foundation Fun, part III

My around the horn post from this week included an item on the ethics of offering unpaid internships and a proposal under consideration across the pond to force arts organizations (and other employers, presumably) to pay interns the minimum wage if the engagement is longer than a month. This sparked a lively discussion, first on Michael Rushton’s Arts Admin blog, and subsequently on a site that’s new to me called Art and Avarice, written by young voice teacher and entrepreneur Milena Thomas.

The discussion quickly involved into a debate on basic economic principles, and I don’t know why, but such topics always get me riled up. I found myself debating with a pseudonymous libertarian purist, the worst kind of people to argue with because the moral nihilism underlying their ideology amounts to a cop-out from considering society’s best interests at all.

In the course of doing some research a few weeks ago I came across a devastating takedown of libertarian ideology in, of all places, The American Conservative. Called “Marxism of the Right” (there’s an attention-getter for you), Robert Locke’s article argues that libertarianism is seductive on the surface but riddled with internal contradictions. Here are some of my favorite quotes:

If Marxism is the delusion that one can run society purely on altruism and collectivism, then libertarianism is the mirror-image delusion that one can run it purely on selfishness and individualism. Society in fact requires both individualism and collectivism, both selfishness and altruism, to function. Like Marxism, libertarianism offers the fraudulent intellectual security of a complete a priori account of the political good without the effort of empirical investigation.

Empirically, most people don’t actually want absolute freedom, which is why democracies don’t elect libertarian governments. Irony of ironies, people don’t choose absolute freedom. But this refutes libertarianism by its own premise, as libertarianism defines the good as the freely chosen, yet people do not choose it. Paradoxically, people exercise their freedom not to be libertarians.

A major reason for this is that libertarianism has a naïve view of economics that seems to have stopped paying attention to the actual history of capitalism around 1880. There is not the space here to refute simplistic laissez faire, but note for now that the second-richest nation in the world, Japan, has one of the most regulated economies, while nations in which government has essentially lost control over economic life, like Russia, are hardly economic paradises. Legitimate criticism of over-regulation does not entail going to the opposite extreme.

This contempt for self-restraint is emblematic of a deeper problem: libertarianism has a lot to say about freedom but little about learning to handle it. Freedom without judgment is dangerous at best, useless at worst. Yet libertarianism is philosophically incapable of evolving a theory of how to use freedom well because of its root dogma that all free choices are equal, which it cannot abandon except at the cost of admitting that there are other goods than freedom.

Anyway, I thought this would be a good time to break out a post I’ve been meaning to write for a while. I’ve gone on at great length about my various problems with the neoclassical economic model (someday I’ll collect them all into one place), but one I haven’t touched upon much yet is the way that economists deal with income.

Consider two people who are participating in an auction for a rare piece of Kevin Costner memorabilia. One is a billionaire who happens to be staying at the hotel where the event is held. The other is a teenager who has spent her (life) savings on the plane ticket that allows her to be at this event in person. She has a shrine to Kevin Costner in her room at home, and this is the one item that will complete her collection. If she misses out on it, she’ll never have another chance. Not only has she scrounged up all of her own savings, but she’s spent a month fundraising pledges from her friends and family to help her buy this item. After exhausting every avenue she can possibly think of, she comes to the auction with $3,000 to spend.

The auction begins, and she and the rich guy are the only two bidders. The price quickly gets up to her maximum of three grand, and she keeps going. It’s up to $4,000, $5,000—at this point she has no idea what she’s even bidding with, all she knows is that she has to have this item. After a while, though, it becomes obvious that she’s not going to win this contest, and she runs from the room in tears and defeat. She commits suicide the next day out of grief.

The rich guy, meanwhile, a big NBA fan, is a little dotty and thought it was an article of Kevin Johnson memorabilia. He takes it home and means to resell it, but he forgets about it (again, he’s a dotty billionaire) and it sits in his closet until he dies, whereupon it’s found by his son who doesn’t realize what it is and tosses it in the trash.

According to the neoclassical economic model, the above is a just and efficient outcome of a fair transaction. The rich guy prevailed in the auction because his willingness-to-pay, as judged by the price he actually paid, was higher than the teenager’s willingness-to-pay (as judged by the price she didn’t pay). Thus, economists would say, the dotty old rich guy “valued” the item more.

This absurd result is made possible because the neoclassical method of modeling demand has no real way of distinguishing between “don’t want” and “can’t afford.” All it sees is that a transaction didn’t happen, and the default assumption on the part of economists is that it must be because the girl didn’t want it as much as the rich guy. The economist’s response to “but I couldn’t afford it!” is, essentially, to say that if she’d really wanted it, she would have proven it by finding some way, somehow, to afford it, even if that meant selling her body or stalking the dude for another 15 years until she could buy it back from him. That the rich guy faces no such great sacrifice to obtain the item is irrelevant to them.

“But Ian,” I hear you thinking, “no one could possibly be that stupid. Real economists know what income effects are and of course they wouldn’t make policy recommendations based on what, on its own, seems like a blunt instrument for estimating demand.”

Ah, if only it were that simple! Alas, economists (with the exception of behavioral economists) all too often have a nasty anti-scientific habit of prescribing policy based solely on their flawed and incomplete theories rather than empirical observation and testing. It’s ingrained into them from their earliest training. And despite Michael Rushton’s protests that “only a fringe” of economists fail to understand the criticisms that I hurl against the neoclassical model, we’re not talking about wackos—these are mainstream, well-regarded figures in the field. I give you William J. Baumol and William G. Bowen, authors of the seminal study on the economics of the performing arts:

Not that [ticket scalping] is necessarily undesirable – indeed, as we have maintained, it is part of the normal allocation process. Suppose only one seat is left for a particular performance and two persons wish to buy it – a visitor to New York who will have no other opportunity to see the show and a native New Yorker who can attend almost any performance. If the two contenders have roughly equal incomes, the visitor will offer to pay more because the seat at this particular performance is of greater value to hi; and we see nothing “immoral” in this act. Things go wrong only when someone tries to maintain a “just price” artificially, either through legislation or through self-denial on the part of the supplier in response to a questionable notion of public virtue. If those who supply the product are unwilling or unable to collect what would normally be its market price, invariably someone else will volunteer to take their place. The speculator who had nothing to do with the production will then reap the rewards which would otherwise have gone to those who contributed their labor and resources to the performance.

Nice trick there, guys, to cherry-pick the one extremely rare situation in which your logic actually works. In practice, of course, the two individuals’ incomes or asset levels will almost never be equal, and they could just as well be as divergent as our Kevin Costner-obsessed teenager and dotty old rich guy above. If the authors had stopped there, of course, that would have been fine—but they go on to disparage the “questionable notion of public virtue” that benefits “speculators” rather than “those who contributed their labor and resources to the performance,” completely ignoring the fact that some of those “speculators” might be people who actually really want to see the show who otherwise would not be able to. And sure, there would be some reselling on the secondary market, but if, say, legislation put in place a lottery system, that would arguably result in a more just sorting of tickets – because the lower-income people who wanted the tickets would keep them, while higher-income people who wanted tickets would still be able to obtain them. If the tickets are all uniformly at a high price, you would have some higher-income people with tickets who don’t actually want them as much as some lower-income people who don’t have a chance to access them.

Or take Tyler Cowen, a tenured professor and author of a fantastically popular economics blog:

One way of measuring the value of health insurance is by its market price and by that standard many of the current uninsured just don’t value health insurance very much.  That’s why they don’t buy it.

Riiiight, because the cost of health insurance strains people’s family finances beyond what is feasible, that means they don’t value health insurance at all. Having been uninsured for extended periods twice in my life (most recently just this past fall), I can serve as my own counterexample on this one – I certainly would have bought myself insurance had I the money.

Cowen goes on to qualify his statements in a way that makes it clear he is open to other interpretations. But that’s not good enough. To me, the notion that “the value of a poor man’s life is not measured by his money” is even a question up for debate is the ultimate sign of economics’ sickness. That Cowen has to lead off with the neoclassical interpretation almost apologetically before presenting alternative views shows how much weight that framework, with all its flaws, still carries with his readers.

We’ve learned this week that our aversion to economic inequality is not just a philosophical abstraction; it may in fact be hardwired into our brains. Human beings have a need for moral fairness and just desserts as part of our biological makeup, it seems, just like sex and food. But it’s no surprise that our economic models don’t take this into account; after all, it seems the people we put in charge of telling us how the world works are the rare people who don’t share this characteristic. In short, it’s true: economists really don’t care about poor people. It’s time we had a framework for understanding our actions that speaks for the rest of us.

• Economicsitis: A Response
• More on income-sensitive tickets
• Behavioral economics

I still can’t figure out if Createquity has four syllables or five.

Indeed it has five syllables: cree-ay-TEH-qui-tee. And in case anyone’s wondering, there’s no glottal before “equity,” I just lean right into the “t” before it.

Also, not that I really need to remind you if you’re reading this, but the blog is not called “Createequity” or “Creatiquity,” both of which I’ve seen more than once around the web. Furthermore, my name is not “David Ian Moss,” though that may well be catchier than my actual name.

I hope this was helpful. Carry on!

• Some food for thought
• Knowledge, part II

• Creative Providence
• AFTA Convention Wrap Day 2
• Live from GIA: Day II – Arts, Culture, and Community Economic Development

It seems that in order to enter the competition, composers have to pay a fee of $50 per work considered. There is a longstanding anathema towards competition entry fees in composer circles, however, and a post on Sequenza21 drawing attention to the situation has drawn a firestorm of over 100 comments.

It’s bad enough, according to composers, that there’s an entry fee charged at all. When I worked at the American Music Center, there was standard language in our monthly newsletter listing competition opportunities that cast a stern frowny-face on those that charged entry fees. The ones that did were actually relegated to their own section, after the entry-fee-free listings, and preceded by a clear statement that AMC did not endorse the practice. Several other composer service organizations take more or less the same stance. What’s really astonishing about this competition, however, is the size of the fee in combination with the financial reward provided to the winner. Composers are asked to pay $50 for each work submitted (up to two submissions allowed); yet the single prize awarded consists of $1000 cash, a day of rehearsal time with eighth blackbird, a single performance and promotional recording, and $500 for travel, totaling on the order of $2000 in direct expenses associated with this competition. It doesn’t take a math genius to realize that this competition may well pay for itself or even make a tidy profit, a huge no-no from the perspective of composers. I have heard of calls for scores with no prize money at all attracting upwards of 300 submissions; it’s possible that the high entry fee will counteract the effects of the award and the much higher profile of eighth blackbird, but even half that figure would yield 8bb’s members several grand for themselves on top of what they spend on the competition.

In one sense, it’s odd for composers to be angry about paying fees, even at $50 a pop, to have their work considered. The culture of not paying entry fees for composer competitions is, if anything, unusual even for the nonprofit sector; composers’ cousins in music, instrumentalists, have competitions of their own and almost always have to pay high entry fees to enter (as several commenters in the Sequenza21 thread were quick to point out). Fees for consideration are common in workshops, summer programs, etc., not to mention of course the granddaddy of them all, college and graduate school applications. The fact is, sifting through hundreds of applications, work samples, and other materials and giving them thoughtful consideration takes time and has real costs, especially if the sifter is busy with other things. The composer may not always have to pay for this service, but it’s never free.

On the other hand, there are real problems with this line of thinking. The first is that it’s not consistent. As a society, we seem to find application fees for the above situations, especially college admissions, perfectly acceptable and normal. But imagine the uproar if foundations started requiring fees to apply for a grant, or if employers tried instituting a fee for sending in a job application? There’s really no vast difference in the resource demands or relationship between applicant and adjudicator between this curatorial process and the ones mentioned just above – yet the culture around entry fees is completely different. Why? Secondly, I’ve written at length on this blog (and will continue to do so) about how class differences give certain artists enormous advantages in an unforgiving market for their work, and competition entry fees are a prime example of why this is a problem. A commenter on Sequenza21, defending the practice, illustrates the point:

$50 is a lot for an entry, but consider your average weekend. Perhaps you go to out to eat, perhaps with your significant other. At most restaurants your looking at around $25-$30 for dinner for two. Maybe you wanna catch a movie so you can hear that new Hans Zimmer score. Tickets for one or two could range anywhere from $10-$20, plus popcorn, candy, drinks. What if instead of a movie you went to a ballgame? Or a play? Or (most hopefully) a symphony concert?

$50 is not a ton to spend on a weekend if you have a secure, full-time job that pays you at least $40,000 a year. For many composers, however, especially the sort that is still entering competitions to gain exposure, the situation is quite different. I recall a period of time during my days in New York when, because of the money I was losing on composing, I ate out approximately once a month, took girls on dates to pizza places, etc. – and I did have a full-time job. Furthermore, this is not just about one competition. Realistically, a composer has little chance of winning the prize, so she has to enter numerous such competitions in order to contemplate the possibility of making her money back in prize winnings. If all of those opportunities have $50 entry fees, only the composers with a secure flow of cash will be able to persevere.

Finally, we have the differential in the valuation of the composer’s time and the ensemble’s time. By setting up the competition as a potential profit-making enterprise, eighth blackbird implicitly states that its time is too valuable to devote in-kind to this relationship, yet it expects the winning composer to donate, at a minimum, their time spent applying to the competition and their time coaching the rehearsal and being present at the performance, and possibly the time writing or adapting a piece specifically for the ensemble as well. This valuation differential frustrates composer Dennis Báthory-Kitsz so much that it inspired him to create the Báthory-Kitsz Performing Ensemble Competition 2010, wherein ensembles apply to him (with entry fee, natch) for the privilege of playing his music.

What many composers in the Sequenza21 thread miss, though, is that there’s good reason for a power differential in this particular case: i.e., to put it bluntly, that eighth blackbird is famous and they are not. Báthory-Kitsz’s proposal would make more sense and the argument would carry more weight if his name were Osvaldo Golijov or John Adams, but it’s not. This is essentially the argument put forth by eighth blackbird’s administrative director, Chris Richardson, in defending his decision to set up the competition this way:

A few have said or implied that the award isn’t sufficient. I’m rather surprised by this contention. I truly thought being the sole winner of an annual contest personally judged by eighth blackbird, plus having the piece performed, plus travel and lodging, plus $1,000 cash, was rather significant.

But eighth blackbird is not blameless in this scenario either. Richardson explains the origins of the competition as follows:

First, it should be worth noting that the contest emerged as a response to a single issue: a growing number of unsolicited submissions. As David wrote above, there is a large pile of scores and recordings in the studio. The group does not want to simply ignore the hard work of composers, and yet they simply do not have time to review them. The question became, ‘how do we rationally manage submissions?’ Having an annual contest provides just such a system. Now there is a simple and objective determination for whether a score is reviewed or not.

[...]

I argued very strongly there be a fee. I believe it encourages self-selection, and as has been repeated above, it just seems to be the standard model. I’m more familiar with the screenwriting world than that of composing, and I have never heard of a screenplay contest that didn’t have a fee. Further, we wanted there to be a significant prize, so the contest would have to pay for itself….Perhaps we’re naive, but we are anticipating about 35-50, which at $50 per application would be just enough to break even, with perhaps a little bit for our time if we’re lucky. I hope we’re wrong and you’re right. This is the first time we’ve done this, so we really have no idea.

There are two things to talk about here. First, Richardson explains in no uncertain terms that this competition is meant to replace, not augment, the band’s consideration of unsolicited scores. In the past, they would receive hundreds of scores from composers, and devoted their time and attention gratis to seeing whether they wanted to perform any of them. Now, suddenly, they are saying they need to be paid for their time spent doing so. Fair enough – but then it’s disingenuous for Richardson or the ensemble to frame this competition, as they have, as some wonderful gift to composers. It’s not. It’s a business decision designed to cut down on their own costs, and composers are smart enough to realize that and treat it accordingly.

Secondly, it’s obvious that Richardson and the ensemble did almost no research on composer competitions before releasing theirs into the world. If they had devoted even an hour’s worth of time to perusing publications listing such opportunities and talking to colleagues who had organized similar competitions in the past, they would have known that $50 is considered a very high entry fee, that it’s very uncommon to expect composers to fully subsidize the competition’s costs, and that large numbers of composers apply for competitions. That they did not do so is pretty much a public relations/business 101 bungle.

(Update: Isaac at Parabasis weighs in here.)

• Professionals vs. Amateurs
• Flashback: Press Play!
• Outrageous Fortune: a composer’s perspective

• Creative Providence
• Around the horn: Snowpocalypse edition
• AFTA Convention Wrap Day 2

Download audio file (pressplay.mp3)

Ian has an additional performance by his own “bandsemble,” Oogog, on his website. It’s a bit cleaner than ours, but I’d like to think the drums add something special. :) I hope he’s able to get a studio recording of it someday. (Note: listen on headphones for the best effect.)

• Flashback: Reinventing the Wheel
• Follow the #NEAcast conversation on Twitter
• Fascinating experiment in crowdsourcing

Download audio file (TechintheArtsCrtqshout.mp3)

I believe this is the first time that Createquity has received a press mention in a medium other than text. Glad to know that we’re, uh, “not all stuff that’s coming from ArtsJournal!” Check out the full podcast here.

• Flashback: Press Play!
• Follow the #NEAcast conversation on Twitter
• Watch the National Arts Journalism Summit here @ 12pm ET

Sergant was interviewed by Hillel Aron, a grad student at USC who is (self-admittedly) a close friend of his, so it should basically be taken as Yosi’s statement. (This didn’t stop Patrick Courrielche from launching an attack on Aron — he’s got a brand to protect now, after all — which provoked an entertaining response from the interviewer.)

The article is mostly review, but is notable for several reasons:

1. We get the back story on how Yosi became involved in the Obama campaign and administration, as well as lots and lots of fun photos, if you’re into that sort of thing.
2. The article does not dwell on Sergant’s relationship with Courrielche, his former employer, and notes that it was Glenn Beck, not Courrielche, who originally put Sergant at the front and center of the story (though who knows what conversations the two men had prior to Beck’s show).
3. It points out an item in the legislation authorizing the NEA that appears to render the conference call perfectly legal, an assertion that Courrielche’s rebuttal does not dispute.
4. We learn that the conference call was simply one of many the White House Office of Public Engagement had set up with different groups in connection with United We Serve, only no one, even the Republicans who were apparently invited, seemed to think any of the others were controversial.

Anyway, this story is older than moldy cheese by now, so I don’t want to give it more life than it deserves (and Yosi, if the article is to be believed, sounds all too happy to move on). But I do think it’s important for arts advocates to familiarize themselves with the facts of this case (in particular, by reading the transcript) before casting judgments about it. This debacle was at best deeply unfair to Yosi Sergant and the NEA and at worst an instance of intentional, cold-blooded character assassination, and we should treat it as such with each other and the world.

• Fox at it again
• Ben Davis takes up the banner
• Shocking(ly tame) NEA audio and transcript released