The Gift_ Creativity and the Artist in the Modern World - Lewis Hyde [175]
Secondly, in line with the hope that the arts might support the arts, Creative Capital grantees agree to share a small percentage of any net profits generated by their projects with Creative Capital, which then applies those funds toward new grants. In designing this give-back portion of the program we had in mind not only the models I have just described but also the ethic by which the producer and director Joseph Papp used to manage the Public Theater in New York.
Papp’s habit was to underwrite a great many theater productions and take a small ownership stake in each. Those that succeeded helped pay for those that came later. In the most famous example, A Chorus Line began at the Public Theater and then went to Broadway, opening in the summer of 1975. It ran without interruption for fifteen years, a commercial success that allowed Papp to support the work of less-established playwrights and companies. David Mamet, Sam Shepard, Elizabeth Swados, the Mabou Mines theater group, and dozens more received support during the years that Papp managed the Public.
Potential profitability is not a criterion for funding awards at Creative Capital; as with other arts funders, we ask our panels to look for originality, risk-taking, mastery, and so forth; we respond especially to projects that transcend traditional disciplinary boundaries. That said, the principle of sharing the wealth is essential to the Creative Capital model. It makes explicit the assumption that all who have succeeded as artists are indebted to those who came before, and it offers a concrete way for accomplished practitioners to give back to their communities, to assist others in attaining the success they themselves have achieved.
Creative Capital is a small experiment with much that we would like to improve. In our first eight years we awarded more than $5 million to 242 artist projects, but we still lack an endowment that would make us self-sustaining (our seed money necessarily came from private philanthropy). We would dearly love to give larger grants, and more of them; we may well find that the give-back provision works well with some disciplines and not with others; and even if it works in a few cases, we may never find our Chorus Line.
For now, however, the point is less about the particulars of this case than about the search for practical responses to the general problem posed by The Gift. Some responses will necessarily be fitted to their historical period; the Music Performance Fund belongs to a time of powerful trade unions, and the heyday of public support for art and science seems to belong to the cold war.
But surely there could also be responses that transcend their time. The royal patronage that Sir Isaac Newton received may have fallen out of favor, but other innovations from his day have survived. The idea that colleges might have endowed professorships has not been lost. Newton was the Lucasian Professor of Mathematics; that position was created in 1663 by one Henry Lucas, and it endures to this day (the theoretical physicist Stephen Hawking is its current occupant). The forums for scientific discourse that Newton knew have likewise endured. In 1672, Newton sent a long letter to Henry Oldenburg of the Royal Society in London, an outline of his theory of light and color. Oldenburg immediately printed the letter in the Philosophical Transactions of the Royal Society. It was Newton’s first scientific publication. Philosophical Transactions is the oldest scientific journal in the English-speaking world, having now published for over 340 years. Oldenburg was its founding editor. When he started it, it wasn’t part of a scientific community, it created a scientific community, and that community has endured.
Lucas and Oldenburg: these are good ancestors for the community of science; their institutions survive and their names are remembered. And for the community of artists?