By Thomas Connolly

When corporate thinking dominates cultural institutions, the art often pays the price.

The arts do not belong in the hands of boardroom bean-counters who set themselves up as wannabe arts suzerains. Photo: Wikimedia

Why are arts organizations run like corporations? What’s good for General Motors is not good for the Boston Symphony Orchestra. The standard explanation is that non-profits should be governed by a volunteer board of directors, usually composed of wealthy executives and well-meaning philanthropists. Why is this taken for granted? Are men and women honed by cutthroat competition, who often value nothing but the bottom line, really the best shepherds for our precious cultural institutions? Clearly, the recent BSO debacle suggests that this model has devolved: an administrative anachronism has become a threat to America’s cultural health. The corporate mindset of arts organization boards—their caution, their fear of artistic innovation and independence—makes them susceptible to political and commercial pressures that undermine the missions they are ostensibly bound to protect. Their generally passive response in the face of the current administration’s efforts to tamp down artistic freedom proves where this kind of governance leads.

Corporate trustees tend to impose rigid, commercial templates onto delicate artistic entities. Philanthropy becomes less a civic contribution than a transactional purchase of creative control. They treat a symphony orchestra or a theater company like a retail chain, focusing on standardized metrics, top-down efficiency models, and marketing maneuvers. Long-term artistic cultivation is usually an afterthought. There are reports that trustees oppress through micromanagement; the very name “board of directors” erroneously invites untrained volunteers to intrude on specialized staff operations, thereby eroding institutional stability. On top of that, board members are often ignorant of or indifferent to the art form they are supposed to support.

The recent treatment of music director Andris Nelsons by the Boston Symphony Orchestra’s Board of Trustees is a case study in a board behaving badly—where an “Executive Director” tyrannizes an artistic director. Operating defensively and with a complete lack of transparency, the BSO trustees terminated the contract of a conductor respected and admired by players and audiences alike, citing the opaque pretext of a “lack of alignment on future vision.” In other words: we canned him because we could. This decision was executed without consulting the musicians—the actual creators of the art—and with a disregard for the orchestra’s followers. By choosing to “fire” an internationally regarded conductor via press release—without providing a single jot of justification—the board intentionally broadsided its own rank-and-file. Rumors persist that not everyone was pleased with Nelsons, but the high-handed manner of his termination serves only to alienate subscribers and leave players disaffected. Ironically, this behavior exemplifies the worst, most authoritarian aspects of corporate control while abandoning the kind of accountability commercial enterprises require. Corporate stockholders are owed an explanation when a chief executive is purged—why was the BSO community left in the dark?

This systemic overreach is an inevitable design flaw of the non-profit governing system itself. Because the public technically “owns” a non-profit corporation, there is no single equity owner charged with enforcing day-to-day accountability. Consequently, control can be usurped by an insular group intent on pushing an individual ideological or financial agenda. Boards often line up in self-protective lockstep, which makes it easy for an almighty chairperson to push their favored artistic legacy.

I have witnessed a board of trustees torpedo its own organization from the inside. In the late 1970s, the Boston Children’s Theatre, where I was a young actor, was housed in a Back Bay brownstone. The American Legion post that owned the building wanted to sell and offered it to the Theatre for a mere $50,000. The board said “no thanks,” claiming it “wasn’t a good investment.” One of those board members was a key developer of Charles River Park—he, of all people, surely knew the value of a Commonwealth Avenue address. The BCT lost its home, and it was never the same.

The arts do not belong in the hands of boardroom bean-counters who set themselves up as wannabe arts suzerains. To save our arts and culture from death by incorporation, the heavy-handed rule of the volunteer corporate board must be dismantled. This does not mean ignoring financial reality, but rather recognizing it. We must replace the top-down model, populated by the privileged, with a balanced, artisan-driven system of governance. What would real accountability mean? Legally mandating that a voting majority of any arts board be composed of the artists, musicians, and community members who create the art and sustain its links to the area the organization serves. This will mean stripping corporate trustees of their artistic veto power, and in that way we will ensure that the wealth that funds the art no longer has the power to destroy it.

Tom Connolly is Professor Emeritus of Humanities and Social Sciences at Prince Mohammad Bin Fahd University. He recently edited a historical study (in English) of the 19th- and 20th-century Jewish community of Döbling for the Österreichischen Akademie der Wissenschaften, Institut für Kulturwissenschaften. His book Goodbye, Good Ol’ USA: What America Lost in World War II: The Movies, The Home Front and Postwar Culture is forthcoming from Houghton Mifflin/PMU Press.