Local Papereating Artist Thinks You Shouldn't Give to the Max
study finds side effects of eating paper include critical thinking about the nonprofit industrial complex
I tend to be satisfied with the food options available at most libraries. Nearly any crunchy snack, from brittle and crisp pulps to chewy art books with glossy paper and soy ink, can be checked out from a public library. But after a month in Glen Ellyn, IL—where the public library has a café, known for its affordable sandwiches—I’ve started to crave more variety: every papereater can appreciate the occasional meal of soup or quiche.
Much to my delight, the Glen Ellyn Public Library Café divides all its café offerings into either “fiction” or “non-fiction.” Tomato Basil Soup, for instance, is not fictional, while an Applewood Smoked Bacon, Romaine, Roma Tomato, and Mayo Sandwich is both “fictional & delicious.” You may be wondering why fictional BLTs cost $6.50; café staff were not amused when I asked.
Glen Ellyn Public Library’s folk taxonomy of sandwich genre begs the question: how might we classify other food groups by literary genre? What if poetry is not a luxury, but a beverage? (poets, please respond: what poetry is most drinkable? what beverage is most poetic?) For all we know, lyric poetry is a London Fog and costs $5.50 for 16 oz, while the experimental stuff is a 10 oz pourover made with 17g of single-origin beans (market rate). Yes, there’s a reason visual poetry isn’t on the menu.
Like non-fiction, media seems like it should be some kind of soup—first, sweat the slivered microfiche until translucent, then add broth, roughly chopped CDs, DVDs, and cassettes. Boil 20 mins, garnish with magnetic tape, and serve with buttered sourdough.
While I was satisfied by the Glen Ellyn Public Library Café (especially the Toasted Sharp Cheddar, half $3.25/full $6.00), some library patrons claim soup and sandwiches simply aren’t enough. Mackenzie Filson, the author of Book Sommelier, has argued for wine bars in libraries, given that library cafés in cities like Helsinki “serve up everything from rainbow trout coconut curry and beet and goat cheese lasagna to light, airy passionfruit cakes.” In Manila, one library services “spicy sisig over rice, towering slices of mango sans rival, and even an espresso margaritas” to patrons who are nestled into “emerald velvet-tufted booths.” Talk about a reading experience!
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On a more serious note: Thursday is Give to the Max Day, and most readers of Papereaters will probably get a flurry of fundraising emails from every arts org they’ve interacted with, personally or professionally.
What you may not realize is that most arts orgs spend very little of their budget paying artists. As I’ve been logging all the public data I can find into a spreadsheet (titled “Artist Pay: Twin Cities Art Orgs, TAOE < $5 million”), I’ve noticed it’s rare for an arts nonprofit to spend even 10% of their annual budget on artist pay—yet most spend at least 50% on wages, salaries, and benefits for W2 employees who do operations and administrative work.
In 2018-19, nearly a third of the 554 artists surveyed by the LA Artist Census reported going without healthcare, food, transportation, housing, or utilities. Nonetheless, slightly over half were asked to donate an art piece for a nonprofit to auction for fundraising—an estimated $3 million in artwork. Arts nonprofits expect donations on November 16 (and honestly, all of the time), while also managing to extract a lot of art from artists for free—that they turn around and sell to the highest bidder. Compared to solo artists, legacy arts orgs have access to moneyed audiences, tax-free donations, and a more expansive grant landscape. But by and large, the revenue that sustains art organizations does not trickle down to artists.
The largest award I could compete for at this point in my career is probably a McKnight fellowship—an application would extract hours of unpaid admin work from me for a 5% chance at a one-time $25k grant. Meanwhile, the director of the Foundation earns over $600k each year (that’s roughly $25k every two weeks). Will the McKnight Foundation send a “give to the max” email blast today, asking you to help it “help” artists? Probably.1
Of course, there are some nuances that I’m not fleshing out. Yes, workers at arts nonprofits are routinely underpaid. However, they still seem to be able to build wealth in ways individual artists can’t—they have cars, children, houses. Most full-time artists I know have forgone all three. The standard business model for arts nonprofits perpetuates a two-tier system. Artists are rewarded with exposure, low wages, and precarity, while arts administrators are compensated at a level that allows them to build wealth.
It’s true that some arts “orgs” are actually more like artist-run projects—those people probably deserve your money. There’s a difference between a legacy nonprofit and the tiny artist-run org that is beloved and scrappy. Some arts orgs run on a shoestring while managing to pay artists fairly, normalizing practices & policies that are extremely artist-friendly. These orgs are the exception, not the rule. If your org is the exception, it should let the public know. The fundraising pitches of even the most artist-centered orgs rarely advertise how much of their budget goes to artist pay, and what metrics were used to determine the pay is fair.2 Without transparency on this point, no organization deserves your hard-earned cash. On Give to the Max day and every day, the public deserves to know who, exactly, is doing the max for artists—and who isn’t.
Want to support the arts on Give to the Max day? Spent your money with artists—the people who are the soil of the arts economy. Most art events are probably organized by artists, and the most affordable/approachable art events are almost always organized by artists. Without artists, there is no live music at your favorite dive bar. Without artists, there are no art/craft fairs where you can meet up with friends and wander around, looking at beautiful handmade things. There is no series of poetry readings at the laundromat, no pickup truck opera, no bike foraging workshop, no experimental performance art cabaret that, honestly, you weren’t sure you would like, but you went because your friend was going, and then ... you walked out two hours later, fundamentally changed as a person. Artists don’t just make stuff, we make art experiences that provoke wonder, delight, and transformation.
While artists probably need donations much more than orgs need donations, most artists won’t ever email you to ask for free money—we just want you to buy a $15 ticket, buy a $10 zine, subscribe to our newsletter for $5/month. We want you to ask about booking us, hiring us. We want you to know that our webshop has new stuff, or that we take commissions. Every single dollar you spend with artists funds art—in a beautiful, direct, grassroots way. This Give to the Max day, hire a local artist.
shoutout to Patrick Scully, who alerted me to this fact. In case you need to pay Patrick for this pearl of wisdom (or anything else), his homepage prominently features a large button that says “Pay Patrick.” ICON.
In their tax records, almost all Twin Cities arts organizations will insist that they “use the MN Council of Nonprofits’ Salary & Benefits Survey” to determine fair wages/salaries/benefits for W2 employees, but offer no information about how they have determined competitive wages for artist/contractors.