The Financial Impact of the Coronavirus on the Arts - Patrick Summers

freelancing singers, actors and actresses, visual artists, and all those who support
them in technical fields, we aren’t talking about a simple paring down of their
savings. We are talking about immediate food and housing insecurity. We are
talking about a whole generation of artists leaving the field for an elusive greener
pasture, and it is a job market packed with the newly unemployed from all sectors.
We are talking about an existential crisis unlike what anyone outside of wartime
has ever experienced, with all of war’s accompanying mental health perils.
It is worth remembering that all non-profits have an annual goal of getting to zero.
We don’t exist to either lose or make money. A non-profit arts company is about
managing loss, not acquiring gain. This is always a difficult concept for those in
businesses for whom the entire goal is profit, and someone is forever re-inventing
the broken wheel that opines a way for opera to pay its own bills with ticket sales.
It takes a generous and mature spirit to hold the belief that Bach and Mozart and
Renoir and Shakespeare are good for humanity, that we are better with them than
without them. Without that generosity though, which is a generosity of mind and
heart, money can’t do much.
It is the emotional and spiritual connection to the art that keeps it alive, and this has
never been truer than a year into a pandemic that has reordered the world.
If having financial means does not make the world more grandly humane, more
humorous, more relatable, or simply more beautiful, then what on earth is money
for?
Yes, the arts weathered two World Wars in the first half of the 20 th Century, and a
global depression between them, but there were very few performing arts
companies in the United States at that time. The New York Philharmonic and the
Boston Symphony are the oldest arts institution in our country, founded in 1842
and 1881 respectively. The Metropolitan Opera, Chicago Symphony, and the
Minnesota Orchestra followed in 1883, 1891,and 1903. Only a few other
companies were founded prior to the post-WWII boom, when arts companies
proliferated across the country, including Houston Grand Opera and Lyric Opera
of Chicago, both in 1955. All of them, old and young, are now in peril.
HGO’s planned seasons of the future are, in non-profit style, planned to get to zero,
but we will fall far short of zero for a number of reasons: it will take time to get
fund-raising back to pre-pandemic levels, and though ticket sales pay relatively
little of our budget, they do pay some and those levels will be low for a long time.